Ideals as Interests in Hobbes's Leviathan: The Power of Mind over Matter

S. A. Lloyd proposes a radically new interpretation of Hobbes's Leviathan that shows transcendent interests—interests that override the fear of death—to be crucial to both Hobbes's analysis of social disorder and his proposed remedy to it. Most previous commentators in the analytic philosophical tradition have argued that Hobbes thought that credible threats of physical force could be sufficient to deter people from political insurrection. Professor Lloyd convincingly shows that because Hob...