State power and normative power: the state as coercive teacher An interview with Tom Pink

Overview & Synopsis

Tom Pink has been teaching moral and political philosophy for more than thirty years at King’s College London, and has done research on decision theory, moral psychology, and history of moral philosophy. He is known for books on free will and the theory of action, and for papers on ethics, political and legal theory and on the history of these subjects, especially from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. He is currently editing The Questions concerning Liberty, Necessity, and Chance (2026) for the Clarendon edition of the Works of Thomas Hobbes. In this interview, Tom Pink highlights the importance of scholastic metaphysics of free action as the indispensable background for understanding the turning point in modern moral and political philosophy. To understand the meaning of the critique of free will in Hobbes' philosophy, it is thus necessary to take a long detour through what Francisco Suárez, a Spanish Jesuit, means by freedom, and to understand in particular how the latter inscribes freedom in the will understood as oriented by a specifically normative power of reason. Unlike the moderns, Hobbes and Hume in particular, who reduce the practical dimension of reason following the former or reject it following the latter, the second scholasticism provides itself with the theoretical tools to think about orienting action according to values. In the political field, this late scholasticism sees the State as having a public reason that is very different from that put forward by liberal theorists following John Rawls: distinct from the reason of individuals, this reason aims to orient public action towards common goods. Forgotten, often misunderstood and caricatured, this moral and political thinking is, according to Tom Pink, a resource for contemporary thinking about action and politics. This interview was conducted by Luc Foisneau, in Paris, in the audiovisual centre of EHESS, 96 boulevard Raspail, on 15th May 2018; it has been revised and completed by Tom Pink on the 4th December 2024.