Hobbes' Biological Rhetoric and the Covenant

Gonzalo Bustamante Kuschel

Philosophy & Rhetoric, Volume 54, Number 3, 2021, pp. 289-312 (Article)

Published by Penn State University Press

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/810404

[ Access provided at 9 Nov 2021 07:50 GMT from CNRS BiblioSHS ]

 Hobbes’ Biological Rhetoric and
the Covenant

Gonzalo Bustamante Kuschel

a b s t r ac t

For Victoria Kahn, Hobbes’ argument that fear of violent death is “the passion to
be reckoned upon” in explaining what inclines men to peace must be interpreted
as a mimetic argument. However, Kahn then notes a paradox that makes Hobbes’
thinking problematic: whereas love and the desires are appetites that produce an
imitative effect, fear is different. Though also a passion, fear lacks that capacity to
produce a mimetic effect or, therefore, to generate a contract. My hypothesis is
that resolving the dilemma presented in Kahn’s interpretation of Hobbes requires
a shift in attention from mimesis to rhetoric and, more specifically, to biological
rhetoric as defined by Nancy Struever. This approach to Hobbes makes it possible
to understand the rhetorical role of fear in generating and maintaining the social
contract, and how the problem that Kahn signals—the impotence of fear in rela-
tion to mimesis—can be resolved.

Keywords: Hobbes, rhetoric, biological rhetoric, mimesis, fear

introduction
The very nature of Hobbes’ work is paradoxical. He takes on the task of
elaborating a linguistic deconstruction and rhetorical critique of religion,
the Bible, and morals, yet does so based on a critical linguistic and institu-
tional reflection on the role of power in shaping the human condition. To
understand Hobbes’ project, an understanding of the role of rhetoric in his
writing is crucial.

doi: 10.5325/philrhet.54.3.0289
Philosophy and Rhetoric, Vol. 54, No. 3, 2021
Copyright © 2021 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA
 gonzalo bustamante kuschel

Much disputed though it has been in the more recent literature,

Skinner’s work remains indispensable as a starting point for understanding
rhetoric in Hobbes. Skinner, in his humanistic reconstruction of Hobbes,
interprets the philosopher’s development as discontinuous, with distinct
views of rhetoric and its value marking each of three stages. As Skinner
sees it, Hobbes was initially formed against the backdrop of the English
Renaissance, in which classical rhetoric was central. Reacting to that con-
text, he initially went through a period of appreciation for science as a
means for determining nonpolemical truth. However, finally concluding
that science and logic were incapable of generating order and power, he
subsequently instead sought to develop a civil science capable of persuading
thanks to an indispensable combination of ratio and oratio (Skinner 1996,
353). Skinner’s work thus expands on the analysis of David Johnston (1986,
66–92), which approaches Hobbes’ rhetoric from a literary and strategic
perspective.
Of the recent counterpoints to Skinner especially relevant in terms of
the objectives of this article, one of the more important is that of Ted H.
Miller (2011). Miller maintains that Hobbes had just one phase. In his view,
Hobbes’ criticisms of certain uses of rhetoric were not a sign of his some-
times subscribing to a scientific perspective and other times embracing a
distinct, humanistic perspective, but rather were shaped by disagreements
among humanists. For Miller, Hobbes’ project must be understood as that
of a humanist offering a philosophy intended to enable humans to establish
sovereignty in place of chaos, a project in which rhetoric played a relevant
role (2011, 7–8).
Another of the more relevant counterpoints to Skinner’s interpretation
of Hobbes’ rhetoric is that of Ioannis Evrigenis (2016). Evrigenis stresses
the ability to persuade an audience for an orator’s own ends. For that, reason
seeks the audience’s approbation of what it proposes. That is, if scientists
seek to have their discovery accepted as valid, they need the ability to con-
vince people of their discovery. The explanations, abstract and difficult,
proper to science would not have the capacity to win over a neophyte audi-
ence (2016, 9–10). While there is a distinction between science and rhetoric,
the latter is a type of science since, according to Evrigenis’ interpretation,
metaphors generate a type of knowledge for Hobbes (Evrigenis 2016, 22), a
point that Hobbes speaks about in the Briefe.
Recently, Timothy Raylor has countered Skinner’s interpretation of
Hobbes’ rhetoric, indicating that rhetoric is understood by the author of

290
 hobbes’ biological rhetoric

Leviathan not in Ciceronian terms, but rather in Aristotelian ones, as an

art of revealing the forms and strategies of persuasion. Thus understood,
rhetoric applies in all areas related to uncertainty and opinion, areas there-
fore ruled by contingency (Raylor 2018). For Raylor, to understand rheto-
ric’s relation with Hobbes’ philosophy, one must take such neo-Aristotelian
rhetoric as the starting point. Reconstructing Hobbes’ rhetoric in those
terms, Raylor rejects Skinner’s idea of three stages, indicating that Hobbes’
disposition toward rhetoric did not change radically over the course of
his life.
In short, for Raylor, Hobbes’ humanism was neither Ciceronian nor
civic but rather influenced by Tacitus, who sought to account for the dis-
tinct forms of cheating, misleading, dissimulating, and the hidden springs
of power. Accordingly, Hobbes was concerned about the potential risks
involved in persuasion and understood rhetoric as an instrument that could
subvert civic order. In Raylor’s view, Hobbes was thus less anti-Aristotelian
than often supposed (2018, 12–15).
For Raylor, one must distinguish between two distinct points. The first
is the fact that Hobbes always maintained that scientific reason and rhe-
torical persuasion were incommensurable, and that rhetorical invention
therefore had no legitimate place in logical reasoning and the discovery of
true propositions. The second is that, for Hobbes, the development of a civil
science nonetheless did not rule out continued use of certain forms of rhet-
oric, including those in the last two books of Leviathan. For Hobbes, the
fact that rhetoric had no place in the discovery of truth was not incompat-
ible with using techniques of rhetorical elocution to win greater acceptance
of them by nonscientists. Hobbes’ resort to rhetoric in the last chapters of
Leviathan is explained by their polemical character.
Here it becomes necessary to turn to an observation of Miller (2011, 12).
Miller notes that Victoria Kahn reveals the rhetorical character of some of
what are considered the most purely scientific of Hobbes’ works. That is, the
scientific works of Hobbes are not necessarily entirely outside the purview
of rhetoric.
My argument is that this radical position, which Miller (2011) indi-
cates is present in Kahn, is correct and that, to attend to it, one must turn
to Kahn’s theory of mimesis. Such a mimetic interpretation of the con-
tract is relevant for the very interpretation of Hobbesian rhetoric itself.
The understanding of the contract as mimetic in Kahn places rhetoric at
both extremes: as an anthropological ability of humans that leads them

