Hobbes on our Mind

Author(s): Perez Zagorin

Source: Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 51, No. 2 (Apr. - Jun., 1990), pp. 317-335
Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press
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 Hobbes on Our Mind

Perez Zagorin

The title of this essay does not refer to Hobbes's conception of mental
functioning but to the way he continues to loom in our mind as a philosopher.1
The year 1988 marked the four-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Hobbes,
who came into the world on 5 April 1588. A celebrated thinker in his own time,
today his fame is greater than ever before. Most students place him among the
preeminent British philosophers, to be compared with only a few others such
as Bacon, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Mill, or Russell. Beside his giant stature as
one of the creators of the philosophic revolution of the seventeenth century, he
is also universally regarded as among the most original and penetrating of
European political theorists. Others would likewise accord him a prime position
as a moral philosopher. The present essay is therefore intended as a belated but
necessary offering in observance of Hobbes's four-hundredth anniversary. Its
purpose is to survey some of the literature concerning his work which has
appeared during the past dozen years or so, with occasional glances further back
as well. Because of the mass of writings about him, my treatment must necessarily
be highly selective. One of its aims will be to note some of the main tendencies
and themes in recent Hobbes studies.
The quantity of publication devoted to Hobbes is itself a phenomenon to be
reckoned with. Its volume has become so great that students can no longer keep
up with it all. Of pre-nineteenth-century British philosophers, only Locke and
Hume elicit comparable attention. The reason for this lies mainly, of course, in
the fascination his ideas exert on nearly all his readers, an effect as observable
in the many seventeenth-century critics and adversaries who were opposed to
his principles as it is among modem scholars. It is also due, however, to the
extraordinaryunity of intellectual vision and literary art which his major works
exhibit and which attained its height in Leviathan. There is no greater writer
of philosophic prose in English than Hobbes. The lucidity of his language, its
compression, penetration, and vitality, its happy fusion of abstraction with strik-
ing images and aphorisms, its apparently seamless reasoning in propounding
truths and exposing errors, its irony and imperturbableself-confidence-all these
qualities combine to give his arguments a captivating force that serves his highest
conceptual ambitions as a systematizer and produces a powerful impression in
the reader. A vast contrast exists in this respect between the philosophic style

I wish to express warm thanks to ProfessorJulian Franklin,ProfessorM. M.

Goldsmith,and ProfessorGordon Schochetfor their criticismsand suggestionscon-
cerningthis essay.

317

Copyright 1990 by JOURNALOF THE HISTORYOF IDEAS, INC.

318 Perez Zagorin

of Hobbes and Locke. It is typical of the two men that the one pictured himself
with Copernicus and Galileo as being the first to establish civil philosophy as
a science, while the other was content to describe himself as merely an under-
laborer in removing some of the obstacles to knowledge.
The present-day Hobbes scholar is exceptionally well provided with biblio-
graphical aids. The fullest and most recent guide by Alfred Garcia (1986),
covering the period 1620-1986, comprises a chronological listing of Hobbes's
works and translations, followed by an international bibliography of writings
on the philosopher.2Also very helpful is Charles H. Hinnant's reference guide
(1980), a chronological list of editions of Hobbes and of scholarship, commen-
tary, and criticism relating to his work between 1679, the year of his death, and
1976.3 The value of this compilation is enhanced by the editor's annotations of
many of the items it includes. Still another useful bibliography has been edited
by William Sacksteder (1982), which lists works, editions, reprints, and trans-
lations of Hobbes, together with writings of every kind concerning him for the
period 1879-1979.4Although they have some overlapping contents, none of these
catalogues is identical in scope or arrangementwith any of the others, and each
has its distinctive merits. All of them attest to the ever-increasing interest in
Hobbes's thought. Beside these guides, a Hobbes Bulletin in Archives de Phi-
losophie (1988), which promises to be the first of a series, contains brief articles
giving a survey and lists of Hobbes publications in Britain, Germany, Italy,
France, the United States, and a number of other countries in the years between
the 1960s and 1980s.5Among the literature of this period there have also been
several critical reviews of researchand interpretationsof Hobbes's political theory
like those by W. H. Greenleaf (1969) and Bernard Willms (1982).6 An annual
journal, Hobbes Studies, has also recently been established by the International
Hobbes Association, which likewise issues a newsletter containing reviews.7
In the domain of Hobbes's own writings, several notable additions have
occurred. For a long time scholars have been aware of the inadequacies of
Molesworth's edition of Hobbes's works, now almost one hundred and fifty
years old, on which they have nevertheless been forced to rely for lack of an
alternative. In 1962 Howard Warrender undertook the direction of a revised
edition of Hobbes's philosophical works to be published by the Clarendon Press.
The first fruits of this project were his critical edition of the Latin and English
versions of De Cive (1983), equipped with a full scholarly apparatus and in-
2 Alfred
Garcia, Thomas Hobbes: Bibliographieinternationale de 1620 a 1986 (Caen,
1986).
3 Charles H. Hinnant, Thomas Hobbes: A Reference Guide (Boston, 1980).
4 William Sacksteder, Hobbes Studies (1879-1979): A Bibliography (Bowling Green,
Ohio, 1982).
5 "Bulletin Hobbes I," Archives de
Philosophie, 51 (1988), 231-336.
6W. H. Greenleaf, "Hobbes: The Problem of Interpretation," Hobbes Forschungen,
ed. Reinhart Koselleck and Roman Schnur (Berlin, 1969); Bernard Willms, "Tendencies
of Recent Hobbes Research," Thomas Hobbes: his View of Man, ed. J. G. van der Bend
(Amsterdam, 1982); see also the latter's Der Weg des Leviathans:Die Hobbes-Forschung
von 1968-1978 (Berlin, 1979).
7 The International Hobbes Association Newsletter, ed. Martin Bertman and Timothy
Fuller, is issued from the Department of Political Science of Colorado College; the
publisher of Hobbes Studies is Van Gorcum, Wolfeboro, New Hampshire.
Hobbes on our Mind 319

