Despite the linguistic turn that characterized much mid- to late twentieth-century political theory, contemporary theorists continue to deploy categorical distinctions between reason and rhetoric. In this essay I advance a shift in perspective that theorists can use to read tensions between reason and rhetoric productively, particularly as we engage canonical thinkers for whom these tensions were constitutive of their political projects. While rhetoric posed a problem for many thinkers of the modern era, it was particularly acute for Thomas Hobbes, whose pursuit of a stable political order at first glance appears to require the stabilization of semantic movement and play. I argue that this appearance is misleading, however, and suggest that political theorists need to rethink how they approach rhetoric to more fully grasp Hobbes's understanding of the political. Instead of appealing to reason to attain a stable, de-rhetoricized order, as many scholars have maintained Hobbes does (so many that it could be said to constitute the most common reading of Hobbes),Footnote ¹ I argue that Hobbes concedes the permanence of the semantic movements inherent in the structure of language—what I call rhetoricity—and political theory's inability to stop these movements. This concession, in turn, leads Hobbes to give up the goal of establishing stable meaning systems, even under Leviathan, and to seek political order elsewhere.

To make this case I consider one part of the rich scholarly debate over Hobbes's relationship to rhetoric, marked in particular by David Johnston's The Rhetoric of “Leviathan” and Quentin Skinner's Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes.Footnote ² I turn to these texts not because they are representative of the larger and ever-growing field of Hobbes scholarship, but because Skinner and Johnston are widely taken to constitute a field of disagreement specifically on the question of Hobbes's use of rhetoric. Without dismissing these important disagreements, I emphasize what unites them, namely, their tendency to view reason and rhetoric dichotomously in a way that Hobbes may have shared, but that does not help us, as contemporary critics of Hobbes, to understand his politics. I argue that this bifurcation limits these scholars' ability to help us understand the role that engagements with language play in Hobbes's pursuit of political order.Footnote ³ At stake in this recasting is a firmer understanding of rhetoric's place in political thinking more generally and a distinction between the different projects of attaining linguistic order and attaining political order. Thus, while I urge theorists to see rhetoric as a master category that makes other forms of discourse such as reason possible, I also emphasize rhetoric's inability to achieve the goals of Hobbes's political project. Only by approaching reason from this perspective—from beyond what I call the “reason–rhetoric divide”—can theorists understand Hobbes's solution to the problem of political order.

I proceed in four steps. First, I advance an argument about the importance of reading Hobbes's texts for rhetorical movement rather than for rhetoric's absence in some notion of de-rhetoricized reason. Second, against the dominant interpretation of Hobbes, I suggest that the reason–rhetoric distinction is not Hobbes's ultimate political problem at all, but reflects a tendency in contemporary theoretical practice to attempt to locate political order in the inherently disorderly world of language. This section requires distinguishing between what Hobbes saw as the causes of political disorder, among which rhetoric certainly looms large, and what Hobbes thought to be an attainable mode of addressing that problem in the world. In a third step, therefore, I show that it is better to understand Hobbes's politics as a concession to the impossibility of suppressing rhetorical movement than to follow the more common claim that he aimed to establish political order by imposing semantic determinacy through reason and logic. In the final section, I map the contours of a political theory that operates beyond the reason–rhetoric divide, emphasizing differences in contemporary theoretical traditions such as deliberative democratic theory and poststructuralism. I explain the methodological stakes of rethinking political questions from the vantage point I defend in my reading of Hobbes.

Reading Hobbes Rhetorically

The problem of rhetoricity and the semantic instability it yields is of continual interest and concern to Hobbes, from his translation of Thucydides's History of the Peloponnesian War, where civil war is marked by the dissolution and resignification of meanings; to the Elements, where “it is impossible to rectify so many errors” to the point that social order seems to require the form of “first grounds of knowledge”;Footnote ⁴ to Leviathan, where “the inconstancy of the signification of … words” is a structural condition of language. In his “Prose Life,” Hobbes insists that when composing Leviathan he “wrote in prose that was simple and direct, not in rhetoric.”Footnote ⁵

