Abstract
The goal of political theory has sometimes been described as the search for the nature of government and sometimes as the search for the justification for government. The first description is more likely to be given by people sympathetic to the idea that political life is natural to human beings and by those sympathetic to the philosophies of Plato, Aristotle and their followers through the centuries. Let’s call this ‘the classical tradition’. (Note, however, that many sophists and Stoics held that government is not natural.) The second description is more likely to be given by people who think that political life is not natural to human beings but is in some way artificial. It is the favoured modern conception of government. Hobbes represents the first giant step forward in this tradition.1 He challenges the classical tradition at the beginning of Chapter 1 of De Cive:
The greatest part of those men who have written aught concerning commonwealths, either suppose, or require us or beg of us to believe, that man is a creature born fit for society. The Greeks call him zoon politikon; and on this foundation they so build up the doctrine of civil society, as if for the preservation of peace, and the government of mankind, there were nothing else necessary than that men should agree to make certain covenants and conditions together, which themselves should then call laws. Which axiom, though received by most, is yet certainly false; and an error proceeding from our too slight contemplation of human nature. (DC 1.2)
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Notes and References
Richard Tuck argues that the modern tradition begins with Hugo Grotius. Several of his works are essential reading: ‘Grotius, Carneades, and Hobbes’, in Grotiana, new series, 4 (1983), pp. 43–62;
‘Optics and sceptics’, in Edmund Leites (ed.), Conscience and Casuistry in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 235–63;
and ‘The “modern theory” of natural law’, in Anthony Pagden (ed.), The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 99–119;
and Philosophy and Government 1572–1651 (Cambridge, 1993). Tuck emphasizes the relation between the project of modern political philosophy and the challenge of scepticism.
Hobbes blames the universities for failing to fulfil their educational mission (B, p. 58 and passim). S. A. Lloyd, Ideals as Interests in Hobbes’s Leviathan (Cambridge, 1992) is very good on this point; see pp. 159–66, 219–21 and 207–12.
Gregory Kavka, Hobbesian Moral and Political Theory (Princeton, 1986), p. 64.
Robert Filmer, Patriarcha and Other Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (Cambridge, 1991), p. 188.
Jean Hampton, Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 58–89.
See also F. S. McNeilly, The Anatomy of Leviathan (New York, 1968) and
Gregory Kavka, Hobbesian Moral and Political Theory, pp. 96–100.
To my recollection, the phrases ‘primary’ and ‘secondary state of nature’ were coined by Martinich in The Two Gods of Leviathan, pp. 76–9.
Clarendon, A Brief View and Survey of the Dangerous and. Pernicious Errors to Church and State in Mr. Hobbes’s Book Entitled Leviathan (1676), p. 181.
The numbers one, seven and ten are not significant. All that is required is a relative ordering of benefits in the way described. A good explanation of game theory is Michael D. Resnik, Choices (Minneapolis, 1987).
The most important applications of game theory to Hobbesian explication are David Gauthier, The Logic of Leviathan (Oxford, 1969),
Gregory S. Kavka, Hobbesian Moral and Political Theory, Jean Hampton, Thomas Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition (Cambridge, 1986) and
Jody S. Kraus, The Limits of Hobbesian Contractarianism (Cambridge, 1993).
Alan Ryan, ‘Hobbes and individualism’, in Perspectives on Thomas Hobbes, p. 92.
Hobbes says: ‘and some that in all other things have disallowed the violation of Faith; yet have allowed it, when it is for the getting of Kingdom’ (L 15.4).
Leo Strauss thinks that the crucial difference between medieval and modern political theories is that while medieval ones are grounded in a conception of objective natural law, modern ones are grounded in the idea of rights, ‘of subjective claims, originating in the human will’ (The Political Philosophy of Hobbes (Chicago, 1936), pp. vii–viii).
J. W. N. Watkins, Hobbes’s System of Ideas, 2nd edn (London, 1973), pp. 55–68. Watkins’s term is Kantian. He puts his thesis in this way because he is specifically controverting the view of A. E. Taylor, who maintained that Hobbes was a kind of proto-Kantian. According to Taylor, Hobbes’s laws of nature are ‘categorical imperatives’ and eo ipso moral laws.
The general point that Hobbes’s laws of nature are genuine laws with a deontological force — that is, they impose obligations on people — was refined by Howard Warrender in The Political Philosophy of Hobbes (Oxford, 1957).
While Warrender was universally respected, his views were generally rejected; see various articles in K. C. Brown (ed.), Hobbes Studies (Oxford, 1965),
Gauthier, The Logic of Leviathan, pp. 155–7, and Hampton, Thomas Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition, pp. 29–34. A revised version of the Taylor-Warrender thesis has been presented by Martinich, The Two Gods of Leviathan.
Depending upon whether they wanted Hobbes to be a liberal or supporter of toleration, on the one hand, or a conservative or Erastian, on the other, his later contemporaries and current scholars emphasize (A) or (B). See Tuck, ‘Hobbes and Locke on toleration’ and Mark Goldie, ‘The reception of Hobbes’, in J. H. Burns (ed.), The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1700 (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 613–14, for further references.
Dudley Digges, an associate of the Tew Circle, who certainly had read Hobbes, thought that subjects gave up all of their rights; see Tuck, Philosophy and Government, pp. 274–6.
See Hampton, Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition, pp. 114–31 and 256–66. Some scholars conflate authorization and alienation, e.g. Michael Oakeshott, ‘Introduction’, Leviathan, p. ix; see Gauthier, The Logic of Leviathan, pp. 153–5, for a criticism.
Hampton, Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition, pp. 166–73;
Stanley Moore, ‘Hobbes on obligation, moral and political’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 10 (1972), pp. 29–42.
Lloyd has the mistaken impression that Hobbes allows for non-absolute sovereignty (Ideals as Interests in Hobbes’s Leviathan, pp. 293–4); cf. EL 2.1.14, 2.1.19, 2.8.7; and L 30.5, 42.82.
When Hobbes defines absolute sovereignty as ‘power unlimited’ he means power unlimited in any dimension (L 22.5). In addition, the sovereign also has to have sufficient power to be able to protect subjects from each other and from invaders. Two or three people gathered together typically do not have the critical mass needed for sovereignty.
James VI and I, A Speech to the Lords and Commons of the Parliament at White-Hall, quoted from David Wootton (ed.), Divine Right and Democracy (Harmondsworth, 1986), p. 107.
This is similar to Walter Ullmann’s distinction between descending and ascending theories (Walter Ullmann, A History of Political Thought: The Middle Ages, revised edn (Harmondsworth, 1970), pp. 12–13);
also, John Sanderson, But the People’s Creatures: The Philosophical Basis of The English Civil War (Manchester, 1989), pp. 86–101.
Robert Filmer, Patriarcha and Other Writings, pp. 184–5. Hobbes’s unusual combination of democratic principles with absolutism explains the apt descrition of him, ‘radical in the service of reaction’: John Tulloch, Rational Theology and Christian Philosophy in England in the Seventeenth Century (Edinburgh, 1874).
‘The virtue of a subject is comprehended wholly in obedience to the laws of the commonwealth’ (B, p. 44).
Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government 1572–1651: Grotius ‘was the most creative figure in this tradition’ (p. xv); but ‘Hobbes saw deeper’ (p. xvii).
Quoted from John Marshall, ‘John Locke and Latitudinarianism’, in Philosophy, Science, and Religion in England, 1640–1700 (Cambridge, 1992), p. 258.
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Martinich, A.P. (1997). Political Theory. In: Thomas Hobbes. British History in Perspective. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25185-8_3
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