Table Of Content

TOM SORELL Introduction Hobbes made his name as the author of a brief book about citizenly duty published in 1642. In its various editions, De cive brought his ideas about the need for undivided sovereignty to a wide, and mostly admiring, Continental audience. Similar ideas in an earlier, unpub- lished, but well-circulated treatise of Hobbes's came to the notice of men of political influence in England in 1640, so that he was known, in parliamentary circles at least, as a political thinker some years before any of his work had gone into print. It is as a political theorist that he is still studied today. Hobbes's Leviathan has eclipsed De cive as the official statement of his theory, but it has much in common with the book he published in 1642 and the manuscript that he circulated in 1640. It is Hobbes's political doctrine that continues to get attention, and new editions of Leviathan are still being issued. His writings, however, range far beyond morals and politics. They present distinctive views in metaphysics and epistemology, and they go beyond philosophy in the narrow modern sense a1 together, to in- clude full-scale treatises in physics, optics, and geometry. Hobbes's thought extends to history and historiography, to law, biblical interpretation, and something like rational theology. All of these subjects are represented in the essays that follow, most in considerable detail. One aim of the volume is to offer a much broader view of Hobbes;s intellectual preoccupations than is usually available to the English- speaking general reader. Another is to bring together the different perspectives on Hobbes that are now being developed in parallel by philosophers, historians of mathematics and science, historians of early modern England, political scientists, and writers on literary studies: current scholarship on Hobbes is more than ever a multidisci- plinary enterprise. It is also international, involving people in most 1 CCaammbbrriiddggee CCoommppaanniioonnss OOnnlliinnee ©© CCaammbbrriiddggee UUnniivveerrssiittyy PPrreessss,, 22000066 2 Introduction English-speaking countries and beyond. French, Italian, German, and Dutch scholars have long been at the leading edge of Hobbes studies, and some of them are contributors to this book. Hobbes's interests were formed and pursued through intellectual networks to which he gained entry as a member of the household of important English aristocrats. He worked for more than one genera- tion and more than one branch of the Cavendish family, and their connections became his. The influences of the different circles in which he moved are brought out in the opening biographical essay, which presents much new research conducted by Noel Malcolm on Hobbes's life. At least four different networks emerge from Mal- colm's account as influences upon Hobbes's principal writings, those he composed in the 1640s and '50s. The first network centered upon the second earl of Devonshire, whom Hobbes was hired, straight out of Oxford, to serve as page. While in the service of the second earl, Hobbes came into contact with Francis Bacon, and also, on the earl's Continental travels, with Venetian writers who op- posed papal claims to have authority over the rulers of Christian kingdoms. The Venetians were interested in Bacon's writings, and after 1615 Hobbes participated in dealings between them, Bacon, and his master. Antipapal ideas are prominent in Hobbes;s political writings; so also, on some readings, are Baconian ideas in his nonpo- litical writings. Two other networks involved Hobbes in the 1630s. One was the so-called Great Tew circle, named for the Oxfordshire home of its focal point, Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland. This group influenced Hobbes's thinking on religion. The other was centered on Sir Charles Cavendish, a relation of the earls of Devonshire, and was carried on partly by correspondence with scientists in England and on the Continent. It brought Hobbes into contact with the chemical experimenter Robert Payne and the optical theorist Walter Warner, and it stimulated Hobbes's already developing ideas on the workings of light and vision. The fourth network, to which Sir Charles Cavendish may have helped to introduce Hobbes, was made up of the scientists and theo- logians grouped round Marin Mersenne in Paris from the 1620s to the 1640s. It is hard to overstate the importance of Mersenne and Mersenne's circle to Hobbes's intellectual development. He probably first made contact with Mersenne while accompanying the third earl of Devonshire on the Grand Tour of the Continent in 1634. He CCaammbbrriiddggee CCoommppaanniioonnss OOnnlliinnee ©© CCaammbbrriiddggee UUnniivveerrssiittyy PPrreessss,, 22000066 Introduction 3 became a regular and active member of Mersenne's circle when he fled England for Paris in 1640, in the days leading to the English Civil War. It was Mersenne who arranged for the publication of De cive. It was Mersenne, too, who approached Hobbes for one of the sets of Objections to Descartes's Meditations. Mersenne acted as intermediary in a correspondence between Hobbes and Descartes on optics and physics. He encouraged Hobbes to write the commentary on Thomas White's De mundo that