Yet despite his distrust of rhetoric, his relationship with it is more complex than mere rejection, in part because his writings stand on the cusp of High Renaissance humanism and modern science.Footnote ⁶ As a result, his texts are heterogeneous, comprised of a tangle of different styles that contain remnants of his humanistic foundations as well as his fascination with geometric and rational orders. In evaluating the course of a long and prolific career such as Hobbes's we would expect to find—as we do—not ex nihilo innovation, but collage. For this reason it is important to read Hobbes not for the absence or presence of rhetoric, but for the rhetorical strategies that make his texts appear rational, on the one hand, and persuasive, imagistic, and emotive—in short, rhetorical in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sense of the word—on the other. This steers the discussion away from the question of whether or not Hobbes turned to rhetoric, so that we can engage in an analysis that does not privilege reason as rhetoric's other. Reworking the categories in this way not only highlights the rhetoricity of Hobbes's texts, but also makes it possible to chart how that rhetoric develops over time. This move places theorists beyond the rhetoric–reason divide where they may read Hobbes without presuppositions about rhetoric's limits; this, I suggest, allows us to see Hobbes's political argument more clearly.

Quentin Skinner's pathbreaking study of Hobbes centers on the idea that reason and rhetoric are held in tension, and identifies these tensions as central to Hobbes's political project. According to Skinner, though Hobbes's early studies centered on humanistic readings of Thucydides's History and Aristotle's Rhetoric in which attention to rhetoric loomed large, the scientific tradition in which Hobbes matured as a thinker was marked by a break with humanism, refocusing Hobbes on modes of scientific reason. This latter period was fueled by a belief that a political knowledge could and should be derived from first principles in accordance with modes of reasoning—what Hobbes calls “ratiocination”—from those principles. According to Skinner, during this period Hobbes came to embrace a more thoroughly rational mode of argument in The Elements of Law and De Cive, thereby distancing himself from the rhetorical tradition. In the final instance, however, Skinner argues that Hobbes “changed his mind” about rhetoric and embraced it in Leviathan as a concession to the requirements of political order.Footnote ⁷

Skinner builds his critique of Hobbes out of a particular understanding of the meaning of “rhetoric,” and opens his book with a distinction: “When Johnston speaks of Hobbes's rhetoric, he employs the word principally to refer to Hobbes's literary strategies, and more particularly to ask what specific political act Hobbes may have been performing in Leviathan.”Footnote ⁸ Skinner, for his part, aims to use “rhetoric” “in the way that Hobbes himself would … have understood it,” as “a distinctive set of linguistic techniques … derived from the rhetorical doctrines of … classical and Renaissance theories of written eloquence.” This understanding of rhetoric leads him to conclude that De Cive “is as violently anti-rhetorical a text as Hobbes was capable of making it.”Footnote ⁹

In his insistence that we evaluate Hobbes against Renaissance categories, however, Skinner's analysis casts Hobbes as a product of his time, a position that is no doubt consistent with Skinner's well-known historical method but that restricts a priori our understanding of Hobbes's political theory. This is problematic for two key reasons. First, it seems possible, even likely, that Hobbes's writings have endured because they exceeded the orthodoxies and concerns of his day. Leviathan, for example, does not represent a mere departure from scientific argument, but is a fusion of multiple styles. In this sense, it does not mark a concession to rhetoric, but exemplifies the fundamental compatibility of rhetoric and scientific method that is made possible by the latter's inherent rhetoricity.Footnote ¹⁰ Hobbes's thought is indebted as much to his historical context as his ability to innovate within and beyond it, across humanistic and scientific traditions.

Second, as I argue below, while the question of what Hobbes thought about rhetoric is certainly important for the history of ideas, interpreting his political argument requires approaching rhetoric from a slightly different angle. I take my view of rhetoric from the work of twentieth-century scholars such as Kenneth Burke and Ernesto Grassi. Despite their many differences, Grassi and Burke both argue that rhetoric concerns the wide range of symbolic structures that comprise society's basic patterns of identification. This is different from the “literary strategies” that Skinner associates with Johnston insofar as it fuses textual tactics with Skinner's more classical view of rhetoric. In this view, rhetoric concerns not only means–end techniques of persuasion but constitutes the means by which social orders are both constituted and become recognizable. Burke, in particular, held that rhetorical commitments bind—and in binding, constitute—social orders, even as those orders remain contingent. Unlike Aristotle, Burke and Grassi maintain that reason is a product of rhetoric, not its opposite.Footnote ¹¹ They share, then, in short, the view that language is inherently rhetorical in the sense that rhetoricity—movements inherent in metaphor, metonymy, and various tropes and devices—constitutes language at the level of both its structure and point of application in political orders. With these thinkers I share the view that reason, which has historically been sought in the service of an attempt to tame language's rhetoricity, necessarily fails. If Hobbes did not hold this view himself, it was still, from the vantage point I am advocating, his problem all along—the structural condition of language that both creates his political problematic and shapes his options in addressing that problematic. While it is no doubt true, then, as Silver argues, that “Hobbes would not regard his terminology as metaphorical,”Footnote ¹² this is different from my point that this view is not sustainable from the epistemological position I am both defending and suggesting would help contemporary political theorists clarify their understanding of language and politics, in Hobbes and beyond.

