Thomas Hobbes is one of the most important figures in the development of modern science and modern politics. As a contemporary of Bacon, Galileo and Descartes, he contributed to the radical critique of medieval Scholasticism and classical philosophy that marked the beginning of the modern age. But he alone sought to develop a comprehensive philosophy—one that treated natural science, political science and theory of scientific method in a unified system. He published this system in three volumes, under the titles Body (1655), Man (1657) and Citizen (1642). In the course of his long career, Hobbes also published treatises on mathematics, on free will and determinism, on the English common law system, and on the English Civil War. Although his work covered the whole of philosophy, Hobbes made his greatest contribution to modern thought in the field of political philosophy. On three separate occasions, he presented his theory of humankind and the state; the most famous of his political treatises, the Leviathan (1651), is generally recognized as the greatest work of political philosophy in the English language.
In all branches of knowledge, Hobbes’s thought is characterized by a pervasive sense that the ancient and medieval philosophers had failed to discover true knowledge, and that a new alternative was urgently needed. It is this sense that defines Hobbes as a modern thinker and gives his work its originality, verve and self-conscious radicalism. In natural science (metaphysics and physics), he rejected the Scholastic and Aristotelian ideas of abstract essences and immaterial causes as nothing more than vain and empty speech. The nature of reality is matter in motion, which implied that all phenomena of nature and human nature could be explained in terms of mechanical causation. In the theory of science, Hobbes dismissed the disputative method of Scholasticism and classical dialectics as forms of rhetoric that merely appealed to the authority of common opinion and produced endless verbal controversies. The correct method of reasoning combined the resolutive-compositive method of Galileo and the deductive method of Euclidean geometry. By combining these, Hobbes believed that every branch of knowledge, including the study of politics, could be turned into an exact deductive science.
In political science proper, Hobbes was no less radical in his rejection of the tradition. He opposed the republicanism of classical antiquity, the ecclesiastical politics of medieval Europe, and the doctrine of mixed-monarchy prevalent in seventeenth-century England. All these doctrines, Hobbes claimed, were seditious in intent or effect, because they were derived from ‘higher’ laws that allowed people to appeal to a standard above the will of the sovereign. Hobbes blamed such appeals, exploited by ambitious priests and political demagogues, for the political instability of his times, culminating in the English Civil War. The solution he proposed was political absolutism—the unification of sovereignty in an all-powerful state that derived its authority not from higher laws but from de facto power and the consent of the people.
With these three teachings—mechanistic materialism, exact deductive science, and political absolutism—Hobbes sought to establish science and politics on a new foundation that would produce certain knowledge and lasting civil peace.
From the first, Hobbes’s philosophical system generated controversy. In the seventeenth century, Hobbes was treated as a dangerous subversive by all who believed in, or had an interest in, the traditional order. Christian clergymen condemned his materialist view of the world as atheistic and his mechanistic view of humankind as soulless; legal scholars attacked his doctrine of absolutism for placing the sovereign above the civil laws; even kings, whose power Hobbes sought to augment, were wary of accepting the teaching that political authority rested on force and consent rather than on divine right (Mintz 1962). In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries his defence of absolute and arbitrary power ran counter to the general demand for constitutional government. Hobbes has been treated more favourably in the twentieth century then ever before. Although some scholars have seen certain parallels between Hobbes’s Leviathan state and twentieth-century tyrannies (Collingwood 1942), most clearly recognize that Hobbes’s enlightened despot, whose primary goal is to secure civil peace, is vastly different from the brutal and fanatical heads of totalitarian states (Strauss 1959).
Such studies can be divided into four groups, each reflecting the perspective of a contemporary school of philosophy as it probes the origins of modernity. First, guided by the concerns of contemporary analytical philosophy, one group argues for the primacy of method and formal logic in Hobbes’s system and views his politics as a set of formal rules which serve as utilitarian guidelines for the state (McNeilly 1968; Watkins 1965). A second group has examined Hobbes’s theory of political obligation from a Kantian point of view. According to this interpretation, Hobbes’s argument for obedience goes beyond calculations of utility by appealing to a sense of moral duty in keeping the social contract, and by requiring citizens to have just intentions (Taylor 1938; Warrender 1957). Developed by Marxist scholars, a third interpretation uses Hobbes to understand the ideological origins of bourgeois society and to provide a critical perspective on bourgeois liberalism by exposing its Hobbesian roots (Coleman 1977; Macpherson 1962). The fourth interpretation reflects the concerns of the natural law school. According to the foremost scholar of this school, Hobbes is the decisive figure in transforming the natural law tradition from classical natural right to modern natural ‘rights’; Hobbes accomplished this revolution by asserting that the right of self-preservation, grounded in the fear of violent death, is the only justifiable moral claim (Strauss 1936).
Robert P.Kraynak
Colgate University
References
Coleman, F.M. (1977) Hobbes and America: Exploring the Constitutional Foundations, Toronto.
Collingwood, R.G. (1942) The New Leviathan, Oxford.
McNeilly, F.S. (1968) The Anatomy of Leviathan, London.
Macpherson, C.B. (1962) The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, Oxford.
Mintz, S.I. (1962) The Hunting of Leviathan, Cambridge, UK.
Strauss, L. (1936) The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, Chicago.
—(1959) ‘On the basis of Hobbes’s political philosophy’, in What is Political Philosophy?, New York.
Taylor, A.E. (1938) ‘The ethical doctrine of Hobbes’, Philosophy 13.
Warrender, H. (1957) The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: His Theory of Obligation, Oxford.
Watkins, J.W.N. (1965) Hobbes’s System of Ideas: A Study in the Political Significance of Philosophical Theories, London.
