Thomas Hobbes: The Secular Foundations of Modern Political Philosophy

On a Tuesday in April 1647, a fifty-eight-year-old mathematics tutor named Thomas Hobbes was in Paris, working on a treatise that would, within four years, scandalize every clergyman in Christendom. The previous three years had been unkind to him: the parliamentary cause was winning the English Civil War, the royalist friends for whom he had been working were in exile, and the Elements of Law, Natural and Politic, a manuscript he had written in 1640 and tried to circulate discreetly, had been copied and pirated by a London bookseller named Matthew Reynolds and sold without Hobbes’s permission. The piracy was a warning. The book he was now writing — the Leviathan, which appeared in 1651, when its author was sixty-three — would be his revenge on the world for the public humiliation, and on the world of letters for its general failure to think clearly.

Hobbes lived another twenty-eight years, dying in 1679 at the age of ninety-one, and the long last act of his life was an exercise in damage control. He burned nothing. He retracted little. He spent the 1660s and 1670s defending, in increasingly quarrelsome prose, the doctrines of the Leviathan against the entire population of Anglican and Presbyterian divines who regarded them as the work of the devil. The famous story that he had an apocalyptic nightmare in the winter of 1666 and was seen walking the streets of London muttering “the Lord hath delivered me over to my enemy” — the diary entry of Samuel Pepys — is, in all probability, a fiction. But it is the kind of fiction that people liked to tell about Hobbes, because it confirmed the suspicion that the most secular philosopher of his age was, at heart, terrified of the doctrines he had espoused.

The Life

Hobbes was born in Westport, a small village outside Malmesbury, on April 5, 1588 — the year of the Spanish Armada. His father was a poor vicar who, after a drunken brawl with a neighboring clergyman, fled the country and disappeared; Hobbes was brought up by his uncle, a glover. He went up to Magdalen Hall, Oxford, in 1603, took his degree in 1608, and was recommended, by the good offices of the principal of Magdalen Hall, into the household of the Cavendish family, the earls (later dukes) of Devonshire. With them he would live, on and off, for the rest of his life. He was tutor to the second earl, then to the third earl, then (after a long interval) to the fourth earl and the fourth earl’s son. He served the family as secretary, accountant, librarian, and general factotum, and the family’s protection, and the family’s library at Chatsworth and Hardwick, were the conditions of everything he wrote.

The decisive decade was the 1630s. In 1634 Hobbes became tutor to the young Earl of Devonshire, and in 1636–37 the two traveled on the Continent, where Hobbes met Galileo in Florence and Descartes in Paris (the encounter was famously cold; Hobbes and Descartes disagreed on everything, including, by the end, on whether they had met) and where he began the systematic application of the new mechanical philosophy to human affairs. The book he produced from this encounter, De Cive (1642; “On the Citizen”), was the seed of the Leviathan, and it was already, in 1642, too dangerous to be published openly in England.

The Leviathan was written in Paris in 1648–1651, partly in the protection of the exiled English court, partly at the urging of Charles II (then in his early twenties), who had read the De Cive in manuscript and was willing to back the new book. The work was dedicated to the “Censors of Books” — the people, that is, who would, in the natural course of events, ban it. Hobbes would spend much of rest of his life being grateful to the dedicatees, since the Leviathan was indeed banned at various points, and the famous 1666 order of the House of Commons to burn Hobbes’s books — directed primarily at the Leviathan and the De Homine — confirmed the appropriateness of the dedication.

