Mortal Gods: Science, Politics, and the Humanist Ambitions of Thomas Hobbes

346 Pages·2016·12.77 MB·English

by  Ted H. MIller

Mortal Gods

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tt ee dd hh .. mm ii ll ll ee rr
TThhee PPeennnnssyyllvvaanniiaa SSttaattee UUnniivveerrssiittyy PPrreessss
UUnniivveerrssiittyy PPaarrkk,, PPeennnnssyyllvvaanniiaa
Chapter 3 is a revised version of “Thomas Hobbes and
the Constraints that Enable the Imitation of God,”
Inquiry 42, no. 2 (1999): 149–76.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Miller, Ted H., 1965–
Mortal gods : science, politics, and the humanist
ambitions of Thomas Hobbes / Ted H. Miller.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Summary: “Argues against the accepted idea that
Thomas Hobbes turned away from humanism to
pursue the scientific study of politics. Reconceptualizes
Hobbes’s thought within early modern humanist
pedagogy and the court culture of the Stuart
regimes”—Provided by publisher.
ISBN 978-0-271-04891-8 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Hobbes, Thomas, 1588–1679.
I. Title.
II. Series.
B1247.M49 2011
192—dc22
Copyright © 2011 The Pennsylvania State University
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press,
University Park, PA 16802–1003
It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University
Press to use acid-free paper. Publications on uncoated
stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences—
Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material,
ansi z39.48–1992.
This book is printed on Natures Natural, which
contains 50% post-consumer waste.
Contents
Acknowledgments vi
1
Introduction 1
2
The Humanist Face of Hobbes’s Mathematics, Part 1 9
3
Constraints That Enable the Imitation of God 35
4
King of the Children of Pride:
The Imitation of God in Context 55
5
Architectonic Ambitions:
Mathematics and the Demotion of Physics 81
6
Eloquence and the Audience Thesis 115
7
All Other Doctrines Exploded:
Hobbes, History, and the Struggle over Teaching 137
8
The Humanist Face of Hobbes’s Mathematics, Part 2:
Leviathan and the Making of a Masque-Text 161
9
Conclusion 201
Appendix: Who Is a Geometer? 221
Notes 239
Bibliography 303
Index 333
aCknowledGMents
I have accumulated many debts in writing this book. I can’t begin to repay
them. I nevertheless wish to thank those who were there from the very begin-
ning, and those who have come along later as the work continued. I am par-
ticularly grateful for the assistance I have received from Tracy Strong, who
saw this work from its earliest and now distant inception. I also have Gerald
Doppelt, Alan Houston, Arthur Lupia, Steven Shapin, and Don Wayne to
thank for their early comments and assistance. I’ve been sustained by good
intellectual company as the ideas in this book made it to the page. For this I
also owe thanks to Chris Dugan, Elizabeth Ellis, Verna Gehring, Bernard Gert,
Christina Haddad, John Hughes, Nancy Luxon, Utz McKnight, James Murphy,
James Philipp, Hans von Rautenfeld, John Richardson, Arlene Saxenhouse,
Verity Smith, Pat Snyder, Marek Steadman, and Elizabeth Wingrove. Chris
Laursen’s encouragement and comments from afar have always been more
than helpful. I offer especially heartfelt thanks to Samantha Frost. She and
Dean Mathiowetz were steadfast in their assistance. They allowed this work to
reach a safe harbor.
I owe particular thanks to Terry Royed for her companionship and
encouragement. She has kept me going. J. David and Susan Miller were always
there, interested and patient. Karen, Alan, Elana, and Michael Rubinstein
were rooting for me.
I also wish to single out Sandy Thatcher for his interest, and his integrity
as an editor. Dan O’Neill gets the credit for sending me to Sandy. I have also
had the good fortune to work with Kendra Boileau and Stephanie Lang. I’m
grateful for their invaluable assistance.
I thank those institutions whose support was crucial to the completion of
this project. This study would not have been possible were it not for the gener-
ous grant and institutional assistance I received from the Huntington Library,
the British Academy, the Earhardt and Mellon Foundations, Dartmouth
College, and the University of Alabama. I also wish to thank the Chatsworth
Devonshire Collection, in particular Andrew Peppitt and Peter Day, the
librarians at Chatsworth, and Diane Naylor for her assistance in procuring the
images from the collection used in this book.
1
introduction
Alexis de Tocqueville is not, perhaps, the first name readers of an interpreta-
tion of Thomas Hobbes would expect to see. For some, it will correctly stand
as a marker of the eclecticism of North American political theory. Neverthe-
less, every interpretation must have an origin, and this one is no exception.
It emerges from within the broad, relatively fragmented and freewheeling
constellation of curiosities of political theory as it is primarily practiced
in departments of political science in the United States and Canada. These
departments are staffed by a community of practitioners long interested in
Hobbes, but often resistant to those readings which celebrate him as a pio-
neer of social science, or hold up his work as an early model of analytic phi-
losophy.1 This reading is, in part, an extension of that tradition of resistance.
De Tocqueville declared history’s trajectory to be the inevitable growth
and progress of equality. Equality was an “irresistible revolution advancing
century by century.”2 There is a straightforward way to connect Hobbes to
this master narrative. By making men equals in the state of nature, Hobbes
rejected the premises that sustained the hierarchical ways of understanding the
natural, social, and political orders rooted within the doctrines of the schools,
churches, and courts. As such, he is a part of the history of equality’s progress.3
As de Tocqueville insisted, though, that progress was (and still is) haphaz-
ard. One can imagine, says de Tocqueville, an “extreme point” where liberty
and equality would “meet and blend.”4 All having an equal right to participate
in government, and all being equal, no one would be able to exercise tyran-
nical power. Along the way, however, the two principles are realized neither
