The Routledge Guidebook to Hobbes' Leviathan

Glen Newey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415671323
• eBook ISBN: 9781317704652
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Hobbes is widely regarded as one of the most important figures in the history of ideas and political thought, and his seminal text Leviathan is widely recognised as one of the greatest works of political philosophy ever written.

The Routledge Guidebook to Hobbes' Leviathan introduces the major themes in Hobbes' great book and acts as a companion for reading this key work, examining:

• The context of Hobbes' work and the background to his writing
• Each separate part of the text in relation to its goals, meanings and impact
• The reception the book received when first seen by the world
• The relevance of Hobbes' work to modern philosophy, it's legacy and influence

With further reading included throughout, this text follows Hobbes' original work closely, making it essential reading for all students of philosophy and politics, and all those wishing to get to grips with this classic work.

1

Hobbes’ Life

Hobbes’ Life and Times

The life of Thomas Hobbes was sociable, rich, pleasant, cultured and long. Hobbes was deeply enmeshed in the society of his time, both in his long involvement with the aristocratic Cavendish family, and in his contact (see the correspondence collected in Hobbes 1994a) with many of the leading European intellectuals of the day. At his death, Hobbes left over £1,000, a substantial sum for the time. In his English verse Autobiography (see Hobbes 1994b, lxiii) he notes that ‘My sums are small, and yet live happy so’. He was a highly cultivated intellectual figure, producing translation from (and into) Latin and Greek, and engaging in speculation about philosophy, physics, theology, biblical interpretation, natural science and mathematics, among other subjects. Hobbes died at the age of ninety-one.

He was born on Good Friday, 5 April 1588, in Westport, north Wiltshire, not far from Malmesbury (he was known, indeed, known as ‘Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury’). Another biographer, Anthony Wood, wrote that Hobbes’ followers were apt to say that ‘as our Saviour Christ went out of the world on that day to save the men of the world, so another savior came into the world on that day to save them’ (Wood 1817, vol. III, 1206). Many of Hobbes’ contemporaries took a less flattering view of him, as we shall see.

Hobbes’ father, also named Thomas Hobbes, was a rural clergyman, curate of the neighbouring parish of Brokenborough. Little is known about Hobbes’ mother, but she may have been Alice Courtnell, who married a Thomas Hobbes in St Martin, Salisbury, not far from Malmesbury, on 3 May 1578. Hobbes had an older brother, Edmund, and a younger sister, Anne. Despite his clerical vocation, Thomas Hobbes senior was a notorious wastrel, though not untypical of the rural clergy of the day. He was illiterate, and apparently often drunk. According to John Aubrey, Hobbes’ friend and biographer, Hobbes’ father was given to falling asleep in church, once stirring from his slumbers to exclaim, ‘trafells [i.e. clubs] are trump[s]’. He was excommunicated – in effect, expelled from the church – for beating up a fellow vicar, Richard Jeane, in Malmesbury churchyard. Hobbes senior had previously been tried in a church court for slandering Jeane, and after the churchyard incident reportedly left the county for good. Afterwards Hobbes’ uncle Francis, a prosperous glove merchant, seems to have acted as the young Thomas’ guardian.

Hobbes attended elementary school in Westport, near Malmes-bury, and later went to school in Malmesbury itself. By the age of fourteen he had translated the ancient Greek playwright Euripides’ Medea from Greek into Latin verse. Between about 1602–3¹ and 1608, Hobbes attended Magdalen Hall (now Hertford College) at Oxford University. At Oxford he received the usual training in classical languages and literature, particularly in the works of the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, which Hobbes would later dismiss in Leviathan as ‘Aristotelity’ (L 462). According to Aubrey he amused himself when not at his studies by perusing maps in shops, and by catching birds. An antipathy to the ‘Schools’, the medieval philosophy derived from Aristotle, remained with him for the rest of his life (e.g. L 59, 227, 418, 472–73).

On the recommendation of Magdalen Hall’s Principal John Wilkinson in 1608, Hobbes was recruited to act as a tutor to the future second Earl of Devonshire, William Cavendish. In fact Hobbes’ duties extended beyond those of a tutor (Hobbes was only about two years older than his master), to acting as a general factotum in the Cavendish household. This passage into the service of the aristocracy was one made by many intellectually able young men of humble origins. Hobbes spent most of the seventy-one further years of his life as a member of the household either of the Earls of Devonshire, or of their cousins, the Earls of Newcastle.

Not much is known about Hobbes’ activities between 1610 and 1614. It was once thought that he was in Europe with his protégé William Cavendish during this period, but there are strong grounds for thinking that they did not leave England until 1614 (Martinich 1999, 29–30). In that year he and Cavendish undertook a tour of France and Italy, where Hobbes learned Italian. They returned in 1615. He seems to have made the acquaintance of Francis Bacon, the Lord Chancellor (1561–1626), soon after his return to England in 1615, perhaps helping Bacon to translate the latter’s Essays from English to Italian before their publication in 1618. Hobbes was the source for John Aubrey’s claim, in his biography of Bacon, that the Lord Chancellor died from a chill caught during a disastrous refrigeration experiment, which involved stuffing a (dead) chicken with snow. In 1620 an anonymous volume was published, entitled Horae subsecivae (‘Leisure Hours’), comprising a number of essays, some of which, it has been argued, were written by Hobbes himself. It is possible to see the foundations of Hobbes’ mature philosophy in two of them, ‘A Discourse upon the Beginning of Tacitus’ and ‘A Discourse of Laws’ (see Hobbes 1995).

