Alison McQueen
Stanford University, Political Science, Faculty Member
- Political Science, Political Theory, History of Political Thought, Political Theology, Realism (Political Science), History of International Relations Thought, and 26 moreColonialism, Imperialism, Eschatology and Apocalypticism, John Rawls, Political Realism, Political Philosophy, Thomas Hobbes, Early Modern Political Thought, Realism, Machiavelli, Realism in political theory, Hobbes, Hans Morgenthau, Early Modern Intellectual History, Classical Realism, Eschatology, Bernard Williams, History Of Political Thought (Political Science), English Civil War, Political Thought, Thucydides, Republicanism, Raymond Geuss, Apocalyptic Eschatology, Intellectual History, and Early Modern English Political Philosophyedit
From climate change to nuclear war to the rise of demagogic populists, our world is shaped by doomsday expectations. In this path-breaking book, Alison McQueen shows why three of history's greatest political realists feared apocalyptic... more
From climate change to nuclear war to the rise of demagogic populists, our world is shaped by doomsday expectations. In this path-breaking book, Alison McQueen shows why three of history's greatest political realists feared apocalyptic politics. Niccolò Machiavelli in the midst of Italy's vicious power struggles, Thomas Hobbes during England's bloody civil war, and Hans Morgenthau at the dawn of the thermonuclear age all saw the temptation to prophesy the end of days. Each engaged in subtle and surprising strategies to oppose apocalypticism, from using its own rhetoric to neutralize its worst effects to insisting on a clear-eyed, tragic acceptance of the human condition. Scholarly yet accessible, this book is at once an ambitious contribution to the history of political thought and a work that speaks to our times.
Research Interests: Religion, Political Theory, Apocalypticism, Eschatology and Apocalypticism, Realism (Political Science), and 10 moreThomas Hobbes, History of Political Thought, History of International Relations, Early Modern Political Thought, Modern Political Philosophy, Niccolò Machiavelli, International Political Theory, Hans Morgenthau, Political Realism, and Realism in political theory
This book uses innovative methodological techniques to identify and explain dramatic changes in Thomas Hobbes’s religious arguments across his three major political works —Elements of Law (1640), De Cive/On the Citizen (1642), and... more
This book uses innovative methodological techniques to identify and explain dramatic changes in Thomas Hobbes’s religious arguments across his three major political works —Elements of Law (1640), De Cive/On the Citizen (1642), and Leviathan (1651). Despite a burgeoning literature on Hobbes and religion, no one has rigorously documented (1) his increasing focus on scripture, (2) his growing attention to the Old Testament in particular, or (3) his progressive adoption of a multi-pronged strategy of religious argument. This book will be the first to systematically explain why Hobbes was increasingly concerned with violent religious pluralism and to account for his ever-more sophisticated responses to it.
Absolving God makes three major contributions. Its scholarly contribution is to show how we can explain many of Hobbes’s most puzzling and politically risky arguments once we recognize how they track the very specific religious debates that fueled Britain’s bloody civil war. The book’s methodological contribution is to show how automated text analysis can give a more comprehensive and precise account of the arguments to which Hobbes was responding. Except for some of my own collaborative work (see below), these methodological tools have not been used by political theorists.
The book’s contemporary relevance comes from showing why a major political thinker thought that the best strategy for dealing with dangerous religious enthusiasm is to meet it on its own terms. Absolving God also isolates the very specific distinctive argumentative tactics that Hobbes thought would be most effective for defusing violent sectarian conflict and evaluates their potential use today.
Absolving God makes three major contributions. Its scholarly contribution is to show how we can explain many of Hobbes’s most puzzling and politically risky arguments once we recognize how they track the very specific religious debates that fueled Britain’s bloody civil war. The book’s methodological contribution is to show how automated text analysis can give a more comprehensive and precise account of the arguments to which Hobbes was responding. Except for some of my own collaborative work (see below), these methodological tools have not been used by political theorists.
The book’s contemporary relevance comes from showing why a major political thinker thought that the best strategy for dealing with dangerous religious enthusiasm is to meet it on its own terms. Absolving God also isolates the very specific distinctive argumentative tactics that Hobbes thought would be most effective for defusing violent sectarian conflict and evaluates their potential use today.
