Domesticating Political Resistance: Rhetoric, Time, and (the Limits of) Settler Sovereignty in Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan

Indigenous movements against settler sovereignty are often characterized as "civil disobedience." This characterization is problematic as it domesticates Indigenous peoples within the boundaries of settler states. Taking up this problematic, this essay shows that the logic and rhetoric in Hobbes' Leviathan is one that either dissolves collective political resistance into individual self-defense, or delegitimizes it by domesticating Indigenous peoples within the confines of the "civil" order that they challenge. It also shows that Hobbes' attempt to erase past conquests and foreclose future challenges to absolute sovereignty proves that he has to reckon with the temporal origins of political beginnings.