Thomas Hobbes Research Paper

For Fame had rumour’d, that a Fleet at Sea,

Wou’d cause our Nations Catastrophe;

And hereupon it was my Mother Dear

Did bring forth Twins at once, both Me, and Fear.

(The Life of Mr. Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, written by himself.)

This statement of Hobbes’ is often referred to because of the role that fear played in his account of human nature and the genesis of political order.

Hobbes was born of a poor family, but obscure birth was no bar to the career of a clever young man at that time. His education made him a fluent linguist and translator, and though he wrote a considerable amount in Latin, which was still the common language of the learned, he became the first philosopher to write his most significant works in English. After study at Magdalen Hall in Oxford, he was recommended by the Principal of his hall to take the role of tutor and secretary in the household of William Lord Cavendish, who ten years later became, Earl of Devonshire. Hobbes spent almost all of the rest of his life in the employment of the Earls of Devonshire or their close relatives the Earls of Newcastle.

As a member of such households, Hobbes several times took sons of his employers on tours of Europe, which gave him a probably unparalleled chance to meet intellectuals: he met Galileo, whose work greatly influenced him as a response to the widely accepted scepticism of the time, Gassendi, Mersenne, and later Descartes, amongst others. These acquaintanceships continued through correspondence and when he fled to France in 1640 in reasonable fear that his political writings might result in threats to his life or liberty. In England, too, he met important people and intellectual leaders; Aubrey records that at one time he acted as secretary to Francis Bacon and also helped to translate some of Bacon’s essays into Latin, with Bacon commenting that he liked Hobbes best of all those who had taken dictation from him because Hobbes understood what it was that he was writing.

Modern science was in a formative stage at that time, with no generally accepted scientific method. As an intellectually lively man, Hobbes in middle life became caught up in the arguments about this set of problems about the investigative methods appropriate to science, and Aubrey records him as saying that it was first reading Euclid, whom he took to produce definitive proofs, which made him alive to the problem and possibility of establishing a scientific method. He was also quite explicitly influenced by Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief Systems of the World, published in 1632. Part of his concern with method came out in his dispute with Boyle (an account of which is given in Shapin and Schaffer 1985) about the significance of experiment, which Hobbes downplayed. Hobbes distinguished quite sharply between knowledge and opinion, knowledge requiring the sort of certainty he found in geometry. He held to the view that people were not capable of genuine knowledge of the external world or its characteristics, but that we can know, with the certainty required for knowledge, the contents of our minds. Genuine knowledge will therefore be of ideas and the relations between them. Observation can give us opinion, but cannot provide genuine knowledge. Nevertheless, Aubrey says, ‘He was wont to say that he had rather have the advice, or take Physique from an experienced old Woman, that had been at many sick people’s Bed-sides, then from the learnedst but inexperienced Physitian,’ so he did not ignore the importance of experience. His interest in optics and ballistics, which developed his interest in mathematics, arose from the Newcastle family’s interest in the production of an effective telescope for military purposes, and he generally took science to be important because of its practical consequences.

This practical approach probably explains at least part of the dispute about the historians’ Hobbes and the philosophers’ Hobbes. During the 1960s and 1970s, Quentin Skinner produced a set of articles (1964, 1965, 1966, 1972) about the interpretation of Hobbes’s writings on politics, the writings for which Hobbes is still remembered. Skinner’s thesis was that more detailed consideration needed to be given to Hobbes’s relationship to other writers of his time and the responses that he and they showed to the political events they lived through. Philosophers, it was implied, had taken Hobbes ahistorically and hence misinterpreted him. The most detailed reply (Warender 1979) does not deny that Hobbes was concerned to contribute to practical political debate of his time, but does deny that the differences between philosophers in their interpretations of Hobbes simply reflect a failure to put Hobbes in his historical context: they are, rather, differences about the account to be given of the philosophical backing for Hobbes’s position. Skinner is clearly right in his understanding of why Hobbes took up the issues he took up, why he thought that certain problems needed to be dealt with, what allusions he might be making, and what he was trying to contribute to the current political debate, etc., that require the historical context. However, it is also true that Hobbes was not simply contributing to the practical debate but thought that he had a special contribution to make because he was producing a science of politics, the science involving timeless truths. He thought that his views were just as relevant to French disturbances of the time as to those in the UK. There is philosophers’ Hobbes to study, and omission of the philosophical aspect of his work leads to misinterpretation.

