ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes to reexamine several aspects of Hobbes' political philosophy from a perspective that may be called conceptual or linguistic. It deals with a brief account of what the linguistic turn does, and does not, imply. The chapter considers some of the political implications of Hobbes' linguistically grounded science of politics. In hindsight, the linguistic turn appears almost as an instance of uncoordinated simultaneous discovery. Among Thomas Hobbes' many boasts, none was prouder than his claim to be the first truly scientific political thinker. Hobbes' new science of politics takes geometry as its model, not out of a Cartesian conviction that mathematics mirrors the underlying structure of the natural world, but because it does not. The civil philosopher's knowledge of matters political is every bit as certain as the geometer's, and for precisely the same reason: geometry is, in Hobbes' view, the product—indeed, the very paradigm—of human art and artifice.
