Hobbes and the 'Liberties' of Subjects

The workshop aims at exploring different ways of approaching Hobbesian thought – far from the standard absolutist interpretation –, in its moral, political and historical sides. In particular, it tries to elucidate those topics concerning the liberties granted to citizens within the civil state by «the silence of the law», i.e. «in those things which in regulating their actions, the sovereign hath praetermitted», or by the unalienable right to safe one’s own life. This general theme is inspired by chapter XXI of the Leviathan, ‘On the Liberty of Subjects’ (in the singular); using liberties, in the plural, we can investigate those spaces of liberty left to individual judgment and traceable in Hobbes’s thought. There is a flourishing literature which aims at exploring the seeds of a ‘proto-liberal’ conception in Hobbes’s moral and political theory. Thus, far from reading Hobbes only as a monolithic theorist of absolutism, the workshop aims at shedding light on those ‘hidden’ sides of Hobbes, which leave room for the possibility of a ‘proto-liberal’ interpretation.