Stephanie B. Martens - Civilization and Its Others- American Imaginaries, State of Nature, and Civility in Hobbes

Yield

23 of 89 paragraphs kept (25.8%). Target: 35%+ — ⚠️ BELOW target.

Thesis

Racial categorization first targeted Ireland through internal colonialism · ch. 0

Argument

1. Calling Hobbes a racist need not be anachronistic. — ch. 0
2. Hobbes locates his hypothesized state of nature in the living present of Americas’ peoples — ch. 0
3. Racial contracts are subordinate to civilizing contracts — ch. 0
4. Social contract theory embeds a tacit savage-versus-civilized opposition rather than only a nature-versus-civility one — ch. 0
5. Hobbes’s exclusionary frame is cultural-historical civility rather than biological race — ch. 0
6. Hobbes’s civility is a fragile, ever-in-progress pacified space built by contract, not brute protection. — ch. 1
7. The word ‘civil’ shifted from civic to cultured behavior during the Renaissance — ch. 1
8. Hobbes promoted civility before the word civilization existed — ch. 1
9. The concept of civilization emerged only in the modern era — ch. 1
10. The adjective ‘civil’ once denoted whole societies, contrasted with the barbarous — ch. 1
11. Civilization is a modern European construction that defines Europeans by excluding their barbarian others — ch. 1
12. Hobbes consistently tied the word savage to America as its expected location — ch. 2
13. Hobbes read contemporary American tribes as living evidence of Europe’s own ancient past. — ch. 2
14. Hobbes frames savages as deprived of arts rather than as hostile enemies. — ch. 2
15. The aboriginal is a European invention, not an observed reality. — ch. 2
16. Early European claims to civility rested on a culture-versus-nature frame, not cultural difference. — ch. 2
17. Cultural difference was routinely misread as a difference in civility. — ch. 2
18. Hobbes’s prejudice against Native Americans was civilizational rather than racial. — ch. 2
19. Modern civility treats the citizen as someone made, not born, through overcoming nature. — ch. 2
20. Hobbes had direct personal and financial ties to English colonization of Virginia — ch. 2
21. Framing natives as uncivilized precludes their equal citizenship. — ch. 3
22. Present reconciliation policies still rest on exclusionary civilizational premises. — ch. 3

