After the body politic: Thomas Hobbes's scientific argument concerning political order

Thomas Hobbes claimed to discover a science of politics, and compared this science to geometry. But in his expositions of civil science, he intertwined prudential arguments with his scientific argument. This dissertation attempts to reconstruct Hobbes's scientific argument more explicitly than Hobbes did, and challenges interpretations of Hobbes that focus on prudential concerns for self-preservation.;I examine Hobbes's theory of language, and argue that Hobbes combined a traditional view of language as a system for signifying mental ideas, with the early modern mechanical conception of body as extension in space, to support his ontological claim that mind is nothing but motions within an organic body. Hobbes's theory of language permitted the concept of cause to apply equally to natural processes and to the logical relations between names. This supported his linguistic conception of science, and provided a bridge between his natural and civil sciences.;After explicating the relations between the sciences in Hobbes's system, I propose a new reading of civil science. Hobbes's ontology of body enabled him to make his radical break with the classical tradition, which had regarded the individual corporeal body as part of an ontologically prior incorporeal body politic. Against this tradition, Hobbes posed the state of nature, which I term a "problem of individual embodiment." As a specifically scientific problem, this is not a strategic dilemma, but rather a logical contradiction involving the status of the individually embodied will.;Though Hobbes's concept of science is coherent in its own terms, I argue it is no longer tenable, due to the twentieth century shift away from theories of signification of mental ideas to theories of publicly shared meaning. This critique opens the way to interpreting Hobbes historically. Like C. B. Macpherson, I relate Hobbes's theory to capitalism. Unlike Macpherson, I draw upon Habermas's theory of modernity and upon the historical sociology of European state formation to relate Hobbes's scientific problem of embodiment to early modern struggles revolving around the body of the absolutist king. Finally, I suggest that Hobbes's problem may continue to illuminate the role of the public sphere in modern democratic theory.