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In his political works, Thomas Hobbes proliferated arguments and overdetermined his conclusions. This article advances the hypothesis that at least some of this overdetermination was intentional. It was part of a "convergent strategy"... more
In his political works, Thomas Hobbes proliferated arguments and overdetermined his conclusions. This article advances the hypothesis that at least some of this overdetermination was intentional. It was part of a "convergent strategy" meant to appeal to a broad, diverse, and unknown audience. The article draws on Leviathan to offer evidence for this hypothesis.
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What role, if any, should appeals to fear play in climate change communication? Moral and practical worries about fear appeals in the climate change debate have caused some to turn toward hope appeals. I argue that fear can be a rational... more
What role, if any, should appeals to fear play in climate change communication? Moral and practical worries about fear appeals in the climate change debate have caused some to turn toward hope appeals. I argue that fear can be a rational and motivationally powerful response to climate change. While there are good reasons to worry about the use of fear in politics, climate change fear appeals can be protected against the standard criticisms of political fear. Hope appeals, by contrast, seem vulnerable to serious motivational drawbacks in the case of climate change. We should not therefore abandon fear appeals in favor of hope appeals. Instead, we should take our bearings from Aristotle in an effort to cultivate fear more responsibly. Aristotle offers an appealing model of “civic fear” that makes room for the best aspects of hope, elicits rather than extinguishes our sense of agency, and invites rather than forecloses deliberation.
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When did European modes of political thought diverge from those that existed in other world regions? We compare Muslim and Christian political advice texts from the medieval period using automated text analysis to identify four major and... more
When did European modes of political thought diverge from those that existed in other world regions? We compare Muslim and Christian political advice texts from the medieval period using automated text analysis to identify four major and 60 granular themes common to Muslim and Christian polities, and examine how emphasis on these topics evolves over time. For Muslim texts, we identify an inflection point in political discourse between the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, a juncture that historians suggest is an ideational watershed brought about by the Turkic and Mongol invaders. For Christian texts, we identify a decline in the relevance of religious appeals from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. Our findings also suggest that Machiavelli’s Prince was less a turn away from religious discourse on statecraft than the culmination of centuries-long developments in European advice literature.
Research Interests: Humanities Computing (Digital Humanities), Digital Humanities, Political Theory, Historical Institutionalism, History of Political Thought, and 12 moreMachiavelli, Comparative Political Theory, Medieval Political Thought, Topic Models, Text Analysis, Comparative Political Thought (Western and Eastern), Mirrors for princes, The Prince, Early Islamic Political Theory, Islamic Politcal Thought, Computer Assisted Textual Analysis, and Macroanalysis
This chapter defends three connected claims. First, we can account for Hobbes’s turn towards the Hebrew Bible by understanding the place of biblical Israel in the political and religious debates of seventeenth-century England. Second,... more
This chapter defends three connected claims. First, we can account for Hobbes’s turn towards the Hebrew Bible by understanding the place of biblical Israel in the political and religious debates of seventeenth-century England. Second, Hobbes’s particular focus on the Mosaic polity is harder to explain. This focus is puzzling because, for both contextual and textual reasons, the period of Davidic kingship seems to fit much better with Hobbes’s philosophical account of the basis of sovereign authority. Third, Hobbes’s focus on the Mosaic polity is best seen as a rhetorical and polemical move designed to appropriate the images and narratives of parliamentarians, republicans, and radicals, and to subversively redirect them in the service of absolutism. There is suggestive textual evidence that Hobbes knew that this was both a radical and a risky strategy.
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This chapter considers the most plausible arguments for a firm distinction between political and international realism. I argue that although there may be foundational theoretical differences between political realism and structural... more
This chapter considers the most plausible arguments for a firm distinction between political and international realism. I argue that although there may be foundational theoretical differences between political realism and structural realism, there are no similarly strong axes of distinction between political realism and classical realism. The exclusion of thinkers such as Carr and Morgenthau from the political realist “canon” cannot be justified on the grounds of important foundational differences and is more likely the result of a caricatured picture of classical realism. What is more, as William Scheuerman has suggested, this exclusion comes at a cost.9 Classical realists offer important lessons for thinking about the possibilities and challenges of the political realist research agenda. This chapter seeks to highlight three lessons that strike me as both particularly valuable and underexplored. The first concerns the nature and breadth of the realist target. The second addresses realist assumptions about human nature. The third deals with realism’s purported conservative bias.
