Governing the Imaginary

This book offers the first study on the relation between the political thought of Thomas Hobbes and the emerging public sphere of early 17th century Britain. It shows how Hobbes’s Leviathan can be seen as a philosophical and political response to the media revolution first ushered in by the printing press and later radicalized by the dramatic events of the British Civil Wars. It explains how Hobbes found the root causes of these wars in the struggle for public support wagered by power-hungry clerics and politicians. As this struggle was carried out through informal means such news and pamphlets, aesthetic representations and public mobilization, the book shows how Hobbes devised a complex theory of government to counter the destabilizing tendencies of such strategies. This theory was in turn premised upon a revised conception of human psychology. The book will be of interest to anyone with an interest in the history of philosophy, political thought, the political culture of the early modern period and the emergence of the public sphere.