Gordon Hull (University of North Carolina at Charlotte), Erasing Agonism: How Algorithmic Governance Goes Further than Leviathan, Philosophy & Social Criticism (2026) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Algorithmic governance is sometimes compared to Hobbes’s Leviathan. Here I argue that, while algorithmic governance shares some similarities with the Hobbesian schema, it goes further in its suppression of contestation. To show this, I read Hobbes against Rancière’s reduction of him to a theorist of consensus to make two basic points. First, it is important for Hobbes that laws be public and rationally comprehensible. By contrast, algorithmic governance is notoriously opaque. Second, Hobbes also retains a sense of equity as an appeal against universally applied legal decisions, allowing decisions to be tailored to individual cases. Algorithmic governance does not typically involve equity-based appeal, a point that is especially clear in the context of bureaucratic governance structures, where algorithmic systems generate results that cannot be either understood or appealed. The result in Rancière’s terms is that classificatory, algorithmic systems are even more powerful agents of depoliticization than Leviathan.
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