Reclaiming the Rights of the Hobbesian Subject

by Eleanor Curran

Overview

'There are no substantive rights for subjects in Hobbes's political theory, only bare freedoms without correlated duties to protect them'. Curran challenges this orthodoxy of Hobbes scholarship, and argues that Hobbes's theory is not a theory of natural rights but rather, a modern, secular theory of rights, with relevance to modern rights theory.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780230001497
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan UK
Publication date:	11/09/2007
Edition description:	2007
Pages:	205
Product dimensions:	5.51(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.02(d)

About the Author

ALISON BASHFORD is a Medical Historian based at the University of Sydney, Australia. She has published on the history of public health and colonialism in the modern period, and on gender and medicine. Books include Imperial Hygiene (2004), Purity and Pollution: Gender, Embodiment and Victorian Medicine (1998) and Isolation: Places and Practices of Exclusion, co-edited with Carolyn Strange (2003). Her current projects are an intellectual history of the problem of world population in the first half of the twentieth century and an international history of eugenics, to be edited with Philippa Levine.

Table of Contents

Introduction PART I: THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF HOBBES'S POLITICAL THEORY Examining the Orthodoxy - Hobbes and Royalism The Political Context - Taking Sides PART II: HOBBES'S THEORY OF RIGHTS: THE TEXTUAL ARGUMENT Liberties and Claims - Rights and Duties The Full Right to Self Preservation and Sovereign Duties PART III: HOBBES AND THEORIES OF NATURAL LAW AND NATURAL RIGHTS The Natural Rights Tradition - With or Without Hobbes? PART IV: HOBBES'S THEORY OF RIGHTS: A MODERN SECULAR THEORY Current Discussions of Hobbesian Rights - The Distorting Lens of Hohfeld Conclusion: Towards a Hobbesian Theory of Rights Index

Editorial Reviews

'In this ambitious and lucid book, Eleanor Curran sets out to challenge some of the main orthodoxies of Hobbesian scholarship...Curran's book performs a great service and deserves to be read by all serious Hobbes scholars. It represents a significant departure from existing treatments, and is richly thought-provoking both in its advocacy of a 'strong' theory of rights, and in its criticism of the existing scholarship. This engaging and lively book may thus itself hope to form a starting point for argument, controversy and debate.' British Journal for the History of Philosophy

'...detailed [and] sophisticated...' - Hobbes Studies

From the Publisher