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Hobbes's View on the Role of Language on Politics and the State by Reason

Jong Eun Lee 1

1국민대학교

Candidate

ABSTRACT

No other political philosophers other than Thomas Hobbes have fully appreciated the extent to which that language plays many a lot of roles in politics. According to Hobbes, what makes human beings different from other animals is their use of the fact that man uses language with the help of reason. Civil philosophy is nothing but the reasoning on the speeches that have resulted from the trains of words. There prevail not only the violences but also the frauds due to abuse and misuse of language in society. This reflects exactly what Hobbes termed calls the state of nature. It is nothing but , I.e., the situation caused by the anarchy of meanings. Men make the social contract to avoid the fear caused by the anarchical state. The sovereign of the Commonwealth, as public reason, becomes a great definer of words, exercises the absolute epistemic power and controls the moral and political language. It is the epistemic power which makes the sovereignty absolute. The Commonwealth becomes artificial because it is established by reasoning through language, and so is language. Therefore, it is an urgent task for the sovereign to define what the political and moral discourses are possible and reasonable. Thus so that men can observe the moral commands by following the commands of the sovereign

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* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.

This paper was written with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea.
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