Hobbes' Linguistic Turn

Abstract

Thomas Hobbes has often been regarded as a "protopositivist" precursor of the scientific study of politics. Terence Ball argues here that it may be more appropriate to consider him as a thinker acutely aware that social and political reality is linguistically made. However, Hobbes was inclined to treat the distortion or breakdown of communication as a technical problem to be met by the sovereign's imposition of "shared" meanings.