Of Contract and Covenant: Thomas Hobbes, Baruch of Spinoza, and Augustine on Social Agreement and Power

Boleslaw Kabala (Yale University)

10am UTC, 8pm Melbourne

Thomas Hobbes and Baruch Spinoza are often contrasted on their understandings of the social contract, as recently explored in the work of Sandra Leonie Field and others. Thus, the Monster of Malmesbury is associated with the formal power of an explicit agreement to set up society, whereas his younger and more romantic Dutch interlocutor (incidentally also the first theorist of modern democracy) is aligned with informal power, and, by the end of his life, the possibility that society might come into being without any contract whatsoever. Augustine did not present in any of his writings a notion of foundational agreement to institute the social project, but he does include elements of what would later become covenantalism, which involves robust notions of interpersonal commitment and consent. In this presentation, I contrast both Hobbes and Spinoza’s understanding of founding agreements with Augustine’s overlapping consensus between the cities of God and man, especially in Book 19 of City of God, showing how it involves elements of both formal and informal power.

Dr. Boleslaw “Bolek” Z. Kabala is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Tarleton State University in Stephenville, Texas. He received the 2024 College of Liberal & Fine Arts (COLFA) Outstanding Junior Faculty Award at Tarleton. He also serves as a Research Associate at the Augustinian Institute at Villanova University. Previously, Dr. Kabala taught at Colorado Christian University and completed his Ph.D. in Political Science at Yale in 2016. He has held positions as a James Madison Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton and Visiting Scholar at the American Public Philosophy Institute at the University of Dallas. Dr. Kabala is the lead editor of Augustine in a Time of Crisis: Politics and Religion Contested (Palgrave, 2021) and Augustine: Frontiers of Pluralism (Routledge, 2024). His current book project, Millennial Visions: Hobbes, Spinoza & The Return of Theological Politics, explores the dialogue between Hobbes and Spinoza and its impact on contemporary debates on public reason and secularization.