Thomas Hobbes: The Father of Law and Literature

Abstract

In a key chapter in his Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes defines justice not as an abstract ideal, but as the consequence of the existence of contracts. If a contract has been agreed to, then it is just to honor it, and unjust to breach it. Both justice and injustice are linguistically produced, and have no more exalted pedigree. The law and literature movement extends Hobbes's insight into the whole of law. Rather than the vocabulary of law being responsive to a set of prior universals, those universals – equal treatment, due process, freedom of speech, equity, etc. – come into view and are able to do their legal work as the result of what has been said about them by authorized practitioners who then regard their creations as commandments handed down from on high. Words may or may not make the world, but they certainly make the legal world.

Keywords:

• Thomas Hobbes
• law of contract
• foundationalist
• justice
• Richard Rorty
• James Boyd White
• rhetoricity

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C.B. Macpherson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 202. Hereafter references to Leviathan will be in parentheses following the quote.

2. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 5.

3. Boyd White, “The Judicial Opinion and the Poem: Ways of Reading, Ways of Life,” in Law and Literature: Text and Theory, ed. Lenora Ledwon (New York: Garland Publishing, 1996), 5.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Stanley Fish

Professor Stanley Fish is one of the US's leading public intellectuals, and a world-renowned literary theorist and legal scholar. He began his academic career in the English Department at the University of California, then became the Kenan Professor of English and Humanities at Johns Hopkins University, where he taught from 1974 to 1985, before becoming Arts and Sciences Professor of English and Professor of Law at Duke. He was dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois from 1999 to 2004. In 2011 he received a lifetime achievement award from Yale University. Professor Fish is a prolific author, having written over 200 scholarly books and articles, and is a contributor to “The Opinionator” blog for The New York Times. He is currently the Floersheimer Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at Cardozo Law School. His most recent book is Winning Arguments: What Works and Doesn't Work in Politics, the Bedroom, the Courtroom, and the Classroom (2016). He can be reached by email at: [email protected]