Hobbes continued in the Cavendish family service, and was a board member and nominal shareholder on the Virginia Company, in which the Cavendish family maintained substantial interests (Malcolm 2002, ch. 3). William Cavendish died in 1628, having succeeded as second Earl of Devonshire only two years earlier. This temporarily left Hobbes without employment in the Cavendish family. Through the good offices of the Earl of Newcastle, however, he soon secured employment with Sir Gervase Clifton, a friend of the Cavendish family. After a second European tour to France and Switzerland as the tutor of Sir Gervase’s son in 1629–30, he returned to the service of the Cavendish family in the household of William’s widow, the Dowager Countess of Devonshire, at Hardwick Hall. In 1629 he published a translation of the ancient Greek historian Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, ‘to the end that the follies of the democratic Athenians might be laid open’, as Anthony Wood said (Wood 1817, vol. III, 1206). In his Autobiography Hobbes wrote that Thucydides was a favourite of his among historians because he showed ‘how stupid democracy is’ (Hobbes 1841, vol. I, lxxxviii).

Thereafter Hobbes extended his intellectual contacts and reputation both in England and abroad. During the 1630s Hobbes associated with members of the so-called ‘Tew circle’, which met at the home of Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland (1610–43), in the village of Great Tew in north Oxfordshire, and was involved in the intellectual coterie which met at the Earl of Newcastle’s home in Welbeck, Nottinghamshire. The Tew Circle included such friends (and sometimes future ex-friends) of Hobbes as Edward Hyde (1609–74), who later became Earl of Clarendon. Hyde wrote a history of what is usually referred to as the ‘English Civil War’,² the religious and political conflicts that raged across the British Isles between 1642 and 1651. Other acquaintances included the lawyer and political theorist John Selden (1585–1654), the poet Edmund Waller (1606–87), theologian William Chillingworth (1602–44) and the Oxford cleric Gilbert Sheldon (1598–1677). The Circle was familiar with the work of Hobbes’ great contemporary, the Dutch legal and political theorist Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), and with continental philosophical doctrines to which Hobbes had already been exposed.

This exposure arose from a third tour of mainland Europe which Hobbes undertook from 1634 to 1636, accompanying the third Earl of Devonshire (who, though still a minor, had succeeded to the title when his father died in 1628). They visited France and Italy, including two prolonged stays in Paris. There he met Marin Mersenne (1588–1648), a friar from the order of Minims, who kept in contact with a wide range of European philosophers and intellectuals, and helped to spread their ideas. Hobbes also met the great astronomer Galileo in Florence. Of his acquaintance with Mersenne, he proudly writes in his verse Autobiography that after showing the friar his writings on motion, ‘I was reputed a philosopher’ (l. 136). His translation of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, with the English title A Briefe of the Art of Rhetorique, was published in 1637. The translation incorporated radical revisions to Aristotle’s text (it was in fact a translation of a Latin summary of the work which Hobbes had previously used for tuition purposes). During the later 1630s Hobbes also wrote a tract in Latin on optics.

The 1630s were also years of political unrest in England. King Charles I failed to summon Parliament during the eleven years between the dissolution of 1629 and the Short Parliament of April 1640. In the election for this parliament, Hobbes stood as a candidate for Derby, but the influence of Devonshire was not enough to secure Hobbes’ election. The King’s eleven years of personal rule (i.e. rule by Charles I and his advisers without summoning Parliament) were marked by growing dissent, including the famous Ship Money case of 1637, which raised the question whether there were any limitations on royal prerogative. Charles also launched a disastrous invasion of Scotland to enforce the Anglican prayer book in 1639. As political ferment grew, Hobbes published the pro-royalist Elements of Law in May 1640.

Moves against Charles’ supporters by the Long Parliament, which opened later in 1640, caused Hobbes to leave for Paris in November of that year – ‘the first of all that fled’, as Hobbes himself said later. He would remain in exile for eleven years. In France he renewed his acquaintance with Mersenne and the other French intellectuals he had met on his visit to Paris in 1634–36. His second major work of political theory, the Latin work De cive, was circulated in a limited edition in 1642 and published in 1647 (an English version was published in 1650, a French translation by Hobbes’ friend Samuel Sorbière having appeared in 1649), though it may have been substantially complete by 1640. De cive was part of a projected trilogy whose other two parts did not appear until the 1650s. Hobbes also wrote a lengthy refutation of the Catholic philosopher Thomas White’s book De Mundo, which was not published during Hobbes’ lifetime (now usually referred to as the Anti-White) (Hobbes 1976).³ He wrote a tract on optics in English, later incorporated into De homine (Hobbes 1841, vol. II).

