The “Market” and the “Forum” in Hobbes's Political Philosophy

Abstract

In the last decade, the deliberative model of democracy has been offered to counter the prevalent conservative economistic tendencies of democratic theorizing. But the ideas of deliberation and rational persuasion are not newcomers on the stage of political philosophy, for they were central to the way classical rhetoricians understood politics. Against this background, this article examines the role economic and deliberative models of politics play in Hobbes's political philosophy. It argues that Hobbes chose to analogize these two models rather than to treat them as competing views of politics because he saw both the economy and deliberation as sites of manipulation and not as “consensus forming mechanisms.”