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Tocqueville’s discussion of American Indians in Democracy in America is often read as the paradigmatic expression of a conventional story about American political expansion. This narrative holds that westward expansion was easy, in part... more
Tocqueville’s discussion of American Indians in Democracy in America is often read as the paradigmatic expression of a conventional story about American political expansion. This narrative holds that westward expansion was easy, in part because American Indians did not offer much resistance. Historians of political thought and scholars of American Political Development tend to affirm this narrative when they read Tocqueville’s text as suggesting merely that Indians are “doomed” to an inevitable extinction. Our interpretation here proceeds along different lines, with a greater focus on the ways in which contending Jacksonian-era discourses of Indian nomadism are represented in Tocqueville’s text. We argue that Democracy reflects complex and often competing descriptions of inherent Indian nomadism, retreat, and removal, with varying attributions of causal responsibility for disappearing Indian populations. This reading of Tocqueville highlights contentions about Indian removal that are often ignored or neglected in current scholarship, and can therefore help us to better appreciate both his text and his time.
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Political realism is frequently criticised as a theoretical tradition that amounts to little more than a rationalisation of the status quo and an apology for power. This paper responds to this criticism by defending three connected... more
Political realism is frequently criticised as a theoretical tradition that amounts to little more than a rationalisation of the status quo and an apology for power. This paper responds to this criticism by defending three connected claims. First, it acknowledges the moral seriousness of rationalisation, but argues that the problem is hardly particular to political realists. Second, it argues that classical International Relations realists like EH Carr and Hans Morgenthau have a profound awareness of the corrupting effects of rationalisation and see realism as an antidote to this problem. Third, it proposes that Carr and Morgenthau can help us to recognise the particular ways in which realist arguments may nonetheless rationalise existing power relations and affirm the status quo by default, if not by design.
Research Interests: Political Philosophy, Moral Psychology, Political Theory, Realism (Political Science), Philosophies of Human Nature, and 11 moreThucydides, History of International Thought, Hans Morgenthau, Political Realism, Moral deliberation, Rationalization, Realism in political theory, History of International Relations Thought, Status Quo, Classical Realism, and E.H. Carr
Appeals to a ‘tradition’ stretching back to Thucydides have been central to the recent emergence of realism in political theory. This article asks what work these appeals to tradition are doing and whether they are consistent with... more
Appeals to a ‘tradition’ stretching back to Thucydides have been central to the recent emergence of realism in political theory. This article asks what work these appeals to tradition are doing and whether they are consistent with contemporary political realism’s contextualist commitments. I argue that they are not and that realists also have independent epistemic reasons to attend to contextualist worries. Ultimately, I make the case for an account of the realist tradition that is at once consistent with moderate contextualist commitments and that preserves the classificatory and analytical value of tradition-building.
Research Interests: Political Philosophy, Political Theory, Contextualism, Realism (Political Science), Raymond Geuss, and 9 moreContemporary Political Philosophy, Contemporary Political Theory, Hans Morgenthau, Bernard Williams, Tradition, Political Realism, Realism in political theory, Classical Realism, and Bernard Williams Realism
This article accounts for the surprising final chapter of Niccolò Machiavelli’s Prince by situating it in the context of the apocalyptic fervor that gripped Italy at the turn of the sixteenth century. In Florence, the Dominican friar... more
This article accounts for the surprising final chapter of Niccolò Machiavelli’s Prince by situating it in the context of the apocalyptic fervor that gripped Italy at the turn of the sixteenth century. In Florence, the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola was at the center of this enthusiastic movement. The final chapter of The Prince, the article suggests, is an apocalyptic exhortation that reiterates Savonarola’s message in secular terms. Machiavelli gravitates toward this apocalyptic solution because he has failed to render the apparent contingency of the political world intelligible by containing it with analytical categories, ordering it with general rules, or analogizing it with metaphors for fortune. Offering evidence of the failure of The Prince to deliver on these epistemological aspirations, the article argues that the work’s concluding chapter amounts to a final attempt to render the variability and contingency of the city’s political situation intelligible by fashioning it into an apocalyptic story with which Florentines would have been intimately familiar.
