ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on Thomas Hobbes and one of his seventeenth-century critics, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. In his theory of the social contract, Hobbes proposes a theory where civil society acquires a similar conventional basis. Hobbesian contractualism is basically an account of the social and the political exclusively in terms of a linguistic construction built up around the conventional sign of the civil sovereign. By the term "materialism", Leibniz refers to the claim that everything existing is of a corporeal nature, that is a natural philosophy that denies the existence of spiritual substances or formal principles in nature. Leibniz sees the anti-finalism implied in the materialist rejection of formalism, the strict economy of metaphysical principles that it calls for, as an open invitation to destroy natural religion and indulge in political skepticism. Leibniz thought that contractualism was at the end of the day aligned with political skepticism.