James A. Moffett ’29 Lectures in Ethics: “Better to be a Traitor? Hobbes on Betrayal”

Guy Fawkes nearly blew up the House of Lords during the opening of Parliament in 1605. Had Fawkes been a Spaniard, he would have been treated as an enemy. But as an Englishman, he was tried as a traitor. This distinction between enemy and traitor has long been a cornerstone of Anglo-American jurisprudence. However, for Thomas Hobbes, the greatest political philosopher of the seventeenth century, there is no distinction: a traitor simply is an enemy.

This lecture will explore why Hobbes might have ventured such a dangerous argument, and the relevance of Hobbes’s account of treason to our contemporary political discourse, where the line between traitor and enemy is so often being erased.