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What role, if any, should fear play in the politics of existential crises like nuclear catastrophe and global climate change? This paper considers why the postwar thinker Hans Morgenthau set aside his principled worries about the politics... more
What role, if any, should fear play in the politics of existential crises like nuclear catastrophe and global climate change? This paper considers why the postwar thinker Hans Morgenthau set aside his principled worries about the politics of fear and began to cast the prospect of nuclear catastrophe in terrifying and apocalyptic terms. I argue that Morgenthau’s resort to existential fear appeals may have seemed like an appropriate strategy in the face of the representational and motivational difficulties of prospective catastrophes like nuclear annihilation and in response to the forms of organized denial and political inertia that these difficulties enable. His aim was to cultivate the salutary fear required to construct new forms of political order as a bulwark against nuclear catastrophe. I suggest that there are lessons from this engagement with Morgenthau for the contemporary question of the place of fear appeals in the climate change debate.
Research Interests: Climate Change, Political Theory, Cold War and Culture, Fear, Nuclear Weapons, and 14 moreHistory of International Relations, History of International Thought, Karl Jaspers, Hannah Arendt, Contemporary Political Theory, Hans Morgenthau, Apocalyptic Imagination, Political Uses of Fear, Gunther Anders, Climate Change Communication, Catastrophes, Fear Appeals, Politics of Fear, and Existential Threats
This chapter identifies and explains three important changes in Hobbes’s religious arguments from Elements of Law (1640) to De Cive (1642) First, Hobbes comes to focus more on religious and scriptural matters, devoting a greater amount... more
This chapter identifies and explains three important changes in Hobbes’s religious arguments from Elements of Law (1640) to De Cive (1642) First, Hobbes comes to focus more on religious and scriptural matters, devoting a greater amount of space to them in De Cive than in Elements of Law. Second, Hobbes’s argumentative strategy evolves. He multiplies independent lines of argument for the same central claims. Third, the content of Hobbes’s arguments changes. In De Cive, he takes a Hebraic turn, offering a new and detailed discussion of the Israelite kingdom of God and relying far more heavily on scriptural evidence from the Old Testament. In each case, these changes can be explained by the changing political context in England and Hobbes’s increasing sensitivity to the challenges of religious pluralism.
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Research Interests: Political Philosophy, Political Theory, Socialisms, Colonialism, Cosmopolitanism, and 12 moreHistory of Political Thought, Political Responsibility, Contemporary Political Philosophy, Empire, Contemporary Political Theory, British Political Thought, Collective Responsibility, Imperialism, Anti-imperialism, Iris Marion Young, Late 19th Century Positivism, and Social Suffering and Structural Injustice
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What role, if any, should appeals to fear play in climate change communication? Moral and practical worries about fear appeals in the climate change debate have caused some to turn toward hope appeals. This chapter argues that fear can be... more
What role, if any, should appeals to fear play in climate change communication? Moral and practical worries about fear appeals in the climate change debate have caused some to turn toward hope appeals. This chapter argues that fear can be a rational and motivationally powerful response to climate change. While there are good reasons to worry about the use of fear in politics, climate change fear appeals can be protected against the standard criticisms of political fear. Hope appeals, by contrast, seem vulnerable to serious motivational drawbacks in the case of climate change. We should not therefore abandon fear appeals in favor of hope appeals. Instead, we should take our bearings from Aristotle in an effort to cultivate fear more responsibly. Aristotle offers an appealing model of “civic fear” that preserves the best aspects of hope, elicits rather than extinguishes our sense of agency, and invites rather than forecloses deliberation.
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In his political works, Thomas Hobbes proliferates arguments and overdetermines his conclusions. This article hypothesizes that at least some of this overdetermination was intentional. It was part of a “convergent strategy” meant to... more
In his political works, Thomas Hobbes proliferates arguments and overdetermines his conclusions. This article hypothesizes that at least some of this overdetermination was intentional. It was part of a “convergent strategy” meant to appeal to a broad, diverse, and unknown audience. The article draws on Leviathan to offer evidence for this hypothesis.
