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As the digital revolution in political discourse continues, there are some important conceptual, methodological and empirical challenges that must be met by scholars interested in new media politics in both France and the United States. Some of the challenges that the Internet poses to basic concepts and procedures in the field of political communication are profound, and perhaps explain a lack of disciplinary consensus on any kind of theory. This article uses an example of recent research to highlight these difficulties and suggest some possible solutions. It then surveys the realm of new media politics in France, and offers some suggestions for future research.

Hannah Arendt claims that Thomas Hobbes was responsible for constituting modern people as apolitical subjects who can no longer make independent moral judgments. The refusal to think that Hobbes allegedly engendered was a major factor in twentieth-century totalitarianism’s worst crimes. In her view, Hobbes’s Leviathan established the architecture of the totalitarian state and initiated the cultivation of people so incapable of exercising moral judgment that they stood idly by and let such a state commit horrors in their name. I argue that Hobbes rejected the proto-totalitarian form of domination Arendt attributes to him and expressed hope about the human capacities for practical judgment and moral improvement. Instead of creating thoughtless subjects which authorize any crime the state might commit, he suggests that the Leviathan should cultivate the public’s capacity for reason and judgment to make violence unnecessary. Considering Hobbes’s accounts of reason and science in light of his materialism shows that the Leviathan requires the exercise of individual moral thought and judgment to function properly. I suggest that the primary duty of the Hobbesian sovereign might be understood primarily in terms of the cultivation of individual judgment and reason rather than its suppression.

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