Troublemakers
By Dieter Thoma
Polity Press, 400pp, £30/$45
Two recent events have made German philosopher Dieter Thoma’s wide-ranging book Troublemakers: A Philosophy of Puer Robustus even more topical than it must have seemed when he was writing it – an unexpected development for a book about Thomas Hobbes’s political theories.
The first is the removal of Julian Assange from the Ecuadorian embassy, an event that has always seemed, if not inevitable, then at least likely, especially if some of the stories about exactly what he was up to in his living quarters are true. The other, however, would have been impossible to predict: the terrible fire that engulfed Notre-Dame Cathedral in mid-April of this year.
