Conjuncted: Hobbes’ Authoritarianism (2)

Hobbes built up a theory of most thorough going collectivism but a rationale of such a collectivism was the peace and the security of the person and property of the individual, which gives a tinge of individualism to the theory of Hobbes. He even allowed his individual the right to resist his Sovereign if the latter attacked the individual’s life for whose preservation the contract was entered into. In certain contingencies the individual could withdraw the allegiance to the Sovereign who was not supporting the individual’s life. “The obligation of the subjects to the Sovereign is understood to last as long, and no longer, than the power lasteth, by which he is able to protect them.” A man has a right to disobey his Sovereign if the latter commands to “kill, wound or maim himself; or not to resist those that assault him; or to abstain from the use of food, medicine or any other thing without which he cannot live.” An individual has the right to refuse allegiance to a deposed Sovereign. Hobbes is an individualist, since his entire system is based on the individual psychology of fear and self-defence. In so far as Hobbes equates the right of resistance of an individual to his capacity to resist, the right equally vanishes against the strength of the Sovereign. The right of the individual to resist the Sovereign if the individual’s life is endangered implies that the individual is the judge as to when his life is endangered. On the Hobbesian view of human nature, the individual will misuse this right and resist the Sovereign as often as he can. This will destroy what Hobbes wanted to create i.e. unlimited absolutism of the Sovereign.

Religion:

Hobbes always considered hereditary absolute monarchy as the best form of the State. He does consider the possibility of elected monarchy, under which the ‘people is sovereign in property’, but not ‘in use’. Hobbes always maintained the distinction between the natural and the artificial State. He distinguished between the ‘commonwealth by acquisition’ and the ‘commonwealth by institution’; the former being based on natural force and the latter on voluntary subjection to an elected Government. Hobbes stresses on the fact that the law of nature is obligatory not only on the basis of Sovereign command but also as delivered in the ‘word of God’. Hobbes mentions solicitude for the eternal salvation of the subjects. With dual intentions, Hobbes becomes an interpreter; of the Bible in the first place to make use of the authority of the scriptures themselves. He does criticize religion in his most important three discourses. We have seen how he answers the question, “on what authority does one believe that scriptures are the word of God?”

Historicity:

Hobbes turning to history is filled with philosophic intentions. Hobbes reiterated the fact that it is history and not philosophy that gives man, prudence. The study is concerned with the historicity of its material; that the clear knowledge of application of the norms which obtain for human actions is the knowledge of actions, which have taken place in the past. Philosophy seeks general precepts, while the study seeks the application and realization of the precepts, the conditions and results of those precepts.

Through history a reader is to be taught which kinds of aims are salutary or destructive. History is often taken up to remedy man’s disobedience. It can be stated that the development, at least in the 16^th century, justifies the assertion that the reason why philosophy turned to history is the repression of the morality of obedience.

Contribution to political philosophy:

The cardinal contribution made by Hobbes in the field of political philosophy was his doctrine of sovereignty. The concept of sovereignty had begun to develop in the hands of Machiavelli, Bodin and Grotius, but Hobbes was facile princeps to give it the shape and content, which sovereignty holds today. He was one of the first to see that the idea of sovereignty lay at the root of any State. His Leviathan aroused the indignation of almost all-important interests in England. His Erastianism (adherence of the supposed doctrine of Erastus. Subordinating ecclesiastical to secular power), was distasteful to the Church. Devoted churchmen found it absolutely intolerable that the Church was a mere department of the State. The monarchists, who adhered to the belief in the Divine Right of Kings, did not appreciate his secular theory based on a social contract. The Royalists on the other hand did not like the Hobbesian view of sovereignty because it justified the de facto Government of a successful dictator as much as that of a legitimate monarchy, and justified the absolutism of a Parliament as much as that of a King. Hobbes thought of the Divine Right of the State as compared to the Divine Right of the King. The parliamentarians viewed with scorn the opposition of Hobbes to mixed Government and constitutional checks. Although his political philosophy was little noticed in England, it created a stir on the continent. While Machiavelli had separated politics from religion and morals, Hobbes not only kept them separate but subordinated religion and morals to politics. Hobbes scored over Machiavelli in his exaltation of the State; for Machiavelli was never so absolutist as to declare that the laws of nature and the laws of God were to find their expression only through the interpretation and the will of the sovereign. The sovereignty of Hobbes was indivisible and unlimited. Hobbes knew that the basis of moral and legal right was reason, but to Hobbes, this reason was the reason of the sovereign expressed through his will only. Hobbes was an individualist in so far as he believed in the natural equality of men. His cardinality as a political philosopher lies in his deriving logically from a mass of free and equal individuals the concept of an omnipotent State. The brilliance of Hobbes was that he turned the theory of early liberalism to the defence of unlimited absolutism at a time when absolutism, born of Divine Right of Kings, was quickly losing its theoretical applications and practical implications.

