Classic Thinkers

Bernard Gert

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745659435
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie der Philosophie

Thomas Hobbes was the first great English political philosopher. His work excited intense controversy among his contemporaries and continues to do so in our own time. In this masterly introduction to his work, Bernard Gert provides the first account of Hobbes's political and moral philosophy that makes it clear why he is regarded as one of the best philosophers of all time in both of these fields. In a succinct and engaging analysis the book illustrates that the commonly accepted view of Hobbes as holding psychological egoism is not only incompatible with his account of human nature but is also incompatible with the moral and political theories that he puts forward. It also explains why Hobbes's contemporaries did not accept his explicit claim to be providing a natural law account of morality. Gert shows that for Hobbes, civil society is established by a free-gift of their right of nature by the citizens; it does not involve a mutual contract between citizens and sovereign. As injustice involves breaking a contract, the sovereign cannot be unjust; however, the sovereign can be guilty of ingratitude, which is immoral. This distinction between injustice and immorality is part of a sophisticated and nuanced political theory that is in stark contrast to the reading often incorrectly attributed to Hobbes that "might makes right". It illustrates how Hobbes's goal of avoiding civil war provides the key to understanding his moral and political philosophy. Hobbes: Prince of Peace is likely to become the classic introduction to the work of Thomas Hobbes and will be a valuable resource for scholars and students seeking to understand the importance and relevance of his work today.

1

Hobbes’s Life, Times, and General Philosophical Views

Hobbes’s Life and Times

Hobbes lived in troubling times. In his Verse Autobiography, he says that he was born prematurely on April 5, 1588 because of his mother’s fear of the impending arrival of the Spanish Armada sent to invade England. He refers to this event by saying, “my mother gave birth to twins: myself and fear.” Somewhat surprisingly, Hobbes seems to be proud of being a fearful person. When he left England for France in 1640, he claims that he was among the first to flee the civil war. But since Hobbes held that the primary goal of reason is to avoid avoidable death, it may be that his claim that he was a timid person was a modest way of claiming that he was a rational person. However, his writing shows no hint of timidity. He put forward views that he knew were quite controversial, when to publish controversial views about politics or religion was far more dangerous than it is now in England and America. Even now, in many parts of the world publishing controversial views about politics or religion may result in imprisonment or even death, and England during Hobbes’s lifetime was more like these parts of the world than present-day England. Both the Roman Catholic Church and Oxford University banned the reading of his books, and there was talk, not only of burning his books but also of burning Hobbes himself. Actually, a few years after Hobbes died, Oxford University did burn copies of De Cive and Leviathan.

Hobbes was intimately involved in the political and religious controversies of his time, so that a proper understanding of his moral, political, and religious views requires some understanding of these controversies. Queen Elizabeth died in 1603 when Hobbes was almost 15 and James VI of Scotland became James I of England. James died in 1625, and his son, Charles 1, became king. Charles I, like his father, believed in the divine right of kings, and was almost continuously in conflict with the Parliament of England, precipitating two civil wars. He was defeated by parliamentary forces in the first civil war (1642–5) and was asked to approve a constitutional monarchy, but he would not do so, and in the resulting second civil war (1648–9) he was defeated again. The monarchy was then abolished and the Commonwealth of England was established with Cromwell as its leader. In 1646, the son of Charles I, Charles II (1630–85), fled to Paris, and Hobbes, who had fled there himself in 1640, became his mathematical tutor for two years. They must have developed a close relationship, for after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, when Charles II became king, Hobbes was welcomed to his court and provided with a small pension. This happened even though Hobbes had presented Cromwell with a copy of Leviathan when he returned to England in 1651.

