Hobbes’s Entanglement with the Excluded Middle in his Theory of Man and Politics

Abstract

Characteristically Hobbes defines a topic and then negates it by its opposite, and in doing so creates contradictories, not just contraries. The invariable result is that he cannot cope with the development of the topic without raising problems of interpretation both for himself and for his critical readers. My primary intent here is to point to a number of these contradictories and to show that in coming to terms with the problems of politics he is constrained to transform contradictories into contraries. Secondly, I wish to show how Hobbes’s style of dealing with these matters lends itself to a variety of incompatible scholarly interpretations, which, though textually grounded, produce endless controversy. Prior to discussing the question of the use of the excluded middle in his philosophy, I shall note something of the range of interpretations scholars have made of his theory of man and politics. I conclude by showing the one-sidedness of commentators’ interpretations that fail to acknowledge the distinction between contraries and contradictories as they appear in his basic philosophy.