Image, Rhetoric, and Politics in the early Thomas Hobbes

Abstract

While critics have relied upon bibliographical data and his translation of Thucydides to establish the early Thomas Hobbes as a humanist, this essay argues that substantive evidence to support this conclusion can be found in the comparatively neglected discourses of the Horae Subsecivae. Reading Hobbe's contribution to the Horae alongside his translation of Thucydides reveals a consistent concern with the political potential of both verbal and visual images and with the dangers rhetorical manipulation could pose to individual and sovereign authority. Together these texts demonstrate an early Hobbes already deeply invested in the political debates and crises of his era.

The Visual Politics of Fear: Anti-Communist Imagery in Postwar Greece

“…Todd Butler argued that Bacon and Hobbes were influenced by Quintilian's theory that 'eloquence is mainly a psychological matter: it is the mind which must be emotionally stirred and must conceive images.' 22 Earlier scholarship has shown that Burke 'analyses the orator's appeal to emotion' as a product of language that stimulates 'image-forming.' 23 Today, psychological analyses attribute the power of images to stir emotions to their capacity to be 'readily absorbed', as viewers do not 'reflect on or deconstruct them in a way that occurs in relation to verbal material.'…”