Syllabus

Leviathan’s Revenge, 1622-2022

Prof. Farid Azfar

Published in the wake of the English Civil War, Leviathan (1651) by Thomas Hobbes is a founding text of political theory. Depending on who you ask, the whole tradition of political thought that starts with the Enlightenment and leads through liberalism to the present is driven either by the fear of Leviathan—the frightening specter at the heart of the text—or the fear of the radically pessimistic implications of the text itself. In recent years, the figure of “Leviathan” and Hobbes’s text have both experienced an extraordinary resurgence. The global pandemic, the capital riots, climate change, the War on Terror, and several episodes in late modern capitalism have produced a spate of op-eds in which historians, pundits, political theorists, and others have turned to Leviathan to crack the façade of modern liberalism.

The idea that the world in the age of Omicron redeems the message of Hobbes’s Leviathan is one—but not the only—meaning of this course’s title. The purpose of this course is not, however, to vindicate the theory of power that Hobbes presents in Leviathan. In fact Leviathan can (as it has been, most recently by David Graeber and David Wengrow) be blamed for the blind.

This course is a reading seminar spots that explain the carnival of perpetual disaster and hallucinogenic moral confusion that seems to characterize our present. When it comes to the question of whether Omicron has validated the truths of Leviathan, this class is decidedly agnostic. It is, however, driven by the assumption that the phenomenon of “Leviathan’s Revenge” is a key to understanding salient truths about the relationship between political theory and historical reality. The essential purpose of the class is to historicize political theory—the conceptual tools through which power is understood—by studying the historical processes that shaped its production, diffusion and contestation in a period that stretches between the seventeenth century and the present. What do these contingent forces reveal about why the problems of our present are understood as they are? What do they tell us about the nature of the relationship between our conceptions of climate crisis, war and disease? This course is based upon the assumption that the history of ideas and a close study of Leviathan can help us imagine alternative futures.

This course begins (as you already know) with a reading of The Racial Contract by Charles Mills and The Passions and the Interests by Albert Hirschman. The questions that are raised by these texts will, along with a critical paragraph from Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism, serve as our point of entry into the text of Leviathan in the first half of the semester, which will end with a survey of the Enlightenment critique of Leviathan. In the second half of the semester, we will inquire into the phenomenon of Leviathan in the age of Omicron.

We will start by looking at two major works of intellectual history—Quentin Skinner’s Liberty Before Liberalism and Stephen Shapin and Simon Schaeffer’s Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life. Each of you will then be assigned the task of studying texts that explore how Leviathan—as text and figure—travels from the seventeenth century to the world as it appears in 2022 by examining selected themes: white supremacy, the Indian Mutiny of 1857, fascism, the War on Terror, and the Anthropocene. Through blog posts and presentations, you will make your findings available to your fellow students. In the last few weeks, we will turn from the past to alternative futures guided by Donna Haraway, whose “cyborg” manifesto promises a powerful feminist, post-humanist framework for approaching and reinterpreting the male-dominated literature on Leviathan.

Requirements

The weekly assignments are structured around the possibilities and constraints of a weekly seminar, which means that the question of how to read will be just as important as what you read and what you write. The major assignments will be three papers (1500 words/approximately 6 pages each), the first of which will evolve from a portfolio of your weekly posts about “keywords for Leviathan”, the second of which will be paired with a short presentation, and the third of which will be based on a work of art, fiction, or film.

Books to Purchase and/or Download

Part One: Contexts and Frameworks

Week 1

Leviathan’s Revenge: from Capitalism to White Supremacy
Leviathan and Specters of Jamestown, 1622-2022

At the end of his famous work Black Marxism, Cedric Robinson evokes Leviathan in his summary of the Black radical critique of Marxist historiography. In this passage, which we will discuss in class on Week 2, Robinson evokes Leviathan when suggesting that the “obsession with property” could not account for the particular brutality of European civilization. “It seemed a certainty that the system of capitalism was part of it, but as well symptomatic of it. It needed a name as the philosopher Hobbes might say” (308).

Week 2

We discuss what the readings we’ve done so far (Mills, Hirschman, Springborg, Pocock) suggest about why and how this nameless problem would have been obscured, erased, and written out.

Week 3

Texts and Contexts

In a famous podcast series, David Runciman has developed his argument about the relevance and limitations of Hobbes’s theory of power in Leviathan. How does Skinner’s account of Leviathan challenge Runciman’s theory of Hobbesian power as conceived in Leviathan?

Part Two: Reading Leviathan in 2022

In the next few weeks, we will use this argument as a starting point for our own journeys into the lexical and conceptual constellations that shape Leviathan’s theory of power. In addition to “power,” each of you will choose at least two keywords from this list and track their usage across the sections of Leviathan.

