Abstract

KAHN, Victoria. Fondly Overcome: Revisiting the History of the Liberal Subject. Acta poét [online]. 2004, vol.25, n.2, pp.27-46. ISSN 2448-735X.

This article reconsiders seventeenth-century English debates about political obligation by analyzing the implicit dialogue between Hobbes's Leviathan and Milton's Paradise Lost. In contrast to historians of political thought who read seventeenth-century debates as anticipating an enervated, proto-liberal conception of the autonomous political subject, I argue that the exchange between Milton and Hobbes highlights the poetic and affective dimension of early modern accounts of political obligation. Once we begin to read early modern accounts through the lens of poetics and the passions, rather than reason and self-interest, we can also see what the early modern period has to offer contemporary debates between liberals and communitarians.

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