formative introduction. Among its valuable features are the notes indicating
divergences between the Latin and English texts, references to parallel passages
in Hobbes's other works, and an appendix of documents concerning De Cive.8
Unhappily, Warrender died in 1985, but it has been stated that new editions of
The Elements of Law and Leviathan were nearing completion at the time.9 If
so, we must hope that their appearance will not be too long delayed.
Over the past century a number of treatises either by or attributed to Hobbes
have been published which were not included in Molesworth's edition of his
works. A recent major addition to the corpus of his writings is his critique of
the Catholic priest Thomas White's De Mundo, edited from the manuscript in
the Bibliotheque Nationale by Jean Jacquot and Harold Jones (1973). A well
known philosopher in his day, White (1593-1676) held many unorthodox opin-
ions and was a friend of Hobbes, whose belief in the necessity of subjection to
sovereign power he shared. Hobbes's lengthy refutation, composed in Latin in
1642-43, takes up a number of scientific and metaphysical problems like the
infinity of the world, matter, motion, and determinism, which are basic to his
philosophy. He also used some of the material in the manuscript in De Corpore
(1655), the first section of his philosophical system on which he was likewise
working in the earlier 1640s. An English translation of his critique of White
has also been published by one of the editors (1976).1?
Apart from a critical edition of his works, including those still unpublished
or published elsewhere than in Molesworth, the most pressing need in regard
to Hobbes's own writings is an edition of his correspondence. When we think
of the great moder editions of the correspondenceof Bacon, Mersenne, Spinoza,
Locke, Oldenburg, and other major figures in the seventeenth-centuryrevolution
in science and philosophy, it seems strange that Hobbes has yet to receive similar
treatment. While many of his letters have been printed, they are inconveniently
scattered in a number of different publications. A helpful first step toward an
edition of his correspondence was taken in E. G. Jacoby's Epistolarium Hob-
besianum (1975), a census listing 360 letters by, to, and about Hobbes, of which
235 have been published.1 Besides these, though, many others may survive
unread in English and French archives which systematic investigation might
unearth.12 A critical edition of Hobbes's correspondence is required not only for
a better understanding of his intellectual evolution but for a fuller knowledge
of his life. We should remind ourselves in this connection that there is still no
8 Thomas
Hobbes, De Cive:The Latin Version,ed. Howard Warrender(Oxford, 1983);
Thomas Hobbes, De Cive: The English Version,ed. Howard Warrender (Oxford, 1983).
Warrender discusses the character of this new edition and the defects of Molesworth's
edition in De Cive: The Latin Version, vi-vii, 34-35; see also Richard Tuck's review,
"Warrender's De Cive," Political Studies, XXIII (1985).
9 Calliope Farsides, "Hobbes en Grand-Bretagne," "Bulletin Hobbes I," 238.
o1Thomas Hobbes, Critique du De Mundo de Thomas White, ed. Jean Jacquot and
Harold W. Jones (Paris, 1973); Thomas Hobbes, Thomas White'sDe Mundo Examined,
tr. Harold W. Jones (London, 1976).
t This listing is printed as an appendix in Ferdinand Tonnies,Studien zur Philosophie
und Gesellschaft im 17. Jahrhundert, ed. E. G. Jacoby (Stuttgart, 1975).
12 The
present writer found one such letter of 1641 in the British Library; see Perez
Zagorin, "Thomas Hobbes's Departure from England in 1641: An Unpublished Letter,"
Historical Journal 21 (1978), 157-60.
320 Perez Zagorin

adequate biography of Hobbes, and certainly nothing comparable to Cranston's

biography of Locke or Westfall's of Newton. General treatments of Hobbes's
philosophy often include a survey of his life. The well known works by Robertson
(1886), T6nnies (1925), and Laird (1934), are good examples, as is the later
study by Miriam Reik (1977).13 The most recent attempt at a biography by
Arnold A. Rogow (1986), though entering into some detail, adds little or nothing
to what has long been known.14None of the existing accounts clears up the
obscurity of his earlier development or contributes significant new information
concerning his intellectual affiliations or his later life. Of the importance, for
example, of his various French associations and experiences during his long exile
in France between 1640 and 1651 there is probably considerably more to be
learned. Until further letters and possibly other documents pertaining to him
are brought to light, however, our knowledge of his personal and intellectual
history will inevitably remain less than satisfactory.
As a great systematizer, Hobbes strove to encompass all branches of phi-
losophy ranging from mathematics, physics, and metaphysics to psychology,
epistemology, and language. As a natural philosopher, moreover, he was one of
the most important figures of his time. Most moder studies, however, have
concentrated on his political and moral theory to the relative neglect of his
natural philosophy. The latter, moreover, has generally tended to attract stronger
interest from continental than from English or American scholarship. The well
known monograph by Brandt (1928) still remains indispensable in its depth and
thoroughness as an account of Hobbes's conception of nature and the method
of science."5Several recent articles by Jean Bernhardt also touch on essential
aspects of his natural philosophy such as light and optics (1978, 1979, 1988).16
In the same area, Richard Tuck deals with the evolution of Hobbes's natural
philosophy in relation to Descartes (1988). Hobbes always insisted that he
arrived at his basic conception of nature independently of the French thinker,
and there is no reason to doubt this claim. Tuck argues in this connection that
by 1641, a considerably earlier date than has been generally supposed, Hobbes
had already written up the mechanistic principles of his philosophy almost as
fully as his political doctrines. To support this conclusion he proposes a revised
chronology of some of the drafts Hobbes left; and he further suggests that the
latter was not the author of the Short Tract on First Principles, as has been
assumed ever since Tonnies first published this work in 1889, but rather that it

13 G. C.
Robertson, Hobbes (Edinburgh, 1886); Ferdinand Tonnies, Thomas Hobbes:
Leben und Lehre, 3rd ed. (Stuttgart, 1925); John Laird, Hobbes (London, 1934); Miriam
M. Reik, The Golden Lands of Thomas Hobbes (Detroit, 1977).
14 Arnold A. Rogow, Thomas Hobbes:Radical in The Service of Reaction (New York,

1986).
15 Frithiof Brandt, Thomas Hobbes's Mechanical Conceptionof Nature (Copenhagen,

1928).
16 Jean
Bernhardt, "Hobbes et le mouvement de Lumiere," Revue d'Histoire des
Sciences, 30 (1977) 3-24; "La Polemique de Hobbes contre la Dioptrique de Descartes
dans la Tractatus Opticus II (1644)," Revue Internationale de Philosophie, 129 (1979)
432-42; text with introduction and commentary of Thomas Hobbes, Short Tract on First
Principles(Paris, 1988). Additional articles by Bernhardt on Hobbes's natural philosophy
are cited in "Hobbes en France," "Bulletin Hobbes I," 268, 269, 278.
Hobbes on our Mind 321

was due to Robert Payne, chaplain to the earl of Newcastle and a friend who
shared Hobbes's scientific interests. Tuck also tries to show how Hobbes's theory
of perception distinguishing their appearances from the real properties of bodies
allowed him to cope with the problem of skepticism Descartes posed. Tuck's
thesis deserves careful consideration, even though it relies heavily on conjecture
and also attributes to Hobbes a much stronger concern with Cartesian skepticism
than is probably warranted.17 A related essay by Tuck on Hobbes's optics likewise
exaggerates the importance of Cartesian skepticism in the formation of his
philosophy (1988). While he was skeptical of many received beliefs and of other
philosophers' versions of natural law, there is no sign that he was ever troubled
by doubt or disbelief in the possibility of knowledge as such. As Richard Popkin
has rightly observed in an essay on Hobbes and skepticism (1982), in spite of
his close personal association with skeptical French thinkers, no skeptical in-
fluence appears in his works.18
The most noteworthy of recent studies of Hobbes's conception of natural
philosophy is Steven Shapin's and Simon Schaffer'sLeviathanAnd TheAir Pump
(1985), an account of his controversy with Robert Boyle and The Royal Society.
This work, which also contains the first English translation of Hobbes's Dialogus
Physicus de Natura Aeris of 1661, is equally important for the history and
sociology of seventeenth-century science. Hobbes challenged the scientific find-
ings based on Boyle's air pump and thereby also impugned the validity of the
experimental method of which Boyle's invention was the symbol. To Hobbes
the results of experience could never produce certain truth or qualify as causal-
scientific knowledge. To Boyle and his defenders, Hobbes's objections proved
him guilty of both dogmatism and error. In exploring the meaning of the
differences between Hobbes's logico-deductive conception of science and Boyle's
experimental empiricism, the authors bring out the profound intellectual and
social implications of the latter's position. Experimentalism entailed that the
aggregate belief of a number of qualified observers should be credited as a
warranted explanation of natural phenomena. It meant modesty in advancing
truth-claims and a willingness to report failures as well as successes in experi-
ments. It also involved conventions of discourse shunning eloquence or florid
speech in favor of plain, unornamented statement. Hobbes was never elected to
membership in the Royal Society, of which Boyle was a founder and leading
figure. This was due not only to personal and intellectual conflicts but also to
the society's fear of Hobbes's reputation for irreligion and some members' dislike
of his political principles.19 As the authors show, however, his controversy with
Boyle constituted a significant episode in the formation of the idea of experi-