CRITICISM OF HOBBES AS A POLITICAL PHILOSOPHER

The Hobbesian theory of social contract implies that man brings with him to the social contract ‘rights’ of the State of nature, which are devoid of social function, social recognition and hence they could only be powers. Hobbes proceeds to evolve his civil society on the basis of social contract, which suddenly transforms the chaos of the State of nature into the ordered civil society. Social contract is itself made in the State of nature. The Hobbesian sovereign is the representative of the people. But what guarantee is there that this ‘representative’ of the people will ‘represent’ the people by following public opinion and looking after the public welfare. John Locke attacked Hobbesian social contract according to which, when men quitting the State of nature entered into society, they agreed that all of them but one should be under the restraint of laws; but that he should still retain all the liberty of the State of nature, increased with power and made licentious by impunity. This is to think that men are so foolish that they take care to avoid what mischief polecats and foxes, may do them, but are content, nay, think it safety, to be devoured by lions. Hobbes builds up his theory on the basis of pleasure-pain theory and evolves a master slave relationship. Hobbes regards matter and motion alone as real. His dogmatic materialism lives him little scope for freedom of human will. He is neither fully utilitarian, nor fully an idealist.

The unsoundness of Hobbes’ State of nature was a State of war of all against all in which the cardinal virtues are force and fraud. So, its clear that Hobbes’ man is anti-social. How could such a man go against his own  nature and suddenly enter a State not of war, but of peace, a State in which force and fraud are deliberately set aside, a State which is founded upon the ideas of right and justice, and in which acts of wrong and injustice are put under the double ban of public disapproval and of positive prohibition? With Hobbes, the self-interest of an individual before the contract is suddenly changed into his duties towards the sovereign after the contract. If men are not all force and fraud, they do not need an absolute sovereign; if they are; they cannot render passive obedience to him for all time after the contract. With Hobbes, it was Absolutism or Anarchy. The only remedy for the good behaviour of men was the coercive power of the sovereign. Hobbes failed to realize that there were other characteristics besides the fear of law and punishment, which kept men from relapsing into anarchy, viz., reason, religion and public opinion based on the faculty of reason. The Leviathan of Hobbes essentially states, ‘This State is a necessary evil, an instrument to defend men against their savage instincts, not to achieve a free and a progressive civilization’. Hobbesian position is that in the case of sovereign, might is right. 

Hobbes was a materialist and a rationalist. His philosophy vindicated the absolute sovereignty of whatever Government happened to be in power. Hobbes believed that human nature was bad but he held that it could be rendered moral by the State, which must be preserved at all costs. It must be realized that Hobbesian State is authoritarian and not totalitarian.

Unlike the totalitarian system, it is based on contractual obligations. In his State, there is equality of all before law and there is no privileged ruling class. Unlike the totalitarian State, it insists on the outward conformity of the subjects to law and not inner conformity to opinions and beliefs. His State, unlike the totalitarian, does not swallow the individual. 

Thomas Hobbes, the Materialist (1)

Hobbes was fundamentally a materialist and was utterly hostile to the supernatural hypotheses in the realm of social thought. In his political philosophy, Hobbes tried to conceptualize the relationship between the new nation State, which had been emerging under the Tudors, and the individual citizen, who could no longer be regarded simply as having a set place in a divinely instituted order. In the old medieval society a man was bound by ties attaching to his status and by duties prescribed for him by the Church. Aristotle’s doctrine of natural kinds and natural places and his account of man as a social animal provided a fitting naturalistic foundation or the theological world view that was accepted by the rulers and the ruled alike. But with the rise of individualism and the social mobility that accompanied the rise of commerce and capitalism, this old conception of man in society no longer applied. Men had shaken off the ties of their guilds and local communities, and the new natural philosophy was beginning to render the naturalistic foundations of the former worldview untenable.

Hobbes’ picture of life as a race, in which we must suppose to have no other good, nor other garland, but being foremost, was a gruesome form of social control which could take its place and prevent the anarchy of a State of nature. The answer was to be found of course in the increasing power of the

executive power of the State and in the growth of the statute law, together with the development of the individual conscience, whereby regulation from within replaced the external authority of the Catholic Church. Hobbes distrusted the anarchic tendencies of the individual conscience as much as he loathed the extramundane authority of the Church of Rome. For him, the task was to banish both, along with the traditional ties. He thought of reconstructing the civil society as a simple mechanistic system.

