Hobbes, Sovereignty, and Early American Literature

Hobbes, Sovereignty, and Early American Literature explores the development of ideas about sovereignty and democracy in the early United States.

Paul Downes (Author)

9781107085299, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 28 July 2015

350 pages, 4 b/w illus.
23.5 x 16 x 2.2 cm, 0.57 kg

'Historically rigorous, formally astute, and theoretically provocative … assuredly will shape discussions surrounding democracy's place in nineteenth-century US literature and culture in the years to come.' John Funchion, American Literature

Hobbes, Sovereignty, and Early American Literature pursues the question of democratic sovereignty as it was anticipated, theorized and resisted in the American colonies and in the early United States. It proposes that orthodox American liberal accounts of political community need to be supplemented and challenged by the deeply controversial theory of sovereignty that was articulated in Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan (1651). This book offers a radical re-evaluation of Hobbes's political theory and demonstrates how a renewed attention to key Hobbesian ideas might inform inventive re-readings of major American literary, religious and political texts. Ranging from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Puritan attempts to theorize God's sovereignty to revolutionary and founding-era debates over popular sovereignty, this book argues that democratic aspiration still has much to learn from Hobbes's Leviathan and from the powerful liberal resistance it has repeatedly provoked.

1. Sovereignty's new clothes
2. Re-reading Leviathan: the 'state of nature' and the 'artificial soul'
3. Hobbes in America
4. 'Heaven's sugar cake': Puritan sovereignty
5. Tyranny's corpse: Jonathan Mayhew's revolutionary sermon on Romans
6. 'Imperium in imperio': founding sovereignty
7. Tar and feathers: Hawthorne's revolution
8. Hobbes, slavery, and sovereign resistance
9. Nat Turner and the African American revolution.

Subject Areas: Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900 [HBLL], History of the Americas [HBJK], Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD], Literary studies: general [DSB]