The Bloomsbury Companion to Hobbes

S.A. Lloyd

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781441141569
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Modern Philosophy

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) is widely held to be one of the most important thinkers in the history of philosophy. His contributions to ethics, political philosophy and psychology in particular were hugely innovative and he was regarded by his contemporaries as a major intellectual figure. This comprehensive and accessible guide to Hobbes's life and work features 120 specially commissioned entries written by a team of leading experts in the field of seventeenth-century philosophy and political thought, covering every aspect of Hobbes's ideas. The Companion presents a comprehensive overview of the major themes and topics in Hobbes's work, in particular within the fields of language, political philosophy, moral philosophy and psychology, religion, law and science. It concludes with a thoroughly comprehensive bibliography of primary and secondary sources. This is an essential reference tool for anyone working in the fields of seventeenth-century philosophy and political theory.

1

LIFE AND TIMES

CHILDHOOD

Thomas Hobbes was born on April 5, 1588 at Westport, a parish on the northwestern outskirts of the town of Malmesbury in Wiltshire. He later recorded that the news of the impending arrival of the Spanish Armada instilled such fear in his mother that it induced her to give birth to him prematurely, and joked that he and fear were twins (Vita carmine expressa, in OL1: lxxxvi). According to Hobbes’s friend John Aubrey, Thomas’ mother belonged to a “yeomanly family” from Brokenborough (Aubrey 1898, 323), which is a village 2.5 km to the northwest of Malmesbury (Crowley 1991, 25). Hobbes’s father, Thomas, was a poorly paid curate at Brokenborough, though he lived at nearby Westport (Malcolm 2004; Rogow 1986, 25–6; Martinich 1999, 3). John Aubrey asserts that the elder Thomas “dis-esteemed learning” (Aubrey 1898, 323). John’s brother William recorded the tale that Hobbes’s father was “a good fellow” who once spent Saturday night playing cards, then fell asleep in church on Sunday, and in his sleep cried out that clubs were trumps—“Trafells is troumps.” He also said that the elder Thomas assaulted a fellow cleric at the church door and as a result was forced to flee from the district (Aubrey 1898, 387). Church court documents show that in 1603 the senior Thomas was accused of slandering Richard Jeane, a local vicar, and that the next year Hobbes attacked Jeane in the churchyard at Malmesbury (Rogow 1986, 26–9; Malcolm 2002, 3). The philosopher nowhere mentions these events. Indeed, in his prose and verse autobiographies, he says remarkably little about his relatives, including his father, merely stating that the latter was a minister and that he baptized him and gave him his own name (Vita carmine expressa, in OL1: lxxxv).

Hobbes had an elder brother, Edmund, who predeceased him. In his last will, drawn up in 1677, the philosopher left £40 apiece to Edmund’s two married daughters. He also bequeathed £20 to each of four of Edmund’s five surviving grandchildren. The fifth was the eldest of them, Thomas Hobbes. He did not benefit from the will, since the philosopher had already given him a piece of land. The will also left £200 to Elizabeth Alaby, a young orphan (Aubrey 1898, 384–5). The size of this legacy is notable, and some have suspected that the girl was really Hobbes’s illegitimate daughter or perhaps granddaughter (Rogow 1986, 131). William Aubrey recorded that Hobbes had a sister, Anne, who married Thomas Laurence, and that the couple had children and grandchildren. The will did not mention this branch of the family (Aubrey 1898, 388–9, 324, 384–5).

Though Hobbes’s father was a singularly unsuccessful cleric, other members of the family were more prosperous. Thomas Hobbes senior had a childless elder brother, Francis, who was a wealthy glover. Francis financed his nephews, paying for young Thomas’ education at Oxford, and later bequeathing some land to him. He left the rest of his land to Edmund, who like his uncle trained as a glover (Aubrey 1898, 324). Perhaps the idea in sending Thomas to Oxford was to educate him for a career in the church. Or maybe a university education simply seemed the logical next step for a child who had already shown striking signs of academic ability by the time he reached his teens. He combined aptitude with a scholarly temperament. His brother Edmund and one of his schoolfellows later reported that “when he was a boy he was playsome enough, but withall he had even then a contemplative melancholinesse; he would get him into a corner, and learne his lesson by heart presently.” The blackness of his hair led the other schoolchildren to call him “Crowe” (ibid., 329).

