Sébastien Bauer

This article aims to further Noel Malcolm’s discussion on Thomas Hobbes’s involvement in the affairs of the Virginia Company and to add new perspectives on the subject. For instance, at the time Hobbes joined, William Cavendish was a prominent director and the head of the Bermuda subsidiary; numerous clues suggest that Hobbes attended more courts than the number proposed by Malcolm; moreover, Hobbes was commissioned to solve significant problems within both companies. Examining Hobbes’s views on monopolies suggests that his political work bears the traces of the experience he accumulated during the 1620s, and that ignoring what he observed leads to misreading what he wrote.

This article investigates the reasons that led Hobbes to write Leviathan in 1651. The emergence of powerful corporations, such as the East India Company, and their role in the civil war provided a practical motive. The theoretical motive arose from his intention to conceptualise the state as a body and the difficulty of doing so within the epistemological framework of his civil philosophy. Seeking to integrate observation without abandoning demonstration, Hobbes envisioned an automaton that relies on modelling rather than argumentation This analogy is far more elaborate than previously acknowledged, especially because the second book contains the textual equivalent of an access door into the automaton which reveals its anatomy and mechanism. This discreet entry is likely not intended for the general public but for the leaders of the trading and colonial companies with whom Hobbes had close relations thirty years before writing his treatise.

Résumé À partir d’un ensemble d’exemples pris dans les textes philosophiques de la première modernité, cet article étudie la manière dont la lecture de textes philosophiques convoque l’idée de contexte, et propose d’en distinguer trois usages pertinents pour la production d’un sens (le contexte comme système de textes, le contexte comme ensemble de données extra-textuelles, le contexte comme conscience réflexive d’un désir de lecture). Il s’agit d’une part de montrer comment s’articulent ces trois conceptions du contexte dans les pratiques de lecture, scolaire aussi bien que savante, et d’autre part de comprendre de quelle manière ces trois conceptions sont toujours susceptibles de prendre une forme dévoyée, produisant une clôture du sens du texte dont il s’agit de se prémunir, en défendant le principe d’un contexte choisi plutôt que subi.