Book Review: Hobbes and the Two Faces of Ethics, by Arash Abizadeh

• Author: Devin Stauffer
• Date: 01 June 2020
• DOI: 10.1177/0090591719868430
• Published date: 01 June 2020
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

Political Theory

2020, Vol. 48(3) 401 –415

© The Author(s) 2019

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Book Reviews

Book Reviews

Hobbes and the Two Faces of Ethics, by Arash Abizadeh. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2018, xi+288 pp.

Reviewed by: Devin Stauffer, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA

DOI: 10.1177/0090591719868430

In his famous Harvard address, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn observed that mod-

ern Western societies tend to look at morality primarily through the lens of

legality. How did this come to be? In his impressive new book, Hobbes and

the Two Faces of Ethics, Arash Abizadeh gives an answer, although he does

not share Solzhenitsyn’s sense that legalism is a problem. Abizadeh traces

the emergence of a juridical notion of obligation back to the seventeenth

century, especially to the works of Francisco Suárez, Hugo Grotius, and

Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes quickly takes center stage. In Hobbes, Abizadeh

finds not a simple abandonment of the “eudaimonistic” approach to ethics

inherited from classical thought but a modified eudaimonism, still rooted in

“reasons of the good,” coupled with a new emphasis on directed, contrac-

tual obligations, rooted in “reasons of the right.” According to Abizadeh, to

understand the development in moral thinking that emerged in Hobbes’s

wake, it is essential to recognize that there are two distinct dimensions of

normativity in Hobbes’s thought, one prudential, the other juridical. Yet,

although he places Hobbes in a certain historical context and discusses the

role he played in a development that has shaped the way we see morality

today, Abizadeh does not dwell on such matters. His engagement with

Hobbes is first and foremost an effort to elaborate the structure, character,

and grounds of Hobbes’s bipartite conception of ethics.

In elaborating Hobbes’s thought, Abizadeh draws extensively from the

conceptual resources of contemporary metaethics and normative ethics.

This is the first thing that will strike political theorists or other readers who

come to Abizadeh’s book from outside the spheres of contemporary phi-

losophy from which he draws. To his credit, Abizadeh addresses the ques-

tion of the advantages and disadvantages of bringing to seventeenth-century

texts terminology and distinctions that have been developed much more

868430PTXXXX10.1177/0090591719868430Political TheoryBook Reviews

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