291
 gonzalo bustamante kuschel

to desire the same objects and from there to confrontation, mimesis is

part of the state of nature, but it is also part of the solution, since it is the
­poetical-mimetic dimension that permits order to be established, leaving
conflict behind. This mimetic poetic capacity consists in presenting charac-
ters as models to follow (cf. Reagan 2012, 27–30). As Kahn defines mimesis,
it is the “human capacity for imitation, metaphor, and emulation” (Kahn
2001, 2004). But in this case, such creation and presentation should occur
within rhetoric insofar as it also implies the art of using words to generate
images—conjured for provoking fear—in the imaginations of the members
of an audience and to move them that way.
Kahn’s idea of mimesis, linked to rhetoric, is a contribution to the
understanding of rhetoric in Hobbes, one that has not been duly consid-
ered and generates a paradox: the passion of fear is crucial for exiting the
state of nature, but fear lacks the capacity to produce a mimetic effect,
thanks to which all, similarly feeling fear by imitation, wish to rise above
the state of nature. It is there that studies like Struever (2009), on Hobbes’
rhetoric as biological rhetoric, point to a way out of this paradox, one for
which a shift from mimesis back to rhetoric, understood as biological rhet-
oric, is again required for understanding the step of exiting from the state
of nature.
Previous considerations of rhetoric in Hobbes, like the works indicated
above, have not paid due attention to Kahn’s idea of mimesis, the para-
dox that follows from it, or Struever’s analytic considerations concerning
rhetoric itself.1 To properly appreciate the analytic value of incorporating
these important and largely neglected insights, one must begin with Kahn’s
contextualization of the idea of mimesis.
As Victoria Kahn (2004) has pointed out, the seventeenth century wit-
nessed a negation of the notion of “government and political life as natu-
ral.” These were replaced by an idea of the state as an artifact that should
be founded by a special kind of discourse, one that would involve a new
poetics not only of the state, but also of the citizen. For Kahn, a rhetori-
cal strategy was, accordingly, vital to both Milton’s and Hobbes’ attempts
to generate new obligations. The difference between a republican Milton
and an absolutist Hobbes, for Kahn, then basically resided in how they
articulated the new contractual discourse sought at the time. This approach
allows Kahn to place the discussion within the context of a new poetics
(Kahn 2004, 15).
According to her reconstruction, Hobbes drove this new poetic
moment, which was profoundly anti-Aristotelian. This “poetic moment” was

292
 hobbes’ biological rhetoric

basically a rhetorical turn that, I argue, was more than a simple persuasive
strategy for Hobbes as Skinner (1996) or Johnston (1989) would have it.
Rather, it was a way of symbolically understanding the social world and its
linguistic structuring. That is why it involved using both a genealogy of dis-
courses and a critical analysis of the linguistic and symbolic settlement of
authority. These aspects of Hobbes’ work captured the idea that the world
of meaning was rhetorical, not factual, that is, that humans understood the
factual world in a rhetorical way.
Kahn indicates that early modern contract theory differentiated itself
from its predecessors by its emphasis on the power of the political con-
tract to give rise to new obligations.2 In her view, this centrality of the
constitutive power of contract requires that this turn in political think-
ing be understood as part of the history of poetics (Kahn 2004, 15–16). In
the seventeenth century, poets as well as politicians were invoked as doers.
Government itself was imagined as the product of a contractualist poetic,
of a mimesis understood not simply as imitation, but rather as a productive
human capacity stemming from imagination’s power “to create new arte-
facts” (Kahn 2004, 16). Following this line of interpretation, Kahn indicates
that this view explains why politics was understood as a prudential activity,
wherein the capacity for poetic fabrication intersected with the normativity
proper to an ethics of virtue. For her, it is from within that context that the
fiction of a political contract and the obligations that it generates must be
understood.3
Conscious of the epoch’s penchant for explaining behavior through
interpretations of romance and through its capacity to activate the imagi-
nation, Kahn sees Hobbes as attempting to use a mimetic process to gen-
erate political obligation. Attempting to motivate the political contract
that way presents a problem, however. The passions that romance triggers
through deception and a fatal mimesis (as destructive imitation) are not
passions that make social peace possible. Kahn therefore reasons that the
argument of Hobbes regarding fear of violent death is neither descriptive
nor normative, but rather metaphoric (Kahn 2001, 7–8).
The idea that Hobbesian fear is metaphorical, not literal, leads Kahn to
suggest that what motivates the social contract is not fear of violent death,
even interpreted as a normative argument, but rather the omnipresence of
romance: all passions, fear of violent death among them, are involved in the
romantic plot. That, in turn, means that the first contract of Leviathan is a
literary contract, and that this literary contract is the precondition for the
political contract that founds the Hobbesian commonwealth.4

293
 gonzalo bustamante kuschel

What is the nature of that literary contract for Kahn? It is mimetic,

with mimesis understood as the human capacity for imitation, whether
metaphorical or through emulation. When, in explaining the generation of
the social contract, Hobbes argues that fear of violent death is “the passion
to be reckoned upon” (Hobbes 1994, 88), his argument must be interpreted
as a mimetic one. As Kahn perceptively maintains, in articulating his politi-
cal philosophy, the author of Leviathan located mimesis at its very center,
where it is mimesis as an impulse as well as the passions that must be con-
tractually defined. However, as I explain in the next section, that is not the
whole story concerning the contract’s generation: there is also a forgotten,
rhetorical element involved.
If one turns to the central characteristic of the state of nature, the war of
all against all, this derives from an “inference . . . of the passions,” which are
in turn inseparable from imagination itself. For example, “vainglory” is an
erroneous conception of our own power, which derives from fame and oth-
ers’ confidence more than our own actions. Excessive belief in oneself and
the adulation of others is what in this case leads us to imagine a power of
our own that we in fact do not have. At work here is a socially constructed,
imaginative mimetic desire. As Kahn writes, “Vainglory . . . is an inaccurate
imagination or conception of our power, which derives from the ‘fame and
trust of others’ rather than from our own actions. . . . Passion is relative
and socially constituted” (Kahn 2004, 142). What is more, in Hobbesian
psychology, all the properly human desires are mediated by the imaginative
activity of comparing ourselves to others (Kahn 2004, 152–53).
There would then exist an important paradox: whereas love and the
desires are appetites producing an imitative effect, there is also a passion
that lacks the capacity to produce that mimetic effect, namely fear, which
would therefore lack the power to dissuade us. For Hobbes, actions typical
of madness, such as those thought to arise from courage, were therefore
possible. The dilemma is that, without fear, there would be no contract, but,
at the same time, it is the one passion that would apparently not produce a
mimetic effect.5
Faced with this dilemma, one needs to turn to Struever’s interpretation.
My hypothesis is that her interpretation of Hobbes’ rhetoric as biological
rhetoric is correct and that, based on this interpretation, one can better
understand the continuity that some, like Raylor (2018), have seen between
the rhetorical and scientific traditions in Hobbes. The Renaissance tradi-
tion that influenced Hobbes was not simply that of Ciceronian humanism.
Rather, it also involved a reinterpretation of rhetoric informed by a legacy