The scholarly assessment of Hobbes has been transformed twice in the last forty years. The first transformation was the work of the Cambridge historian Quentin Skinner, whose 1966 M.A. thesis and the books that grew out of it argued that Hobbes was, in the strict sense of the term, a Renaissance humanist who was working in a particular rhetorical tradition, and that the Leviathan’s most famous doctrines were, in part, replies to a particular English controversy about the proper limits of royal authority. The second transformation was the work of the Cambridge philosopher David Johnston, of the Harvard political theorist Steven Smith, of the Princeton historian Jonathan Israel, and of the Cambridge historian Richard Tuck — each of whom, in different ways, has tried to recover the Leviathan as a serious work of political philosophy rather than a piece of historical evidence. Tuck’s Hobbes: A Very Short Introduction (2002) is the best brief account; Smith’s Hobbes’s Leviathan (1994) is the most philosophically serious. The older view — that Hobbes was a reactionary apologist for Stuart absolutism, in a tradition of thought that ends in Carl Schmitt — is now generally regarded as too simple.

The Philosophical System

Hobbes’s mature philosophy is contained in three large treatises and one shorter one: De Cive (1642), the Leviathan (1651), De Corpore (1655), and De Homine (1658). The Leviathan is the most important of the four and the only one that has had a continuous effect on the political thought of the modern age. The De Corpore is a long treatise on logic and physics that was, in its day, more influential than the Leviathan; it is, in ours, mostly unread. The De Homine is a treatise on anthropology that is, in part, an attempt to do for psychology what the De Corpore did for physics. The system as a whole is the most thoroughgoing application of the mechanical philosophy to human affairs that the seventeenth century produced, and the most rigorous of the natural-law traditions that ran from Grotius to Pufendorf to the modern doctrine of human rights.

The metaphysics is straightforward. The world is composed of bodies in motion. The bodies have properties — figure, motion, rest, color, weight, hardness, and the like — that are themselves motions of smaller bodies inside them. The “subtle” matter that Descartes postulated, and the immaterial souls that the schoolmen had relied on, are expelled from the system. There is, in Hobbes’s view, no mind distinct from the body. The mind is the body considered in its operations on itself — a “phantasme” of motions, a kind of internal cinema. The theological implications were noticed immediately, and Hobbes was to spend the rest of his life being accused of atheism. The accusation is, on a strict reading, wrong — Hobbes was a theist of an austere and unorthodox kind, and the Leviathan begins with a long argument for the existence of a God who is the first cause of all motion. But on a charitable reading, the accusation is the point. Hobbes’s God does nothing in the world. He sets it in motion, gives it a set of laws, and steps back. The God of the Leviathan is the God of Deism, and Hobbes is the first major European philosopher to be a Deist in this specific sense.

The State of Nature

The state of nature, as Hobbes reconstructs it in chapters 13 and 14 of the Leviathan, is the most famous thought-experiment in the history of political philosophy. It is a logical construction, not a historical one. The point is not that human beings ever lived in such a condition. The point is that if you take away the basic facts of political life — a common power, made effective by the threat of punishment, that can settle disputes and enforce contracts — you get, by deduction, a state in which there is “no place for Industry … no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation … no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.”

That last sentence is, perhaps, the most quoted line in English political philosophy, and it is regularly misread. Hobbes is not claiming that human life, in the absence of government, would be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. He is claiming that, in the absence of government, the reasons people would have for forming families, building houses, planting fields, opening shops, writing books, and being reasonable to one another would be absent. Civilization is the result of calculation, and the calculation collapses when the state collapses. The argument is about incentives, not about anthropology. It is, in a way that Hobbes’s successors rarely acknowledge, the founding text of the entire rational-choice tradition in political theory.

The state of nature’s claim is not that human beings are bad. It is that they are not good enough, and that the “passions that encline men to Peace” — the fear of death, the desire of commodious living, the hope of obtaining it by industry — are not, by themselves, sufficient to produce a stable peace. The argument is darker than it looks. It is darker than the Augustinian pessimism it partly draws on, and it is darker than the Christian natural-law tradition of Aquinas. It is darker because it does not, in the end, appeal to anything outside human reason — not to the image of God in man, not to the gifts of grace, not to a final judgment. The reasons for peace are natural reasons, available to anyone who can count.

