Made with Words: Hobbes on Language, Mind, and Politics

Philip Pettit always writes with a clarity most scholars can only feign as a virtue of their disciplines. Made with Words picks up on his earlier, famous work on the concept of freedom, and uses it as a backdrop for analyzing Hobbes - someone everyone likes to criticize, but rarely read with sympathy. Pettit's book is a welcome change to this tendency to see Hobbes as something to quickly reject before moving on to one's own theory, instead taking the sophistication of what Hobbes offers seriously and using it to make many important claims, including the claim that Hobbes' reputation as a revolutionary thinker is well deserved, for his work is not only revolutionary, but a model of philosophical thinking.