The events at issue in the dispute he saw himself as entering, though Hobbes did not see himself as only, or always as primarily, concerned with politics, were political events. Hobbes was born in the reign of Elizabeth I and died on December 3, 1679, in the reign of Charles II, during which time he had been a tutor in mathematics to the Prince of Wales (accepting the position in 1646), had been awarded a pension by Charles II, was probably invited to stand as a candidate for the Short Parliament, and had lived through the English civil wars of the 1640s and the Commonwealth. He had had his books burnt in the University of Oxford and had been forbidden to publish his ideas in England, had (with some reason), felt threatened with accusations of heresy, and had seen much turmoil in Europe. The issues that concerned him in politics were basically issues of stability. He was concerned with what was required for a state to remain stable and peaceful so that people could live their lives with the security they needed in order to be able to pursue their projects.

Hobbes’s initial intellectual interests were in such fields as optics, ballistics, and mathematics, especially geometry. He is remembered by many for his attempts to square the circle, and he took part in vituperative disputes with the Savilian Professors of Mathematics at Oxford and especially with Wallis. His enduring contribution to our intellectual heritage, though, is in the fields of morality and politics, which he tried to establish in a scientific manner. His main publications in these fields were The Elements of Law; De Ci e (originally in Latin, but there soon appeared an English translation about which there is some disagreement concerning the extent to which Hobbes approved of it); Le iathan (originally in English but translated with changes into Latin so that it could be read elsewhere); and De Homine (which still lacks a complete English translation, though there is a partial translation in Gert 1972). The translations show Hobbes’s keenness to make his ideas available as a contribution to the current political debates in a number of countries, and this is also reflected in the changes in his styles of presenting his ideas (see, for example, Johnston 1986). His Behemoth, an account of the causes of the English civil wars of the 1640s, also reflects his ideas on politics. He discusses methods of proof and the nature of science and true knowledge frequently, the most extended discussion being in De Corpore, an English translation of which appears in volume 1 of the Molesworth edition of Hobbes: English Works.

Hobbes’s best-known work is Leviathan, the last of his English writings directly on the science of politics. It appeared in 1651, at the time of Hobbes’s return to England. There are two different stories about how it fits into the historical context and what it was intended to achieve. The Royalist Earl of Clarendon (in A Survey of Mr Hobbes his Leviathan) reports Hobbes as saying

… that he knew when I read his Book I would not like it, and thereupon mentioned some of his Conclusions; upon which I asked him, why he would publish such doctrine: to which, after a discourse between jest and earnest upon the Subject, he said The truth is, I ha e a mind to go home.

Many Royalists did take the book that way, as a defence of Cromwell and his Commonwealth. Aubrey, on the other hand, says

He wrote and published the Leviathan far from the intention either of disadvantage to his Majestie, or to flatter Oliver (who was not made Protector till three or four yeares after) on purpose to facilitate his returne; for there is scarce a page in it that he does not upbraid him

and goes on to suggest that the purpose was to provide justification for those who had fought on the Royalist side until all was lost and now faced the prospect of losing all their property if they did not recognise Cromwell’s authority. The most that can be done to sort out this disagreement is to see what the arguments of Le iathan will support.

Hobbes’s moral and political theory is presented as an account of how and why people emerge from their natural condition and live together in civil society. This involves giving an account of human nature, of the natural condition of mankind, and of the laws of nature that make the transition possible. There is still argument about just what Hobbes’s position is on each of these matters. It is clear that Hobbes takes the natural condition of mankind (he rarely uses the expression ‘state of nature’) to be a state of insecurity and constant fear. Though not always a condition of actual fighting, it is a condition in which people will take an aggressive stance towards each other and in which nobody can be trusted and fighting is always likely to break out. The reasons for this are to do with human nature, and the solution is the making of a contract to establish a sovereign.

