Hobbes's Body Politics

Meghan Robison is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Montclair State University. Her work focuses on early modern political thought, with particular attention to Thomas Hobbes. She examines how philosophical understandings of living embodiment shape the ways human beings establish relations of authority, obligation, and accountability in political and domestic domains. She has published articles in Scienza & Politica, Arendt Studies, Hypatia, and Hobbes Studies, and has contributed a chapter to The Edinburgh Critical History of Early Modern and Enlightenment Philosophy (2025).

Robison advances a striking reinterpretation of Hobbes grounded in a fresh reading of his concept of life. Against the standard materialist, mechanistic, individualistic readings of Hobbes, she builds on his description of life as self-instigated, a “motion of limbs that comes from within.” This insight underwrites a new kind of relational account of voluntary motion and a robust conception of agency and power, opening a genuinely original and promising path for rethinking Hobbes’s political theory.

• AcknowledgementsIntroduction. Who’s Afraid of Thomas Hobbes?Chapter 1. Homo Artificialis: Art, Life and the Body Politic in the Introduction to LeviathanChapter 2. Voluntary Motion: Self-directed LifeChapter 3. Desire: Self-expressive LifeChapter 4. The Power to ProsperChapter 5. The Natural Condition of MankindChapter 6. Making Covenants of PeaceChapter 7. Authorizing PersonsNotesBibliography