17
Richard Tuck, "Hobbes And Descartes," Perspectiveson Thomas Hobbes, ed. G.
A. J. Rogers and Alan Ryan (Oxford, 1988). This volume of essays, one of the Mind
Association Occasional Papers, was issued to mark Hobbes's fourth centenary.
18 Richard Tuck, "Optics And Sceptics: The Philosophical Foundations of Hobbes's

Political Thought," Edmund Leites (ed.), Conscience And Casuistry in Early Modern
Europe (Cambridge, 1988); Richard Popkin, "Hobbes and Scepticism," L. J. Thro (ed.),
History of Philosophy in the Making: A Symposium of Essays to Honor Professor James
D. Collins on his 65th Birthday (Washington, 1982).
19On this subject, see now the essay by Noel Malcolm, "Hobbes and the Royal
Society," Perspectiveson Thomas Hobbes.
322 Perez Zagorin

mental science and its eventual ascendancy and institutionalization in a com-

munity of scientists.20
While many past and present writers have touched on Hobbes's general
philosophy, few have examined it in close detail or attempted to establish its
precise relationship to his political theory. In his tripartite classification of
philosophy, the first part dealing with the general principles of body, which
received its main statement in De Corpore,was accorded logical priority over
the second and third parts dealing respectively with the special faculties of man
and the artificial body of the commonwealth. This first part included his physics
and metaphysics, his materialistic monism and treatment of body and motion
as the ultimate constitutents of reality, and his notion of philosophy as a science
consisting exclusively of reasoning on causes and effects which proceeds de-
ductively in the manner of geometry. In the 1930s, the well known work by
Leo Strauss contended that his political doctrines owed nothing to his scientific
philosophy (1936).21 This represents an extreme judgment which probably few
present-day scholars would accept. Later on, in opposition to Strauss, J. W. N.
Watkins in a broad study of Hobbes's system of ideas stressed the use throughout
his work of the resolutive-compositive method associated with Galileo and the
new science. Watkins concluded that Hobbes's system formed an interconnected
whole wherein his materialism, nominalism, and understanding of philosophic
method provided the groundwork on which his political philosophy depended.22
More recently, in a dissent from Watkins, Tom Sorell, concentrating on
Hobbes's conception of science, has sought to show the lack of unity between
his natural and civil philosophy. Not only does he consider the latter as inde-
pendent, but also believes that it contains more advocacy than explanation and
more moralizing than the analysis of bodies into their constitutive elements.23
On the other hand, Machiel Karskens has maintained in an acutely reasoned
paper that Hobbes based his anthropology on his mechanistic theory of science
and metaphysics of motion. He offers a number of suggestive observations, such
as that for Hobbes, "bodies in themselves have no explanatory value" but
"function as the metaphysical anchor which secures the link between science
and reality." Even in his physics, "they are reduced almost completely to a
substratum." This enables Karskens to claim that Hobbes's theory of science
was not reductionist in the sense of attempting to reduce all phenomena of
anthropology or political science to material particles in motion.24
Y. C. Zarka has attacked the same problem in an effort to comprehend the
totality of Hobbes's thought and holds that his politics and ethics cannot be
understood independently of his general philosophy (1987). He finds Hobbes's

20 Steven
Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle,
And the Experimental Life (Princeton, 1985).
21 Leo
Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and Genesis (Oxford,
1936).
22
J. W. N. Watkins, Hobbes's System of Ideas: A Study in the Political Significance
of Philosophical Theories (London, 1965).
23 Tom
Sorell, Hobbes (London, 1986); see also the same author's "The Science in
Hobbes's Politics," Perspectiveson Thomas Hobbes.
24
Machiel J. J. Karskens, "Hobbes's Mechanistic Theory of Science and its Role in
his Anthropology," Thomas Hobbes: His View of Man.
Hobbes on our Mind 323

originality in his separation of metaphysics from ontology. This was connected

with his nominalism and conventionalism, which led him to base knowledge on
deductive reasoning in accord with the names and definitions given to things.
Like Vico afterward, he believed that men can know as certain only what they
make themselves as the work of their own minds.25Because nature is the work
of God, men can only attain to a conditional or hypothetical knowledge of its
causes, not its real essence; whereas they can know the true causes of the
commonwealth with certainty because they make it themselves as an artificial
body by their covenants. For Hobbes knowledge is therefore severed from being
as a purely human creation established on the conventions of language. In place
of the older hierarchic order that assured mankind of its natural place and end,
Zarka conceives Hobbes as having effected a metaphysical recentering that
situates man in the artificial order of the state as the product of his own speech
and making.26
The question of the connection between the different parts of Hobbes's
philosophy thus remains a contested issue. Obviously, his political philosophy
must in a certain sense be independent of his natural philosophy, if only because
it comprises a normative as well as descriptive theory which cannot therefore
be derived from any set of empirical propositions about the world or human
behavior. Nonetheless, his political philosophy remains inconceivable without
the influence of the principles of science which shaped his natural philosophy.
It is equally evident that both exhibit the same naturalistic character and seek
to apply the same conceptions of knowledge and philosophic method to their
respective domains.
Although natural philosophy and metaphysics were among Hobbes's per-
manent preoccupations, his most lasting achievement lay in political philosophy,
and this is what continues to arouse the interest of most students. In this field,
two principal positions or approaches are discernible, one predominantly his-
torical and the other predominantly philosophical. While by no means wholly
exclusive of each other, either the one or the other takes precedence in the
majority of Hobbesian studies. The first approach aims to explain Hobbes's
political thought and to recover its intention and meaning by relating it as closely
as possible to its contemporary context. Historians who accept this view may
conceive this context in somewhat different ways and assign priority to one of
its features rather than others, but all of them nevertheless agree in stressing its
role as fundamental. For this approach political philosophy is never concerned
with a set of identical or continuing problems to which different thinkers give
a succession of answers over the centuries. On the contrary, it is held to deal
always with historically determined and particular problems that change in the
course of time. The second approach, while also concerned of course to establish
the meaning of Hobbes's ideas, situates them chiefly within the discussion of
what it considers enduring problems of political theory by philosophers ancient
and moder. For this approach, which is apt to be more rigorously analytical
than is the historical, Hobbes's importance lies in his present relevance no less