Hobbes has more to say about the actual origins of states in A Dialogue Between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Laws of England, but what he is intending to do with his story of the contract is to set up a model for the establishment of a state. This, on his account, is what is involved in explaining something or giving its causes. Establishing the cause of something, on Hobbes’s account, is not the searching after particular matters of fact in the situation that we might go into in investigating a traffic accident. He gives an example to explain his method in chapter 1 of De Corpore. A figure placed before us might look like a circle, but mere observation cannot assure us that it is one. Knowledge of its cause assures us of that.

For let it be known that the figure was made by the circumduction of a body whereof one end remained unmoved, and we may reason thus; a body carried about, retaining always the same length, applies itself first to one radius, then to another, to a third, a fourth, and successively to all; and, therefore, the same length, from the same point, toucheth the circumference in every part thereof, which is as much as to say, as all the radii are equal. We know, therefore, that from such generation proceeds a figure, from whose one middle point all the extreme points are reached unto by equal radii. And in like manner, by knowing first what figure is set before us, we may come by ratiocination to some generation of the same, though not perhaps that by which it was made, yet that by which it might ha e been made; [italics added] for he that knows that a circle has the property above declared, will easily know whether a body carried about, as is said, will generate a circle or no. (Hobbes 1839, Vol. 1, p. 6)

The last sentence here makes clear that Hobbes does not seek causes as we usually do at the beginning of the twenty-first century, but seeks a model that will explain what it is to be a circle, or a civil society. He is not committed to the idea that states actually do begin from contract, and he certainly recognizes that many begin with, or are expanded by, conquest. A civil society, then, will be something that has the features of an institution established by contract. It will involve obligations on people, and those obligations will depend on reciprocity. One of the distinguishing features of Hobbes’s account is that the reciprocity would not primarily be between sovereign and citizen, but between citizens (as it is in such present-day theories as Rawls 1972); the sovereign, importantly, is outside the contract. Were he not outside it, then somebody else would have to hold the authority to determine whether the sovereign was behaving properly, and that person would then have the ultimate authority and be the actual sovereign. This is the absolutism of the Hobbesian sovereign to which so many have objected. Hobbes, both in not depending on an actual contract and in making the mutual obligations between citizens rather than between citizen and sovereign, was moving beyond the other contract theorists of his time.

Why would the natural condition, in which people have no common sovereign, be the unpleasant state that Hobbes describes? He gives several significantly different examples in discussing the natural condition, American Indians and the relationships between sovereign states amongst them, which can be confusing. The core of the notion is that people are in their natural condition if they have no common sovereign, so that somebody might be in his natural condition with respect to one person but not with another. It is not that the whole world must be in either the natural condition or civil society or that an individual person must be either in the natural condition or not. Within a family we might not be in our natural condition with respect to each other, but each of us might be in the natural condition with respect to people outside our own family.

Why should people who lack a common sovereign be unpleasant to each other? One thesis is that it is because they are self-interested and will therefore naturally clash in the absence of a coercive power to prevent them. This is the interpretation that has led to games theorists taking up Hobbes (e.g., Gauthier 1969, Hampton 1986, Kavka 1986) and to his being taken as providing a ‘realist’ model for international relations (e.g., Bull 1980) with reasons of state and pursuit of national self-interest at the center of concern, that is, of international politics as power politics. This is, perhaps, a plausible picture of international politics. Along with this idea goes the interpretation of the laws of nature as policies to be followed out of self-interest, fitting with Hobbes’s description of them as rules of prudence.

Bernard Gert (1972) argues strongly against the claim that Hobbes is a psychological egoist who believes that people always seek their own narrow interest. Certainly it seems clear that Hobbes did not believe that people could do no other than try to preserve themselves when their lives were threatened: not only did he comment on those who give their lives too cheaply in duels because of a confused notion of honor, but he admired some of those who gave their lives in defence of the Royalist cause in the civil wars and made laudatory remarks about one of them in dedicating Leviathan to his brother. This position, then, requires a different account of the laws of nature.

