The Elements of Representation in Hobbes: Aesthetics, Theatre, Law, and Theology in the Construction of Hobbes's Theory of the State (Studies in the History of Political Thought, 2)

Book info: The Elements of Representation in Hobbes: Aesthetics, Theatre, Law, and Theology in the Construction of Hobbes's Theory of the State (Studies in the History of Political Thought, 2) (Hardcover, 304 pages) – Brill, 2009. Language: English.

Commentators have traditionally constructed Hobbes's thinking on representation too narrowly, as a self-contained area of his political theory. This book challenges this orthodoxy of Hobbes scholarship, which owes less to Hobbes’s thought than to contemporary preconceptions of what counts as political thinking. In her powerful and original analysis, Mónica Brito Vieira mines neglected strands of Hobbes's theory of representation, and reinstates it in a much wider pattern of Hobbes’s theorizing about human thought and action in relation to widely varied images, roles and fictions. The result is a compelling portrait of how man's natural power to form representations through the imagination and artifice underpins his capacity to break away from nature, and fashion a world that best suits his needs. About the Author Mónica Brito Vieira, Ph.D. (2005) in History of Political Thought, University of Cambridge, is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon and a Visiting Scholar at Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge. She specializes in the history of political thought and contemporary political theory, and is the co-author (with David Runciman) of Representation (Polity, 2008).