Annotation Roundup

Question

• Racial contracts are subordinate to civilizing contracts — If solidarity and cohesion have traditionally been built around a civilizing/racial contract that excludes ‘pre-civilized’ others, what does this suggest about positive-shared-project solidarity as a rival mechanism?
• Hobbes had direct personal and financial ties to English colonization of Virginia — Does Hobbes’s Virginia Company membership appear in his political texts, and does his share purchase after the 1622 massacre signal a particular stance on Indigenous resistance?
• Hobbes’s prejudice against Native Americans was civilizational rather than racial. — Worth chasing: if exclusion is civilizational and reversible through ‘civilization,’ does this framing soften or merely modernize the justification for colonial domination of Native American polities? Xref
• Social contract theory embeds a tacit savage-versus-civilized opposition rather than only a nature-versus-civility one — Connects to Charles W. Mills’s Racial Contract (cited) — the racial contract as background exclusion that makes the social contract possible.
• Hobbes locates his hypothesized state of nature in the living present of Americas’ peoples — Direct raw material for the ‘civility framing vs threat-based solidarity’ thread — Hobbes grounds his abstract war-of-all model by pointing at actually-existing others, which is exactly how the American imaginary converts a hypothetic state into an empirical present.
• Racial categorization first targeted Ireland through internal colonialism — Docts the ‘racial contract’ / internal colonialism genealogy — echoes how the civilizing gaze, not just the racializing one, was first trained on an internal population.
• Civilization is a modern European construction that defines Europeans by excluding their barbarian others — Connects to Gilroy’s conviviality and postcolonial critique of the civilization/barbarism binary that underwrites exclusionary solidarity.
• The concept of civilization emerged only in the modern era — Echoes the point that categories like race are also recent constructions, and connects to Norbert Elias’s The Civilizing Process on the French ‘civilisation’.
• The adjective ‘civil’ once denoted whole societies, contrasted with the barbarous — The civil-versus-barbarous binary underlies the state-of-nature framings this reading of Hobbes engages, since ‘savage’ societies were imagined as lacking civility.
• Hobbes promoted civility before the word civilization existed — Relevant to the American imaginaries thread: the semantic pre-history of ‘civilization’ as distinct from ‘civility’ bears on how later American discourse conflates manners with political community.
• Hobbes’s civility is a fragile, ever-in-progress pacified space built by contract, not brute protection. — Relevant to the reading purpose on solidarity formed through positive shared construction — Hobbes’s civic space is made by men, not by shared enemies.
• Hobbes consistently tied the word savage to America as its expected location — 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.
• Hobbes read contemporary American tribes as living evidence of Europe’s own ancient past. — Connects to the ‘American imaginaries’ framing of the reading purpose; also links to how threat-based vs. developmental-stage thinking about others operates in political theory.
• Cultural difference was routinely misread as a difference in civility. — Directly supports the reading purpose on how a community imagines its own cohesion through civility, contrasted with threat-based solidarity; also evokes Gilroy’s conviviality as an alterative.
• Early European claims to civility rested on a culture-versus-nature frame, not cultural difference. — The raw/the cooked echoes Claude Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist opposition between nature and culture in The Raw and the Cooked.
• Modern civility treats the citizen as someone made, not born, through overcoming nature. — Connects to the reader’s research on solidarity through shared projects: Martens frames citizenship here as self-overcoming, which contrasts with convivial/Gilroy’s unplanned coming-together.
• Hobbes’s prejudice against Native Americans was civilizational rather than racial. — Connects to the reader’s interest in civility-framing and how a political community imagines its own cohesion — here Hobbes excludes a group from civility entirely, framing them as outside history, which bears on the threat-based vs. project-based solidarity question.
• The aboriginal is a European invention, not an observed reality. — A single word (‘original’) carrying both ‘primal source’ and ‘odd/strange’ echoes the logic the reader studies — cohesion invented through imagined contrast rather than observed reality.
• Present reconciliation policies still rest on exclusionary civilizational premises. — Connects to the reader’s interest in civility as an imagined basis of political cohesion — here civility’s hidden cost is that the uncivilized are structurally denied full political personhood, an inverse of conviviality-based solidarity. Seed
• Hobbes’s exclusionary frame is cultural-historical civility rather than biological race — Angle: how cultural/civilizational hierarchy does exclusion’s work without ever declaring race — the ‘polite racism’ analogue across eras.
• Hobbes consistently tied the word savage to America as its expected location — 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. Define
• Hobbes’s exclusionary frame is cultural-historical civility rather than biological race — Sharply distinguishes ‘biologically racist’ from ‘civilizational’ exclusion — a taxonomical distinction central to the chapter’s whole argument.
• The concept of civilization emerged only in the modern era — Clarifies that ‘civilization’ as a term is recent, a useful corrective against treating it as timeless.
• The adjective ‘civil’ once denoted whole societies, contrasted with the barbarous — Distinguishes the earlier person-level meaning of ‘civil’ from the society-level usage that contrasts organized citizenries with the ‘barbarous and savage’.
• The word ‘civil’ shifted from civic to cultured behavior during the Renaissance — Clarifies the semantic evolution of ‘civil’ from civic to polite/cultivated before ‘civilization’ itself was coined.
• Hobbes’s civility is a fragile, ever-in-progress pacified space built by contract, not brute protection. — Distinguishes Hobbes’s technical ‘civil’ (the contracted commonwealth space) from its modern sense of politeness.
• Cultural difference was routinely misread as a difference in civility. — Clarifies the civility/nature distinction operating in Hobbes and his readers.
• Early European claims to civility rested on a culture-versus-nature frame, not cultural difference. — Clarifies that civility was conceived as taming of wild raw nature, a nurture/versus-nature polarity.