at the extreme nor simultaneously, but distinctly and unevenly. Here again, a
connection to Hobbes can be made. Hobbes moved from the equality of his
state of nature to the gaping inequality embodied in the absolute sovereign’s
relation to his or her subjects. In accord with the ideology of absolutism,
Hobbes declares that the sovereign must outshine all the other subjects like
the sun outshines the stars.5 The thirst for equality, de Tocqueville thought,
2 p mortal gods
could bring about tyranny. It could be of the absolutist variety, or the tyranny
of the majority, which he feared most. Both the absolute sovereign and the
sovereign majority might be compared to gods; they are likened to entities
that dwarf all others with their power (and make them more equal to each
other in their common subjection).6 When Hobbes speaks of his sovereign as
a “Mortal God,”7 it is useful to think of what he hoped to assemble, but also,
with de Tocqueville, what he was taking apart. His work was also an assault
on the intermediary institutions between the sovereign and the people such as
the established church,8 the nobility, and the courts. In so far as his philosophy
insisted upon a unified form of sovereignty that need not take the form of an
assembly, it was also an assault on Parliament.
For my immediate purposes, however, these initial points of connection to
de Tocqueville can give way to another, perhaps less straightforward link. It
concerns not merely de Tocqueville, but also the sometimes tangled relation-
ship between some committed Tocqueville scholars and the audiences that
make use of de Tocqueville for their own purposes. Alan S. Kahan, author of
Aristocratic Liberalism: The Social and Political Thought of Jacob Burckhardt, John
Stuart Mill, and Alexis de Tocqueville, wrote of de Tocqueville (and his two
other subjects) that “the interpreters of aristocratic liberals are all too often
ready to ignore the issues and circumstances . . . [these thinkers] thought
crucial. Instead of asking the three what their questions were, we ask them
our own questions, and as a result get an answer that is distorted and misun-
derstood.”9 Hobbes scholars have undertaken their own reclamation efforts.
Hobbes, they have declared, must be spared our purposes and given back to his
own. Among Hobbes scholars, these sentiments will bring to mind the “con-
textualist” approach of the Cambridge School historians. I will discuss the
relationship between contextualist readings and the status of “his own” below.
In light of the goals of this interpretation, de Tocqueville’s would-be
rescuers offer a more poignant dynamic. They, of course, resist certain pres-
entist readings by insisting that we understand de Tocqueville as a man of
the nineteenth century (if not a man whose life was primarily determined
years before by the French Revolution). They also, and more interestingly,
caution against reading de Tocqueville as if his intended audience was in
fact (or at least necessarily) the society of relative equals within the United
States. They urge us to consider that his foremost audience may have
been the frightened aristocrats of his native France. In short, they raise
the possibility that Democracy in America was not aimed toward the sensi-
bilities of our time and the political events that consume us. Democracy in
America is not “ours,” they suggest, because it was not written to appeal to
introduction p 3
today’s egalitarians, much less those whom it describes. The book critically
defends democratic ways to an inegalitarian aristocratic culture still trying
to find its footing in early nineteenth-century France.10
For whom did Thomas Hobbes write? My purpose is not to duplicate
the reservations urged upon readers by the de Tocqueville scholars. Hobbes
is not warning one class that another is coming to replace it. The differences
between our society and Hobbes’s are in many ways unlike the differences
between our society and de Tocqueville’s. In both cases, however, our demo-
cratic sensibility is offended by the suggestion that the texts of these two
men are not immediately ours.11 Nevertheless, the example of de Tocqueville
should prompt useful questions about how to approach Hobbes. Why should
we be more attentive to where Hobbes’s audiences stood within the hier-
archical cosmos of seventeenth-century Britain? In short, because doing so
gives us a better appreciation of Hobbes’s politics. We should therefore ask:
what did it mean to address oneself, or to offer a philosophical doctrine,
to a sovereign one would make absolute? We can gain new and important
insights into Hobbes’s politics if we try to discern how he negotiated (in the
full sense) these distinctly seventeenth-century contexts and their attending
practices. More specifically, I will read Hobbes in light of the practices of
humanist education, patronage, and what I call the high culture of practical
mathematics that were a part of seventeenth-century Britain’s most imagina-
tive plastic arts.
Against the trajectory of this—or any contextual—approach one might
raise a hermeneutic objection. Any reader—in fact, all readers, whether they
acknowledge it or not—will reveal that the text they interpret is always for
them because it cannot be otherwise.12 My interpretation always makes a book
mine, and your interpretation makes it yours. In a broader historical frame, we,
today, make the books we interpret ours. This argument seems to me undeni-
able, but if we must always make an author ours, the example of de Tocqueville
suggests that one of the more fruitful ways to make an author ours is to make
him untimely: “acting counter to our time and thereby acting on our time.”13
That is, the interpreted author who will necessarily be made ours can be ours in
the way we make them not theirs. In this case “not theirs” does not mean deny-
ing authors their contexts, or more aptly, what we think of as their contexts. It
means working from those contexts to pull him or her away from some of our
contemporaries. In fact, this reading works toward a doubly untimely Hobbes.
I make arguments for taking Hobbes away from his scientific admirers,14 and
for bringing him, I hope, too close for comfort to those who typically think
of themselves as having achieved maximal distance from him.