294
 hobbes’ biological rhetoric

connecting Aristotle and his rhetoric to materialist currents. Finally, the

reason that the impotence of fear that Kahn points out can be overcome
if one attends to the rhetorical dimension of the contract is that Hobbes’
rhetoric is, precisely, biological. Though Kahn’s interpretation of Hobbes
connects mimesis with contract theory like no other, it results in a critical
paradox that cannot be resolved from within her own framework.
The argument that follows proceeds in three sections. The first pres-
ents the biological-materialist elements in Hobbes, and then shows how
these elements are relevant to understanding Hobbes’ rhetoric. The s­ econd
section then turns to Struever’s interpretation of Hobbes’ rhetoric as
­
neo-Aristotelian. This appreciation of how Aristotle’s biological rhetoric
inspired Hobbes is crucial for understanding the unity of corporeality and
language in relation to Hobbes’ rhetoric, and therefore contributes signifi-
cantly to scholarly discussions concerning interpretations of rhetoric in
Hobbes. The third and final section of the article then shows how it is
possible to interpret the contract in Hobbes as a rhetorical act, with fear
used rhetorically both to generate the contract and to maintain it. Finally,
the conclusion returns to the problem of the rhetoric of mimesis and its
relation to the covenant.

rhetoric in hobbes
To duly account for the idea of rhetoric in Hobbes, one must bear in mind
his claim that there was a continuum between the human animal and non-
human animals.6 The difference was that the production of human language
could be organized politically. However, for Hobbes, the human animal’s
possession of a language capable of political use did not imply a substantive
difference between human and nonhuman animals, or one having a soul
and the other lacking it. Rather, corporeality, and the biology that deter-
mines it, provided the basis for language, which Hobbes then saw  as, in
turn, providing the foundation for social life (see Hobbes [1839] 1969, 74).
The reason language was a sine qua non of political life for Hobbes
was that political life was an artifice.7 Without the artifice of language, the
essential political processes of personation and incorporation—the founda-
tional moment when each individual human-animal declares: “I authorise
and give up my right of governing myself to this man, or to this assembly
of men, on this condition, that thou give up thy right to him, and authorize
all his actions in like manner” (Hobbes 1994, 109)—would be impossible.
It is that connection between the human animal’s corporeality and his, and

295
 gonzalo bustamante kuschel

his psyche’s, capacity to be affected by words which allows the Hobbesian

rhetorical interpretation of language strategies to provide us with a picture
of actors’ intentions, interests, and relations. Those language strategies are
what, for Hobbes, explain the capacity of language to mobilize individu-
als, affecting their imagination by means of discourses, words, and images.
Based on his analysis, one can understand both aspects of the dynamic of
political speeches: both what mobilizes people, and the intentionality of
those who mobilize them.
Hobbes provides a definition of rhetoric in the Briefe: “Rhetorique, is
that Faculty, by which wee understand what will serve our turne, concerning
any subject, to winne beliefe in the hearer” (Hobbes 1986, 40). In Elements
of Law, Natural and Political, he similarly defines eloquence: “Eloquence is
nothing else but the power of winning belief of what we say; and to that
end we must have aid from the passions of the hearer” (Hobbes 2013, 177).
In that sense, one could suppose that, for Hobbes, eloquence and rhetoric
could be likened, and that a distinctive characteristic of both was their prof-
itability, with the profitability of rhetoric depending, precisely, on the art of
eloquence (Evrigenis 2016, 44–65).
This very potential for advancing the speaker’s interests is, for Hobbes,
what allows rhetoric to transform politics into a battleground, a feat accom-
plished through paradiastole.8 Paradiastole changes the meaning of a con-
cept by assigning a new, opposed meaning to it. One thereby seeks to alter
the concept’s meaning, appropriate it, and pass it on to someone who then
interprets it in its new sense. For Hobbes, paradiastole is the main feature
of rhetorical battles. Rhetoric, rather than the “art” of speaking, is the abil-
ity to impose concepts by assigning desired content to words. Concepts,
thus, take the form of linguistic tools that operate by generating a certain
perceived reality in a given area.
Hobbes developed an idea of rhetoric inseparable from an idea of
understanding. In his words:

Speech or language is the connection of names constituted by the

will of men to stand for the series of conceptions of the things
about which we think. Therefore, as a name is to an idea or concep-
tion of a thing, so is speech to the discourse of the mind. And it
seems to be peculiar to man . . . for animals do not know that words
are constituted by the will of men for the purpose of signification.
Moreover the signification that does occur when animals of the
same kind call to one another, is not on that account speech, since

296
 hobbes’ biological rhetoric

not by their will, but out of the necessity of nature, these calls by
which hope, fear, joy, and the like are signified, are forced out by
the strength of these passions. (Hobbes 1991, 37–38)

The difference between animal and human communication is that the

former has only denotation, not a capacity for connotative meaning, and
therefore lacks rhetorical skill. As Hobbes explained, “For even if some
brute animals, taught by practice, grasp what we wish and command in
words, they do so not through words as words, but as signs” (Hobbes 1991,
37). In that sense, his idea of rhetoric has a hermeneutic character. Pure
semantics would not be capable of enabling us to understand the impli-
cations and meaning of communication. From the moment that speech
takes on a performative character, actions are executed with it; these actions
imply the intentionality of the agents, so that utterances would have a stra-
tegic connotation. Likewise, the force of rhetoric itself bridges sensations
and words. An understanding of something cannot be dissociated from
the effect it produces on the senses. From the moment we become “body-
animated-rational, or man” (Hobbes [1839] 1969, 4), “thinking” is deter-
mined by the linguistic conditions that arise from that same corporeality
(Hobbes [1839] 1969, 34; cf. Frost 2008).9
The question that then arises is whether a nonrhetorical language exists.
Such a language would be valid solely by virtue of definitions intertwined
and related to each other, with every individual necessarily understanding
them in the same way and with respect to which all therefore have the same
idea or reaction. In short, a nonrhetorical language would be characterized
by a unity of criteria. Hobbes’ answer seems to be that such a language is
not possible; its necessary precondition would be either individuals capable
of segregating rationality from corporeality, or a uniform mechanism by
which given words would consistently affect each individual’s passions in
the same manner. As Hobbes writes in De Cive: “Neither endeavour they
so much to fit their speech to the nature of the things they speak of, as
to the passions of their minds to whom they speak; whence it happens,
that opinions are delivered not by right reason, but by a certain violence of
mind” (Hobbes 1991, 231). It is also clear from the following passage that a
nonrhetorical language appears as unfeasible to Hobbes:

For if those colors and sounds were in the bodies, or objects that
cause them, they could not be severed from them, as by glasses, and
in echoes by reflection, we see they are; where we know the thing

297
 gonzalo bustamante kuschel

we see is in one place, the appearance in another. And though at

some certain distance, the real and very object seem invested with
the fancy it begets in us; yet still the object is one thing, the image
or fancy is another. (Hobbes 1994, 7)

