Macpherson's Hobbes – is Leviathan really a bourgeois one?

Abstract

Author examines C.B. Macpherson's ifluential interpretation of Hobbes's Leviathan in which the interpreter tries to persuade us that Hobbes's civil society or state is a bourgeois one. Author questions Macpherson's central claim that Hobbes's analysis of the nature of man is already a picture of a man in society or “bourgeois” man. He shows that this thesis has no support in Hobbes's text and then rejects each of Macpherson's arguments which should support it. Then he explains that Macpherson's interpretation of Hobbes, exactly because it is based on this “bourgeois” thesis, overlooks the importance of a number of central points of Hobbes's political theory in Leviathan, for example why his conception of natural rights should necessarily be limited to condition of nature and this right ceases to exist with men's departure from the condition of nature. From the same reason Macpherson overlooks the real binding force of Hobbes's political and moral obligation to obey sovereign, which he reduces to mere utilitarian calculus.