Vengeance or Punishment. Justice, Anger and Indignation in Thomas Hobbes

Abstract

This article proposes a periodization of Hobbes’s treatment of revenge, anger, and indignation from the Elements of Law, through De Cive, to Leviathan. In the Elements, indignation is a comparative grief at the prosperity of those deemed unworthy, whose political activation depends on rhetorical amplification; in Leviathan, it becomes a form of anger activated by the hope of resistance. Taking on a triadic structure, indignation turns harm suffered by another into a common cause, aligning spectators with the victim and directing hostility not only against the perpetrator of injustice but also against the power that appears to protect the perpetrator, thereby undermining civil peace. This trajectory intersects with Hobbes’s problem of order: sovereignty seeks to stabilize the passions by removing the response to injury from the recursive logic of revenge and concentrating it in the sovereign power to punish. Indignation, however, reintroduces contingency into the covenantal horizon and reveals the structural instability of sovereign order