The Politics of Motion

The World of Thomas Hobbes

Thomas A. SpragensJr.

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780813186580
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Two principal issues interact and overlap in this penetrating analysis: the relationship between Hobbes' natural philosophy and his civil philosophy, and the relationship between Hobbes' thought and the Aristotelian world view that constituted the philosophical orthodoxy he rejected.

On the first point Thomas A. Spragens Jr. argues that Hobbes' political ideas were in fact significantly influenced by his cosmological perceptions, although they were not, and could not have been, completely derived from that source. On the second, the author demonstrates that Hobbes undertook a highly systematic transformation of Aristotelian cosmology: he borrowed the form of the Aristotelian cosmology, but radically refashioned its substance to accommodate the discoveries of contemporaries such as Galileo.

1

Hobbes the Philosopher

Political theory should not be an antiquarian exercise. Its proper task is the clarification of patterns of political order—those patterns which we inhabit and those for which we should strive. Perhaps unfortunately, however, it does not follow that we are permitted to ignore or to forget our past. Whether it be regarded as an incubus or as a treasure-house, whether we agree with Marx or with Burke, we must recognize that we are inescapably history-laden creatures. As political animals we do not enter upon an empty stage; as political theorists we cannot begin writing upon a clean slate.

Thoughtful students of the political tradition of the West have generally agreed that the ideas of that remarkable seventeenth-century English iconoclast, Thomas Hobbes, comprise one of the most important strands of that tradition. Michael Oakeshott has written: ‘The Leviathan is the greatest, perhaps the sole, masterpiece of political philosophy written in the English language. And the history of our civilization can provide only a few works of similar scope and achievement to set beside it.’¹ And Leo Strauss has concurred: ‘Hobbes’s political philosophy is of supreme importance not only for political philosophy as such, i.e. for one branch of knowledge among others, but for modern philosophy altogether, if the discussion and elucidation of the ideal of life is indeed the primary and decisive task of philosophy.’² Moreover, this widespread recognition of the significance of Hobbes’s thought has tended to increase rather than to abate in recent years. The years since the Second World War have, as Keith Brown recently observed, ‘seen a remarkable increase of interest in the writing of Thomas Hobbes.’³ Since Howard Warrender published his significant study of Hobbes’s theory of obligation in 1957, at least seven book-length treatments of Hobbes’s thought have appeared.⁴

Several probable reasons for this notable level of contemporary interest in Hobbes’s thought are worthy of mention, wholly apart from the more fortuitous and technical academic reasons. The first of these is quite simply the depth and profundity of Hobbes’s ideas. While he was sometimes erratic and sporadic in his speculations, his thoughts consistently reach the most fundamental problems of political life; and they do so within the setting of a wide-ranging and largely coherent view of the universe. Any system of ideas with these virtues possesses a kind of perennial relevance which makes recurrent renewals of interest in them a predictable pattern rather than a cause for bemusement.

Another reason for recurrent interest in Hobbes is the recognition that he anticipated some very contemporary problems, methods, and descriptive models in his work. For example, Hobbes’s discussions of psychology possess some interesting similarities to comparable discussions in the literature of psychological behaviorism.⁵ Some of Hobbes’s theories about the nature and status of law are very close to the theories of recent legal positivism. And others have remarked upon the similarities of some of Hobbes’s comments about language to the concerns and methods of contemporary linguistic analysis.⁶

Hobbes especially seems modern in his disillusionment with the possibilities of politics and with the instincts of man. Although new currents of ideological utopianism seem to be arising, the dominant tendency of the contemporary Western intellectual world has been toward a sober modesty in its expectations from political man. The early Enlightenment faith in the inexorable progress of the human race to ever greater heights of order, happiness, and liberty survived into the bland optimism of Victorianism; but this optimism has now pretty well disappeared under the onslaught both of harsh political events and of incisive intellectual attacks. The brutalities and absurdities of two world wars dispelled any illusions about the inevitability or the easy attainability of ‘peace in our time’. The early bright hopes of some of the Western intelligentsia for communism as an inevitable solution to man’s inhumanity to man largely dissipated when the brave and hopeful words of Marx degenerated into the drab and stultifying reality of Stalin. In an age where the somber voices of our tradition, once a distinct minority, are now being heard with attentiveness, Hobbes seems peculiarly appropriate. Like Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Freud, he represents a genuine part of our intellectual tradition which warns us not to confuse our ideals with reality.

