Hobbes: producing politics/effacing interrogation

As suggested in the last chapter, an analysis focused on the contemporary problem of the political must engage with sovereignty, as it is the discourses and practices of sovereignty that have, since early Modernity, framed the problem of the political, providing the logic and justification for the political spaces we have created and inhabited.1 But why focus on Hobbes to explore the problem of sovereignty? There are certainly many other theorists with whom one might begin; the development of the modern state and the discourses of sovereignty that enabled it were complex processes and many theorists contributed to them in different ways. Hobbes famously wrote from within the chaos and violence of civil war in England; Leviathan was first published in 1651. This context defines what is at stake in his project: he wrote with an intense focus on how the horrific violence he saw around him might be contained. As such, the analysis was a response to the collapse of the forms of political authority that had previously contained violence, ordering it and enabling people to live their lives without the constant chaos and devastation of civil war. He wrote, in other words, to establish order, to argue for a basis for shared forms of political authority capable of stemming bloodshed. As such, his text contains an implicit analysis of the source of the conflicts around him, as well as a prescription for how authority might be constituted differently. His response to this was modern sovereignty, and his account of what it is-what assumptions and practices ground and enable it, and what exclusions are necessary to achieve it-remains paradigmatic. Starting with different theorists would provide different insights. I choose to begin with Hobbes not only because his account remains paradigmatic, but because it is so alert to and explicit in its engagement with the violences it effects. It also provides particularly sharp insights into not only the specific relationship between sovereignty and indigeneity, but contemporary politics more generally.