is now a main source for Hobbes's metaphysical ideas. Intellectuals in Mersenne's orbit also played their part in the development of his scientific ideas. The mathematicians Gilles Roberval and Claude Mydorge and the phi- losopher Pierre Gassendi were notable figures among them. Intellectual exchanges on so broad a front over several decades might have produced a miscellany of theories, but in Hobbes an interest in the problems of mathematics, physics, optics, and politics combines with a predilection for system and synthesis. He was concerned to impose order and coherence on his own ideas and dis- coveries; but he was also concerned with order and coherence in the body of the new science in general - not only his own contributions but those of other mathematicians, optical theorists, astronomers, and physiologists, mainly Continental ones, who presented the explanation of effects in proper deductive form and found mechanical causes for phenomena. These two ambitions, of systematizing his own science and of systematizing contemporary deductive science in general, are sometimes confused together in his writings, as I argue in the essay on Hobbes's scheme of the sciences. His trilogy of De corpore, De homine, and De cive present the "elements" of science in general, but science in general contains two sciences that Hobbes thought he had invented himself, optics and civil science. In Hobbes's scheme, different natural sciences are sciences of different kinds of motion,- and politics comes after the natural sciences in the order of teaching. But it is far from clear whether politics is a science of motion, or whether Hobbes is only claiming that it can be under- stood in the light of the sciences of motion. Again, his understanding of the elements of science in general may produce an inadequate and incomplete account of the scope of science, and a worse such account than Bacon's, to which Hobbes's was up to a point indebted. Science as a whole was supposed to start with "first philosophy," a set of definitions, distinctions, and arguments required to make intel- CCaammbbrriiddggee CCoommppaanniioonnss OOnnlliinnee ©© CCaammbbrriiddggee UUnniivveerrssiittyy PPrreessss,, 22000066 4 Introduction ligible the explanatory concepts of the mechanical philosophy. Yves Charles Zarka shows how Hobbes's first philosophy was simulta- neously a radical revision of the concepts of Aristotle's physics and metaphysics, a conscious departure from Descartes, and, paradoxi- cally, a doctrine founded on a theology of voluntarism. Hobbes re- vamps Aristotle's doctrine of causation, and he purports to derive the fundamental concepts of science - those of body and motion, for instance - from traces of sense-experience in the corporeal human subject, not the innate ideas of an immaterial Cartesian soul. So far Hobbes's first philosophy has contents that are firmly rooted in a temporal and material reality: is there any need for theology? Making extensive use of the the Anti-White, Zarka argues that God and God's omnipotence, which the categories of the first philosophy are supposed to exclude from the foundations of science, are actually presup- posed by those foundations. In particular, God is needed to unify what are otherwise entirely separate causal chains in the world, and to make intelligible the distinctive Hobbesian notion of an "entire" cause. Just how well Hobbes's first philosophy grounds the natural sciences is unclear, according to Zarka. It works well for the pure sciences of motion - geometry and mechanics - but it may not pro- vide adequate materials for the explanation of sensible appearance. Douglas Jesseph's essay takes up Hobbes's conception of the method of discovery and demonstration in natural science. The way in which this method is modeled on the method of geometry is discussed and illustrated. Jesseph focuses on Hobbes's identification of science with knowledge of causes, and his identification of knowledge of causes with knowledge of motions. Geometry has a highly intelligible subject matter, according to Hobbes, because we have a maker's knowledge of it. We know the properties of the figures from the motions we use to construct them. Accordingly, in teaching geometry to someone else it is crucial to get over the relevant motions from the beginning. The very definitions of the figures must mention them. Natural science in general is less certain and demon- strable than geometry, because a maker's knowledge of its subject matter - bodies independent and external to us - is available only to God. To understand the properties of natural bodies, we have to make hypotheses about the motions that might have caused them. The reliance of his method of physical explanation on hypotheses about motions put Hobbes at odds with English scientists, and his CCaammbbrriiddggee CCoommppaanniioonnss OOnnlliinnee ©© CCaammbbrriiddggee UUnniivveerrssiittyy PPrreessss,, 22000066 Introduction 5 methodology of natural science in general was attacked by members of the Royal Society in the period after he returned to England from Paris. Hobbes is not consistent in linking science or natural science to knowledge of motions; he sometimes claims that science has its starting point in semantic