Let us take a brief look at his social contract and the commonwealth.

Social Contract: Hobbes had a ready model at hand through which he might present his Galilean analysis of the rationale of civil society, the social contract theory. Despite its obvious flaws, the social contract theory was an attempt to rationalize political obligations, to substitute an intelligent bargain for mystifying appeals to Divine Right and tradition. Hobbes’ feat was to employ this model to demonstrate that absolutism is the only possible logical outcome of consistent concern for individual interests. In his attitude towards tradition and Divine Right, he was at one with the defenders of the Government by consent. But because of his depressing estimate of human nature, he came to the somewhat gleeful conclusion, that absolutism could be the only rationally defensible form of Government. Hobbes imagined the individual in the State of nature as having an unlimited right to “protect his life and members” and “to use all the means, to do all the actions, without which he cannot preserve himself.” Hobbes uses the concept of right in a way to talk about both what a person is entitled to do and what a person cannot be obliged to renounce. Hobbes’ “Rights” of nature are derivative from man’s tendency to assert him and seek power. Hobbes held that men would also be driven by his fear of death to accept certain laws of nature and prescribed that every man should lay down his rights to all things and be contended with so much liberty against other men, as he would allow other men against himself. This could be done with either not interfering with other’s enjoyment of their rights or by transferring one’s rights to another, in which case the transfer is obliged not to hinder the recipient. The mutual transferring of such rights is called a contract and the third law of nature is that men perform their covenants made.

Commonwealth: The definition of commonwealth is, “one person, of whose acts a great multitude, by mutual covenants one with another, have made themselves everyone the author, to the end he may use the strength and means of them all, as he shall see expedient, for their peace and common defence.” The person that results is the Sovereign, and everyone else is his subject. The Sovereign is created by the contract, but is not a party to it. His basic principle of human nature is revealed by his Galilean resolution, “that the dispositions of men are naturally such that, except they be restrained through some coercive power, every man will dread and distrust each other.” No motive in human nature, except the fear of death, is strong enough to counteract the disruptive force of man’s self-assertion. The fear of death must, therefore, the explanation of the existence of civil society. Sovereignty must be perpetual, undivided and absolute, for to divide and limit sovereignty would be to risk anarchy. The safety of the people is the supreme law.

Historical background

In the 17^th century England, the middle class had carried forward their rebellion against absolute monarchy based on Divine Rights. The Parliament was the representation of this class and its fight. The men who now fought the Stuart Kings were precisely those who had profited from Tudor absolutism, which now began to irritate them. The lower middle class then split from their upper counterpart and rallied around Cromwell. So far as the untitled and the unmoneyed class was concerned, they stood largely by the Throne, although they had as little to gain by the King as from the Parliament. The middle class was so afraid of the poor people as of the King. When the parliamentarians talked about the Government based on consent, they had no intention of extending the franchise to the people; it was to be their own consent. Right to property, which they held to be sacred, meant to them the principle that the King had no right to tax them without their consent; it also meant the denial of property to the poor.

It was in this climate that Hobbes arrived on the intellectual scene of England. Coke was attacking the Divine Rights of Kings and he regarded both King and the Parliament, as subject to common law which, to him, was the truly sovereign power in the land. Common law had to be interpreted by the Judges. Throughout Europe, absolute State was becoming the order of the day. Louis XI had first subjugated the feudal nobility. The Reformation then enabled the monarchs to better the Church. Henry VIII had claimed jurisdiction and powers, which no earlier British King had done. To the discomfiture of Hobbes, the cursed Puritans had undone the work so artistically done by Henry VIII and the price had to be redesigned so that the fabric may be saved from total destruction in the hands of the rabble.

Hobbes was eclectic as he borrowed from previous thinkers, but gave his own orientation to their concepts. He agrees with Machiavelli that man is selfish and that human nature is bad but insists that the State could transfer the man into a moral being by the exercise of the master’s rod. He is indebted to Bodin for his concept of sovereignty but, unlike Bodin, would impose no limitations of Divine, Natural or Constitutional law on his subjects. He agrees with Grotius that, reason is the basis of law but insists that it must be sovereign’s reason alone. He modifies the Divine Right theory by discarding the Divine origin of the State and by giving Divine Right to the State instead to the King. Hobbes like Machiavelli, subordinated ethics and religion to politics and was the first prophet of sovereignty.

