Digital Mind 🧠

🪵 The Threshold

Hobbes consistently tied the word savage to America as its expected location

Properties1
tagsja-picks, xref, seed, factual_claims, primary_study, singleton, category/factual-claims

2 min read

Hobbes consistently tied the word savage to America as its expected location

Evidence

The Americas seem to be the typical, expected, location of ‘savagery.’ In Hobbes’s texts, almost every occurrence of the term “savage” is accompanied by the presence of the term “America” in the same sentence. In Leviathan speciCDcally, the expression “savage people” is found three times, each time followed in the same sentence by ‘of’ or ‘in America’: most famously in Chapter 13, quoted above (“the savage people in many places of America”) but also in Chapter 30 (“the Savage people of America”) and once in the plural, in Chapter 46 (“the Savages of America”). This association is also found in Hobbes’s other English works, for instance, in the “Answer to Sir W. Davenant’s Preface,” Hobbes’s text establishes directly a stark contrast between the ‘civility’ of Europe and the ‘barbarity’ of Americans: ” (…) whatsoever distinguisheth the Civilitie of Europe, from the Barbaritie of the American savages, is the 36 Thomas Hobbes, De Cive: The English Version, ed. — , Stephanie B. Martens - Civilization and…, 54

Categorization

  • XREF: This contrasts sharply with the reader’s focus on positive shared-project solidarity — Hobbes samples negative (threat-based, American ‘savagery’) evidence to construct his state of nature, which is the foil for the civility framework under study. — connects to: Hobbes locates his hypothesized state of nature in the living present of Americas’ peoples — , Stephanie B. Martens - Civilization and…, 24
  • SEED: Potential essay angle: how a single corroborating example (America as savage) does rhetorical heavy lifting for an entire political theory, and what happens to that theory when the example is detached from it.
✉️

Backlinks