Johnston, for his part, argues that while “Hobbes understood The Elements of Law to be a work of science,”Footnote ¹³ he turned to an increasingly “rhetorical” style in Leviathan.Footnote ¹⁴ According to Johnston, Hobbes did not, as Skinner argues, “change his mind” and “break” with rhetoric;Footnote ¹⁵ instead, Hobbes shifted his intended audience, thereby marking Leviathan as a political tract intended to persuade and encourage political change. Johnston argues that “in his original manuscript Hobbes had framed his political argument essentially in the form of a logical demonstration. He had, in effect, chosen the ‘dry discourse’ of science over the more evocative and powerful language of rhetoric.” The rhetoric of Leviathan, on the other hand, was “almost diametrically opposed” to the rational artifice of the earlier draft, where the “language is vastly more vigorous, vivid, and rhetorical in character through the work.”Footnote ¹⁶ Johnston's Hobbes is thus more flexible than Skinner's, as Johnston recognizes that Hobbes's “new fascination with the axiomatic method and its explanatory potential did not in any sense constitute a rejection of the rhetorical tradition that had shaped Hobbes's thinking during the first forty years of his life.”Footnote ¹⁷ Nevertheless, Johnston comes to the same conclusion that Skinner does: Leviathan marks a “change of mind” and return to rhetoric.

Skinner's claim that De Cive was “violently anti-rhetorical” and Johnston's claim that the central contention of the Elements, that “rhetoric is the greatest and most insidious enemy with which reason has to contend,”Footnote ¹⁸ are united by their use of a reason–rhetoric distinction to mark the space between Hobbes's humanistic and scientific commitments. This is true, moreover, even though “the direction of his thought in Leviathan is essentially the same as it had been in his earlier Elements of Law.”Footnote ¹⁹ For Johnston, “the fundamental dilemma confronting Hobbes's political theory can be reduced to the simple question: science or rhetoric?”Footnote ²⁰

It is important to notice that this disjunction is no mere descriptor in Skinner's and Johnston's projects. Rather, insofar as it makes the space between reason and rhetoric unbridgeable, it is productive of a political problem that both motivates Skinner's and Johnston's readings and constitutes the problem they address. For Johnston, the move between Hobbes's texts seems both a matter of category (Leviathan is, taken as a whole, more of a text of rhetoric, the Elements one of science) and degree (the Elements is a work of reason, while Leviathan is imagistic, intended “less to demonstrate truth of his political doctrines than to imprint them upon the minds of his readers”Footnote ²¹). Yet Johnston also acknowledges the porosity of these categories—Hobbes's “distinction between logical argument and rhetorical presentation was not so absolute as to preclude any intermingling of these two forms of discourse.”Footnote ²² In the Epistle Dedicatory to the Elements, Hobbes tells the Earl of Newcastle, “For my part, I present this to your Lordship, for the true, and only foundation of such science. For the style, it is therefore the worse, because whilst I was writing I consulted more with logic, than with rhetoric. But for the doctrine, it is not slightly proved.”Footnote ²³

Scholars have noted Hobbes's attempt to rationalize the Aristotelian rhetorical definitions in his “literal” translation of the Rhetoric.Footnote ²⁴ Yet it is also the case that as early as the Elements Hobbes understood that language always mixes rhetoric and reason—definitions, after all, are products of rhetorical invention, and are therefore contestable propositions subject to challenge and revision. Hobbes notes only that the Elements is “more” logic than rhetoric, his claim concerned less with an assessment of the status of the final text itself than with explaining the modes with which he “consulted.” Even in his own terms, therefore, Johnston's characterization of the Elements as “a sharp contrast between logic and rhetoric, and the attack upon the latter for its systematic abuse of language” is impossibly sharp.Footnote ²⁵ His qualifications themselves suggest ambivalence about the sharpness of the reason–rhetoric split, as when he notes that “Hobbes's manuscript was essentially a work of science … that undoubtedly realized his aim…and did not in any substantial way break out of the limits imposed by its scientific form.”Footnote ²⁶ Indeed, the categories do continually break down as Johnston reads Hobbes through the reason–rhetoric distinction. In the passage quoted above he notes that Hobbes's strategy “in Leviathan was almost diametrically opposed” to the spirit of the early manuscript.Footnote ²⁷ Similarly, Johnston notes that in his polemics with Thomas White, Hobbes “takes pains to differentiate” logic, history, rhetoric, and poetry, each with “its own distinct, legitimate end.”Footnote ²⁸ Here, logic is marked by an absence of “tropes or figures” that would “introduce equivocation and ambiguity,”Footnote ²⁹ while rhetoric is (tautologically) marked by the presence of rhetorical phenomena.Footnote ³⁰