25
See Perez Zagorin, "Vico's Theory of Knowledge," The Philosophical Quarterly,
34 (1984), 15-30, for a discussion of Vico's epistemology in relation to Hobbes.
26 Yves-Charles Zarka, La Decision metaphysiquede Hobbes: Conditionsde la
politique
(Paris, 1987).
324 Perez Zagorin

than in his originality or effect in his time. Those who adopt it do not hesitate
to reformulate or amend his arguments where they find them inconsistent or
mistaken, and they may do so by attributing beliefs and intentions to him which
are not discoverable in the text and do not square with the way in which his
contemporaries understood him.
In recent years one of the principal proponents of the historical approach
has been Quentin Skinner, who beside his contributions to Hobbes scholarship
has also expounded his methodological prescriptions for the study of the history
of political thought in a number of essays. As he defines it, the context of this
history in the case of any particular thinker consists of conventions of language,
specific political issues, the writings of other authors, and intellectual traditions.27
Among numerous instances of the philosophical approach are the writings of
A. E. Taylor, Howard Warrender, and David Gauthier, all leading Hobbes
students, as well as those by more recent authors to be noticed later. Perhaps
Michael Oakeshott, another notable interpreter of Hobbes, stands midway be-
tween the two camps, though inclining more towards the latter. Whereas Skinner
sees Hobbes's political theory as a species of ideology which he relates to
questions posed by the English revolution of the mid-seventeenth century, the
scholars mentioned above all concern themselves almost entirely with Hobbes's
text and concentrate on explicating the logical structure of his concepts, with
little if any reference to the revolt against the Stuart monarchy and its accom-
panying problems which, by Hobbes's own account, turned his mind away from
natural philosophy and metaphysics to political philosophy.
The differencebetween the two positions was clearlyjoined in some comments
by Howard Warrenderon Skinner's methodological program. Warrender's The
Political Philosophyof Hobbes (1957), which deals with his theory of obligation,
has been one of the most extensively discussed and controversial interpretations
of Hobbes's thought.28In an examination of the ideological context of Hobbes's
theory of obligation, Skinner criticized Warrender's view that the meaning of
this theory could be understood apart from its relationship to the prevailing
climate of opinion and debates concerning the question of obedience to a de

27 Skinner's preface to his The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (2 vols.;

Cambridge, 1978), I, x-xv, contains a brief statement of his "particular way of approaching
the study and interpretation of political texts;" the bibliography of this work includes a
list of his essays on the subject. Skinner's views have provoked considerable discussion
and criticism. Some students of political thought who adhere to the historical approach
have questioned the explanatory adequacy of his conception of the historical context.
This criticism is implicit in the discussion of context and of what constitutes an historically
grounded understanding of political texts in Richard Ashcraft's Revolutionary Politics
and Locke's Two Treatisesof Government(Princeton, 1986), ix-xii and Introduction. For
other comments and criticisms, see James Tully (ed.), Meaning in Context: Quentin
Skinner And His Critics (Princeton, 1989), which includes Skinner's articles and a reply
to his critics. I am indebted for an illuminating discussion of the issues and problems
connected with this subject to a seminar paper by my student, Dean Kernan, "What is
the History of Political Thought the History of?"
28 Howard Warrender, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: His Theory of Obligation

(Oxford, 1957).
Hobbes on our Mind 325

facto government that arose in 1650 following the abolition of the English
monarchy (1972).29
To this criticism Warrenderrejoined that "the classic texts in political theory
are more than tracts for the times" and that Skinner's kind of contextualism
was unsuitable to their study. The political philosophy of Hobbes belongs not
only to its contemporary milieu but also to the long tradition of natural law
concepts and to the context of modern interpretations of his work. Even though
Hobbes's thought may have been implicated in the contentious issues of its
immediate political environment, Warrenderdenied that the latter could explain
its theoretical structure or basis. For him Hobbes intended his principles to
apply to man in general and the reason for his continuing importance lay in his
insights extending beyond his own time into fundamental theoretical problems
of peace, order, and justice (1979).30
Warrender's disagreement with the centrality assigned to the historical ap-
proach is implicit in most of the Hobbes scholarship which is the work of
philosophers rather than historians. This has never been more apparent than at
present, when Hobbes's political and moral philosophy may be related to John
Rawls's A Theory of Justice or interpreted in terms of recent theoretical devel-
opments like game theory or rational choice theory. It seems apparent that there
is no way to adjudicate between the two positions, which respond to different
kinds of interests. Both are necessary, although a tension is always likely to exist
between them. The historical contexualization of Hobbes's political thought
provides a certain understanding which is not attainable in any other way. It
may serve as a control or corrective on philosophical interpretations imputing
meanings or beliefs to him that historical evidence and its conclusions show
either to be unlikely or to be views that he could not possibly have held. On
the other hand, his political doctrines were obviously more than the product of
their historical context, and their meaning cannot be reduced to the latter.
Similarly, it is impossible to limit the relevance of Hobbes's work to its original
context, since political thought does not consist of a series of discrete and
unrelated moments, but is part of a continuous history in which some of the
major questions Hobbes addresses may engage philosophers of the present as
much as they did those of the past.
In any retrospect of the literature on Hobbes since the end of World War
II, amidst a number of excellent works by scholars of several different countries,
four in particular stand out by the degree to which they either stimulated or
tended to dominate much of the discussion of his political and moral philosophy
until very recently. The first of these is Michael Oakeshott's introduction to his
edition of Leviathan (1946), which by its fresh examination of Hobbes's political
thought, especially his concept of obligation, brought a renewed impetus to
Hobbesian scholarship. The other three are A. E. Taylor's celebrated article,
"The Ethical Doctrine of Hobbes," which was first published in 1938 but gained
widest attention after its inclusion in K. C. Brown's much read collection, Hobbes

29
Quentin Skinner, "The Context of Hobbes's Theory of Obligation," Maurice Cran-
ston and Richard Peters (eds.), Hobbes and Rousseau (Garden City, 1971).
30 Howard
Warrender, "Political Theory and Historiography: A Reply to Professor
Skinner," Historical Journal, XXII (1979), 931-40; cf. also Warrender'scomment in the
introduction to his edition of the Latin version of De Cive, 33.
326 Perez Zagorin

Studies (1965); Warrender's The Political Philosophyof Hobbes (1957); and C.

B. Macpherson's The Political Theoryof PossessiveIndividualism (1962).31 What
all of the last three had in common was that each contained a new and original
interpretation of Hobbes's thought. Macpherson preferred a Marxian account
of his political theory which explained his understanding of human nature, the
state of nature, and the polity as a derivation from his (unstated) assumption
of the concept of possessive individualism reflecting the emergent capitalist
market society of his time. Taylor challenged the opinion that Hobbes's moral
theory derived from his psychological teaching and rested on self-interested,
prudential considerations, contending instead that it contained Kantian features
and was in reality a strict deontology entailing both theism and a doctrine of
objective duty. Finally, Warrender, whose work aroused greater interest than
any other of the period, held that Hobbes's theory of obligation was necessarily
theistic, consisting of the duty men are under to obey the laws of nature both
in the state of nature and in civil society because they are the commands of
God.
None of these theses, it is safe to say, has gained general acceptance. Most
students have found both textual and historical reasons for rejecting Macpher-
son's attempt to treat Hobbes as the first political theorist whose philosophy
incorporated the presuppositions and values of the bourgeois social order. They
have likewise remained unconvinced by Taylor's and Warrender's image of a
Hobbes who grounded duty in reasons divorced from self-interest and who
derived such political and moral obligations as seeking peace and keeping cov-
enants from the command of God. Most recently, however, attention has shifted
from the problems emphasized by these authors to different ones. While the
question of Hobbes's concept of obligation will doubtless continue to be an issue,
additional themes have come to the fore as topics of discussion, as may be seen
in several of the works on Hobbes that have appeared during the 1980s.
One of these is Gregory Kavka's Hobbesian Moral And Political Theory
(1986), a study typical of Anglo-American analytical philosophy in its aims and
method. For the author, as for other contemporaryphilosophers, Hobbes remains
significant because of his illuminating treatment of lasting problems in Western
ethics and politics like the relationship between morality and prudence and
between the individual and the state. Ignoring the historical context, he subjects
many of Hobbes's views to close scrutiny in order to fashion a "Hobbesian"
theory of morals and politics by modifying or discarding those of Hobbes's
concepts that he finds erroneous. Thus, he sets aside the philosopher's meta-
physics as irrelevant to his political doctrines. He also rejects as empirically
unsound some of his assumptions like psychological egoism, the claim that
human actions are always motivated by self-interest. In place of the latter, for
example, he substitutes the notion of predominant egoism as sufficient to sustain
Hobbes's conclusions. Incorporating these and other revisions, he gives a sys-
tematic exposition of Hobbes's moral and political ideas based on Leviathan.
The discussion brings out Hobbes's emphasis on the need for consistency between
moral requirements and the motivations of human nature; his reconciliation of