Around the beginning of 1603, or perhaps a little earlier, Hobbes matriculated at Magdalen Hall, Oxford. In 1874 Magdalen was amalgamated with another hall to become Hertford College, and Hobbes is sometimes classified as an alumnus of Hertford (Hamilton 1903, 143, 107–8). The date of his arrival in Oxford in uncertain, though early in 1603 is likely (Malcolm 2004; a case for 1602 is made in Martinich 1999, 8–10). He spent most of the rest of his teens at Oxford, graduating BA in February 1608 (In Vita carmine expressa, OL1: lxxxvi and Vita, OL1: xiii, he records that he went to Oxford in his fourteenth year; but in Vita, OL1: xiii, he also says that he stayed at Oxford for five years (“per quinquennium”), and he graduated in February 1608: Malcolm 2002, 4n9 is an excellent discussion). Shortly afterwards, he took service with the Cavendish family (Aubrey 1898, 330). We have a good deal of information about Hobbes’s education at Oxford, and before and after he went there (see “Education” below), but little about other aspects of his life at the university, though John Aubrey does record that especially in the summer he was fond of getting up early in the morning and trapping jackdaws with baited string smeared with birdlime. When he entered the employment of William Cavendish, he went hunting and hawking with him (Aubrey 1898, 329, 330–1).

JPS

FURTHER READING

Aubrey, John, “Thomas Hobbes,” in “Brief Lives,” Chiefly of Contemporaries, Andrew Clark (ed.), 2 vols, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1, 321–403.

Crowley, D. A. ed., 1991, A History of the County of Wiltshire. Vol. 14: Malmesbury Hundred (Victoria History of the Counties of England), Oxford: Oxford University Press for the Institute of Historical Research.

Hamilton, Sidney Graves, 1903, Hertford College, London: F. E. Robinson & Co.

Martinich, A. P., 1999, Hobbes: A Biography, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Malcolm, Noel, 2002, “A Summary Biography,” in Aspects of Hobbes, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1–26.

— 2004, “Hobbes, Thomas (1588–1679),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, September 2004; online edn, section “Family and Childhood.”

Rogow, Arnold A., 1986, Thomas Hobbes: Radical in the Service of Reaction, New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

CIVIL WAR

Hobbes’s political theory is often seen as a reaction to the English Civil Wars of 1642–6 and 1648 (Sharpe 1989, 67–8). Parts of Leviathan were certainly written with the events of the wars and their aftermath in mind, but the first two versions of Hobbes’s theory were penned well before war began. The dedication to Newcastle of The Elements of Law is dated May 9, 1640, and that of De Cive to Devonshire October 22, 1641 (November 1 new style). Charles I effectively began the Civil War by raising his standard at Nottingham on August 22, 1642, though the first pitched battle—Edgehill—was not fought until October 23 (Braddick 2009, 210, 241). It makes sense, however, to locate the formation and development of Hobbes’s theories in the context of the troubles that led up to the English Civil War—including the so-called Bishops’ Wars (1639–40) between Charles I and his Scottish subjects. Hobbes himself said, in the “Preface to the Readers” printed in the 1647 edition of De Cive, that “my country, some years before the civil war broke out, was already seething with questions of the right of Government and of the due obedience of citizens, forerunners of the approaching war.” It was to address these questions, he said, that he had deferred his projected work on the first two parts of his projected philosophical treatise—the parts on body and man—and instead “hurried on the completion of this third part,” concerning politics (De Corpore Preface to the readers, section 19; On the Citizen, eds Richard Tuck and Michael Silverthorne, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998, 13). De Cive and the earlier Elements of Law did contain much material that was directly relevant to the debates that took place in the months leading up to civil war. Indeed the entire argument in favor of absolute and indivisible sovereignty was of central concern to those discussions.

During the 1620s, the English parliament frequently debated the extent of royal power. Many members argued that the king was bound by the law of the land, and that his powers were limited, not absolute. They insisted especially vigorously on the subject’s rights of property against the sovereign, arguing that the crown could tax only with the consent of parliament, which represented the people. After dissolving parliament in 1629, Charles proceeded to raise funds without its consent. For example, he levied Ship Money in order to pay for the navy. His right to do so was narrowly vindicated by the judges in a famous trial, Hampden’s Case, in 1637–8. In the 1630s, religious grievances against Charles I grew in both England and Scotland, as many people came to believe that the king’s ecclesiastical policies were infringing their rights of conscience, and the law of God. In Scotland, a national rising resulted. In 1638, the Scots made a covenant with God to defend their religion and liberties, and in the following year they went to war with the king, or, as they preferred to put it, with his evil advisors. By this time, the king’s advisors included Hobbes’s patron the Earl (and later Marquess and Duke) of Newcastle, who became Governor to the Prince of Wales in 1638 and a Privy Councillor the next year. In the Elements of Law, which he wrote at Newcastle’s request and dedicated to the Earl, Hobbes trenchantly affirmed the absolute power of sovereigns, and denied that they are in any way bound to obtain their subjects’ consent to taxation. People, he said, have no rights of property against the sovereign. He also denied that we can covenant with God, and that we have rights of conscience that permit us to disobey the king (The Elements of Law II.8.8; II.8.5; I.15.11).

