Additional information
by Philip Pettit (Author)
Hobbes's extreme political views have commanded so much attention that they have eclipsed his work on language and mind, and on reasoning, personhood, and group formation. But this work is of immense interest in itself, as Philip Pettit shows in Made with Words, and it critically shapes Hobbes's political philosophy.
Pettit argues that it was Hobbes, not later thinkers like Rousseau, who invented the invention of language thesis--the idea that language is a cultural innovation that transformed the human mind. The invention, in Hobbes's story, is a double-edged sword. It enables human beings to reason, commit themselves as persons, and incorporate in groups. But it also allows them to agonize about the future and about their standing relative to one another; it takes them out of the Eden of animal silence and into a life of inescapable conflict--the state of nature. Still, if language leads into this wasteland, according to Hobbes, it can also lead out. It can enable people to establish a commonwealth where the words of law and morality have a common, enforceable sense, and where people can invoke the sanctions of an absolute sovereign to give their words to one another in credible commitment and contract. Written by one of today's leading philosophers, Made with Words is both an original reinterpretation and a clear and lively introduction to Hobbes's thought.Back Jacket
"Philip Pettit is a major figure in political theory and an important voice in philosophy in general. He has an astonishing range, and in this book he expands it still further. More than a mere introduction, Made with Words offers a coherent and well-argued picture of most of the main components of Hobbes's wide-ranging philosophy. It is for providing a sense of the sweep of Hobbes's philosophy as an integrated system that readers will be most indebted to Pettit. A book of bracing clarity and interest, it will help students to consider Hobbes carefully and it will encourage scholars to reconsider him."--Kinch Hoekstra, University of Oxford
"This is an elegant and persuasive account of Hobbes's philosophy in the whole, from one of our leading political philosophers. Because the writing is so clear and lively, and the scholarship worn with relative ease, it will appeal to a wide readership."--Duncan Ivison, University of Sydney
Author Biography
Philip Pettit is the Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Politics and Human Values at Princeton University. His books include The Common Mind, Republicanism, and Rules, Reasons, and Norms. A collection of papers on his work, Common Minds: Themes from the Philosophy of Philip Pettit, appeared in 1997.
