Što da se radi s Levijatanom?
What Is to be Done with the Leviathan?

Summary/Abstract: If it is true that a systematic understanding of modern society cannot be constituted without relying on the major works of the political thinking of modernity, the opposite is also true, i.e. that none of those works cannot be properly understood unless from the viewpoint of a developed theory of modernity. In his General Theory of Modernity, Jacques Bidet points out that his metastructural theory of the modern epoch finally makes it possible to critically reexamine and reconstruct the entire “political metaphysics” of modernity. His intention is sufficiently (at the very least) outlined in his interpretations of Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Rousseau, Kant and Hegel. The author singles out Bidet’s pregnant interpretation of Hobbes, and faces the question: what is to be done with the Leviathan? The first part of the article gives a detailed account of Bidet’s basic hypotheses and insights into Hobbes’ crucial role in finding an adequate conceptual definition of the logical starting point of exposition of the theory of modernity as a purely discursive relation in the formula of the social agreement. The second part puts forward a critical appraisal of Bidet’s key reconstructional thesis that Hobbes’ theory of authorisation is perceived as the actual logical starting point of exposition of metastructural theory categories. In part three it is shown that Hobbes’ theory of political representation and authorisation could indeed be the starting point to a political theory of modernity (because it establishes man as the “author” of politics, and his representative or the sovereign as his “actor” or representative). In the author’s judgement, Bidet’s reconstructional thesis, which denies the epistemological status of the “natural state” as the first and most general concept in the sequence of exposition, is not valid. In the natural state, man’s nature is not ahistorically postulated as that of a wolf; it is essentially dual. At issue here is primarily the modern man (and not merely man in general) in the epochal constellation wherein he, simultaneously and contradictorily, exists as a particular individual (bourgeois), which pursues his natural right, and as a moral subject (a Christian believer), which, as a being of conscience, fathoms and follows the imperatives of the natural or moral or divine laws. Precisely this duality, his inner cleavage of modern man, is also the starting supposition of Hobbes’ theory of modernity encompassed in the key concept of the “natural state”. In view of Bidet’s argumentation, and relying above all on Zarka’s fundamental interpretation of Hobbes’ political philosophy as semiology of power, we are constantly faced with the Leviathan as an incomparable challenge to our cognitive faculty.

• Details
• Contents