The link between the dispelled illusions of the mid-twentieth century and the renewed interest in Hobbes is perhaps best captured in the words of R. G. Collingwood, who wrote in 1942:

It is only now, towards the middle of the twentieth century, that men here and there are for the first time becoming able to appreciate Hobbes’s Leviathan at its true worth, as the world’s greatest store of political wisdom. . . .

The wars of the present century have taught some of us that there was more in Hobbes than we had supposed. They have taught us that, to see political life as it really is, we must blow away the mists of sentimentalism which have concealed its features from us since the beginning of the eighteenth century. I believe that I am not reporting my own experience alone when I say that the dispelling of these mists by the almost incessant tempest through which we have precariously lived for close on thirty years has revealed Hobbes’s Leviathan as a work of gigantic stature, incredibly overtopping all its successors in political theory from that day to this.⁷

If Hobbes can speak to us across the span of centuries with meaning and force as, in some ways, a fellow modern man, this ability is more than fortuitous. He lived at a crucial turning point in the intellectual history of the West, what has been termed the ‘intellectual revolution of the seventeenth century’ or the ‘scientific revolution’; and perhaps more than any of his contemporaries he apprehended the truly radical transformation that had taken place. While Descartes was leaving mind and God prophylactically protected from his critical doubt, and while Locke was pouring much old wine into new wineskins, Hobbes’s relentless mind insisted upon following out the implications of the new sensibility to the whole span of reality. With this rigorous insistence, Hobbes moved in some areas almost instantaneously to conclusions and images which the mainstream of Western thought reached only step by step, if at all.

Although many new ideas and discoveries have intervened between Hobbes’s day and ours, we are nevertheless still deeply influenced in our apprehension of the world by the ideals and beliefs of the seventeenth century. As Alfred North Whitehead observed, some of the most fundamental ideas of what he termed ‘the century of genius’ are ‘still reigning.’⁸ Others have made similar observations.⁹ For this reason, when we dissect Hobbes, we are likely to find that we are cutting upon some very live tissue. Understanding how he viewed the world can help us to recognize some of the matrices of our own perceptions. And since Hobbes is consciously aware of propositions which have since drifted into the level of tacit, hence unarticulated and unexamined, assumptions, reading him with understanding becomes an especially valuable experience in self-understanding.

Hobbes provides an especially fertile source of insight into our intellectual tradition, since the linkages to the Aristotelian components of the tradition can be recognized in him, even as he attacks the central substantive models of Aristotelianism. We therefore gain a further appreciation of the continuity of our intellectual tradition, and we can understand how Whitehead could say that ‘science started its modern career by taking over ideas derived from the weakest side of the philosophies of Aristotle’s successors.’¹⁰

Given the intrinsic fascination of Hobbes’s ideas and the pivotal position which he occupies in the history of Western thought in general and Western political thought in particular, it is not surprising that a considerable variety of interpretations of his ideas have been expounded. The possibility of various interpretative emphases is also enhanced by some important problems and ambiguities in his corpus. Different pictures of Hobbes can emerge from different judgments as to what is central and what is peripheral in his work, and, in cases of apparent contradiction or superfluous multiple explanations, from different judgments as to what reflects his real intent. No single, final, and unequivocal account of the meaning and significance of Hobbes’s political theory is therefore likely to arise. This is not necessarily a situation to be deplored, however. Profound and fecund thinkers will always contain heuristic possibilities which are not all mutually compatible simply because they touch profoundly the complexity of reality.

