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5 - Secular Imaginaries of the State of Nature

from Part II - Making Sense through the State of Nature

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 November 2025

Christopher Watkin
Affiliation:
Monash University, Victoria
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Summary

Abstract: This chapter understands modernity’s fragmented and contradictory secular modernities through the prism of the state of nature accounts of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. It offers a new taxonomy of the varieties of modern secularization in terms of deflationary, collateral, and psychologizing imaginaries.

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