Hobbes, Sovereignty, and Early American Literature
Jul 2015 · Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture Book 175 · Cambridge University Press
Ebook
313
Pages
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About this ebook
Hobbes, Sovereignty, and Early American Literature pursues the question of democratic sovereignty as it was anticipated, theorized and resisted in the American colonies and in the early United States. It proposes that orthodox American liberal accounts of political community need to be supplemented and challenged by the deeply controversial theory of sovereignty that was articulated in Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan (1651). This book offers a radical re-evaluation of Hobbes's political theory and demonstrates how a renewed attention to key Hobbesian ideas might inform inventive re-readings of major American literary, religious and political texts. Ranging from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Puritan attempts to theorize God's sovereignty to revolutionary and founding-era debates over popular sovereignty, this book argues that democratic aspiration still has much to learn from Hobbes's Leviathan and from the powerful liberal resistance it has repeatedly provoked.
About the author
Paul Downes is Associate Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Democracy, Revolution, and Monarchism in Early American Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2002), which was a co-winner of the MLA prize for a first book. He has also written a number of essays on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American fiction. His work explores the concepts of democracy and sovereignty as they have been instituted and imagined in the early United States and in the discourse of transnational humanitarian intervention.
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