Hobbes’s own contemporaries reacted to his thought with virtually unanimous horror. The clergy, Aristotelian and Platonic philosophers, divine right royalists, and lawyers all found Hobbes indigestible for a diversity of reasons. To one Norfolk divine, Hobbes was ‘the hideous monstrosity and British beast, the Propagator of execrable doctrines, the Promulgator of mad wisdom, the Herald and Pugilist of impious death, the Insipid Venerator of a Material God, the Renowned Fabricator of a monocondyte Symbol, the Depraved Renewer of old heresies to the faith, the Nonsensical roguish vendor of falsifications.’¹¹ Like Machiavelli, Hobbes became a quasi-demonic symbol to most men of his time. His alleged atheism, his materialism, his political absolutism, his alleged libertinism all were perceived as bound up in one frightening package, potent but wholly unacceptable, worthy of being taken seriously but only as an adversary.

More recent commentary on Hobbes has tended to centre around two principal problems: the relationship of his political thought to other parts of his world view such as his natural philosophy, his psychology, and his rationalist methodology; and the structure of his theory of political obligation.

In his book on Hobbes published in 1886, George Croom Robertson took issue with the conventional assumption that Hobbes’s political ideas had sprung from the womb of his philosophical materialism.¹² According to Robertson, Hobbes’s historical and personal circumstances, rather than a more systematic and abstract philosophical doctrine, was the real source of his political ideas. ‘More than of almost any other philosopher,’ Robertson argued, ‘it can be said of Hobbs that the key to a right understanding of his thought is to be found in his personal circumstances and the events of his time.’¹³ Methodologically, said Robertson, Hobbes proceeded not by drawing out the implications of his general principles for politics, but rather by following up the consequences of what he directly had observed on a relatively ad hoc basis about human psychology and political realities. ‘There can be little doubt, however Hobbes might wish by afterthought to connect his theory of political society with the principles of his general mechanical philosophy, that it sprang originally from a different line of consideration. Direct analysis of the notions of Justice and Law, in relation with such knowledge of human appetites and passions as any man “that will but examine his own mind” has by experience, remained for him always a sufficient basis for civil philosophy, without going deeper.’¹⁴

The problem to which Robertson directed his attention here is both interesting and vexing for several reasons. As a general problem, it is significant as one seeks to understand the structure of political theory which, in its classic form, often purports to make precisely the kind of connections between cosmology and sociology that Robertson minimizes in Hobbes. With specific relation to Hobbes himself, the problem is complicated by Hobbes’s own apparent ambivalence on the issue. On one side of the question stands the fact that Hobbes wrote his Philosophical Rudiments Concerning Government and Society (De Cive) before writing De Corpore and De Homine, which treated the more fundamental principles of his general philosophy. If Hobbes’s political ideas were in fact derived from his materialist philosophy, the logical, hence chronological, relationship should have been reversed.

Hobbes was aware of this problem. The departure from logical order, he said, was an outgrowth of the political situation; and it did not disturb him greatly because he felt that De Cive could stand by itself. ‘Therefore it happens, that what was last in order, is yet come forth first in time. And the rather, because I saw that, grounded on its own principles sufficiently known by experience, it would not stand in need of the former sections.’¹⁵ Since Hobbes himself attests that the principles of De Cive may be ‘sufficiently known by experience,’ then Robertson’s view that Hobbes’s attempt to ground his political ideas in his natural philosophy was an ex post facto gloss seems quite sustainable.

On the other hand, Hobbes clearly felt that a fundamental unity pervaded his work, that his political principles did have logical footing in his natural philosophy, and that the former depended upon the latter for their demonstrability. ‘Such things as I have said are to be taught last (i.e., civil philosophy),’ he wrote, ‘cannot be demonstrated, till such as are pro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Foreword
• 1. Hobbes the Philosopher
• 2. Inertia and the End of the Finite Cosmos
• 3. The Corporealization of Substance
• 4. The Disordering of Nature
• 5. A New Science and Political Deliverance
• 6. Passion and the Politics of Containment
• 7. Conclusion and Methodological Postscript
• Index