Because the politically perilous times that Hobbes lived through were due in large part to religious conflicts, it is no surprise that in trying to fashion his political theory Hobbes pays far more attention to religion than is common for contemporary political philosophers in the west. However, in the Islamic world, where religion is taken as seriously today as it was in seventeenth-century England, Hobbes’s concern with religion may be far more relevant. But although Hobbes was concerned with religion, religious beliefs play no essential role in his moral and political theories. He presents his views so that those for whom religion is important can take God as the source of morality, but he is quite clear that morality can be based solely on human nature and rationality. Although he defines the laws of nature, which incorporate the moral law, as the dictates of reason, he says that they can also be considered as the commands of God. He says this because he knows that most people are far more influenced by their religious beliefs than by philosophical arguments. It is because he wants to influence the way people behave that he sometimes writes in a way that can be interpreted as if the force of morality did depend on the laws of nature being the commands of God.

In Hobbes’s time, neither atheism nor deism was a position that any person seeking to influence the way people should behave or how a commonwealth should be organized would put forward. Indeed, if a person hoped to have any practical influence, he would also not put forward any non-Christian view. Hobbes lived in a Christian world, and all of the religious controversies were controversies between different branches of Christianity. In England these were Roman Catholicism, Anglicanism, and Presbyterianism, whereas on the continent the controversies were between Catholics and Protestants. Less than 10 years after Hobbes graduated from Magdalen Hall, Oxford, the Thirty Years War (1618–48) began on the continent. This war started as a religious controversy but later became more of a political war. It involved so much death and destruction that many felt the need to find a moral view that was independent of any particular religion and could command acceptance from all rational persons. Probably the most important writer putting forward such a view was Hugo Grotius. Although Grotius was born only five years before Hobbes, on April 10, 1583, his influential book, On the Law of War and Peace (1625) was published 15 years before Hobbes wrote the first draft of a book on moral and political philosophy. That draft, The Elements of Law Natural and Politic, which was clearly influenced by Grotius’s book, was not written until 1640. Although Hobbes circulated it in manuscript, he realized that it had serious problems and did not have it published. Nonetheless, this first draft of a book continues to be taken by many commentators on Hobbes as presenting the clearest account of his views on human nature. This has resulted in a serious distortion of his considered and mature views on human nature and morality.

Hobbes’s considered views on human nature and his developed moral and political theories are presented in De Cive, his first published book on moral and political philosophy. This book, written in Latin (1642, Notes and Preface added in 1647), was translated into English as Philosophical Rudiments Concerning Government and Society in 1651, the same year that the English edition of Leviathan was published. (The Latin version of Leviathan was published in 1668.) De Cive was supposed to be the third book of a trilogy; the first book was to be De Corpore (1655), which was devoted to an examination of language, scientific concepts, physics, and geometry. The second was De Homine (1658), most of the first nine chapters of which were devoted to optics, but the last six chapters, X–XV, provide an account of human nature that can serve as an introduction to the moral and political philosophy put forward in De Cive.

The combination of the translation by myself and colleagues of these chapters from De Homine and of the English translation of De Cive was published in a volume entitled Man and Citizen (1991 [1972]). These chapters from De Homine serve as a foundation for De Cive in the same way as Part I: “Of Man” of Leviathan serves as a foundation for Part II: “Of Commonwealth,” so that Man and Citizen provides another complete account of Hobbes’s moral and political theories, including his account of human nature. When both of these accounts put forward the same views, we can be confident that these are indeed Hobbes’s considered views. This book uses Leviathan and Man and Citizen as the primary sources for Hobbes’s account of human nature and for his moral and political theories.¹

Hobbes published De Cive before he finished the two books of his trilogy that were supposed to precede it because of his concern about the impending civil war in England. Although Hobbes was aware that most people acted on their emotions rather than their reason, he exhibited the standard naïveté of philosophers, acting as if philosophical arguments would affect people’s behavior. He not only wanted to discover the truth, he wanted to persuade others that he had discovered it. He believed that if his discoveries were universally accepted, there would be no more civil wars and people would live together in peace and harmony. After praising the work of the geometricians, he says:

