BOOK: Johan OLSTHOORN, Hobbes on Justice [The History and Theory of International Law, eds. Nehal BHUTA, Francesca IURLARO, Anthony PAGDEN & Benjamin STRAUMANN] (Oxford: OUP, 2024), ISBN 9780198867982, 100 GBP

 

(image source: OUP)

On the book:

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.

On the author:

Johan Olsthoorn is associate professor in political theory at the University of Amsterdam. He has published extensively on Hobbes and early modern moral, legal, and political theory in journals including Philosophers' Imprint; Journal of the History of Philosophy; History of Political Thought; and European Journal of Political Theory. Co-editor of Hobbes's On the Citizen: A Critical Guide (Cambridge, 2019), this is his first monograph.

Reviews:

"Johan Olsthoorn is one of the most astute commentators on Hobbes's moral and political philosophy writing today. His book is scholarly, rigorously argued, and full of insight. No serious student of Hobbes's philosophy can afford to forgo grappling with Olsthoorn's reading. " - Professor Arash Abizadeh, McGill University "Hobbess theory of justice has been neglected because it has seemed so obviously to fail as an account of what justice is ordinarily taken to be. The great strength of Johan Olsthoorns analysis is that he does not seek to avoid or tone down the implications of the Hobbesian claim that the nature of justice is defined by the will of the sovereign. Instead he follows Hobbess arguments to their conclusions, and in the process brings out both the complexity and the power of Hobbess civil theodicy. This beautifully clear and always rigorous book is a landmark in Hobbes scholarship." - Professor James Harris, University of St Andrews.

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