ABSTRACT
Introducing this topic in an exchange between Islamic and Western scholars in Indonesia, I must admit to having felt some uncertainty about the relevance of a chapter centred on the political thought of Thomas Hobbes. In stages, however, Islamic scholars enlightened my ignorance of the history of Islamic political philosophy, which, I discovered, had a distinctly Hobbesian cast. A powerful government capable of awing subjects or citizens into peaceful coexistence seemed as logically needful to Islamic thinkers as it had to the great seventeenth-century British philosopher. Moreover, the problem of properly securing people’s allegiance to the earthly Leviathan − which, I argue here, was a latent problem for Hobbes that pointed the way to some form of nationalism − seemed not irrelevant to the present condition of Indonesia, with its huge diversity of peoples and languages and its need to accommodate so disparate an array within the confines of a modern nation state. I was encouraged to hope, therefore, that the following reflections on a conundrum at the heart of Western liberal democracy might have some interest and resonance in the Indonesian context.