information, and that the meanings of terms are no more than human stipulations. This is the context from which Hobbes's nominalism is sometimes improperly ab- stracted. Jesseph keeps the connections between Hobbes's theory of science and his theory of names, operations on names and concatena- tions of names, quite intact. In Hobbes's scheme of the sciences, geometry is the most basic science of motion, and the first science after first philosophy to be acquired if science as a whole is being learnt from the elements. Hardy Grant suggests that Hobbes's valuable - and correct - insight about the importance of geometry to the rest of natural science is largely independent of his idiosyncratic, mechanistic philosophy of mathematics, and independent again of his failed ventures in circle- squaring. Grant explains what was at stake in these ventures, and makes intelligible to the general reader the mathematical point of the long series of exchanges between the Oxford mathematician John Wallis and Hobbes on the squaring of the circle. He also explains for the mathematically more able what goes wrong in some of Hobbes's "proofs" in this area. Grant then turns to what he thinks was valuable in Hobbes's mathematics. He takes the requirement that motions be specified in geometrical definitions and shows how it made sense in its time. He notes that Hobbes's standards of defini- tion left their mark on no less a mathematician than Leibniz. Grant also explains clearly how, despite the difficulties in Hobbes's own criticisms of algebra, one could be respectably skeptical of the value of algebra. Hobbes claimed that he laid the foundations of the science of optics, and optical material dominates Dehomine, the second section of his account of the elements of science. Prins's essay shows how in his practice as a writer on optics, Hobbes combined geometry and mechanics in the way that his methodological writings required them to be combined. Probably optics was the prototype of a Hobbesian natural science, and the requirements for natural science in general were drawn from Hobbes's understanding of how this subject worked. There is some controversy among scholars - discernible if one com- CCaammbbrriiddggee CCoommppaanniioonnss OOnnlliinnee ©© CCaammbbrriiddggee UUnniivveerrssiittyy PPrreessss,, 22000066 6 Introduction pares Noel Malcolm's text with the notes to Yves Charles Zarka's essay - about whether all of the optical writings that have traditionally been attributed to Hobbes are in fact Hobbes's work. Most com- mentators say that the Short Tract is by Hobbes; others, including Malcolm and Richard Tuck, conjecture that Robert Payne, a member of the Cavendish circle, composed it. Prins includes the Short Tract in the long series of treatises in which Hobbes was concerned with the explanation of light, vision, and sensible qualities, especially in the 1630s and 1640s. Prins argues that Hobbes's own good opinion of his achievement in optics has some foundation, and that he was certainly a sophisticated and well-informed writer on the subject. Bernard Gert turns in his essay to what Hobbes regarded as the after-effects of sense, especially visual sensation: namely imagina- tion, memory, passion, and action. Gert emphasises the point that Hobbes's understanding of many of these phenomena is eked out from the meagre resources of the concepts of matter and motion. Hobbes's determinism is considered, and Gert ends by considering the way in which passion and reason can interact to produce the behavior called for by Hobbes's moral philosophy. Although self- interest is crucial to the rational control of the passions, Gert denies that for Hobbes it provides the sole motivation for doing anything. Hobbes, he says, is no psychological egoist. Certain passages in Le- viathan and elsewhere may make it seem as if Hobbes was suppos- ing that there was only one kind of motivation in human beings, and as if it were always selfish; but, Gert says, Hobbes's theory of human nature is never about all, only about many, human beings, and plenty of room is left for variety of motivation not only between human beings but within human beings over time. The picture of the typical Hobbesian agent as a selfish being ruthlessly propelling himself by the shortest path to his gratification is probably closer to the picture Hobbes gives of the human child than of the human. Richard Tuck's essay starts out with a discussion of the distinctive subject matter that Hobbes allocates to moral philosophy- human passions and patterns of behavior - and tries to explain why Hobbes chooses to link that subject matter with the subject matter of optics in De homine. The two subject matters belong together, on Tuck's interpretation, because optics and moral philosophy both acknowledge and correct different types of error and illusion. Optics explains the difference between the thing as it appears to the senses CCaammbbrriiddggee CCoommppaanniioonnss OOnnlliinnee ©© CCaammbbrriiddggee UUnniivveerrssiittyy PPrreessss,, 22000066 Introduction 7 and the thing, and moral philosophy specifies the different sources - principally linguistic - of illusions about the good and conflict between human beings. Moral philosophy then hits upon a good that is