Yves Charles Zarka is indeed one of the most important philosophers in france, though he has been little recognised in the anglophone world, at least beyond hobbes scholarship. he is currently the chair of political philosophy as well as director of the centre de philosophie, d’épistémologie et de politique at the université paris descartes (sorbonne). he is also the director of several imprints at the presses universitaires de france, is the editor of the journal cités, and has collaborated with jürgen habermas and axel honneth. as to his work on hobbes, he is the director of vrin's oeuvres de hobbes, in addition to several writings – including this book, la décision métaphysique de hobbes and l'autre voie de la subjectivité – as well as a number of edited volumes. thus, while his work on hobbes is what he is primarily known for in english, his research extends to political philosophy broadly, both in its history and its current articulations.

Perhaps the fact that I feel the need to state that Zarka's work covers political philosophy in its historical and contemporary registers explains some of the reasons why he is not as well known to Englishlanguage readers as he could be. It does not seem to be a great stretch to claim that Hobbes scholarship in the English-speaking world has been influenced by the work of Quentin Skinner, whose fundamental philosophical positions lead him to ask ‘why [texts] were written in the form in which we have them’. This question leads to detailed examinations of the surrounding contexts of the material he examines; of other texts of the time that may have influenced by, or been in immediate conversation with, say, Leviathan; and so on. This approach is, in its way, laudable, leading to any number of insights as to how and why a certain text came to be written in the way that it did. However, it is not the only approach to historically grounded philosophy, and I would argue that it is a limiting and limited approach in its way as well.

The limits to Skinner's approach can be seen at the end of the same sentence cited above, where he articulates a problematic approach to the history of political philosophy: ‘what can I hope to learn from this text about politics’.