31 Thomas
Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Michael Oakeshott (Oxford, 1946); A. E. Taylor,
"The Ethical Doctrine of Hobbes," K. C. Brown (ed.), Hobbes Studies (Oxford. 1965);
C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of PossessiveIndividualism (Oxford, 1962).
Hobbes on our Mind 327

the principles of morality with the prescriptions of long-run prudence and self-
interest; and his demonstration of why social peace is a common good as the
prerequisite of each individual's secure well-being. As Kavka rightly claims,
Hobbes provides reasons for being moral that most rational persons should be
willing to accept. But as he also correctly points out, Hobbes's arguments extend
only to a morality of requirements, i. e., to an explanation and justification of
the minimal standards of conduct we are required to follow in our relations
with others and which we can reasonably expect and require others to follow.
For a higher, more ideal standard of personal and social morality than this we
must look elsewhere.
Kavka's discussion includes various interesting features, of which I shall
note only two. Some years ago John Rawls in his Theoryof Justice (1972) drew
on game theory to propose that the Hobbesian state of nature represents a classic
case of the Prisoner's Dilemma (PD). PD presents a logical analysis of rationality
in certain situations of uncertainty and incomplete information. Its essence as
a non-cooperative, non-zero-sum game is its demonstration that a decision re-
garding a course of action made by two or more people in isolation from one
another will produce a worse outcome for all of them even though, assuming
the conduct of the others as given, the decision is a rational one for each separate
individual. Implicitly it poses the question of how individuals situated as are
Hobbesian men in the war of all against all of the state of nature can ever
contract with each other to escape from their natural condition. Kavka tackles
this problem in an application of several versions of PD to the state of nature,
concluding in accord with Hobbes that rational cooperation to attain egress
from it is possible. Another interesting (though scarcely novel) feature of his
account is the distinctly more liberal Hobbes it presents. The author stresses
aspects of Hobbes's political theory which, by changing certain assumptions,
can be shown to allow a more liberal, limited state, and argues that even
revolution can sometimes be considered a rational choice in Hobbesian terms.32
Akin to Kavka's work in its analytical treatment is Jean Hampton's Hobbes
and the Social Contract Tradition(1986), a systematic examination of the moral
and political teachings in Leviathan which likewise uses such moder techniques
as game theory to probe Hobbes's arguments. As part of her study, the author
takes up several topics that have aroused much puzzlement among students of
Hobbes. How, for example, can we reconcile his conventionalist conception of
truth as founded entirely on the definitions of language with the fact that he
also seems to be a realist who implies a correspondence theory of truth? She
does not resolve this difficulty, but nevertheless regards Hobbes's understanding
of science as presupposing that truth consists in correspondence or a correct
description of the way the world is. Similarly, in ethics, proceeding from his
analysis of human beings as moved wholly by appetite or aversion, Hobbes
appears to be an ethical subjectivist or relativist who defines as good whatever
object a person desires. Not only does this make ethics a part of psychology
and preclude any deontological interpretation of his moral philosophy, but it

32
Gregory Kavka, Hobbesian Moral and Political Theory (Princeton, 1986); John
Rawls, A Theoryof Justice (Oxford, 1973), 269-70. Cf. also J. W. N. Watkins's discussion
of the relation of PD to Hobbes's state of nature in Robert Borger and Frank Cioffi
(eds.), Explanation in the Behavioral Sciences (Cambridge, 1970), 202-6.
328 Perez Zagorin

raises the problem of he can then ascribe an "ought" or normative status to

his own moral precepts which he presents as conclusions of reason synonymous
with the law of nature. Hampton maintains, however, as is surely correct, that
ethical subjectivism cannot be his dominant position, and holds that he also
distinguishes between real and apparent good, the former therefore having the
character of objective ethical truths which all people can and ought to accept.
Hampton's chief attention falls on the flaws she perceives in Hobbes's version
of the social contract and in contract theory in general. With the help of PD
and other devices of game theory, she attempts to prove that Hobbesian men
in the state of nature could neither contract to institute a sovereign nor alienate
their rights to it. She then reconstructs the argument by substituting for the
contract a type of Self-Interested Agreement which she thinks individuals in the
state of nature who desire peace could make and keep. In this case they would
not need to alienate any rights to the sovereign, but would lend it their powers
to act as their agent. On this subject, however, the author's reinterpretationhas
the serious drawback that it runs directly counter to Hobbes's meaning, since
in his exposition both the polity and sovereignty presume the possibility of a
covenant or contract by consenting persons.33In a critique of Hampton's view,
David Gauthier, relying on the same methods, has refuted her conclusion and
effectively vindicated Hobbes's conception ( 1988).34Other recent commentators,
moreover, have denied the analogy between PD and the state of nature. As
Alan Ryan has noted, Hobbesian men in the state of nature do not seek to gain
everything they can and thus break promises whenever advantageous; rather,
they are risk-avoiding, danger-of-death minimizing creatures who have a very
strong rational motive to contract for the sake of peace (1988).35 In another
comment on the problem, Isabel Hungerland has pointed to the unique philo-
sophical merits of Hobbes's derivation of morality from assumptions of both
rationality and egoism on the part of parties to the social contract. The reason,
she observes, why PD doesn't apply to the state of nature is that Hobbes built
into his model the means whereby the non-cooperative game of the state of
nature could be transformed into the cooperative game of civil society. He did
this by showing the connection between morality and advantage, so that moral
rules appear as strategies which benefit everyone alike if everyone abides by
them (1987).36
In contrast with the preceding works, two other recent monographs exemplify
a markedly different approach to Hobbes. The first, David Johnston's The
Rhetoric of Leviathan (1986), seeks to place him in the rhetorical tradition of
Renaissance humanism and hence to explain Leviathan as a speech act which
proposes to do as well as say something. We have already noted the appearance
of this view in the study by Sorell, which touches on the persuasoryand rhetorical
functions of Hobbes's civil science. It is also in line with the centrality claimed
for rhetoric by contemporaryliterary theory and by historians of political thought
such as J. G. A. Pocock. For the former, philosophy, far from being the distinctive

