James Phillips

This article proposes that Hobbes runs two different arguments for sovereignty in Leviathan. The one is polemical and takes up the notion of a covenant from early-modern resistance theory in order to redeploy it in the cause of absolutism. The other is biblical and constructs an image of the sovereign whose authority is a Mosaic legacy. The one argument is addressed to the unruly subject and teaches obedience, whereas the other is addressed to the sovereign and sets out the positive vocation of a Christian ruler. The conjunction of secular materialism and divine right in Leviathan becomes less puzzling when the book’s addressees are differentiated. By depriving the subject of any right of appeal to God in protest against the sovereign, Hobbes dismantles one of the bulwarks of early-modern resistance. This motive for secularism has understandably no role to play in Hobbes’ conception of the sovereign. Indeed, as far as facilitating the sovereign’s biblically framed vocation is concerned, the secularism of Leviathan is arguably simply a means to an end.

Gilles Deleuze and Hannah Arendt are two thinkers who have theorised the exceptionalism of the revolutionary moment. For Deleuze, it is the moment of the people to come. For Arendt, it is the moment of the freedom of political action. In the decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall there has been extensive debate on how to remember the German Democratic Republic (DDR) and how to understand the events leading up to its demise. Arendt's analyses of totalitarianism, natality and the public sphere provide points of orientation in an attempt to clarify the nature of the DDR, the dishonesty of its evaluation in the West as well as the transitory purchase of its legitimating discourse on later generations of its citizens. Deleuze's reinvigoration of the revolutionary sense of the term ‘people’ sets it in defiance of prevalent notions of popular sovereignty and therefore facilitates a different reading of the protests against the so-called people's republic of the DDR: something else was at issue besides the substitution of one state form for another.