In his autobiography, Thomas Hobbes stated that he wrote his most influential work of political theory, Leviathan, to "absolve the divine laws" in response to "atrocious crimes being attributed to the commands of God." This article attempts to take Hobbes seriously, and to read Leviathan as a contribution to the religious politics of the English Civil War. I demonstrate Hobbes' appropriation of the religious terms and sources characterizing civil-war political discourse, and explore these terms and sources both in Hobbes' response to religiously motivated politics and in the foundations of his most important political ideas. Hobbes emerges from this account as a critic of Christian politics and enthusiasm broadly conceived, as a political philosopher who employed an Israelite political model, and as an erstwhile ally of some of those usually considered his deepest opponents.
This article participates in efforts by IR theorists to clarify aspects of modern sovereignty – an idea currently in rupture and being rethought – by returning to its founding ‘Westphalian moment’. While recent work has reconnected modern sovereignty to religion, considering Westphalia as a religious settlement and Christian concerns persisting in the groundwork of IR, our work looks beyond Christian concerns and asks how Westphalian sovereignty addressed non-Christians. We trace a yet-untapped discussion of the Jews – presented as a paradigmatic religious ‘other’ – among architects of Westphalian sovereignty from Bodin through Grotius, Hobbes, Harrington, and Spinoza. We demonstrate that foundational theorists of modern sovereignty considered religious diversity a political problem. Some cited essential sameness, minimising difference between Jews and Christians. Others considered the possibility of Jewish sovereignty long before this idea is usually considered to have entered modern consciousness. While the discussion of Jewish sovereignty among architects of modern sovereignty may seem to justify a Jewish state in a world of Westphalian states, it also emphasises Westphalia’s territorialising of religious difference. This aspect of the Westphalian framework is surely inadequate today, when territorialising religious difference is neither normative nor likely possible.
Hugo Grotius is commonly accepted as the first modern natural law theorist, yet Grotius’s definition of natural law was not new and what, if anything, was “modern” about his natural law remains a subject of debate. This paper suggests that a key to the novelty of Grotius’s natural law may be in the prominent role Philo Judaeus, cited 114 times in The Laws of War and Peace, played in Grotius’s natural law theory. Philo’s natural law is explored, and Philo’s connection between will and reason, among other aspects of his thought, are found to have contributed to Grotius’s modern conception.
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