Eleanor Curran 
Reclaiming the Rights of the Hobbesian Subject 

‘There are no substantive rights for subjects in Hobbes’s political theory, only bare freedoms without correlated duties to protect them’. Curran challenges this orthodoxy of Hobbes scholarship, and argues that Hobbes’s theory is not a theory of natural rights but rather, a modern, secular theory of rights, with relevance to modern rights theory.

Table of Content

Introduction PART I: THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF HOBBES’S POLITICAL THEORY Examining the Orthodoxy – Hobbes and Royalism The Political Context – Taking Sides PART II: HOBBES’S THEORY OF RIGHTS: THE TEXTUAL ARGUMENT Liberties and Claims – Rights and Duties The Full Right to Self Preservation and Sovereign Duties PART III: HOBBES AND THEORIES OF NATURAL LAW AND NATURAL RIGHTS The Natural Rights Tradition – With or Without Hobbes? PART IV: HOBBES’S THEORY OF RIGHTS: A MODERN SECULAR THEORY Current Discussions of Hobbesian Rights – The Distorting Lens of Hohfeld Conclusion: Towards a Hobbesian Theory of Rights Index

About the author

ELEANOR CURRAN is a Lecturer at Kent Law School, The University of Kent, UK.