Squelching the Double Vision: Thomas Hobbes and the Problem of "Political Theology"
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2015
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Against dominant interpretations of Thomas Hobbes that ignore or downplay the place of theology in his work, this essay aims to show the centrality of theology to the account of politics Hobbes offers in Leviathan. By attending closely to the case Hobbes makes to his Christian readers to see the world and its history as he narrates it—a case that entails several modes of suasion: scientific demonstration, appeals to intuition, theological and scriptural argumentation, all of them seasoned with Hobbes’s distinctive rhetorical flourish—this essay displays the subtle way that he incorporates the nascent modern nation-state into a Christian account of salvation history, thus urging his readers to accept its total claim on their lives.
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Dillon, Ben (2015). Squelching the Double Vision: Thomas Hobbes and the Problem of "Political Theology". Dissertation, Duke University. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/11372.
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