Of course, Johnston is correct in noting that the “abuse of language” is a central problem in both the Elements and Leviathan, where Hobbes identifies the inability to control language with stable, fixed definitions as a key source of social instability. In both texts, however, Hobbes was also a prime abuser, as in such obvious infractions as his conceptualization of politics through a master metaphor of geometry in the Elements, even as he recognizes that there is a qualitative difference between geometry and political life;Footnote ³¹ his depiction of the state as a body in Leviathan, where the state itself is also doubly metaphored as a machine; and, finally, and ironically, his denunciation of metaphor as “a fool's fire.”Footnote ³² By not highlighting these contradictions, Johnston misses an opportunity to rework Hobbes's texts vis-à-vis the paradoxes that categorical distinctions between reason and rhetoric present. Most importantly, Johnston's otherwise astute readings fail to properly situate rhetoric within the context of Hobbes's politics.Footnote ³³ As I show in the next section, this has led to a crucial misunderstanding of Hobbes's political argument. Specifically, while Hobbes may have used the problem of rhetoric to frame his concern about communicative disorder in a way that generates the political problems he seeks to remedy, he also recognized the impossibility of stabilizing language through strategies of reason. I now turn to this important distinction and show the stakes for our understanding of both Hobbes and the reason–rhetoric divide I have located in Skinner's and Johnston's texts.

Hobbes and the Impossibility of Suppressing Rhetoric

If rhetoric is indissociable from argument, theorists will meet frustration when they attempt to separate them.Footnote ³⁴ Hobbes, of course, tempts his readers down this path by packaging his project in the language of science, characterized as it is in the modern era by a promise to suppress rhetoricity. Yet, as Philip Pettit notes,

This strategy of denunciation affords Hobbes a number of tactical possibilities. First, he calls upon the Aristotelian rhetorical topoi—a series of definitions that classical rhetoricians developed to produce persuasive outcomes,Footnote ³⁶ but adapts them for his argumentative purposes, rebuilding them through scientific metaphors that appear to rationalize the otherwise nonrational Aristotelian categories of ethos and pathos. As Kahn notes (though still bifurcating reason and rhetoric), Hobbes takes us “from rhetoric as an appeal to passions, to logic, which involves reasoning about passions.”Footnote ³⁷ This allows him to engage pathos without losing the authority that rational argument commands.Footnote ³⁸

This problematizes Skinner's claim that “while Hobbes reminds us of [the topoi] … his purpose in citing them is as far as possible from that of the theorists of eloquence.”Footnote ³⁹ In fact, Hobbes neither “reminds” us of nor “cites” the topoi, but treats them as though they are self-evident and naturalized into a logical order. From beyond the reason–rhetoric divide, however, it is clear that he does not accomplish this self-evidence by “de-rhetoricizing,” as Mark Wildermuth argues, or by “grounding” rhetoric in logic, as Kahn argues.Footnote ⁴⁰ As Norman Jacobson puts it, “as if doing magic, [Hobbes] transformed [the passions] in his magnificent logic machine. Into the machine went the likes of envy and fear and anxiety and pain and murder, out came sovereignty and positive law.”Footnote ⁴¹ Jacobson's metaphor underscores the transformative strategy of Hobbes's argument, which marks a shift in rhetorical mode rather than an escape from rhetoric. “Rationalization” requires repackaging—and not erasing—the topoi. Similarly, this repackaging does not constitute “a frontal assault on the topoi”Footnote ⁴² or “placing definitions entirely beyond the reach of eloquence.”Footnote ⁴³ Hobbes's ability to utilize the topoi without them registering as such is testament to his strategy's persuasive force in a way that Aristotle would no doubt appreciate.

Conceptualizing reason as a form of rhetoric opens several theoretical possibilities. Above all, it suggests that we learn less about Hobbes's thought by respecting a distinction between reason and rhetoric than we do by asking either why he did not view reason as a form of rhetoric or whether he thought that reason was largely free of the problematic features of language that threaten order. In a sense, why one would want to exclude reason from the category of rhetoric is the more interesting question. Though Skinner would rightly point us back to Hobbes's historical context for our answer, doing so does not help us to understand how Leviathan secures political order. The reason–rhetoric divide only serves to obscure this question.