33 Jean Hampton, Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition (Cambridge, 1986).
34 David Gauthier, "Hobbes's Social Contract," Perspectiveson Thomas Hobbes.
35 Alan Ryan, "Hobbes and Individualism,"
Perspectiveson Thomas Hobbes, 92-93.
36 Isabel C. Hungerland, "The Leviathan, Old and New," Craig Walton and P. J.
Johnson (eds.), Hobbes's "Science of Natural Justice" (Dordrecht, 1987), 279-82.
Hobbes on our Mind 329

species of discourse, supreme in its impersonal concern for truth, it purports to

be, is inseparably a part of writing or literature and thus inescapably subject to
their inherently rhetorical character.37For the latter, a political text is preem-
inently the product of a linguistic paradigm and is both a speech act and an
event intended to produce an effect in the world.38Johnston reads Hobbes's
political theory as evolving from the predominantly scientific aim of his earlier
writings to the predominantly rhetorical and persuasive aim of Leviathan. Ac-
cordingly, he sees the latter as a political act directed toward a broad popular
audience with the object of effecting a transformationof popular political culture.
Viewed from this angle, the theological and religious discussion of the latter
half of Leviathan, which students often tend to neglect, was an integral part of
the work's purpose and designed to shape readers' opinions in ways that would
make the political arguments of the first half more compelling.39
While it is true that Leviathan was more closely attuned to the contemporary
political and religious situation than his preceding political writings, there are
numerous difficulties in the way of this rhetorical interpretation of Hobbes's
masterpiece. Of course Leviathan endeavors to convince readers of the truth of
its propositions, an aim it presumably shares with most philosophy. Hobbes
wanted his doctrines to be taught in the universities and believed they would
preserve commonwealths if put into practice; moreover, the conclusion of Lev-
iathan, with its references to the contemporary scene, includes a direct justifi-
cation for royalists to submit to the revolutionary regime that had deposed and
executed Charles I. Clarendon, one of Leviathan's acutest contemporary critics,
paid tribute to the effectiveness of Hobbes's style as an instrument for the
inculcation of subversive beliefs, commending his "order and method in writing,
and his clear expressing his conceptions in weighty, proper, and significant
words.... "4 Does this mean, though, that he dedicated Leviathan more to
persuasion than to truth, or that he relied on the strategies of rhetoric rather
than on strength of reasoning and logic to convince his reader?
As a classically educated scholar Hobbes was well acquainted with rhetoric,

37 See Christopher Norris, The DeconstructiveTurn (London, 1983), ch. 1, and Terry

Eagleton, Literary Theory (Minneapolis, 1983), ch. 4. The view that rhetoric and per-
suasion determine the language of all the human sciences is the subject of the essays
collected in John S. Nelson, Allan Megill, and Donald N. McCloskey (eds.), The Rhetoric
of the Human Sciences. Language and Argument in Scholarshipand Public Affairs (Mad-
ison, 1987).
38 See Anthony Pagden (ed.), Introduction to The Languages of Political Theory in

Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1987); J. G. A. Pocock, "The Concept of a Language

and the Metier d'Historien: Some Considerations on Practice," in ibid., and the same
author's "Texts as Events: Reflections on the History of Political Thought," Kevin Sharpe
and Steven Zwicker (eds.) Politics of Discourse: Literature and History in Seventeenth-
Century England (Berkeley, 1987).
39 David Johnston, The Rhetoric of Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes and the Politics of

Cultural Transformation(Princeton, 1986).

40Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon, A Brief View and Survey of the Dangerous and
Pernicious Errors to Churchand State in Mr. Hobbes'sBook, Entitled Leviathan (Oxford,
1676), 16; see Perez Zagorin, "Clarendon and Hobbes," Journal of Modern History, 57,
4 (1985), 593-616.
330 Perez Zagorin

on which he composed a treatise in the 1630s.4'The conflict between philosophy

or science and rhetoric, however, is an old, recurrent story in western thought.42
Not only is it among the themes of Hobbes's first political work, The Elements
of Law, as Johnston does not omit to point out, but there is no reason to suppose
he ever changed his mind about the two. In Leviathan he lists "the use of
Metaphors, Tropes, and other Rhetorical figures instead of words proper" as
one of the causes of absurdity, and also bans metaphor from "all rigorous search
of Truth...."43 Of course, nothing is easier than to deconstruct Hobbes's claim
by showing that he himself employed rhetorical figures while condemning them;
as Brian Vickers has unanswerablyobserved, "the general truth holds, that those
who attack rhetoric, or metaphor, invariably have to use rhetoric and meta-
phor."44 All the same, Hobbes distinguished throughout his political writings
between eloquence appealing to passion and prejudice and eloquence appealing
to reason and logic. Teaching, he maintained in The Elements of Law, begets
knowledge, while persuasion begets only opinion.45He did not direct Leviathan
at a wide popular audience, which hardly existed for such a book, but at political
elites, the educated, and the learned. It was these he wished to influence, as was
inevitable in the hierarchic society of his time. Moreover, if Leviathan was
calculated above all to persuade, why did it go out of its way to offend so many
readers?Many of its doctrines ran counter to the strongest convictions of lawyers,
clergy, Aristotelians, university dons, Catholics, Anglicans, Presbyterians, par-
liamentarians, and royalists. It is true that Hobbes wrote this, more than any
of his other works, with the hope of directly affecting the English political
situation; and in 1656 he claimed that it had "framed the minds of a thousand
gentlemen to a conscientious obedience to the present government," which was
then the Cromwellian protectorate.46His larger purpose, nevertheless, was to
propound a political philosophy that would instruct men on the necessity of
absolute sovereignty and subjection as the sole means of realizing their natural
right to self-preservation and desire for peace and a secure life. Hobbes's con-
ception of philosophical method offered no ingress to rhetoric as a paramount
aim. Far from being primarily a rhetorical work intent on persuasion, Leviathan
was a fundamental treatise of political and moral philosophy containing unpal-
atable truths of whose certainty it sought to convince readers through a com-
bination of reasoning, logic, and empirical propositions which it invited them
to confirm from their own experience.47

41 Thomas Hobbes, A
Briefe of the Art of Rhetorique, 1637, which contains a summary
of Aristotle's Rhetoric.
42 See Brian
Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric (Oxford, 1988), and the literature there
cited.
43 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Oxford, 1943), 36, 54 (chs. 5, 8).

4Vickers, 199.
45Thomas Hobbes, The Elements of Law, ed. F. Tonnies (Cambridge, 1928), 49-50.
46 "Six Lessons to The Professors of Mathematics,"
English Works, ed. Sir William
Molesworth (11 vols.; London, 1839-45), VII, 336.
47 For a recent discussion of Hobbes as a rhetorician of
logic and thinker who sought
to invent a new language of certainty, see Victoria Kahn, Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skep-
ticism in The Renaissance (Ithaca, 1985), ch. 8, which also surveys his view of rhetoric.
C. W. Schoneveld, " 'Insinuations to the Will': Hobbes's Style and Intention in Leviathan
Hobbes on our Mind 331