That moving of the body through language is the role of rhetoric inso-
far as it enables comprehension to play a role, both intersubjectively and
subjectively. Intersubjectively, from the moment the social state emerges
and we thereby leave behind the state of nature, rhetoric is an element of
language. In the social state, rhetoric is a means by which individuals seek
to convince others of the convenience of their own intentions. As Hobbes
notes:

The general use of speech, is to transfer our mental discourse, into

verbal; or the train of our thoughts, into a train of words; and
that for two commodities, whereof one is the registering of the
consequences of our thoughts; which being apt to slip out of our
memory, and put us to a new labor, may again be recalled, by such
words as they were marked by. So that the first use of names is to
serve for marks, or notes of remembrance. (Hobbes 1994, 16–17)

Therefore, from the moment that the social order arises, there is rheto-
ric. The subjective aspects of human beings that permit rhetoric, however,
already exist in the state of nature and figure in relation to self-conviction
about executing X or Y. Again, if Hobbes were an absolute mechanist,
viewing humans as mere automata, then everyone would opt for the same
course of action when faced with any given dilemma. Only a nonmechanic
materialism leaves open the possibility of individuals acting differently in
the same state of nature. That variability implies the existence of self-delib-
eration, a process whereby the individual, influenced by affections and pas-
sions, chooses one path over another (Hobbes [1839] 1969, 408–9).
Taking the Hobbesian theory of language as a starting point, one can
distinguish between denotation (the assignment of names to objects) and
signification (Biletzki 1997, 57–70 and 154–78). The latter is separable from
comprehension, since it relates to the speaker’s use of words, one deter-
mined by the speaker’s intention. The use of signification in each act of
communication would, then, entail a persuasive strategy chosen to allow
the speaker to reach the objective associated with a given communica-
tion. It is at this juncture between the word, its use, and communicational

298
 hobbes’ biological rhetoric

intentionality that meaning is created. Hence, as Biletzki correctly notes,

in Hobbes there is a confluence between a theory of meaning and the use
of language; the two are inseparable. Moreover, for Hobbes this is the dis-
tinctive feature of human communication. Animals, of course, did have
the ability to distinguish marks, but they lacked the ability to make inten-
tional use of them and to develop rhetorical strategies. Rhetoric is there-
fore inseparable from the specifically human use of language, which always
takes a rhetorical form.10
The relationship between “words” and “passions” is not that of a mechan-
ical stimulus of something already existing in human beings. Hobbes him-
self indicated that very few appetites and aversions were to be found in
humans “naturally,” meaning independently of experience (Hobbes 1994,
28). Most were constructs derived from our experience and, therefore, pos-
sessed both an individual-psychological ingredient and a social-historical
one. Thus, from the moment they awakened the imagination—the “first
internal beginning of all Voluntary motion” (Hobbes 1994, 27)—words were
constructors of passions. Passions thus comprised two elements: one cor-
poreal and the other semantic. That is why, as Frost (2008) correctly notes,
passions can be “moved.”
Following this interpretation, Hobbes’ rhetoric is inseparable from the
biological body that generates it, and understanding it involves analyzing
at least four levels: discourses, persuasion, the internal (and external) oscil-
lation of our passions, and the generation of contracts. The celebration of
contracts was a rhetorical act through which different passions together
resulted in a common creation. This explains Hobbes’ characterization of
the covenant in chapter 14 as “an act of will” consisting in “the last act of
deliberation,” and his statement that it “is therefore always understood to
be something to come; and which is judged possible” (Hobbes 1994, 86). In
that sense, the will to concur on striking a deal was not an act of atomized
will, but rather the result of a series of intersubjective acts of deliberation
and persuasion, a result that was itself rhetorical in form.

what is the basis of unity between corporeality

and language?
Struever indicates that, in appropriating Aristotle’s rhetoric, Hobbes con-
ceived it as a life science. It was Aristotle’s observations of animal behavior,
not his ethical works, which were taken up by Hobbes. Aristotle’s rhetoric
thus provided Hobbes a framework within which emotion, imagination,

299
 gonzalo bustamante kuschel

and reason converged. Hobbes’ rhetoric can, accordingly, be understood

as “biological rhetoric.” Struever explains that, in the seventeenth century,
there were two models for understanding life. On the one hand, there was
the Aristotelian model, which was considered a nonexclusivist theory pos-
iting a continuity between humans and other animals. On the other hand,
there was the dualistic, Cartesian model, which denied such a continuity.
As Struever demonstrates, in that discussion, Hobbes aligned himself with
Aristotelianism (Struever 2009, 14). For example, strikingly here, Hobbes
wrote, “This alternate succession of Appetites, Aversions, Hopes and Feares
is no less in other living Creatures than in Man; and therefore Beasts also
Deliberate” (Hobbes 1994, 33).
Struever thereby comes to four conclusions regarding Hobbes’ perspec-
tive. First, for Hobbes, deliberation puts an end to the freedom of doing or
ignoring; liberty is the consequence only of unfinished activities. Second,
desire and aversion are certainly just biological, as beasts deliberate too,
albeit in a more limited, strictly denotative way. Third, the idea of will fig-
ures in this model only as the last in a chain of demands or aversions, as a
performance, not a skill; beasts therefore also have will. And fourth, what
we understand by deliberation is the oscillation between different pas-
sions, which fight within our bodies to lead us in one direction or another.
Therefore, what we understand by voluntary movement is nothing more
than having followed the final passion at the moment of action. Without
passions, will therefore could not exist (Struever 2009, 78). Based on these
insights, Struever concludes:

Rhetoric accounts for politics by virtue of its biological assump-

tions; rhetoric postulates the pressure of physiology on psy-
chology, and psychology on the psychology of address. Hobbes’
psychophysiological description . . . of deliberation as the oscilla-
tion between aversion and desire becomes the basic template for
political practice, a template that sorts and underlines the natu-
ral mechanics; it encases the acts of counsel and advice, and of
political deliberation in general, the negotiations of public utility,
for conservation of life (HN, 74). The template stringently limits
useful possibility. (Struever 2009, 37–38)