This brings us to a crucial distinction. While Hobbes is concerned with the specter of demagoguery and the semantic disorder it generates, and while he understands that the structural features of language constitute political problems, he does not argue that these problems can be solved through language, as much of the Hobbes scholarship—including that of Skinner and Johnston—suggests. While this may appear to be a small distinction, it is critical for grasping Hobbes's politics. It suggests that Hobbes's concern with disorder is not resolved through the imposition of reason and that language remains, in nature as well as under Leviathan's sword, always subject to the sways of contingency. Instead of attempting to stabilize language with more language (with, for example, the rhetorical strategies that Kahn details), Hobbes shifts his focus toward the establishment of Leviathan, which operates on a quite different level. It operates, as I shall argue, in more properly political domain.

Before showing how these distinctions alter the more common reading of Leviathan's political argument, it is important to note how deep they cut for Hobbes. Whereas Aristotle argues that language communicates already existing thoughts, Hobbes maintains that language makes thinking possible.Footnote ⁴⁴ If words “are wise men's counters,”Footnote ⁴⁵ as Hobbes says they are, then all knowledge, from the geometric to the political, exists in a semantically contingent medium.Footnote ⁴⁶ At best, this knowledge can be made internally consistent, bound by private ratiocination that is destabilized and undercut when applied to social contexts, despite attempts to fix them. Hobbes tells us, “Although reason is dependent on language, it is equally clear … that reason must also in some sense be independent of language if it is not to be contaminated by rhetoric.”Footnote ⁴⁷ But such contamination is always possible because of the rhetorical movements inherent in the act of defining: “for one man calleth wisdom, what another calleth fear; and one cruelty, what another justice; one prodigality, what another magnanimity.” As a result, Hobbes concludes that “such names can never be true grounds of any ratiocination.”Footnote ⁴⁸

What is particularly critical to note is that this remains the case even after the establishment of a superior power such as Leviathan. Under Leviathan, Hobbes must find a way to suppress either what Kahn calls the “waywardness” inherent in language or its political effects.Footnote ⁴⁹ The first possibility, however, is a nonstarter. Since Hobbes's understanding of the mind suggests that reason is always already placed in a field of rhetorically constituted modes of reasoning, all rational structures are vulnerable to semantic shifts. In fact, it is precisely the inability to form from the products of private reason a dependable universal consensus that drives Hobbes's argument for Leviathan. This suggests that Hobbes's nominalism needs to be separated from the attainment of political order, which naming cannot ultimately achieve. Indeed, it is precisely because all Hobbesian subjects grasp, if only within the confines of their private reason, the arbitrariness of these attempts to fix language that they will, through rational self-interest, accede to Leviathan's authority.Footnote ⁵⁰ Be it through consensus or an act of ascription by Leviathan, contingency still constitutes a perennial specter for Hobbes that is capable of bubbling up through and destabilizing the meaning structures that Hobbesian social order requires.Footnote ⁵¹ This further suggests that “rhetorical devices” would not “foster conceptual diversity and, ultimately, civil war”Footnote ⁵² any more than applying scientific reasoning to politics would, since the definitional basis of science is subject to the same specters of movement.Footnote ⁵³ We must look elsewhere for the Hobbesian solution.

It should be noted that this is a quite different question from the question whether Hobbes believes that we can know the world, even if only to a limited degree. As Winifred L. Amaturo notes, for Hobbes the body, as “the most indubitable claim we have for both the value and the reality of the self,” serves as a grounding against ideational and rhetorical sways.Footnote ⁵⁴ Michael Oakeshott similarly notes that Hobbes begins with sense because “the fact of our having sensations seems to him the only thing of which we can be indubitably certain.”Footnote ⁵⁵ At the same time, the body does not and cannot stop these sways on its own. Instead, the body functions in Hobbes's thought as the means by which an alternative route to political order can be achieved as fearful, because embodied, subjects reason themselves to contract. Amaturo's view that the Hobbesian body serves to ground the internal deliberations of minds that are “ineluctably rhetorical”Footnote ⁵⁶ thus points toward the position I am defending, since a Hobbesian politics that takes bodies to be (at least relatively) stable underscores the limits of language as a site for attaining the conditions that Hobbes requires to escape the warlike conditions of nature. As Amaturo's study shows, Hobbes's view of the body underwrites his political arguments in ways that linguistic solutions—private or public—could never do on their own.