If the moral philosophers had as happily discharged their duty, I know not what could have been added by human industry to the completion of that happiness, which is consistent with human life. For were the nature of human actions as distinctly known as the nature of quantity in geometrical figures, the strength of avarice and ambition, which is sustained by the erroneous opinions of the vulgar as touching the nature of right and wrong, would presently faint and languish; and mankind should enjoy such an immortal peace, that unless it were for habitation, on supposition that the earth should grow too narrow for her inhabitants, there would hardly be left any pretence for war. (D.C. Ded., p. 91)

It is true that great philosophers such as Hobbes do have an effect on society, but usually this effect takes place many decades, even centuries, after they have written. For example, Hobbes’s view that morality is independent of religion is now the standard view of many educated people in English-speaking countries; however, almost no one in Hobbes’s time accepted such a view. That is why Hobbes devotes more than a third of Leviathan trying to show that his moral and political theories are not only compatible with Christian Scripture but are also actually supported by Scripture. Although his works are now studied in colleges and universities, Hobbes did not write them as academic works. Despite its size, about 500 pages, Leviathan is a political tract, which is why Hobbes published it first in English rather than in Latin, in contrast with all the books of the trilogy, De Corpore, De Homine, and De Cive.

Many of Hobbes’s views about human nature and the emotions were taken from Aristotle, especially his Rhetoric. Individual elements of his accounts of morality and politics are also not original, but were put forward by others who participated in the political and religious controversies that were current in his time. Hobbes’s originality is in how he unites all of these elements into a powerful philosophical system. He wrote with the intention of influencing current events; however, philosophers do not now read Hobbes because of the role he played in the political and religious controversies of his time.

Like all great philosophers, Hobbes transcended his times. He constructs a philosophical system in which all of his moral and political views are derived from what he considers to be clear truths about human nature, language, morality, and rationality. He takes this system so seriously that he abandons positions that were held by most of his political allies; e.g., he denies the divine right of kings. Once he discovers what he takes to be obviously true premises, he follows out their implications regardless of where they lead. Of course, like most philosophers, he knows what results he wants, and this influences his choice of premises. However, unlike many philosophers, he never adopts a premise solely because he needs it to reach conclusions he wants. For example, John Rawls, in A Theory of Justice, rules out envy from the characteristics people have in the original position because only by doing so can he reach the conclusion that all rational persons will choose the two principles of justice that he wants as his conclusion.

Hobbes on Religion

Hobbes is so contemporary in so many of his philosophical views that it is easy to think of him as holding contemporary views in all matters. That would be a mistake. At the present time, most philosophers who are not officially associated with some religion usually do not believe in any traditional concept of God. Hume, in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779), presents arguments against theism that have never been refuted, but he provides no positive alternative to explain all those features of world, especially the biological world, that seem to need an explanation. It is not until Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) and Descent of Man (1871) that a non-theistic explanation for these matters becomes more plausible than a theistic explanation, not only to philosophers but also to others. Hobbes wrote De Cive and Leviathan two centuries before Darwin and a century before Hume. He almost certainly believed that there was a being that created the world, but it was crucial to him that the miraculous stories in the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Scriptures be interpreted so that they were compatible with his philosophical views, especially his moral and political theory.

Just as almost all philosophers who wrote after Darwin accepted Darwin’s natural selection account of the evolution of human beings, so almost all philosophers who wrote after Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632) accepted the Copernican system. Just as acceptance of Darwinian evolution is often taken as incompatible with orthodox Christian belief, so too was acceptance of the Copernican system. However, just as many contemporary Christians accept the Darwinian account of the origin of human beings, so many believing Christians during the seventeenth century accepted Galileo’s views. It is tempting for contemporary philosophers to underestimate the importance of religious beliefs, for many of the most distinguished contemporary scientists do not believe in a theistic God. However, even the greatest scientists during the time of Hobbes, e.g., Galileo and Newton, believed in such a God. It is important not to forget the extraordinary impact that the Darwinian account has had on belief in any kind of theistic God. Even if Hobbes was a deist, it is crucial for understanding him to appreciate the importance that he attributes to Christian religious belief.