Struever relates what she retrieves from Hobbes’ rhetoric to Aristotelian,

Ciceronian, and Quintilian rhetoric. In the Quintilian case, rhetoric always

300
 hobbes’ biological rhetoric

dominates motion, and therefore logically also involves “quintessential

rhetorical competence in moving the affects” (Struever 2009, 16).
In an online symposium of the European Hobbes Society, Patricia
Springborg, Ted H. Miller, and Alan Cromartie advance a series of criti-
cisms of Raylor (2018), to which Timothy Raylor himself then responds
(Cromartie et al. 2019). In this context, Springborg points to the signifi-
cant role that atomism plays in Hobbes’ understanding of rhetoric, one that
makes Struever’s discovery of “biological rhetoric” in Hobbes all the more
plausible. Although logic’s place in rhetoric and science was not directly
addressed, a relevant point that followed from the discussion concerned
Hobbes’ view of the place of rhetoric in d ­ eliberation. On this point, the
panelists agreed that, for Hobbes, deliberation implied rhetorical elements,
and that science per se would lack persuasive capacity.11
In the same colloquium, Cromartie himself recalls Hobbes’ famous
discussion in Leviathan of how “all deliberations,” if they are to maintain
the attention and produce consensus, need “powerfull Eloquence,” since
otherwise, “the effects of Reason will be Little.” The ability of reason and
logic to produce conviction and acquiescence in others are thus inseparable
from rhetoric. The same, I argue, applies to Hobbes’ view of the capacity for
self-conviction, a substantial part of any self-deliberative exercise.12
Hobbes’ critical reflection on society is grounded in his analysis of
human animality and the ferocity lurking, thinly veiled, within a social
world built linguistically, one whose institutions are inherently fragile
by dint of their contractual origins. If life in society rests on the fragile
cornerstones of language’s artificiality, then the kind of reality promoted
through the use of words is peculiarly perilous for it. Language is highly
“­de-ontologizing” for Hobbes. That is, it does not refer back to any social
institution with an ontological reality beyond that produced by language
itself. That fragility explains Hobbes’ concern about “poisonous teachings”
that could spread throughout society from academic or religious speeches
of a revolutionary type.13

rhetoric’s political dimension: paradiastole and fear

Skinner maintains that Hobbes’ Leviathan rekindled the persuasive force
of rhetoric, making it impossible to abandon. The force of rhetoric lay in its
ability to drive human passions and will, a field in which logic was sterile
and ineffectual. In Skinner, although we first have an early Hobbes critical

301
 gonzalo bustamante kuschel

of eloquent in utramque partem argumentation and its social effects, there

is then a later Hobbes who, for the benefit of establishing a scientia civilis,
required the use of both reason and rhetoric, and sought to use the power
of rhetoric in the interest of reason. In this regard, Skinner argues that
Hobbes returned to the Ciceronian tradition of ratio atque eloquentia; that
is, placing the power of oratory at the service of winning an audience for
the dictates of reason (Skinner 1996, 346).
Hobbes’ view of rhetoric is, however, ultimately a critique of the notion
of citizenship extant in the classic republican tradition, which was inex-
tricably tied to the use of rhetoric as a means of expression in the public
space. In that tradition, the citizen who used eloquence and oratory in
public life stood apart from passive subjects who obeyed the law as an
expression of the sovereign’s will, with no pretense of being active agents
committed to sui juris. In assailing rhetoric in De Cive, Hobbes therefore
took aim at the notion of the vir civilis, the ideal citizen who uses ora-
tory to take part in public life, as propounded in the Renaissance ideal of
­scientia civilis. Hobbes, through conceptual decomposition, irony, and logic,
sought to demolish the notion of an active civic life lived through rheto-
ric and therefore also rejected the distinction between citizens and passive
­subjects. Hobbes sees in rhetoric an instrument of political conflict, but also
the basis of the republican idea of citizenship, which he rejects (Skinner
2008, 285–86).
In his work, Hobbes critiqued rhetoric using a rhetorical strategy of
his own. As Skinner accurately notes concerning the Hobbesian strategy of
using rhetoric in his favor, its focus is conceptual redescription. This strategy
transformed one sociopolitical concept into another through paradiastole, a
technique of redescribing in order to construct criteria and true meanings
based on the creative capacity of language. As such, paradiastole therefore
implies that truth, rather that determined ex ante, is subject to debate, an in
fieri, indeterminate argument subject to linguistic confrontation. The stra-
tegic definition of a concept at a given moment is contingent, debatable,
and malleable. Only ex post, once a given position becomes hegemonic, can
there be truth (Skinner 1996).
The argumentative force of this strategy of redescription lies in its
capacity to stir the passions of the audience, which is to be won over by
images and emotion rather than the enunciative structure of the argument.
Key to winning over the passions of an audience is eloquence, and spe-
cifically, the ornatus. Cognizant of this, Hobbes was concerned about the
dangers of using paradiastole in utramque partem arguments, but he also

302
 hobbes’ biological rhetoric

recognized its potential to advance his new scientia civilis. For example,
when redescribing the meaning of freedom, Hobbes inverts the classic
treatment of the city of Lucca as an example of a city that was free, inter-
nally and externally, in contrast to Constantinople, which typically figured
as an example of oriental despotism. Hobbes collapses this distinction, with
clear rhetorical intent, maintaining that, “There is written on the turrets
of the city of Lucca in great characters at this day the word libertas; yet
no man can thence infer that a particular man has more liberty, or immu-
nity from the service of the commonwealth, there than in Constantinople.
Whether a commonwealth be monarchical or popular, the freedom is still
the same” (Hobbes 1994, 140).
For her part, Kahn concurs that, to win his audience’s ear, Hobbes had
to have recourse to arguments that went above and beyond logical reason-
ing, thereby bestowing on scientific argumentation the persuasive power
it lacked (Kahn 2020, 33–61).14 In the case of the contract, he pointed to
the image of loss of life in order to awaken the common aversion we have
to losing our own lives, one that psychologically explains fear. Fear, as an
aversion, cannot at the same time be an appetite, but it can be made into a
common experience that allows human conduct to be motivated with the
same force as a “common appetite,” for protecting our own lives. It is here
that, by means of analyzing the linguistic art of making or construction,
Kahn’s idea of Leviathan as a work pursuing practical, political objectives
but using the power of language to do so necessarily implies that linguistic
self-consciousness and its appeal to the passions, especially fear, has power
only because language is in sync with individuals’ corporality.15 It is that
material base of the human animal that is affected by words, and therein
lies the power of language.
What explains the universality of the passion of fear is that humans,
uniquely and exclusively, all possess experience of themselves, which
they receive through their senses. Ultimately, even when interacting with
others, we continue experiencing ourselves. This is the materialist basis of
Hobbesian psychology and what explains the centrality and force of lan-
guage. Leviathan therefore recurs to remind us of death and its imminence
in order thereby to maintain social order.
That reminder of death is rhetorical. The metaphors, images, and use
of history as a form of narrative of destruction serve a persuasive function;
together, they contribute to the eloquence required to maintain social peace.
Fear is necessarily required to bring the contract into being. In situations
of civil war, of war of all against all, or in which a conquering sovereign