The second of these monographs, Deborah Baumgold's Hobbes's Political

Theory (1988), likewise departs from the analytical orientation of recent phil-
osophical commentators. Baumgold is much less interested in the internal struc-
ture of Hobbes's ideas than in their relevance to the realities of governing a
state. She states her disagreement with the "orthodox paradigm" in Hobbes
studies, which concentrates on the problem of obligation and depicts him as an
individualistic thinker who based his conclusions on an analysis of individual
human nature and behavior. Instead, in accord with R. G. Collingwood's logic
of question and answer, she seeks to determine what questions Hobbes seemed
to be addressing and tries to insert his arguments into the controversies and
conditions of his time. Thus she points to his perception of the weaknesses of
the early moder state and explains his concept of absolute sovereignty as a
prescription for overcoming them. In her view, he was concerned not with
obligation or obedience by ordinary subjects or individuals in general but with
the importance of particular institutions, political roles, and the compliance of
elites in insuring the creation and stability of coercive authority. Her most striking
assertion is that Hobbes was not a natural rights theorist, an opinion she defends
on the ground that the few universal inalienable rights he left to subjects under
sovereign power, such as self-defense or the liberty to refuse self-accusation,
were politically insignificant.48
Baumgold's study includes shrewd insights into the political motives and
practical considerations that may have underlain Hobbes's writings. It makes
clear, too, how his precepts for ruling in the public interest, which comprised
his "art of government," served to enhance the strength of sovereign power. At
the same time, however, it largely underestimates or ignores the character of
his thought as political philosophy. Few will concur with the author that Hobbes
was not an individualistic thinker deeply concerned to establish a basis of ob-
ligation by individuals as such. Similarly, her opinion that he was not a natural
rights theorist appears equally mistaken. This is evident when we reflect that
the foundational concept of his political philosophy is the right of nature, i.e.,
the pre-political claim which human beings possess to self-preservation and,
beyond that, to the commodities of civilized living which they also desire. Nor
is it the case that his treatment of the natural rights of subjects made them
politically inconsequential. Despite his insistence on the duty of obedience to
the sovereign, Hobbes left surprising scope for the liberty and private judgment
of subjects. His position is summarized in the blanket statement in Leviathan
that a subject may refuse to obey if the sovereign's command frustrates the end

Compared to Earlier Political Works," Hobbes's "Science of Natural Justice," presents

a view similar to Johnston's that Leviathan strove first of all for belief, not truth. Jeffrey
Barnouw mentions a number of articles on Hobbes and rhetoric in "Hobbes aux Etats-
Unis. Rhetorique et religion," "Bulletin Hobbes I", 290-309. Gigliola Rossini, "The
Criticism of Rhetorical Historiography and the Ideal of Scientific Method: History,
Nature, and Science in the Political Language of Thomas Hobbes," The Languages of
Political Theoryin Early Modern Europe, deals with the opposition of science and rhetoric
in Hobbes's thought.
48 Deborah
Baumgold, Hobbes's Political Theory (Cambridge, 1988).
332 Perez Zagorin

for which sovereignty is ordained.49Needless to say, only the subject can decide
whether or not this condition is met. According to Bishop Bramhall, one of his
prominent seventeenth-centuryadversaries,Hobbes provided such a wide liberty
for subjects that Leviathan ought to be entitled a "Rebel's catechism." Clar-
endon's critique expressed the same judgment.50Although one of Baumgold's
aims is to understand Hobbes in the light of the issues and controversies of his
time, her denial of his importance as a natural rights theorist is directly contrary
to his contemporaries' perception of his work.
Hobbes's central position in the natural rights tradition is one of the principal
subjects of Richard Tuck's study of the origin and development of natural rights
theories (1979), which discusses him in relation to Grotius, Selden, Pufendorf,
and other natural rights theorists of the seventeenth century. Tuck's work on
this neglected subject includes material unlikely to be familiar even to specialists
and makes an important contribution to the history of early modem political
philosophy. At the same time, however, it also puts forward some doubtful
notions concerning Hobbes. It claims that he was indebted for the development
of his ideas to the influence of John Selden, whose main treatment of natural
law, De lure Naturali et Gentium, appearedin 1640, and groups him with several
other English royalist writers as one of Selden's intellectual disciples.5' As I
have tried to demonstrate elsewhere, however, this thesis is contrary to the
evidence and quite implausible. Not only was Hobbes a far more original thinker
than Selden, but the differences between them were so considerable that any
supposition of indebtedness of one to the other must be considered as un-
founded.52
In continental European writings on Hobbes, the emphasis of Anglo-Amer-
ican philosophers on the logical structure and coherence of his thought tends
to give way to other concerns. His attitude toward God and religion is discussed
in the veteran Hobbes scholar Raymond Polin's Hobbes, Dieu et Les Hommes
(1981). Curtly dismissing as false and fallacious the attempt by F. C. Hood and
others to present Hobbes as an orthodox Christian thinker, Polin argues for the
more common view that his radical rationalism left no room for God in his
political philosophy.53Arrigo Pacchi also deals with the disputed question of
the place of God in Hobbes's thought and suggests that he held both a philo-
sophical and a theological conception of God, the first envisaging him as prime
cause and mover, the second as the biblical deity of Judeo-Christian tradition
(1988).54
Klaus-Michael Kodalle's Thomas Hobbes-Logik der Herrschaft und Ver-

49Leviathan, 166 (ch. 21); cf. the discussion in Perez Zagorin, A History of Political
Thought in the English Revolution, (London, 1954), 184-85.
50 John Bramhall, The Catching of Leviathan, 1658, in Works(5 vols.; London, 1842-
45), IV, 555; Clarendon, 86-87, part of a discussion of Leviathan ch. 21 on "The Liberty
of Subjects."
51 Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories:Their Origin and Development(Cambridge,

1979), chs. 4-6.

52 Zagorin, "Clarendon and Hobbes," 598-605.

53 Raymond Polin, Hobbes, Dieu et les hommes (Paris, 1981); F. C. Hood, The Divine
Politics of Thomas Hobbes (Oxford, 1964).
54
Arrigo Pacchi, "Hobbes and the Problem of God," Perspectiveson Thomas Hobbes.
Hobbes on our Mind 333

nunftdes Friedens(1972), focuseson the significanceof Hobbes'sreligiousand

theologicalideas for his politicaltheory, and perceivesa relationshipbetween
his conceptof contractas the originof the politicalorderandthe biblicaldoctrine
of the covenantwhich was revivedin the federaltheology of sixteenth-and
seventeenth-century Protestantism.He also sees Hobbesas creatinga spacefor
the free subjectivityof inner belief, since the subject'sconformityto the sov-
ereign'scommandin mattersof conscienceextendsonly to outwardactions.55
BernardWillms,in an essay on Hobbes'santhropology(1982), dwells on his
conceptof libertyas definingthe humanconditionand therebyenvisagingman
as a being of open possibility.He associatesHobbesboth with Hegel and with
Nietzsche'snotion of man as the animalwho remainsunfixed("Der Mensch
ist das noch nicht festgestelltTier") and argues that for Hobbes the state
representsthe dialecticaland politicalsolution to the pure self-relatednessof
humanlibertyin the state of nature.In this way, accordingto Willms,Hobbes
made man'ssubjectivitya new foundationfor politicaltheory.56
In anotheressay also devotedto Hobbes'santhropology,SimoneGoyard-
Fabreconnectsthe latterwith his conceptof naturalright (1982). She suggests
that his originalitylay in his secularizedidea of naturalrightas a purelyhuman
poweror libertyrootedin humannatureand devoidof any moralmeaningor
connotation.In the Hobbesiancommonwealth,however,which men make as
the productof theirreason,rightundergoesa metamorphosis wherebyit becomes
the basis of civil society and transcendsthe lawless conditionof the state of
nature.57 It is impossibleto agree,though,withGoyard-Fabre's beliefthatnatural
right for Hobbes was not a moral fact. The truth, on the contrary,appearsto
be that his treatmentof the desire for self-preservation and peacefulliving in
which naturalright originatesis at once both descriptiveand normative.His
conceptionof the right of natureforms the point in his philosophywhere he
attemptsto unite fact with norm and is with ought.58It is never less than a
moral principle,since he identifiedit with the drive for self-preservation and
consistentlyaffirmedthat anythingmen do in pursuitof their urge to live they
do with right. Beyondthat, it remainsthe sourceof obligationand sole justi-
ficationof the commonwealth,becausethe only reasonmen can have for con-
sentingto submitto sovereignpoweris to secureor realizetheir naturalright.
Although most authorshave given prominenceto Hobbes'ssweepingem-
powermentof the sovereignand his emphasison the necessityof strong, au-

