Neutralising the “specious name of Libertie”: Hobbes on Freedom as the Silence of the Law

This article argues that freedom as/in the silence of the law forms a third, largely overlooked, category of freedom in Hobbes. It conceptualises this freedom as a form of civil non-obligation, which takes the form of a negative permission, upheld by the prospect of the sovereign's coercive intervention. This freedom, not freedom as impediment (to motion), I contend, constitutes Hobbes's reply to the republican conception of freedom.