9 The Problem of Sociability after Hobbes: Pufendorf and Locke on the Politics of Recognition

Abstract

Thomas Hobbes's place in the history of modern political thought is somewhat curious. Hobbes is perhaps the most 'political' of all political philosophers, focusing as he did primarily on the origins, nature, and authority of the state as an "artificial person". 1 Yet the period ca.1650-1800 witnessed a notable expansion of the scope of the political, with an increased attentiveness to how broader social and economic forces exert themselves on individuals in such ways as to render them susceptible to 'government', understood in a Foucauldian sense as "the conduct of conduct". 2 As Foucault argued, sociability (socialité)-how individuals coexist with one another-became a new matter to "police" from the seventeenth century onwards. 3 Hobbes is implicated in this turn away from a narrow focus on the state and its monopolization of disciplinary power, because to a considerable extent it was undertaken to confront a question that Hobbes had himself made pressing-but one to which his own political theory was held to offer an inadequate solution. 4 This was the problem, in Kant's memorable formulation, of "unsocial sociability". 5 By what means might human beings, with all their antisocial characteristics, be induced to exercise the kinds of 1