Abstract

My aim in this essay is to put forward an understanding of Thomas Hobbes, not as a thinker confined to the field of political thought, but as a mainstream modern philosopher. Moreover, considering the allegorical significance of Leviathan’s frontispiece, Hobbes’ philosophy should be considered, I shall contend, a forerunner of Kant’s Transcendental Idealism and its heirs, German Idealism and 20th Century Continental Philosophy. At the same time, Hobbes’ work would throw a revealing light into the political core of modern “pure” philosophy, disclosing its often neutralised, but nevertheless essential concern with the inherent unsociability of modern human beings, and with its (im)possible transmutation into immanent political sociability. Therefore, my reading of Hobbes’ thought as a forebear of Kantian philosophy and its heirs is, at the same time, a suggestion to understand that tradition as fundamentally political, even in its most abstruse and overtly non-political passages. Hence, the syntagma “political philosophy” would be a tautology: in its core, philosophy’s driving concern is politics, the political. And, if all this holds, whatever Hobbes actually wrote about politics, and whatever evidence this may provide of his conservatism, his despotism or his liberalism, all this should be sifted out considering his main philosophical position; this consideration should enable us to tell apart the genuinely metaphysical in Hobbes’ oeuvre –those metaphysical principles that “ground an age” and constitute “the most intensive and the clearest expression of an epoch”, according, respectively, to Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt– disentangling it from a thinker’s inescapable contingent commitments in turbulent times