303
 gonzalo bustamante kuschel

seeks to establish peace by force, death is an equally present reality, one

we experience. But Hobbes is interested in convincing people of the need
to maintain peace and order precisely to avoid the need to reach the point
where factual, lived experience rather than rhetoric is what reminds us that
destruction of civil peace will result in potential loss of our lives and goods.
Fear needs to be kept present in order to maintain social peace, and its rhe-
torical reinvigoration therefore serves to assist in maintaining tacit consent
to the contract.
Hobbes’ creation of the Leviathan is accordingly inseparable from the
rhetorical exercise of making words physically affect us. Precisely because
fear never originates as an appetite, it is necessary that sociohistorical
circumstances or linguistics instead produce it.16 Hobbes’ bet is that the
existence of the rhetorical-linguistic conditions for the existence of fear
contribute to avoiding the emergence of the sociohistorical condition
surest to produce it: a state of war. As mentioned, Hobbes defines the art
of rhetoric in the Briefe as the “Faculty, by which we understand what
will serve our turne, concerning any subject, to winne beliefe in the hearer”
(Hobbes 1986, 40). In other words, when it comes to the threats to life and
limb that failure to maintain the contract would entail, the speaker must
convert a mere aversion to losing those essential goods into the actual pas-
sion of fear, a feat that can be accomplished only through rhetoric that pro-
vokes a reaction of fear corporally experienced by the audience. Therefore,
the state of nature does not just play the role of explaining the original
advantages of cooperation and the rationality of submitting oneself to a
sovereign to which one gives life. Rather, through the image of a life that is
“nasty, brutish and short,” Hobbes seeks rhetorically to provoke fear of that
state of nature. Rhetoric is thereby allied to logic in the interest of achieving
Leviathan’s political objective.
When Hobbes indicates that “the general use of speech is to transfer
our mental discourse into verbal, or the train of our thoughts into a train
of words” (Hobbes 1994, 16), what he is doing is describing the process by
which we first convince ourselves of something in order to later exteriorize
it. That process does not take place through logical analysis. If it did, logic
would have the ability to persuade. Instead, a rhetorical process of self-
convincing occurs. That process, here again, is connected to Hobbes’ variety
of materialism, which is not mechanical-Cartesian, but instead implies a
permanent structure of mediation between the subject and the environ-
ment, one through which the consciousness of the subject is continually
configured.

304
 hobbes’ biological rhetoric

That reasoning helps explain the value that Hobbes perceived in the
rhetoric of Thucydides, whose contextual narration Hobbes understood as
having achieved a dual objective. First, Thucydides succeeded in using rhe-
torical analysis self-reflexively, to analyze the risks of rhetoric itself. Second,
he brought to life again in the reader those situations that had produced
the civil war, and succeeded in doing so through images so vivid that they
inspired renewed fear (Bredekamp 2020).
Here one must return to Struever’s affirmation that biological rhetoric
is a rhetorization of the psychological, one based on Aristotle’s psychologi-
cal rhetoric, but with a strong dose of Sophistic pessimism (Schuhmann
2004). In that context, in line with Thucydides, Hobbes interprets the risks
of paradiastole in terms of its potential to generate moral arbitrariness.
Unlimited by the natural intuition that precedes language and its con-
text, speeches have the capacity to move individuals in any direction. Most
worrisome for Hobbes, that capacity makes a determinate use of concepts
impossible; their definition by the sovereign is necessary. As Hobbes states,
“theft, murder, adultery, and all injuries, are forbid by the laws of nature;
but what is to be called theft, what murder, what adultery, what injury in
a citizen, this is not to be determined by the natural, but by the civil law”
(Hobbes 1991, 152).
Struever is therefore correct in arguing that Hobbes drew on the design
of Aristotle’s rhetoric as a “life science,” paying more attention to Aristotle’s
meticulous observations of animal behavior than the abstract neatness of
his ethical treatises (Struever 2009, 30). The diverse powers and abilities,
physical and intellectual, are so intertwined, so temporally integrated, that a
fragmented analysis of them is impossible. The driving force of human life,
like that of other animals, is therefore our being moved by desire, which is
not delimited by any form of theology, whether real or fictitious.
As Struever notes, “in classical Aristotelian rhetoric, it is the passions
that explain words’ ability to generate passions as movements of the soul,
causing motus animi” (Struever 2009, 78), a view implying that the passions
are understood as movements that generate other movements and there-
fore cannot be conceived in static form. That idea in Aristotle is clearly
reflected in Hobbes’ claim that deliberation is nothing more than oscilla-
tion, basic movement (Struever 2009, 38). Hobbes’ psychological rhetoric is
therefore fundamental for understanding politics as a process of movement
and oscillation produced by the effect of words and images on the imagina-
tion and, from there, on the human body. It is that capacity to unleash pas-
sions by means of language that allows for the connection of civil life with

305
 gonzalo bustamante kuschel

biology. That is why Hobbes rejects the distinction between rational activity
and other forms of activity proper to bodily biology.
The true difference between animals and men is that, because of our
linguistic capacity, we can, through imagination, develop antisocial atti-
tudes. The instincts of animals ensure social order for them, and they can
safely follow them, whereas we risk behaving as brutes. Aristotle, after his
famous affirmation that he who is unfit to live in society is either a beast
or a god, depicts the character of the bestial man as: “the most wicked,
the most cruel, the most lustful, and most gluttonous being imaginable”
(Aristotle [1912] 2009, bk. 1, chap. 3).17 The Hobbesian state of nature as an
image of politics corresponds to bestiality as described by Aristotle.
Aristotle thought it necessary to avoid that politics of bestiality through
justice, stating that “justice is a political virtue, by the rules of it the state is
regulated, and these rules are the criterion of what is right” (Aristotle [1912]
2009, bk. 1, chap. 3). In contrast, Hobbes sought to do so by means of creat-
ing an image of the state in which the divine and the bestial were melded
together. He rhetorically generated a Leviathan by combining the idea of a
mortal god with a mythological image, thereby creating an automaton per-
mitting the establishment of peace. The need for the Leviathan to be rep-
resented arose because it had to be feared, and for that it had to be a sign.18
Hobbes indicates that “fear inclines men least to break the law” (quoted
in Struever 2009, 23), and it is fear that permits the formation of social
order and the contractual emergence of the sovereign. That fear must be
activated through rhetoric and is therefore not the opposite of liberty, but
rather compatible with it. In that, Struever is correct in indicating Hobbes’
closeness to Aristotle’s idea that fear facilitates deliberation (Struever 2009,
23). Such fear-driven deliberation leads to greater respect for the law and
allows for the emergence of the absolute sovereign.
This corporeal force of rhetoric can already be found in Cicero, who
referred to “the rousing of their [the people’s] feelings to whatever impulse
our case may require,” and added “the members of the tribunal, of their
own accord, should carry within them to Court some mental emotion that
is in harmony with what the advocate’s interest will suggest” as well as “that
of all the resources of an orator far the greatest is his ability to inflame
the minds of his hearers and to turn them in whatever direction the case
demands.” As for the capacity to produce that effect by using fear, Plato
himself stated in the Laws that an aspect that made the Athenian constitu-
tion venerable was “the spectacle of the sheer magnitude of the military and
naval armament.” Also considering fear along these lines, Thucydides, in his