likely to be universally acknowledged as such - self-preservation - and tries to present certain behaviors - the ones traditionally regarded as virtuous - as means to self-preservation or peace. These are the behaviors prescribed by what Hobbes calls the "laws of nature. " Tuck is struck throughout by the way that Hobbes can have it both ways in his moral philosophy - being subjectivist about valuations, but objectivist about the moral laws. Moral laws can be objec- tive in the sense of commanding universal assent and leading to a condition (peace) that everyone will find subjectively preferable to its absence (war), without there being an independently existing rightness that they conform to. As Tuck reads him, then, Hobbes can therefore concede something to skepticism about the objectivity of values, and yet not conclude that, morally speaking, anything goes. For related reasons Hobbes's doctrine can actually have an effect on the valuations it criticizes. By showing how the all-out drive for short-term advantage leaves everyone worse off when all or most participate in that drive, Hobbes gives people a motivation for revaluing short-term gain, and indeed all other apparent goods whose pursuit might involve war. As an effectual or productive science, Hobbes's moral philosophy has more in common with the branch of learning traditionally known as rhetoric than has often been acknowledged. Alan Ryan's essay on Hobbes's political philosophy overlaps sig- nificantly with Tuck's and with the sequence of essays that com- pletes this volume. The sequence concerns the relation of Hobbes's political philosophy to Hobbes's time, its status as a branch of learning in comparison to history and rhetoric, and its bearing on Hobbes's writings about law and religion. Some of these connections are indicated in Ryan's general essay. It presents Hobbes's theory of the institution of sovereignty as an answer to the question of who has the right to declare what is law. Hobbes's theory suggests that the sovereign is the source of the law and that therefore the sovereign is the authoritative pronouncer of what it requires of the many who submit to the sovereign. As for the many, they are the source of the institution of the sovereign. They agree with one another to abide by the laws that some designated individual or assembly de- CCaammbbrriiddggee CCoommppaanniioonnss OOnnlliinnee ©© CCaammbbrriiddggee UUnniivveerrssiittyy PPrreessss,, 22000066 8 Introduction clares for the purpose of securing their safety. They may not like the laws, but they cannot justly refuse to obey them: that would be to break an agreement, the very essense of injustice. A host of problems attend Hobbes's account of how an agreement can be made in a pre- political setting, and also his assumptions about the power of agreement-making to explain political obligation. Few people con- sciously become parties to a social contract or perform acts that indisputably make them parties to one. And even on Hobbes's assumptions, which come close to requiring subjects of a sovereign to abstain altogether from making judgments about their own safety, the many need not put up with just anything the sovereign declares legal. Clear and present danger to one's life, or the appearance of such danger, restores the right of private judgment. Hobbes evi- dently believed that the conditions for the resumption of private judgment were very far from being met in England when subjects of Charles I resisted his edicts, but Hobbes was alive to the ease with which people could be convinced that life under a sovereign power was intolerable. Worse, because he sometimes insists that the public safety the sovereign secures goes far beyond mere protection of life and limb, there is uncomfortably extensive scope for the judgment that life under the sovereign is unsafe. Ryan discusses further difficulties that arise from the detail of Hobbes's theory of punishment. Along the way he contrasts Hobbes's treatment of a number of these matters with those of Harrington, Filmer, and Rousseau. Hobbes's politics was supposed to be a science. It was supposed to offer sure principles of submission and sovereignty that might be applied universally. It was not a plan for government drawn from the example of civilizations of the past; and officially, at least, it was supposed to solve a perennial problem: that of how to keep states from dissolving. On the other hand, Hobbes's discovery and statement of this science was supposed to be timely. Why had De cive, which was planned as the third of the three-part Elementorum philosophiae, appeared in print long before the first two volumes were close to completion? Because, Hobbes said, the disorders in his country - the English Civil War - had wrested the book from him. Was the political theory in fact commentary on current events mas- querading as science, or was it science being made available just when it was needed? Johann Sommerville's essay shows that the truth lies somewhere in between. Hobbes's picture of the causes of CCaammbbrriiddggee CCoommppaanniioonnss OOnnlliinnee ©© CCaammbbrriiddggee UUnniivveerrssiittyy PPrreessss,, 22000066 Introduction 9 dissolution of commonwealths in general is suspiciously close to