Johan Olsthoorn – författare

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) is widely regarded as one of the most important political thinkers in the Western tradition. Justice is one of the main political concepts today. This is the first book-length analysis of Hobbes's ideas on justice.Hobbes made many startling claims about justice. Norms of justice have no place outside the commonwealth, the civil law determines what is just and unjust, and nothing sovereigns do is unjust to their citizens. But what exactly did Hobbes mean by justice? And how did he convince his audience that he was speaking about justice when advancing such controversial views, and not about something else?In Hobbes on Justice, Olsthoorn traces the place of justice in Hobbes's moral, legal, political, and international thought as developed over time. The book reconstructs his idiosyncratic glosses on notions like justice, rights, injury, obligation, and law; proposes new solutions to some long-standing interpretive puzzles; and provides in-depth discussions of property, slavery, treason, just war and other neglected aspects of Hobbes's thought. Olsthoorn shows that Hobbes's theory of justice doubled as a civil theodicy: it aimed to morally empower sovereign rulers by vindicating them from all stains of injustice, no matter how horrid their rule.Combining analytic philosophy, intellectual history, and political theory, this major new study of Thomas Hobbes will be of wide and cross-disciplinary interest to scholars of philosophy, law, politics, and history.

The legal rights of a person within a state depend in part on their migration status. Many states across the world deny non-citizen residents or ‘denizens’ certain political, socio-economic, and cultural rights granted to every citizen alike. This book tackles pressing moral questions raised by legal rights-differentiation by citizenship status by drawing on the ethics of migration, citizenship, multiculturalism, refuge as well as on normative theories of law, territory, and settler colonialism.Egalitarian values, at the heart of liberal democracy, ground a presumption against legal rights-differentiation. Any deviation from legal equality stands in need of justification. What, if anything, could justify legal rights-differentiations along the lines of citizenship? When, if ever, is it morally permissible for states to deny denizens certain legal rights granted to every citizen alike? This book scrutinizes these politically increasingly salient questions from a wide range of perspectives and drawing on recent literature.This book will be of great interest to philosophers, legal and political theorists, and researchers studying migration studies, philosophy, human rights, law and politics. This book was originally published as a special issue of Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy.

This is the first book-length study in English of Thomas Hobbes's On the Citizen. It aims to show that On the Citizen is a valuable and distinctive philosophical work in its own right, and not merely a stepping-stone toward the more famous Leviathan. The volume comprises twelve original essays, written by leading Hobbes scholars, which explore the most important themes of the text: Hobbes's accounts of human nature, moral motivation, and political obligation; his theories of property, sovereignty, and the state; and, finally, his ideas on the relation between secular and ecclesiastical authority, and the politics behind his religious ideas. Taken together, the essays bring to light many distinctive aspects of Hobbes's thought that are often concealed by the prevailing focus on Leviathan, making for a richer and more nuanced picture of his moral, legal, and political philosophy.