55 Klaus-Michael Kodalle, Thomas Hobbes-Logik der Herrschaft und Vernunftdes

Friedens (Munich, 1972); see also the same author's "Covenant: Hobbes's Philosophy
of Religion and his Political System 'More Geometrico,' Hobbes's "Science of Natural
Justice."
56 Bernard Willms, "Liberty as Conditio Humana in Hobbes," in Thomas Hobbes:
His View of Man.
57 Simone Goyard-Fabre, "Right and Anthropology in Hobbes's Philosophy," Thomas
Hobbes: His View of Man; cf. the same author's "Metamorphosis of the Idea of Right
in Hobbes's Philosophy," Hobbes's "Science of Natural Justice".
58 On Hobbes's conflation of is and ought, see the present writer's essay, "Cudworth

and Hobbes on Is and Ought," in Richard Ashcraft, Richard Kroll, and Perez Zagorin
(eds.), Philosophy, Religion, and Science in the Later Seventeenth Century (Cambridge,
forthcoming).
334 Perez Zagorin

thoritarian government, some have also pointed out his affinities with liberalism.
The liberal aspects of his political theory explain the early interest the English
utilitarians took in him, despite their rejection of the notions of natural rights
and contractualism. Hobbes seen as the founder of liberalism through his con-
ception of natural right provided the main theme in Leo Strauss's classic work
on his political philosophy. C. B. Macpherson also perceived him as a seminal
theorist of liberalism and the bourgeois polity through the role he ascribed to
possessive individualism in shaping Hobbes's political thought. A recent extreme
version of Hobbes as a theorist of liberalism appears in Frank M. Coleman's
Hobbes and America (1977), a study heavily influenced by Macpherson's inter-
pretation, which it takes to much greater lengths. Coleman pictures Hobbes as
a philosopher allied to the revolutionary goals of the commercial Protestantism
of the seventeenth century who became the theoretical progenitor of the political
order that emerged in the United States. Casting a relentlessly critical eye on
the failures of American liberal democracy-its unattended social problems,
propensities to violence, and susceptibility to financial corruption, he explains
them as due to the principles first formulated by Hobbes and subsequently
introduced into American constitutionalism through the influence of Locke and
Madison to become the basis of the American political tradition. These principles,
according to the author, place the source of right in individual will and recognize
no common or public good transcending the private needs or interests of the
polity's members. They conceive the state's purpose as conflict management
through supervisionof the transactional relations between independently situated
political actors. Hobbes was a liberal democrat, Coleman holds, because he based
government on consent of the governed taken one by one, affirmed the equality
of men, and maintained that the sovereign must uphold the rights of bourgeois
men.59
While not wrong in pointing to the individualism inherent in Hobbes's
political philosophy, this characterizationof the latter as the source of American
liberal democracy is far too crude and historically unbalanced to be credible.
To make out his case the author must retell the outworn tale of modern history
as the rise of the middle class which historians have long discarded. He must
also disregard the extensive powers with which Hobbes invests the sovereign to
assure its supremacy over private interests, including ultimate control of prop-
erty; and he must likewise overlook Hobbes's statements that the sovereign is
obliged by the law of nature to govern for the public good and safety, which
are identical with its own good. When we think of how critical Hobbes would
have been of the pluralism, political controversies, and unrestrained expression
of public opinion in the United States, the suggestion that he was a democrat
appears fantastic. It certainly never occurred to him to extend the idea of the
equality of men in the state of nature (which signified only their equal freedom
and ability to destroy one another without a coercive power to rule them) into
an equality of political rights and participation under government.
Nevertheless, his affinities with liberalism are undeniable, though in ways
Coleman mainly ignores. This is most evident in the place natural right occupies
in his political philosophy as the only rationale of the commonwealth and
59Frank M. Coleman, Hobbes And America: Exploring the ConstitutionalFoundations
(Toronto, 1977).
Hobbes on our Mind 335

subjection. It is also seen in Leviathan's critique of inquisitions into conscience

and its arguments favoring religious toleration and freedom of belief, a theme
Alan Ryan has recently explored in several essays (1983, 1988).6 It is no less
manifest in Leviathan's advice to the sovereign to rule with equity in the general
welfare and according to law. Although Hobbes was a legal positivist who defined
law exclusively as the command of the sovereign, he was wholly opposed to
arbitrary government. One of his deepest ties to liberalism, as well as most
radical breaks with traditional moral philosophy, lies in his denial that there is
any summum bonum for men to pursue. Hobbes refrains from positing a hi-
erarchy of values or recommending any scheme of life as best. He conceives
humans as self-interested, competitive beings pursuing their personal ends, and
he only strives to lay down the moral principles that permit them to do so in
conditions of peace and without injury to others.
At one time Hobbes was envisaged as a thinker to whom a certain definite
set of propositions and beliefs could confidently be ascribed as constituting his
fundamental doctrines. Today our image of his philosophy has become frag-
mented as specialists concentrate on its different aspects with little or no reference
to the whole. Moreover, the prevailing impression produced by the recent lit-
erature is of the many disagreements among his interpreters. It is ironic that a
thinker so greatly committed to clarity, logic, and strictness of definition should
be criticized by many of his commentators for his inconsistencies and confusions
and be understood in such diverse and contradictory ways. Although Hobbes
as a systematic philosopher sought to communicate a comprehensive vision of
man and the universe, the coherence between the different parts of his philosophy
is frequently denied, and no consensus exists even about some of his basic
principles. The analytical dissection of his text has at times resulted in a kind
of scholasticism which has lost sight of its fundamental meaning and intention.
What is needed at present is a more integral conception of his thought which
recognizes its essential unity and its domination in spite of logical gaps by a
single spirit derived from the new science of the seventeenth century. What is
likewise needed is a renewed realization of the profound originality, radicalism,
and innovative character of his political and moral theory. Hobbes's greatness
consists not only in the fact that he was the first thinker to base the political
order exclusively on rights instead of duties. He was also the first to see that
there can be no divine or transcendent source or guarantor of moral values, and
that men must create their normativity themselves out of their own reason and
human nature.

The University of Rochester.

60Alan Ryan, "Hobbes, Toleration, and the Inner Life," David Miller and Larry
Siedentop (eds.), The Nature of Political Theory (Oxford, 1983); "A More Tolerant
Hobbes?," in Susan Mendus (ed.), Justifying Toleration (Cambridge, 1988).