his description of the causes of the Civil War in England, which suggests that he was working from historical example rather than deriving his account of the sources of instability in states from the operations of certain passions present in different groups of human beings. Som- merville shows that Hobbes's absolutism, as evidenced in his theories of the rights of sovereigns, evolved during the Civil War period, so that the doctrine of Leviathan is recognizably different from that of the Elements of Law and De cive. Hobbes always made clerical powers subject to the sovereign's authority, and held that the sovereign could autonomously determine property rights; but in Levia- than, Sommerville argues, he took the opportunity of making his account of the rights of sovereigns reflect his disagreements with some moderate royalists, notably in respect of the division of powers between sovereign and assembly. In Maurice Goldsmith's essay, Hobbes's doctrine about law, so central to the political philosophy, is clearly explained, related to positions in twentieth-century jurisprudence, and, finally, considered in the context of Hobbes's disagreement with Sir Edward Coke and the attack on Hobbes by Sir Matthew Hale. At the center of the discussion is Hobbes's theory of sovereignty and his view that, as Goldsmith puts it, "the sovereign is above, not beneath the law." In comparison to Coke, Hobbes thinks little of common law, except where "common law" is redefined as his own laws of nature. Its accumulation of precedents smacks too much of experience and too little of reason. In practice it waters down sovereignty, giving lesser officials too much of a free hand in the interpretation and applica- tion of the law. He prefers statute law, written, highly general, straight from the legislator. The reservations that might be felt about handling legal and political matters by a neat rule book were expressed by Hale, whose criticism of Hobbes was an indirect de- fense of Coke. There is an account of the English Civil War between the lines of Hobbes's treatises on morals and politics, but there is also an ex- plicit account of it in Behemoth. This is a work of history on the Civil War, rather than a scientific treatise on government, and Hobbes's understanding of the difference between these genres- between a history and a work of science - is one of the topics of Luc Borot's essay. The distinction between history and science is con- CCaammbbrriiddggee CCoommppaanniioonnss OOnnlliinnee ©© CCaammbbrriiddggee UUnniivveerrssiittyy PPrreessss,, 22000066 io Introduction tinuous in Hobbes's thought with the distinctions between pru- dence and sapience and between experience and reason. Science, sapience, and reason are the favored sides of the distinctions, and Borot explains why. Part of the explanation is that they draw on different cognitive faculties, and that the faculty engaged by history, namely memory, is more limited than the faculty of reasoning engaged by science. Memory stores truths only for a time, and only particular truths. Reasoning affords both generality and depth. It can reach conclusions that are universally valid, and can penetrate to the grounds of truths that are witnessed and remembered. A written history makes what is remembered last, but, without the help of science, it cannot achieve generality and depth; it cannot be genu- inely explanatory. Another way of putting the point is by saying that for Hobbes, history cannot teach, in the sense of demonstrating things. On the other hand, Hobbes thinks that history can be politically instructive, that it is more accessible than science, and that it needs to inform civil science. So it is not valueless, and indeed is better suited to instructing a wide audience than science. Both Behe- moth and his very first published work, a translation of Thucydides7 History of the Peloponnesian War, were supposed to be politically instructive, Thucydides through its sub-text, and Behemoth through its surface meaning. The bulk of Borot's essay concerns the relation of history to different forms of public instruction. Victoria Silver's essay on rhetoric also dwells on Hobbes's translation of Thucydides, and on Hobbes way of marrying the goal of instruction - of teaching the truth - with the instrument of vivid, persuasive speech, whether in the form of history, or, despite its pretensions to do without all of these adornments, in the form of philosophy. She locates Hobbes's views on the relation between rhetoric and philosophy within a long tradition of seeing the relation as one of antagonism. Up to a point Hobbes gets beyond that, strug- gling to reconcile eloquence and reason. Hobbes's views on religion, touched on by so many other contributors to this volume, are impressively disentangled by Patricia Springborg in the concluding essay. An important distinction for undertanding Hobbes in this connection is that between what goes on invisibly and privately and sometimes involuntarily in one's head - the formation of belief - and what is done in public with consequences for other people. The inner sphere is outside the sov- CCaammbbrriiddggee CCoommppaanniioonnss OOnnlliinnee ©© CCaammbbrriiddggee UUnniivveerrssiittyy PPrreessss,, 22000066