Hobbes remained in France until after the publication of Leviathan in mid-1651, by which time Charles had been defeated in the civil wars, executed and replaced by a republican regime. Hobbes seems to have begun writing the book in 1649, and must have composed it very rapidly: he had written thirty-seven of the chapters (which became forty-seven in all, together with the ‘Review, and Conclusion’, though Hobbes had originally projected fifty) by May 1650 (Malcolm, in Hobbes 2012, vol. I, 2). The rest of the book was more or less finished by the end of that year. It was published in London in April or May 1651.⁴

When he was asked by his old friend Edward Hyde why he had published it, Hobbes famously replied – in a mood, Hyde recorded, ‘between jest and earnest’ – that ‘[t]he truth is, I have a mind to go home’ (as Hyde recounted in his ‘A Survey of Mr Hobbs His Leviathan’, in Rogers 1995, 184). This presumably indicates that Hobbes thought Leviathan would help him to find favour with the new republican regime in England, despite his association with royalism during the civil wars. If this was indeed Hobbes’ calculation, it was correct (see Collins 2005). He returned to England in 1651–52 and remained unmolested by the republican regime.

However, the book’s vehement hostility to Roman Catholicism – chapter 47 of the book compares the Papacy with ‘the Kingdom of Fairies’ – incurred the displeasure both of the French clergy and the English court in exile (Charles I’s widow Henrietta Maria was a Catholic). The book’s views on church government, sovereignty and controversial points of theology were also unwelcome in orthodox royalist circles and indeed Anthony Ascham, one of the so-called ‘de facto’ apologists for the new English republican regime, whose views bore a passing similarity to Hobbes’, had recently been murdered in Spain by royalist agents. Just as the Elements of Law had prompted Hobbes’ departure from England to France in 1640, the publication of Leviathan sped him back from France to England eleven years later.

Back in England Hobbes continued to publish prolifically, though he was now well into his sixties and in poor health. He engaged in a lengthy dispute with Bishop John Bramhall (1594–1663) on free will, and published the first and second parts of the Elements of Philosophy, the De corpore (1655) and De homine (1658). The latter adds some important material to the political theory set out in Leviathan. The publication of Leviathan made Hobbes famous. A number of attacks on the book soon appeared in print, such as Alexander Ross’ (1591–1654) Leviathan Drawn Out With a Hook of 1653, George Lawson’s (1598–1678) An Examination … of Mr Hobbs His Leviathan, which appeared in 1657, and Bramhall’s The Catching of Leviathan, published in the following year.

In 1660 Charles II returned from exile as the restored Stuart monarch. As a supporter of the King during the civil wars, Hobbes was not initially threatened by the persecution of former republicans and regicides that followed the Restoration. But with the Restoration of the monarchy came that of the Church of England too, and a series of statutes reasserted religious orthodoxy after the free-for-all of the late 1640s and 1650s. Hobbes duly found himself under threat of investigation by the House of Lords as part of the proceedings on a bill against ‘Atheism and Profanity’ in 1666–68. This episode is discussed in greater detail in Chapter 11.

During this decade, as he approached the age of eighty, Hobbes remained very active: the Latin version of Leviathan dates from this decade (for the dating of the Latin text, see Chapter 2), as probably does his Dialogue between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Laws of England.⁵ Hobbes’ sight was failing by this time, and because he was no longer capable of writing in person he had to dictate to an assistant. Behemoth, his narrative of the background to the civil wars in Britain in the 1640s, was written in 1670, though it was not published until 1679, the year of his death.

In the final decade of his life Hobbes lost little of his intellectual vigour. He continued to engage in polemics. One of these involved John Fell (1625–86), the Hobbes-hating Dean of Christ Church, Oxford. Fell demanded changes to a (largely favourable) biography of Hobbes which was included by Anthony Wood in the latter’s History and Antiquities of the University of Oxford. In the 1670s Hobbes also wrote and published a history of the church, the Historia Ecclesiastica, and two works on mathematics, as well as a translation of Homer, The Travels of Ulysses, which went through several editions before Hobbes died. According to Bishop White Kennett, at this stage of his life Hobbes would have ‘dinner’ at about noon, and would then retire to his study ‘with 10 or 12 pipes of tobacco laid by him’; he would then start ‘smoking, and thinking, and writing for several hours’.

Hobbes was a man of idiosy...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Series editor’s preface
• Preface to the second edition
• Acknowledgements
• List of figures
• Introduction
• 1. Hobbes’ life
• 2. Leviathan: the book
• 3. Human knowledge, reason and ignorance
• 4. The state of nature: law and right
• 5. State of nature to commonwealth
• 6. Contract and consent
• 7. Sovereignty, state, commonwealth
• 8. Law, crime, punishment
• 9. Religious liberty and toleration
• 10. Leviathan and international relations
• 11. Leviathan: early responses
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index