The Sovereign

The solution to the state of nature is the social contract. Each individual agrees, with every other individual, to transfer the right of self-government to a third party — the sovereign — on the condition that everyone else does the same. The sovereign is not a party to the contract. The sovereign does not, in any strict sense, “agree” with the subjects. The sovereign simply is the result of the agreement of the subjects with one another, and is, for that reason, outside the agreement. The arrangement is the foundation of what we would now call the modern state, and the strange feature of it — that the sovereign cannot, in the strict sense, do injustice to the subjects, because the subjects have authorized the sovereign to act in their name — is the foundation of what we would now call sovereignty.

The argument is not a defense of Stuart absolutism. The sovereign in Hobbes’s theory is not, in any sense, a king. The sovereign is a function, exercisable by a monarch, by an aristocratic council, or by a democratic assembly. The theory, in fact, contains a careful argument (chapter 19 of the Leviathan) for the comparative advantages of monarchy and democracy, and concludes that monarchy is more efficient at producing internal peace but more subject to the dangers of a bad successor. Hobbes’s own preference, in his private writings, was for monarchy, and his political sympathies were consistently royalist. But the theory he produced was, in its central structure, indifferent to the form of government. That is part of what made the book so dangerous. A theory that authorizes the sovereign, in the abstract, can be used to authorize any sovereign in particular.

The argument is also, in a sense, a defense of order over liberty. The sovereign, in Hobbes’s view, has nearly absolute authority over the public actions of subjects, including the authority to determine the official religion, the content of education, the organization of the economy, and the conduct of foreign affairs. Subjects retain a right of self-preservation — they may flee, or resist a sovereign who is about to kill them — but they do not retain a right of revolution. The reason is the one already given: a revolution puts the state back into the state of nature, and the state of nature is intolerable. The argument is the basis of the modern case for the priority of order over liberty, and it is the basis of the modern doctrine of the secular state, in which the church is a department of the sovereign, the Bible is to be interpreted by the sovereign, and the pope has no authority over the English church.

A Judgement

Hobbes is the most underrated philosopher of the early modern period. The reason is partly that his conclusions are too uncomfortable for modern readers — the absolute sovereign, the repudiation of revolution, the atheism-by-implication — and partly that his prose is not good enough to survive the long period of his obscurity. The Leviathan is a wonderful book, but it is not a well-written one; it is, in places, badly organized, and the famous opening chapters on the senses and the imagination have a way of making modern readers put it down before they reach the politics.

The best current work on Hobbes — by Skinner’s student Sorell, by Tuck, by the late Susanne Sreedhar, and by A. P. Martinich’s careful editions — has made it possible, for the first time in two hundred years, to read the Leviathan as a serious work of philosophy rather than as a historical curiosity. The verdict that comes out of this body of work is that Hobbes is a much better philosopher than his twentieth-century reputation allowed. He is, in particular, the most original of the natural-law theorists. Grotius had argued that natural law would be valid even if God did not exist. Hobbes took the next step. Natural law, in his view, is a system of conclusions of reason about the means to self-preservation. It is, in a phrase that Hobbes never used but that has stuck to him, the first positivist theory of morality: the rules come from calculation, not from God or from the nature of things.

The Leviathan is, in this sense, the most underrated work in the canon of political philosophy — not because Hobbes’s arguments are subtle, but because his conclusions are too uncomfortable for modern readers. The book is, in any case, the one that the Enlightenment could not stop arguing with. Locke’s Two Treatises is, in its central argument, a refutation of Hobbes. Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality is, in its central argument, an attempt to imagine a pre-Hobbesian anthropology. Kant’s philosophy of history is, in its central argument, a refutation of Hobbes by means of a teleology that Hobbes would have rejected. Even the Scottish moralists — Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume, Smith — are, in their different ways, attempts to construct a moral psychology that does not depend on the Hobbesian premise that human beings are fundamentally self-interested. The Enlightenment is, in significant part, a long argument with Hobbes, and the argument has not ended.