Research Interests: Intellectual History, Sociology, Philosophy, Epistemology, Rhetoric, and 10 morePolitics, Classical rhetoric, Thomas Hobbes, Early Modern Political Thought, Modern Political Philosophy, Overdetermination, Appeal, Early Modern English Political Philosophy, Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan, and Hobbes studies
Research Interests: History, Digital Humanities, Political Theory, Corporate Governance, Political Science, and 15 morePolitics, Historical Institutionalism, History of Political Thought, Islam, Machiavelli, Comparative Political Theory, Medieval Political Thought, Topic Models, Text Analysis, Mirrors for princes, The Prince, Early Islamic Political Theory, Islamic Politcal Thought, Computer Assisted Textual Analysis, and Macroanalysis
Research Interests: Sociology, Cognitive Science, Philosophy, Political Philosophy, Epistemology, and 15 morePolitical Theory, Contextualism, Political Science, Politics, Raymond Geuss, Contemporary Political Philosophy, Contemporary Political Theory, Hans Morgenthau, Bernard Williams, Tradition, Realism, Political Realism, Realism in political theory, Classical Realism, and Bernard Williams Realism
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Research Interests: Philosophy, Political Theory, Political Science, Socialisms, Colonialism, and 10 moreCosmopolitanism, History of Political Thought, Political Responsibility, Empire, British Political Thought, Collective Responsibility, Imperialism, Anti-imperialism, Iris Marion Young, and Social Suffering and Structural Injustice
Political realism is frequently criticised as a theoretical tradition that amounts to little more than a rationalisation of the status quo and an apology for power. This paper responds to this criticism by defending three connected... more
Political realism is frequently criticised as a theoretical tradition that amounts to little more than a rationalisation of the status quo and an apology for power. This paper responds to this criticism by defending three connected claims. First, it acknowledges the moral seriousness of rationalisation, but argues that the problem is hardly particular to political realists. Second, it argues that classical International Relations realists like EH Carr and Hans Morgenthau have a profound awareness of the corrupting effects of rationalisation and see realism as an antidote to this problem. Third, it proposes that Carr and Morgenthau can help us to recognise the particular ways in which realist arguments may nonetheless rationalise existing power relations and affirm the status quo by default, if not by design.
Research Interests: Philosophy, Political Philosophy, Moral Psychology, Political Theory, Political Science, and 15 morePolitics, Philosophies of Human Nature, History of International Thought, Hans Morgenthau, Realism, Political Realism, Moral deliberation, Rationalization, Realism in political theory, History of International Relations Thought, Classical Realism, CARR, Rationalisation, Seriousness, and E H Carr
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Tocqueville’s discussion of American Indians inDemocracy in Americais often read as the paradigmatic expression of a conventional story about American political expansion. This narrative holds that westward expansion was easy, in part... more
Tocqueville’s discussion of American Indians inDemocracy in Americais often read as the paradigmatic expression of a conventional story about American political expansion. This narrative holds that westward expansion was easy, in part because American Indians did not offer much resistance. Historians of political thought and scholars of American Political Development tend to affirm this narrative when they read Tocqueville’s text as suggesting merely that Indians are “doomed” to an inevitable extinction. Our interpretation here proceeds along different lines, with a greater focus on the ways in which contending Jacksonian-era discourses of Indian nomadism are represented in Tocqueville’s text. We argue thatDemocracyreflects complex and often competing descriptions of inherent Indian nomadism, retreat, and removal, with varying attributions of causal responsibility for disappearing Indian populations. This reading of Tocqueville highlights contentions about Indian removal that are of...
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The failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has led many observers of international affairs to question why the Bush administration appeared so confident of the existence of these weapons prior to the war. This article... more
The failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has led many observers of international affairs to question why the Bush administration appeared so confident of the existence of these weapons prior to the war. This article suggests that a partial answer to this question can be found by applying Irving Janis’s “groupthink” model, which examines pressures for concurrence-seeking in small groups. While Janis’s model yields important insights into the case of U.S. decision-making leading up to the war in Iraq, this case illustrates some of the shortcomings of the groupthink theory. From a policy perspective, this analysis illustrates the necessity of supporting debate in the policy-making process and the perils of acting on worst-case thinking.
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What role, if any, should fear play in the politics of existential crises like nuclear catastrophe and global climate change? This paper considers why the postwar thinker Hans Morgenthau set aside his principled worries about the politics... more
What role, if any, should fear play in the politics of existential crises like nuclear catastrophe and global climate change? This paper considers why the postwar thinker Hans Morgenthau set aside his principled worries about the politics of fear and began to cast the prospect of nuclear catastrophe in terrifying and apocalyptic terms. I argue that Morgenthau’s resort to existential fear appeals may have seemed like an appropriate strategy in the face of the representational and motivational difficulties of prospective catastrophes like nuclear annihilation and in response to the forms of organized denial and political inertia that these difficulties enable. His aim was to cultivate the salutary fear required to construct new forms of political order as a bulwark against nuclear catastrophe. I suggest that there are lessons from this engagement with Morgenthau for the contemporary question of the place of fear appeals in the climate change debate.