The question I am posing is this: If one necessarily reasons from positions that are already and always contestable, is there a political solution to the disorder semantic movement causes? When one follows Hobbes's argument from his theory of mind to the “war of all against all,” we see that a unified theory of language runs through his argument, from the early epistemological chapters of Leviathan to his prescriptions for the Christian commonwealth. Noticing these common threads can help us to clarify the role that language plays in Hobbes's pursuit of political order, which is informed by the limits posed by the indeterminate nature of language and the inability and failure of rhetoric to correct for that nature. Hobbes's political argument requires finding a way to derive stability, not from but in spite of the unstable structures that language yields.

From Semantic Disorder to Political Order

We are now in a position to recast Hobbes's political argument. How does he negotiate the problem of order in a world that is always subject to the specter of semantic movement? Is it the case, as Pettit argues, that “all such words come to have in every mouth the single, uncontentious meaning that is authorized by the sovereign”?Footnote ⁵⁷ Does Leviathan really solve the semantic problems that motivate Hobbes's political concerns either by establishing what Pettit characterizes as a rhetorical invention of a “new order of common meanings”Footnote ⁵⁸ or through rhetorical strategies, as Kahn argues?Footnote ⁵⁹

I am suggesting that these views need revision. In particular, I am arguing that Hobbes's solution to political disorder is less the establishment of Pettit's “common meanings” or Wolin's “political universe of unequivocal meaning”Footnote ⁶⁰ than a solution that takes the problem of rhetoric and semantic contention to be both basic and structurally irresolvable. As Grassi notes, rhetoric, “because of its ‘archaic’”—i.e., its beginning, initiating, ruling—“character, sketches the framework for every rational consideration, and for this reason we are obliged to say that rhetorical speech ‘comes before’ every rational speech, i.e., it has a ‘prophetic’ … character and never again can be comprehended from a rational, deductive point of view. This is the tragedy of the rationalistic process.”Footnote ⁶¹ Political solutions seeking semantic stability will, indeed, take on a tragic character for those theorists who undertake projects dependent on ordering the disorderly nature of language. This inherent limitation of linguistic solutions to problems of political order becomes clear when we consider Hobbes's position that only when we are “restrained with natural impediments” can we be said to be unfree.Footnote ⁶² Considering that no such impediment can be placed in the way of semantic movement, it becomes clear why Leviathan cannot stop the movements inherent in language and the ratiocination that it makes possible. This is true regardless of the fact that Leviathan's subjects acknowledge “an obligation to obey whatever the sovereign declares to be law.”Footnote ⁶³

In covenanting to establish Leviathan, subjects agree that semantic agreement is both impossible to attain and the stakes of disagreement too high to accept. Yet, as I have shown, interpretations of Hobbes that maintain that Leviathan imposes semantic order do not notice that even unitary meanings perceived as stable remain subject to semantic movement. It is more accurate to say that Hobbes concedes language's inherent instability and advances a prescription for political order that is free of the illusion that common meanings can be established. Somewhat paradoxically, then, Hobbes's extensive discussion of sense in part one of Leviathan serves to delineate the bounds of the political rather than provide a political argument for resolving difference and taming disorder. Hobbes's willingness to lead his readers to impasses that inform the study of politics makes his texts—and Leviathan in particular—masterworks not only of political argument, but of methodology as well. Hobbes makes clear that it is critical that the theorist know where not to look for political solutions and shows the reader the serious consequences that stem from empiricist epistemologies.

This empiricism and theme of externality runs throughout Hobbes's theoretical corpus. Just as he famously conceptualizes liberty as “the absence of external impediments,”Footnote ⁶⁴ so too are limitations on the free play of semantic structures only to be found in observable, external forces.Footnote ⁶⁵ In the Elements he notes that “the force therefore of the law of nature is not in foro externo, till there be security for men to obey it; but is always in foro interno, wherein the action of obedience being unsafe, the will and readiness to perform is taken for the performance.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Later, in Leviathan, “the laws of nature oblige in foro interno, that is to say, they bind to a desire they should take place; but in foro externo, that is, putting them in act, not always.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Unlike the sphere of internal deliberation, where Hobbes thinks individuals can reason and bind themselves to the products of those deliberations, “external impediments” and not definitions are Leviathan's key tools for attaining order, even as those impediments might be utilized in the service of settling conflicts over interpretative disagreements. By legitimizing Leviathan's sword, “man's achievement in subduing political nature had issued in a realm of political meanings whose sole guarantee of coherence was an act of power.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Hobbes's concession to the rhetorical basis of language wisely leads him to defend the need for an arbitrary interpretation of laws that is backed up with the capacity for violence. External power, not internal semantic stability among Leviathan's subjects, purchases Hobbesian political order.

