2021

Bourcier, Benjamin; Jakonen, Mikko

While more than a century separates Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) and Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), their respective philosophies maintain a close relationship which, although it has often attracted the attention of historians of philosophy and commentators, has never been studied for its own sake. We propose here to make up for this lack by studying the relationship between the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes and that of Jeremy Bentham in the field of political, legal and moral philosophy. In this way, we hope to explain the commonalities, influences, reappropriations, differences and oppositions existing between these two sets of ideas and, by so doing, contribute to a better understanding of their role in the history of modern English philosophy.