306
 hobbes’ biological rhetoric

account of the disorders during the plague in Athens, linked them to there
then prevailing “no fear [phobos] of god or law of man,” fear that, if present,
would have “had a restraining influence” (Kapust 2008, 356–57).
Sallust himself interpreted the order found in the era of Rome’s great-
ness as attributable to the fact that “fear of the enemy [metus hostilis] pre-
served the good morals of the state.” After the destruction of Carthage,
Sallust observed, the fear supporting public order disappeared, and there
emerged a new attitude: “when the minds of the people were relieved of
that dread [ilia formido], wantonness and arrogance naturally arose, vices
which are fostered by prosperity. Thus the peace for which they had longed
in time of adversity, after they had gained it proved to be more cruel and
bitter than adversity itself. . . . The community was Split into two parties,
and between these the state was torn to pieces” (quoted in Kapust 2008,
357). Hobbes’ deployment of rhetoric in Leviathan was consistent with such
classical emphasis on fear’s productive capacity to motivate and buttress
social order.

conclusion
In sum, even in critiquing rhetoric, Hobbes drew on a rhetorical strat-
egy of his own. As Skinner accurately notes concerning the Hobbesian
strategy of using rhetoric in his favor, his criticism of rhetoric and its
social impact concentrated on conceptual redescription. This operation
transforms comprehension of the conceptual meaning of one sociopo-
litical concept into another through the use of paradiastole, a rhetorical
technique of redescription that allows for establishing definitional criteria
and ways of understanding the truth based on the creative capacity of
language. The use of paradiastole as such therefore inherently carries the
implication that truth, rather than determined ex ante, is subject to debate.
Truth is an in fieri indeterminate argument subject to linguistic confronta-
tion. Only ex post, once a position has become hegemonic, can there exist
a social perception of truth. The underlying principle is that the definition
of a concept at a given moment is strategically contingent, debatable, and
malleable.
The argumentative force of this redescription strategy lies in its capac-
ity to stir the passions of the audience, winning it over through images and
emotion rather than through the enunciatory structure of the argument.
Key to winning over the passions of an audience is eloquence, and within
it, the ornatus. Cognizant of this, Hobbes sees paradiastole as dangerous

307
 gonzalo bustamante kuschel

when used in utramque partem arguments, but as useful for advancing his
new scientia civilis, as he does for example, when redescribing the meaning
of freedom.
But something that is absent in most relevant analyses of Hobbes’ rhet-
oric, from Skinner to Raylor, is Kahn’s positioning of it in relation to under-
standings of literature and romance at the time, and her consideration of
the role of mimesis in the contract. What remains unexplained within such
a mimetic understanding of the contract is how fear, which motivates the
contract and its fulfillment, can move us to action despite its peculiar inca-
pacity to inspire mimesis. I have suggested that, in order to overcome this
paradox, one must attend to the role that not only mimesis but also rhetoric
plays, both in contracting and in the subsequent maintenance of social order.
Although the recent work of Evrigenis (2016) and Raylor (2018) has con-
tributed to a better understanding of the connection between rhetoric and
materialism and how that connection stems from Aristotelian rhetoric, they
still do not explain Hobbesian rhetoric as biological rhetoric, as has Nancy
Struever. Yet, only starting from the idea of biological rhetoric is it possible
to understand the role of fearsome images in lending force to eloquence.
In the state of nature, there is a clear and present danger; the senses
register the effects of the war of all against all, and that allows for people,
one by one, each to become convinced of the need to form a contract. For
that, a sovereign power renewing their fear is unnecessary. However, once
civil order is established, in order to maintain the contract—by tacit con-
sent, for example—ongoing rhetorical action is needed for fear to remain
a current and generalized aversion. That idea of the need to update fear to
provoke deliberation and help preserve social order was part of the Greco-
Roman tradition of political thought and can be found in the idea that, if
deliberation consists in an alternating series of desires and aversions, then
a biological dimension that goes beyond mere biology to include sociohis-
torical experience as well contributes to driving it.
For Hobbes, the force of rhetoric is founded on the pressure physiol-
ogy exerts on psychology, which in turn determines what action to take.
His rhetoric is therefore linked to a view of politics based on biological
assumptions. Given Hobbes’ psychophysiological description of delibera-
tion as the oscillation between aversion and desire, language and rheto-
ric becomes the very basis for political practice, a foundation for politics
that classifies and underlines the natural mechanics flowing from the
interaction of physiology, psychology, and action. Thus, through its inter-
nal effect on individuals, rhetoric is inseparable from deliberation, and

308
 hobbes’ biological rhetoric

that is what is decisive in making fear “the passion to be reckoned upon”

(Hobbes 1994, 88).

School of Government
Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez

notes
My deep and sincere gratitude to both the reviewers and the editor for taking the time
to provide me with valuable comments and suggestions. I also wish to thank Elaine R.
Thomas for her assistance with the language, her editing of this article, and her relevant
comments. Thanks also to Patricio Espinosa for his help and feedback and to my faculty,
FAL, for their permanent support. My gratitude to the participants of the second collo-
quium on Hobbes and Rhetoric organized in Santiago de Chile: Kinch Hoekstra, Patricia
Springborg, Luka Ribarević, Andrés Rosler, Marco Geuna, and Luc Foisneau. This article
is part of a national grant of the Chilean ANID, Project Fondecyt 1200439.
1. The article does not pretend to provide an exhaustive revision of each and every
work on Hobbes and rhetoric.
2. Like Kahn (2004, 8), I understand the contract as a metaphor appropriate for ana-
lyzing nature in Hobbes’ work, albeit for sometimes different reasons.
3. As Kahn (2004) notes, “The state was an artifact that was brought into being by a
powerful, if sometimes fictional, speech act. For these reasons, I argue, early modern con-
tract theory is best thought of as a radically new poetics of the subject and the state” (1–2).
4. In Leviathan, Kahn explains, “Hobbes declares that the ‘first use of Speech’ is—or
should be—metalinguistic: it consists in ‘the right Definition of Names’ or words, that is,
a single definition, based on an agreement among individuals to use words in the same
way (4.28). . . . When we consent to the political contract, we consent as well to a lin-
guistic contract, that is, to the sovereign’s regulation of ‘the use of words’ (32.255)” (Kahn
2004, 149).
5. As Kahn notes, “If love and desire are forms of appetite, fear is a kind of aversion—
and in fact, Hobbes often uses the two words synonymously” (Kahn 2001, 15).
6. This explains the fact that, for Hobbes, reason is “no less a part of human nature,
than any other faculty, or affection of the mind” (Hobbes 1991, 15).
7. As Hobbes wrote in Man and Citizen, “It is easily understood how much we owe
to language, by which we, having been drawn together and agreeing to covenants, live
securely, happily, and elegantly” (Hobbes 1991, 40).
8. In the discussion that follows, use of the term “paradiastole” follows that of Skinner
(2002, 273–77).
9. Where consideration of Hobbes’ idea of thinking bodies and its consequences is
concerned, I follow Frost’s (2008) analysis.