  • Nature and Fear
  • Peace and Contract
  • Motion and Resistance
  • Death and Liberty
  • Sovereign and Law
  • Sense and Glory
  • God and Matter

What does the process of tracking these keywords reveal about Hobbes’s construction of power? How, for example, do his treatments of death and liberty modify or complicate his theory of power? What are the implications of these constellations for Mills’s and Hirschman’s arguments about the place of Leviathan in the intellectual histories of capitalism and white supremacy? How, by extension, do they challenge or amplify Runciman’s point?

In making sense of your findings, you are required to consult and engage least one of the articles in the Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s Leviathan. This is usefully broken into sections, but don’t underestimate the power of the index!

Week 4

Leviathan’s Man

Moodle post and brief presentation on keywords (1-2 pages, 5 minutes)

Week 5

Leviathan’s Commonwealth
  • Leviathan, Part 2, “Of the Commonwealth,” 177-254

Moodle post and brief presentation on keywords (1-2 pages, 5 minutes)

Week 6

Leviathan’s Religion
  • Leviathan, Parts 3-4, “Of the Christian Commonwealth” and “Kingdome of Darkness,” 255-482

Moodle post and brief presentation on keywords (1-2 pages, 5 minutes

Week 7

Contexts and Influences

Everyone reads:

Contexts (Summarize the one you’re assigned):

Futures (read all three):

How does Noel Malcolm describe Hobbes’s theory of power? What do your readings of Leviathan—and anything else we’ve read this semester—add to Malcolm’s reading? What do Hamilton, Mortimer & Scott, and/or Armitage reveal about the social, political, and ideological forces that shaped this Hobbesian theory of power? What does this exercise reveal about the contingent origins of Hobbes’s Leviathan? What do these contingent origins suggest about the implications of “Leviathan’s Revenge” as manifested in the effect of Covid19 on Leviathan’s legacy as revealed in the articles from the Spring and summer of 2020? the age of Coronavirus as represented by the three articles from the Spring and summer of 2020.

Your paper should address all these questions but not necessarily in this order. What does the intellectual history of Leviathan (as revealed in the contextual articles) tell us about its intellectual futures, as revealed in the articles from 2020? Can Mills, Hirschman and/or anything else we’ve read this semester help you frame the problem
if not answer the question?

Paper One is due on Friday at 5pm. The paper should be 5-6 pages double-spaced and emailed to me. You may also post the paper as an addendum to your Moodle post from Tuesday.

Having this solidified will prepare us as we journey in the second part of the semester to Hobbes’s reception and influence on the trajectories of international law, global order, American democracy, fascism, race and the War on Terror.

Week 8

Gendering Hobbes’s America

Question: The “racial contract”, as Mills states in his introduction, was influenced by Carole Pateman’s “Sexual Contract.” In what ways can you use the Fox-Genovese article and Coleman together to reconstruct different aspects of the sexual contract that underpins the racial contract? What are the specific logics that only appear when we counterpose these histories this way? These need not be logics in which the “sexual contract” and “racial contract” work symbiotically. How do the Hobbesian histories of sociology and international relations that we have studied for the last two weeks shape how you think about the implications of gendering Leviathan?

Week 9

Leviathan and Slavery

Question: This week’s readings concern the role of Hobbesian thought in the mental, cultural and political structures of white supremacy. How do the readings for last week explain the role of gender and sex in the constitution of the problem that Aravamudan lays out here? What is Downes’ disagreement with Nyquist when it comes to Hobbes and slavery? How do Burnard and Navin’s account of Hobbesian thought in Jamaica and South Carolina help you evaluate this debate? Based on this exercise, how would you respond to Christopher Warren’s article about Leviathan and BLM?

Week 10

Balancing Power: from the State of Nature to the Law of Nations

Optional:

These articles and excerpts explore the short, medium and long-term reception of Leviathan showing how the Enlightenment struggle with Hobbes shapes the emergence of empiricism and, by extension, Enlightenment sociology and psychology. This, by extension, also shapes and is shaped by the impact of Hobbesian theories on conceptions of order and disorder in the international arena? What do the excerpts from Locke, Mandeville and Hume suggest about the relationship between empirical epistemologies and the conditions of power that link the sexual and racial contracts?

Week 11

Skepticism and the International Law of Leviathan

Our readings for the past two weeks will have provided many instances of how the story told by Hirschman about the replacement of the passions by the interests was inside the history of The Racial Contract. This week we will closely study this relationship through the legal history of ideas and particularly the history of international relations. How does Hobbes’s place in the history of skepticism explain his place in the law of nations? What does his impact on sociology and psychology (as studied the previous week) add to your understanding of this relationship? Does Collins’ account of the Hobbesian origins of Lockean toleration warrant a revision to how we conceive of the place of Leviathan in the history of the law of nations? How does it shape your reading of the preamble to the treaties?