Though Leviathans cannot stop semantic movement, they can stop the conflicts that arise from it, which is why, from the Elements to Leviathan, Hobbes's political problems are always problems of language that cannot be solved through language. The semantic movements built into language's structure cannot, as Skinner and Johnston, as well as Kahn, Silver, and Pettit, seem to maintain, be corrected or mitigated through additional linguistic activity such as rhetoric. This is true even when that rhetoric is one of rational discourse deployed in an attempt to create reasonable subjects. At the same time, linguistic activity remains irreducibly constitutive of political life, which suggests, somewhat ironically, that that which constitutes politics also riddles political life, and that which enables language to function undermines the possibility of meaning.Footnote ⁶⁹ For in the state of nature, “wherein all men are equal, and every man allowed to be his own judge,” every man may “do whatsoever seemeth good in his own ideas … as the necessary means of his preservation.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Exporting the laws of nature from internal deliberation to social orders would require transferring one's private language to the external world. Such a transfer would require metaphysical maneuvering that Hobbes knows is impossible.

If Hobbes were to place “his ultimate trust in that greatest and most fundamental of all human inventions, language,”Footnote ⁷¹ then that trust would be misplaced. Even if language is a human invention, as not only Jacobson but Pettit also argues,Footnote ⁷² it is an invention that is largely out of the control of the speakers who use it. Because semantic movement is part of language's structure, those who seek order must find their solace elsewhere. If Hobbes's political project hinges on “the proper use of names in language,”Footnote ⁷³ then Leviathan is a skillful response to that project's impossibility. I am suggesting, moreover, that this is doubly true, both conceptually, insofar as the reason–rhetoric divide cannot be sustained as a theoretical horizon, and politically, insofar as order can only be obtained through strategies that concede the fact of rhetoricity and do not attempt to circumvent the structure of language.

Among Hobbes's many important contributions to political thought was his ability to recognize that Leviathan solves the problem of political disorder, but not semantic indeterminacy. In this view, part of what makes him masterful is his grasp of the limitations of resolving political problems through language. Insofar as it fails in its attempt to control semantic movement, rhetoric poses crucial challenges to political order. But these challenges help Hobbes to distinguish what can be gained from manipulations of language (such as through rhetorical strategies of closure that can, of course, always be opened) from what can only be attained through economies of violence and external systems of power. Hobbes, in other words, refines and refocuses our understanding of the political. Only when we grasp what can and cannot be attained through engagements with language can the richness of Hobbesian political theory come fully into view.

Rethinking the Relationship between Rhetoric and Political Theory

The tendency to bifurcate reason and rhetoric that led to these confusions is not limited to those theorists rethinking canonical texts or those concerned primarily with the history of ideas. Despite a tendency to assume that contemporary political theory transcends the epistemic categories of earlier periods, my argument is not limited to the Hobbes literature but is intended to address contemporary thinkers, ranging from those who embrace the linguistic turn to those who distance themselves from it.

Consider, for example, that the poststructuralists Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari claim that one of their key innovations, the “desiring-machine,” is “not a metaphor” and is to be taken literally.Footnote ⁷⁴ From a slightly different perspective, in “Political Theory as Political Rhetoric,” John D. Nelson assures the reader that his “purpose is not to persuade [the theorist] to turn rhetorical,”Footnote ⁷⁵ just as Bryan Garsten notes that “we go too far when we aim to eliminate rhetoric from deliberation altogether,”Footnote ⁷⁶ as though such an elimination were possible. These examples mark a contemporary tendency in their shared assumption, made possible by the reason–rhetoric divide, that some theory is more rhetorical than others. This raises the possibility of a nonrhetorical political theory that, in turn, limits our ability to think seriously about political theory's breadth and depth as a rhetorical tradition. This, as I have shown with Skinner and Johnston, can lead theorists to dead ends that confuse rather than illuminate our understanding of political life.

