Rochester’s Libertine Poetry as Philosophical Education

Abstract

Whatever the interminable discussions regarding the true meaning and import of Hobbes’ political philosophy, one key question it poses to post-Restoration society is this: if the state is indeed an artificial man that requires the sacrifice of a natural portion of our being to enter, what—beyond pure violence and doctrine to shape the drive to self-preservation—is capable of holding it together? If bodies are themselves composites, refashioned and maintained by the material quest for pleasure and vainglory, what parts must be sacrificed to polity, and what happens to those parts necessarily excised in becoming part of a polity? These questions precipitate a crisis in the thought, experience,..