Abstract
Chronological awareness might lead us to consider Hobbes’s Leviathan as his most definitive statement on political philosophy in the historical development of his thought and to prefer it for that reason to his earlier works on the subject, in interpreting his system. However, history involves more than mere chronology. There is evidence of various kinds that Leviathan (1651) did not just come last, but was conceived from the start as different in intention and therefore in nature from both De Cive (1642) and The Elements of Law (1640).
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Notes
F. Tonnies, ‘Siebzehn Briefe des Thomas Hobbes an Samuel Sorbiere’, Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie III (1890), p. 208; Hobbes to Sorbière, Paris, 14 June 1649; ‘non enim iam quaerendae sed explicandae demonstrandaeque Verität is labor editionem moratur’.
Francis Bacon, The Works, ed. J. Spedding, a.o. (London, 1857), III, p. 441.
See Q. Skinner, ‘Thomas Hobbes and his Disciplines in France and England’, Comparative Studies in Society and History VIII (1956–66), pp. 159–60, and C. von Brockdorff, Hobbes als Philosophe (Kiel, 1929), pp. 150–51. The theory of a ‘proto-Leviathan’ in Latin is defended by F. Tricaud in the introduction to his French translation of Leviathan (Paris, 1971).
These remarks were made by Hobbes in his Answer to Bramhall (EW IV, 317). The progress of the translation is discussed by Tricaud (op. cit.). For Blaeu’s and Sorbière’s promotion of a Latin edition see a letter by Sorbière to Hobbes, Paris, 1 July, 1664 (no. 60 of Hobbes’s foreign correspondence in the Hardwick papers at Chatsworth House, England). A Dutch translation of Leviathan appeared in 1667 and of De Cive in 1675. More information on these and on Hobbes’s relations to Holland is to be found in my forthcoming study on Anglo-Dutch translation in the 17th century, to appear in the series of the Sir Thomas Brown Institute of State University of Leiden.
The frontispiece is discussed by K. Brown, ‘The Artist of the Leviathan Title-page’, British Library Journal IV (1978), pp. 24–36. Brown suggests that Hobbes may have had a hand in the design. For the title-pages of De Cive, see my ‘Some Features of the Seventeenth-Century Editions of Hobbes’s De Cive Printed in Holland and Elsewhere’, in J.G. van der Band, ed., Hobbes’s Studies of Man (Leusden, 1982).
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© 1987 Martinus Nijhoff Publishers (Kluwer Academic Publishers), Dordrecht
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Schoneveld, C.W. (1987). ‘Insinuations to the Will’: Hobbes’s Style and Intention in Leviathan Compared to Earlier Political Works. In: Walton, C., Johnson, P.J. (eds) Hobbes’s ‘Science of Natural Justice’. Archives Internationales D’histoire des Idées/International Archives of the History of Ideas, vol 111. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-3485-6_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-3485-6_8
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