Hobbes frames rhetoric as an enemy that reason must escape

Evidence

Similar to the view Hobbes adopted in The Elements of Law, according to which “rhetoric is the greatest and most insidious enemy with which reason has to contend,” what Hobbes describes in Leviathan is the aspect of language that is constitutive of language, but is also an abuse of language, and that, like the enemy, must be escaped and left behind. … Language thus preserves the past, and it is as such that it is properly used. — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 356

Categorization

• DEFINE: Rhetoric as the enemy of reason is a definitional deployment of the enemy-figure central to the book.