309
 gonzalo bustamante kuschel

10. This explains why in De Corpore Hobbes indicates that establishing language is
more than just naming and assigning a meaning to objects and connecting them through
rules ([1839] 1969).
11. See Cromartie et al. (2019).
12. It is therefore possible to affirm that what Nienkamp defines as internal rhetoric
exists in Hobbes. Nienkamp (2001) himself rejects the existence of internal rhetoric in
Hobbes because he misunderstands Hobbes’ mechanical theory in Cartesian terms.
13. For a list of those dangerous teachings, see Hobbes (1994, 477–81).
14. See Kahn (2020, 35).
15. As Kahn notes, “Leviathan is as much about the power of language, about the
linguistic art of making or construction, as it is about politics” (Kahn 2020, 35).
16. Hobbes indicates in the Briefe (1986, 75–76) that fear is just a product of our mind,
one generated upon perceiving an external entity that can do us harm. That harmful capac-
ity is linked to its power over us, for example, through knowing aspects of us that could
damage our reputation. Both fear and power are relational and depend on the asymmetry
between X and Y for Hobbes. The same is true of an orator’s ability to use fear to manipu-
late an audience.
17. My reading of the importance of this part of Aristotle’s work for Hobbes fol-
lows the argument developed in Jimena Bezáres’ master’s thesis, titled “Sobre la bestia
espontánea. Lo monstruoso en Aristóteles y Hobbes,” which is currently in progress at the
Universidad Nacional de San Martin, Argentina.
18. Bredekamp (2020) sees Hobbes as a seminal figure for understanding the image as
a sign. Bredekamp suggests that the process of transforming a “mark” (Merkzeichen) into
a “sign” (Anzeichen) comes about through “substitute” acts of the image that produce some
kind of exchange between the bodies represented and the images representing them.

works cited
Abbott, Don Paul. 2014. “‘Eloquence Is Power’: Hobbes on the Use and Abuse of Rhetoric.”
Rhetorica 32 (4): 386–411.
Aristotle. (1912) 2009. A Treatise on Government. Trans. William Ellis. London: J.M. Dent.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/6762/6762-h/6762-h.htm#link2HCH0003.
———. 1926. The “Art” of Rhetoric. Trans. J. H. Freese. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Biletzki, Anat. 1997. Talking Wolves: Thomas Hobbes on the Language of Politics and the Politics
of Language. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Bredekamp, Horst. 2020. Der Leviathan. Das Urbild des modernen Staates und seine
Gegenbilder. 1651–2001. 5th ed. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Cromartie, Alan, Ted H. Miller, Timothy Raylor, and Patricia Springborg. 2019. “Online
Colloquium (1): Introduction to Philosophy, Rhetoric, and Thomas Hobbes.” http://
www.europeanhobbessociety.org/general/online-colloquium-1-introduction-
to-philosophy-rhetoric-and-thomas-hobbes.

310
 hobbes’ biological rhetoric

Evrigenis, Ioannis. 2016. Images of Anarchy: The Rhetoric and Science in Hobbes’s State of
Nature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Frost, Samantha. 2008. Lessons from a Materialist Thinker: Hobbesian Reflections on Ethics
and Politics. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Garsten, Bryan. 2006. Saving Persuasion: A Defense of Rhetoric and Judgment. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Hobbes, Thomas. (1839) 1969. De Corpore. Vol. 1 of The English Works of Thomas Hobbes. Ed.
Sir William Molesworth. London: John Bohn.
———. 1986. A Briefe of the Art of Rhetorique. In The Rhetorics of Thomas Hobbes and Bernard
Lamy, ed. John T. Harwood, 1–128. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University
Press.
———. 1991. Man and Citizen (De Homine and De Cive). Ed. Bernard Gert. Indianapolis:
Hackett.
———. 1994. Leviathan: With Selected Variants from the Latin Edition of 1668. Ed. Edwin
Curley. Indianapolis: Hackett.
———. 2013. Elements of Law, Natural and Political. Ed. Ferdinand Tönnies. London:
Taylor & Francis.
———. 2018. Behemoth: Or the Long Parliament. Ed. Ferdinand Tönnies. Franklin Classics.
Johnston, David. 1986. The Rhetoric of Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes and the Politics of Cultural
Transformation. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Kahn, Victoria. 1985. Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism in the Renaissance. Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press.
———. 2001. “Hobbes, Romance, and the Contract of Mimesis.” Political Theory 29 (1): 4–29.
———. 2004. Wayward Contracts: The Crisis of Political Obligation in England, 1640–1674.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
———. 2020. The Trouble with Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kapust, Daniel. 2008. “On the Ancient Uses of Political Fear and Its Modern Implications.”
Journal of the History of Ideas 69 (3): 353–73.
———. 2019. “Hobbes, Lucretius, and the Political Psychology of Peace.” History of
Political Thought 40 (2): 246–69.
Leijenhorst, Cees. 2001. The Mechanisation of Aristotelianism: The Late Aristotelian Setting of
Thomas Hobbes’ Natural Philosophy. Leiden: Brill.
Miller, Ted H. 2011. Mortal Gods: Science, Politics, and the Humanist Ambitions of Thomas
Hobbes. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Nauta, Lodi. 2002. “Hobbes the Pessimist?” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 10
(1): 31–54.
Nienkamp, Jean. 2001. Internal Rhetorics: Toward a History and Theory of Self-Persuasion.
Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Paganini, Gianni. 2020. “Early Modern Epicureanism: Gassendi and Hobbes in Dialogue
on Psychology, Ethics, and Politics.” In The Oxford Handbook of Epicurus and
Epicureanism, ed. Philip Mitsis, 671–710. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Prokhovnik, Raia. 1991. Rhetoric and Philosophy in Hobbes’ Leviathan. New York: Garland.
Raylor, Timothy. 2018. Philosophy, Rhetoric, and Thomas Hobbes. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Reagan, Laura S. 2012. “Mimesis in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651).” History of the
Human Sciences 25 (4): 25–42. https://doi.org/10.1177/0952695112444983.

311
 gonzalo bustamante kuschel

Schuhmann, Karl. 1998. “Skinner’s Hobbes.” British Journal of the History of Philosophy 6 (1):
115–25. https://doi.org/10.1080/09608789808570984.
———. 2004. Selected Papers on Renaissance Philosophy and on Thomas Hobbes. Ed. Piet
Steenbakkers and Cees Leijenhorst. New York: Springer.
Skinner, Quentin. 1991. “Thomas Hobbes: Rhetoric and the Construction of Morality.”
Proceedings of the British Academy 76: 1–61.
———. 1996. Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
———. 2002. Renaissance Virtues. Vol. 2 of Visions of Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
———. 2008. Hobbes and Republican Liberty. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
———. 2018. From Humanism to Hobbes: Studies in Rhetoric and Politics. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Springborg, Patricia. 2016. “Hobbes’s Materialism and Epicurean Mechanism.” British
Journal for the History of Philosophy 24 (5): 814–35.
Struever, Nancy. 1992. Theory as Practice: Ethical Inquiry in the Renaissance. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
———. 2009. Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
———. 2015. The Language of History in the Renaissance: Rhetoric and Historical Consciousness
in Florentine Humanism. Princeton: Princeton University.

312