Week 12

Leviathan to the Everywhere War

Benjamin doesn’t Hobbes in his “Critique of Violence” and Gregory doesn’t mention Hobbes in his account of the “everywhere war”—but are the post-war and post-9/11 worlds they describe in some way even more Hobbesian than the world described in Leviathan? How is this borne out by a deeper into the role of Hobbesian thought in the history fascism and then its revival in the post-911 eras?

Week 13

Presentations

Fascism and Terror

The presentations should be 5-10 minutes long. They should use the supplementary readings to go deeper into the primary question for the week under question. They should also engage the contemporary relevance of the findings. Technology is not essential. The key criteria for the presentation is that it engage your audience in a way that establishes a set of connections that previously weren’t there in their minds.

Your presentations (10 minutes) should address the following questions (not necessarily in this order).

  1. How does the figure of Leviathan figure in the problem of fascism, terror or counterterror? What do these readings suggest about why the figure of Leviathan erupts?
  2. How does the distinction between natural and positive law and their various relationships to ends and means play out in this case—either of Leviathan’s eruption or in any other aspect of the political relations described by the chapters and/or sections you’ve read?
  3. How does the extension of law-making violence through the means of lawpreserving violence manifest in the readings you’ve done?
  4. In what ways do the readings demand or at least invite the making of a clear distinction between mythical and divine violence? How do they add to Butler and/or the “Wake up and Do Divine Violence” piece?

These presentations will then serve as the basis for a brief in-class writing assignment which will jumpstart the second paper assignment, due next Friday. The writing assignment will build off the presentations we will just have listened to. The rest of the paper will flow organically. If you have a lot of work next week and you want to prepare for what you’ll be doing between Tuesday and Friday of next weeks, I would suggest that you consolidate your thoughts on the last four weeks of readings along the lines of the questions I posed include the general question about what they reveal about the effect that ideas can have on political history. But you can also wait until next week to do that. For now, I want you to focus on the readings and make sure that your presentation addresses the questions that are listed.

Paper Two

How and why did the contradictory legacies of Hobbes’s Leviathan shape the histories of fascism, genocide and counter-terrorism in the 20th and 21st centuries? What can we learn about the force that is driving this phenomenon from the parallel histories that we’ve studied of Leviathan’s highly contested and contradictory influences on the historical patterns of American politics in the 18th century, patriarchy, white supremacy, Enlightenment moral philosophy, natural law theory and IR theory from Kant to Benjamin?

Week 14

Leviathan to Cyborgs

Moodle Post:

Can the Cyborg Avenge Leviathan’s Revenge? The two articles—by Latour & Callon on inequality Graeber & Wengrow on actor-network theory—argue respectively for a deeper engagement with Leviathan and a radical transcendence from Leviathan. In some ways their arguments are directly opposing. But perhaps they are united by an emphasis on the importance that they place on how we imagine political relations. In what ways, then, can Haraway’s ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ help provide a better framework through which to conceive the problem that Latour & Callon are trying to describe as well as the problem that Graeber & Wengrow are trying to escape? In other words, can the cyborg save us from Leviathan’s revenge? If the cyborg can’t avenge Leviathan, can it mediate the debate in some way?

Final Paper: Can the Cyborg Avenge Leviathan’s Revenge?

Your answer to the question to the Moodle post will be the first step of your final paper, due on May 10th. The next step—and the bulk of your final paper—will be constructed around a reading of the three articles in the “supplementary readings” (Boucher, Grewal and Lakisch) which respectively concern the political erotics of Leviathan, its relevance for climate change in the age of the Anthropocene, its potential for addressing enduring problems in International Relations. A lot of this should be familiar which means that what is not familiar about these arguments will jump out.

The central question is: Can shifting the frameworks of our political imaginaries from Leviathans to Cyborgs provide the basis for critiquing and/or expanding the arguments these scholars make? Or is there an imaginative framework that is superior to Leviathans and the Cyborg and/or interesting in relation to them? I encourage you to look at works of art—to expand the range of your thinking—or to zoom in on what really fascinates you about these articles. But regardless of how far you go beyond the scope of these articles, I would like you to engage all three articles in your response.

This paper can be as short as 6 pages and as long as 15. It will be evaluated on clarity, rigor and the overall quality of its thinking. This is also the kind of paper that can serve as the basis (or even a draft) of an article you would submit to the Swarthmore History Department Journal. Especially if you think of the three articles as primary sources in the history that we’ve been studying of Leviathan’s legacies over the years. Once you’re done, I’ll ask you all to share your papers with each other, both so you have a record of your learning and so that any of you that is interested can talk about the possibility of co-authoring something for the History Department Journal—or whichever other forum over the summer. But whether or not you do that, this will produce a repository of your and your classmates’ learning which you can also take with you on the journey that leads to your thesis or whatever other intellectual milestone lies ahead.