These common-sense observations about the influences on Hobbes simply acknowledge that Hobbes was a person of his time. It would be a serious mistake to attribute to Hobbes views that no one could be expected to hold in seventeenth-century England, such as secular humanism. But Hobbes was a humanist in the sense that he was deeply influenced by his reading of classical sources such as Homer and Thucydides. His first published work was a translation of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War (1629) and his excellent translations of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey were completed and published less than five years before he died in 1679. He knew all three classical languages, Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, and was clearly extremely proficient in both Greek and Latin. Given how much he borrowed from Aristotle’s Rhetoric concerning the emotions, and that he translated Thucydides while in his 30s, it is likely that Hobbes’s views about human nature, rationality, and morality were developed prior to his discovery of Euclid when he was 40 years old. Although he presents his views on human nature, morality, and politics as if they were derived from his metaphysics, it is fairly clear that the substance of his views on these topics was fixed by his humanistic readings and his own observations of the behavior of people.

Nonetheless, we do not now read Hobbes primarily because of the views that he holds about human nature, morality, and politics, but because of the way in which he argues for his views. Hobbes presents his moral and political theories as if he were putting forward scientific theories, combining very plausible definitions of such key terms as “justice,” “morality,” and “rationality” with common-sense observations about human nature. It is the systematic character of Hobbes’s thought that makes his theories so powerful. But his theories are not quite as systematic as he sometimes seems to claim. He does think that an account of human nature is derivable from materialism, but he makes no effort to derive his account of any of the passions from his metaphysical materialism. Although his account of human nature is not derived from his materialism, but based on introspection and observation of the behavior of others, once he has that account, he develops his moral and political theories in a remarkably systematic way.

Hobbes holds a very contemporary sounding form of materialism, encountering some of the same problems that contemporary materialists have. Even though his metaphysics does not have any significant impact on his moral and political theories, he does have some interesting metaphysical views. It is worthwhile to provide a brief account of his materialism, partly because this plays a role in his attempt to reduce the influence of traditional religious beliefs that he considered dangerous. A similar reason makes it worthwhile to provide a brief account of epistemological views, for they also serve to diminish the plausibility of traditional religious views. Hobbes’s account of language, reasoning, and science has a much wider interest. Hobbes has a sophisticated account of the uses of language, anticipating some of the discoveries attributed to contemporary philosophers. He regarded human beings’ use of language as the primary activity that distinguished them from non-human animals. He also regarded language as an essential feature in the formation of a commonwealth.

Hobbes on Human Nature, Morality, and Justice

Before I present an account of Hobbes’s views on language, reason, and science, and brief accounts of his metaphysics and epistemology, I shall briefly anticipate what will be the main topics of the following three chapters: human nature, morality, and justice. Hobbes’s felt need to lessen the influence of religion colors his views on language, metaphysics, and epistemology as well as being a significant part of his moral and political theories. The amount of space that Hobbes devotes to religion and the interpretation of Scripture in both De Cive and Leviathan cannot be explained except by his conviction that religious beliefs were a constant and serious threat to the stability of a commonwealth. He believed that unless he could show that Christianity supported the moral and political philosophy that he was putting forward, his theories would have no practical influence at all. He was not writing for an academic audience: he was writing to influence those who ran the commonwealth. But he was first and foremost a philosopher, so he wanted his influence to be based on correct accounts of human nature, rationality, morality, and politics.

Hobbes adopts only those premises that he thinks even his opponents would grant. Once he has adopted these premises, he does not reject them because they lead to conclusions to which he would prefer they did not lead – e.g., ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Preface
• 1 Hobbes’s Life, Times, and General Philosophical Views
• 2 Human Nature
• 3 Hobbes’s Moral Theory
• 4 Hobbes’s Political Theory
• 5 After Hobbes
• Bibliography
• Index