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This paper situates Thomas Hobbes’ work within the context of the apocalypticism of the English Civil War. During Hobbes’ life, there was an explosion of apocalyptic prophecy that combined fears of the imminent end of the known world with... more
This paper situates Thomas Hobbes’ work within the context of the apocalypticism of the English Civil War. During Hobbes’ life, there was an explosion of apocalyptic prophecy that combined fears of the imminent end of the known world with hopes for a radically new future. The chaos and violence of the English Civil War only seemed to confirm these prophetic revelations and there emerged a widespread expectation that God would violently irrupt into secular history to save the elect and condemn the damned. In this paper, I argue that Hobbes’ work bears the mark of this context. Yet, while a substantial amount of scholarship has grappled with the English thinker’s understanding of the political implications of religion and his accounts of the origins of the civil war, Hobbes’ engagement with apocalypticism remains profoundly underexplored. I argue here that the radical apocalyptic imaginary let loose during the civil war worried Hobbes immensely. While Christian eschatology had initially been deployed as a legitimating tool by kings and church authorities, the apocalyptic imaginary escaped this effort at sovereign control and was suddenly abroad in the land. Hobbes responds to this threat not by condemning the apocalyptic imaginary, but by trying to put it back in the service of sovereign power. He fights apocalypse with apocalypse. I argue that Hobbes pursues two paths in his project – one that is overtly Christian and another that is seemingly secular. His theological argument offers a de-radicalized Christian eschatology in which the sovereign is the only authority capable of proclaiming the apocalypse. Hobbes’ political argument stages a secular apocalypse, in which the terror and chaos of the state of nature are the preconditions for a kingdom ruled by a mortal God. In pursuing these two paths, Hobbes does not escape the apocalyptic imaginary, but rather redeploys it and tries to return it safely into sovereign hands. This paper proceeds in three parts. First, I begin by tracing the evolution of the apocalyptic imaginary from the late 16th century to the English Civil War, with a particular focus on its relationship to sovereign power. Second, I outline Hobbes’ theological response to the apocalyptic imaginary. Here I raise questions about the value of a response to Christian eschatology that does not engage with the capacity of apocalypticism to captivate the imagination and provoke belief. Third, I argue that Hobbes’ seemingly secular response to the anarchic potential of apocalypticism is more successful because it works on an imaginistic register, offering a vivid and frightening picture of an alternative eschaton.
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Political realists have long been the favored foes of those seeking to articulate and defend principles of international justice. Classic works often begin by refuting what they take to be a typically realist skepticism about the... more
Political realists have long been the favored foes of those seeking to articulate and defend principles of international justice. Classic works often begin by refuting what they take to be a typically realist skepticism about the possibility of effective moral constraints and the potential for international moral progress. On this conventional reading, realists hold that the international system is an anarchic realm governed entirely by power and necessity. In “The Twilight of International Morality,” the canonical political realist and postwar International Relations scholar Hans Morgenthau offers a strong antidote to this too familiar picture. The article deserves to be read today as an example of a morally serious political realist attempting to think soberly and empirically about international moral progress. Morgenthau begins the article by challenging the presumption that the practice of international politics is not subject to effective moral constraint. He observes, for instance, that tactics like assassination and diplomatic poisoning are as effective and feasible now as they were in the early Renaissance and yet they are used far less. The reason for this, argues Morgenthau, is that with the development of the modern state during
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This chapter defends three connected claims. First, we can account for Hobbes’s turn towards the Hebrew Bible by understanding the place of biblical Israel in the political and religious debates of seventeenth-century England. Second,... more
This chapter defends three connected claims. First, we can account for Hobbes’s turn towards the Hebrew Bible by understanding the place of biblical Israel in the political and religious debates of seventeenth-century England. Second, Hobbes’s particular focus on the Mosaic polity is harder to explain. This focus is puzzling because, for both contextual and textual reasons, the period of Davidic kingship seems to fit much better with Hobbes’s philosophical account of the basis of sovereign authority. Third, Hobbes’s focus on the Mosaic polity is best seen as a rhetorical and polemical move designed to appropriate the images and narratives of parliamentarians, republicans, and radicals, and to subversively redirect them in the service of absolutism. There is suggestive textual evidence that Hobbes knew that this was both a radical and a risky strategy.