Overview

In this major contribution to our understanding of Hobbes's political thought, Andrea Bardin contends that it should be analysed in relation to the 'materialist agenda' Hobbes was pursuing when confronting Descartes's project. Bardin pinpoints the changes in Hobbes's political thought to the intellectual context in which he elaborated his materialist ontology and epistemology. He investigates the classical sources that initially shaped Hobbes's political thinking, including Thucydides and Aristotle, as well as the broad materialist agenda that Hobbes drew from Bacon and elaborated in opposition to Descartes. He studies Hobbes's exchanges with his contemporary interlocutors in the Mersenne circle, including Descartes and Gassendi, with whom he discussed first philosophy and natural philosophy. In this way, Bardin vindicates materialist critiques of the idealist foundations of early modern mechanical philosophy.

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9781399540872

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Reviews

This is a meticulously researched and carefully wrought study of the epistemological and ontological quandaries Hobbes navigated while engaging challenges posed by Bacon, Galileo, and Descartes. Bardin gives a fascinating analysis of the compromises Hobbes makes vis à vis his materialist metaphysics for the sake of securing political stability. -- Samantha Frost, University of Illinois The history of philosophy is conducted in many ways, some painstaking but short on engagement with big issues, while other approaches take a broader perspective, but miss out on the detail of historical scholarship. The best histories combine the two, merging scholarly detail with theoretical daring. This work is exemplary in combining meticulous scholarship with incisive political and philosophical judgment on what was important about theoretical responses to the new mechanical sciences. Andrea Bardin is an exciting scholar, who knows Hobbes well, and he is fully versed in debates on materialism and idealism. He sees Hobbes as a materialist, whose materialism and political theory were undermined by the temptations of a foundational reading of the new mechanism. This book will prove vital in our readings of Hobbes and materialism. -- Gary Browning, Oxford Brookes University

Author Information

Andrea Bardin is Professor of Political Philosophy in the Department of Political Science, Law and International Studies at the University of Padua. He works on the relationship between science and political thought, and political anthropology from early modernity to the present. He has written extensively on Gilbert Simondon and Thomas Hobbes, and is the author of Epistemology and Political Philosophy in Gilbert Simondon: Individuation, Technics, Social Systems (Springer, 2015) and Hobbes's Materialist Agenda: The Politics of Early Modern Science (Edinburgh University Press, 2026).

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