‘Just say thank you’: Gratitude in early modern political thought

Gratitude is conspicuous only by its absence in the story we have inherited about the most distinctive characteristics of early modern political thought, which (we are assured) set it apart from what went before. From the mid-seventeenth century, 'contract', as Henry Sumner Maine famously declared, displaced 'status': the obligations predicated on personal exchanges of benefits and service between social unequals that characterised pre-modern societies now acquired a juridical, and more determinate and depersonalised, form. On this story, social contract theorists -- pre-eminent among them, Thomas Hobbes -- privileged justice (the faithful performance of covenants into which we have entered freely) over gratitude (the acknowledgement of another's beneficence towards us). My talk, and the project on which I am currently working, subjects this story to critical scrutiny. It does so primarily by revisiting the place of gratitude in Hobbes's account of the commonwealth; but it roams beyond Hobbes to consider theories of kingship, and the relationship between the person and the office of the sovereign, in early modern European political thought. 

Tim Stuart-Buttle is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of York. In 2024-5, he was a Research Fellow at the Collegium for Advanced Studies at the University of Helsinki. He completed his D.Phil. at the University of Oxford in 2013, before taking up postdoctoral positions in Cambridge and York. His first book, From Moral Theology to Moral Philosophy: Cicero and Visions of Humanity from Locke to Hume, was published by Oxford University Press in 2019.

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