In a desperate effort to get aid against the Scots, Charles summoned the English parliament in the Spring of 1640. The Earl of Devonshire tried to have Hobbes elected as a member for Derby, but without success (Sommerville 1992, 18). Charles was unable to reach an agreement with parliament, and in May he dissolved it. The Scots then proceeded to occupy northern England and force the king to come to terms, which included that he summon parliament again. This new parliament—known as the Long Parliament—first met in November 1640. Hobbes’s Elements circulated widely in manuscript. He “saw words that tended to aduance the prerogatiue of kings began to be examined in Parlament” (Correspondence 1: 115; Hobbes to John Scudamore, Viscount Scudamore, Paris 2/April 12, 1641), and for his own safety therefore fled to France, where he spent the next eleven years. So Hobbes saw nothing of the Civil War or its immediate effects in England. It is tempting to suppose that his account of the state of nature was affected by what he witnessed or heard about wars in his own times—such as the English Civil War, or the Thirty Years’ War in Germany. In fact, he says relatively little about civil wars in the Elements of Law. His discussion of the state of nature in that book compares it to “the experience of savage nations that live at this day” and to what history records about “the old inhabitants of Germany and other now civil countries” (The Elements of Law I.14.12). So according to Hobbes, Germany in his own time—the time of the Thirty Years’ War—was a civilized country. Leviathan denounced civil war more vigorously, stressing “the miseries and horrible calamities” that accompany it, and arguing that the state of nature, which still existed among “the savage people in many places of America,” could also easily be extrapolated from “the manner of life which men that have formerly lived under a peaceful government use to degenerate into, in a civil war” (Leviathan XVIII.117/94; XIII.77/63).

Though Hobbes was in France during the English Civil War, many of his friends and associates remained in England. Newcastle equipped an army for the king. It controlled much of the north until its defeat at the battle of Marston Moor in July 1644. Newcastle then fled to the Continent, eventually joining Hobbes in Paris. The stream of royalist exiles continued as the king’s fortunes worsened, and in 1646 the Prince of Wales—later Charles II—also came to Paris, where Hobbes taught him mathematics. Charles I surrendered in the same year. Early in 1647, the first widely available version of Hobbes’s political philosophy appeared. This was the second edition of De Cive, published by the famous firm of Elzevir at Amsterdam. The first edition, printed at Paris in 1642, had been issued in only a small number of copies. It may be no accident that Hobbes’s ideas did not reach a large audience until after the defeat of the king. The royalist war effort had a propaganda angle, as well as a more crudely military one. Arguably, as long as their was a chance of victory for Charles, it made sense for his supporters to stress the moderation of their cause, and Hobbes’s trenchant absolutism was not helpful in that regard. The same goes for the similar ideas of Sir Robert Filmer, whose writings were not published until after the Civil War, though many of them were written well before its close, and some before it began.

While in exile in France, Hobbes continued to follow events and debates in England. In Leviathan, he argued that there would have been no Civil War if people had not been persuaded that sovereignty was divided between King, Lords, and Commons. Belief in divided sovereignty, he contended, had brought divisions first over political matters, and then “about the liberty of religion.” The resulting conflicts, he claimed, “have so instructed men in this point of sovereign right that there be few now in England that do not see that these rights are inseparable, and will be so generally acknowledged at the next return of peace” (Leviathan XVIII.116/93). Some parliamentarian theorists—and most famously Henry Parker, in his Observations upon some of his Majesties late Answers and Expresses (1642)—did indeed argue for undivided sovereignty, placing it in parliament. But Hobbes was wrong to think that such ideas had come to be broadly accepted. In his Treatise of Monarchie (1643), Philip Hunton argued in favor of mixed and limited monarchy, and similar ideas exercised considerable influence throughout the 1640s and 1650s. It was, indeed, in these decades that the idea of the separation of powers began to spread, and theorists came to argue that executive and legislative power should be in different hands. Hobbes never distinguished between executive and legislative power, and insisted that sovereign rights were indivisible.

In all his political works, Hobbes condemned the principles that the parliamentarians used to justify resisting and later executing the King. He went into most detail about actual English events in Behemoth, a history of the period 1637–60 probably written around 1667–9 (Behemoth, ed. Paul Seaward, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2010, 6). But his basic claims on the wickedness of resistance, and the folly of the idea th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• 1. LIFE AND TIMES
• 2. METHOD, SCIENCE, AND PHILOSOPHY
• 3. METAPHYSICS, EPISTEMOLOGY, AND LANGUAGE
• 4. MORAL PHILOSOPHY AND MORAL PSYCHOLOGY
• 5. POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY AND LAW
• 6. RELIGION
• 7. ENDURING DEBATES AND OPEN QUESTIONS
• Bibliography
• Index