Hobbes was clear that the laws of nature are effective only in conditions of reciprocity and preferably conditions in which there is a sovereign to guarantee reciprocity. This at least looks as though it supports the idea that the only reason for obeying them is self-interest and particularly fear of the sovereign, but drawing that conclusion means ignoring the fact that Hobbes treats prior performance by one party to a contract as making an obligation effective on the other party just as much as does having a sovereign who will force one to comply. The laws of nature, he says, obligate in foro interno, in conscience, in the natural condition, that is, they bind in the intention, but they bind in foro externo, in the act, only in civil society. Virtues are more complex than they are sometimes treated as being: Hobbes’s point is that benevolence, for example, is a good thing because of the role it actually plays in civil society. Handing a knife to somebody who wants to kill me is not benevolent; it is simply stupid. Handing over money to a grocer who refuses to provide me with the goods I want is not required by justice. The virtues actually require a setting of relatively peaceful and secure life if they are to be possible to exercise, and Hobbes’s stronger thesis that they can be exercised only by people who are subject to a common sovereign obviously bodes ill for a morality of international relations and explains why Hobbes has been taken up by some proponents of world government. (On this interpretation of Hobbes, see, for example, Bull 1980 and Ewin 1991.) On this account, the story Hobbes tells of people agreeing on principles of peace is a model of the sort he describes in the account of the circle, and the model is for virtues. Certainly, for all his objections to Aristotle, his objections to what Aristotle said about virtues is that he identified them as means, and not in terms of their being, as Hobbes put it, ‘not properly Lawes, but qualities that dispose men to peace, and to obedience’ (Chap. 26 of Leviathan). That is, he suggests agreement with Aristotle’s general position about morality, but disagrees with the principles by which virtues are to be identified. And this fits, not with games theory, but with the accounts of ethics that now seem to be emerging from evolutionary theory about the characteristics that make our social species capable of surviving (see, e.g., Alexander 1987).

If people have these virtues as part of human nature, even if they do not have them perfectly, why would the natural condition of mankind be as horrible as Hobbes suggests? Because, in the absence of a sovereign, the virtues cannot be operable; the laws of nature will not bind in foro externo, that is, to any overt action. We are all equal in the natural condition not only in that we are all vulnerable to sudden death, but in that there is no particular reason why any of us should subject his or her reason to that of another. If we differ and neither of us can persuade the other, then there is no reason why either should submit. And in this world we do differ: we see the world in different ways from different backgrounds, are struck by different features of the situation, and we calculate differently. We have differences about the nature of justice, and we differ about who did what to whom. When we differ about something like justice, there is no reason why one should submit to the view of another and do what he simply regards as unjust. It is differences of judgment, rather than clashing interests, that the sovereign must deal with, providing an artificial reason to replace the right reason that fails to do the job. Those who insist on right reason in a dispute, Hobbes says, are simply insisting on being judges in their own case, for each man takes for right reason what is his own.

His first argument for the sovereign in Leviathan appears early in Chap. 5 in the discussion of disagreement and the need to establish an arbitrator or judge to determine disputes (though the arbitrator or judge might be a meeting of the populace voting on the matter or any number of other things, and is best thought of as a procedure rather than as a person), an arbitrator whose judgment we agree to accept before we know what it is, thus establishing rights. Without those rights the virtues will not be operable, and without the virtues, at least to a degree, the rights could not be established. The recognition of authority, on Hobbes’s account, is something without which humanity could not survive. Our moral views have the status of private views in which we can clash, but people have a capacity for politics that makes it possible for them to establish a public morality (or law) of rights that determines the sphere within which each person’s private judgment can operate.

This shows some of Hobbes’s relationship to modern liberalism. And because people do have failings, and because we need security even though we know that there are dangerous people whom we could not recognize at first sight, the sovereign must have coercive powers including the powers to tax people to cover the costs of his activities; there will be clashes of interest as well as clashes of judgment. The sovereign must be absolute in that his function is to resolve disputes, and he cannot do that if his authority depends on his agreeing with both parties. But that, Hobbes suggests, is a logical truth about any system of government and is compatible with our choosing government even by a meeting of all the citizens; it does not require subjection to the arbitrary will of one person, but does require subjection to the decisions of the community however they are determined. This brings out some of Hobbes’s relationship to modern democratic theory. The sovereign makes it possible to resolve disputes peacefully and be sure that the resolution will be enforced, so he makes it possible for us to act as one; he determines for us the will of the community, and thus makes us one person. This Hobbesian idea of sovereignty as ultimate and absolute remains influential.

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