Scholars in the deliberative democratic tradition are especially dependent on such distinctions. Marked by their longstanding concern with how rhetoric is used in politics rather than viewing rhetoric as a constitutive feature of the political itself, this group has long been concerned with containing semantic movement and play rather than working with it. Jürgen Habermas is famously concerned with envisioning an “ideal speech situation” that enables democratic deliberation by limiting the scope and force of that space to certain forms of rational—not rhetorical—deliberation. Habermas pursues this goal by deploying what Arash Abizadeh calls “philosophy/rhetoric” binaries, attempting to purchase a rational order at the expense of rhetoric.Footnote ⁷⁷ Garsten also identifies “find[ing] a place for political rhetoric while firmly putting it in its place” as a central goal of his book Saving Persuasion, Footnote ⁷⁸ in which he is concerned not with those decisions that confront theorists by dint of rhetoric's indissociability from political life, but with how rhetoric can be made consistent with democratic ideals. In this view, being “rhetorical” is cast not only as a choice but also as a source of anxiety about agonistic forms of democracy.

The deliberative democratic tradition may be excused for its efforts to contain rhetoric because of its defense of Enlightenment reason. But the absence of rhetorical analysis in poststructuralism is curious considering the critical disposition so much poststructural work takes toward scientific argument. An embrace of rhetoric, as my reading of Hobbes shows, is well positioned to deepen our understanding of poststructuralist concerns such as contingency and distinguish between issues of language and the political questions they raise. Reading beyond the reason–rhetoric divide has much to offer poststructuralists precisely because they utilize, on different registers, strategies similar to those that the modern scientific tradition attempted to contain in the name of rigor.Footnote ⁷⁹

This distancing of rhetoric also seems to stem from a misunderstanding—or at least a thin understanding—of the meaning of rhetoric itself, which many contemporary theorists construe as argument and persuasion in an already-constituted world.Footnote ⁸⁰ As I have suggested, this position largely preserves the Aristotelian distinction between rhetoric and rational argument that fails to take seriously the constitutive role a rhetorically constituted language plays in political life.Footnote ⁸¹ Of course, as I have noted above, contemporary rhetoric scholarship is more robust than this position indicates, and it is this more expansive understanding of rhetoric that I deploy here. Even if Hobbes himself did not accept this view of rhetoric and reason, I am suggesting that it is necessary for understanding his politics.

As my reading of Hobbes shows, rhetorical analysis affords a supple and technically specific means of charting the persuasive and identificational strategies at work in both political life and the texts that help us make sense of it.Footnote ⁸² This is due in part to rhetoric's attentiveness to tactical linguistic phenomena that poststructuralism has not often engaged. Poststructuralists have developed numerous critical tools for seeing knowledge as both bound to and a product of power relations, emphasizing the “discursivity” of those relations.Footnote ⁸³ Michel Foucault, for example, showed that subjects—including theorists—find themselves always already discursively located, noting, for example, that “in any society, there are manifold relations of power which permeate, characterize, and constitute the social body, and these relations of power cannot themselves be established, consolidated, nor implemented without the production, accumulation, circulation, and functioning of a discourse.”Footnote ⁸⁴ But Foucault does not attend to the ways in which systems of power-knowledge are constituted through and embedded in rhetorical strategies that, in turn, militate against resistance; rhetoric, on the other hand, can account for those relations' identificational and persuasive force.Footnote ⁸⁵ Similarly, when Judith Butler attends to the role that discourse plays in maintaining systems of power, she usually pitches her criticism at a register of abstraction that is removed from the rhetorical structures that constitute the knowledge through which those systems are stabilized. To be sure, her preferred terminologies of “performativity,” “narrative,” and “structures of address” do critical political work, but not quite the same work that rhetorical analysis does.Footnote ⁸⁶ As Michel de Certeau notes, “The discipline of rhetoric offers models for differentiating among types of tactics”Footnote ⁸⁷—models that, in turn, illuminate discursive forms in a way that engagements with “language” or “discourse” cannot.

In this sense, rhetoric's attention to the constitution of discourse may serve as a critical supplement to poststructuralism, connecting it with and enabling it to benefit from the lessons learned from humanistic critiques of science and reason. These analyses can help us to understand Hobbes's project, but also—as I have shown in my reading of Skinner, Johnston, and others—the ways in which his critics have reinscribed Hobbes's assumptions in their contemporary interpretations. Contemporary theorists engaged in rhetorical analysis can capture political struggles more directly at the point where they interact with and shape political knowledge. This, I have suggested, requires operating beyond the reason–rhetoric divide in a way that allows them to connect to a large range of historical debates, even as they remain critical of the assumptions—epistemological, ontological, and beyond—that underpin them. Such an approach ensures that theorists can better understand and engage this history insofar as it still lingers at the margins—and sometimes at the center—of contemporary political work.