Morality as a basis for his political philosophy:

Political philosophy of Hobbes was based on Moral philosophy on the one hand and politics on the other. Hobbes treated it systematically in his three discourses viz., Elements of Law, Elements Philosophiae and in the Leviathan. In so far as the principles of political philosophy are not borrowed from natural sciences, the two are independent of each other. According to Hobbes theory of human nature, the basis is in the two most certain postulates of human nature. The first being that of ‘natural appetite’. The second being ‘natural reason’. Hobbes reduces man’s natural appetite to vanity; he can’t recognize the fear of a violent death, not the fear of a painful death, and certainly not the striving after self-preservation as the principle of morality. As he aptly puts it that it is not the legality of the action, but the morality of the purpose that makes a just man.

Concept of individual:

In modern political philosophy, the individual is looked upon as the unit of the society and his liberty and freedom are of central importance. He undoubtedly has the duty to obey the law of the State, but the ground of political obligation is no longer an inexplicable divinity, which hallowed the medieval polity; but an expanded area of freedom which, obedience would release. The State is all-powerful, but its omnipotence is not the outcome of sheer physical force; it is a result of the superior moral ethos, which is the offspring of the contract. The primary functions of the modern State are threefold:

1. Happiness or Utility.
2. Material or moral progress.
3. Promotion of fear and extension of liberty.

The individual, therefore, is of capital importance and the State is, in the long run, subservient to him. It is to hinder hindrances. The hindrance may be the individual himself, or a group of individuals or a class; it may be other states, aggressive, jingoistic and expansionist. In every case, the State has to function as a shield for the individual against aggression and as a sword for his welfare. Positive in content, modern political philosophy is scientific and empirical in nature, approach, and methodology and in technique. Advances in pure and applied sciences have had a deep impact on political thought, the chief example being Hobbes.

Genesis and Evaluation of Political Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes. Part 2.

Hobbes recognizes the nature of the ideal of an exact philosophical morality,which is paradoxical and makes it the backbone of his political philosophy. In his moral philosophy also, the antithesis between the virtue and pseudo-virtue forms a constituent part. He also teaches that true virtue and pseudo-virtue differ only in their reason. Like Plato, he also recognizes only political virtues. Hobbes also distrusts rhetoric, in a way, which recalls Plato.

A pleader commonly thinks he ought to say all he can for the benefit of his client, and therefore has need of a faculty to wrest the sense of words from their true meaning, and the faculty of rhetoric to seduce the jury, and sometimes the judge also, and many other arts which I neither have, nor intend to study.

Basing his reason on Platonic approach, he thought that the difference between the analysis of ordinary values and of passions given in Aristotle’s rhetoric on the one hand, and the theory of ethics on the other, not nearly great enough. While in Aristotle’s view the common passionate valuations have a peculiar consistency and universality, Hobbes, by reason of his radical criticism of opinion as such, cannot but deny them this dignity. 

What Hobbes’ political philosophy owes to Platonism is the antithesis between truth and appearance, the fitting and the great, between reason and passion. From the very outset, Hobbes’ conviction was the antithesis between vanity and fear and for him, it was of fundamental importance for morals. But in the beginning, Hobbes understood this antithesis as an antithesis within the domain of the passions. But when he turned to Plato, he began to conceive this antithesis between vanity and fear as the antithesis between passion and reason. However, resolutely Hobbes demands a completely passionless, purely rational political philosophy, he desires, as it were, in the same breath, that the norm to be set by reason should be in accord with the passions. Respect for applicability determines the seeking after the norm from the outset. With this, Hobbes does not merely tacitly adopt Aristotle’s criticism of Plato’s political philosophy but he goes much beyond Aristotle.

Primary reason for Hobbes’ opposition to Plato, is the motive for turning to Euclid as to the ‘resolutive-compositive’ method. In this method, the given object of investigation is first analysed, traced back to its reasons, and then by completely lucid deduction the object is again reconstituted. The axioms, which Hobbes gains by going back from the existing State to its reasons, and from there he deduces the form of the right State; are according to him, the man’s natural selfishness and the fear of death. Hobbes’ political philosophy differs from Plato in that, in the latter, exactness means the undistorted reliability of the standards, while in the former, exactness means unconditional applicability, under all circumstances. Hobbes took the ‘resolutive-compositive’ method over from Galileo. He believes that by this method he can achieve for political philosophy what Galileo achieved for physics. But the adequacy for physics does not guarantee its adequacy for political philosophy. For while the subject for physics is the natural body, the subject of political philosophy is an artificial body, i.e. a whole that has to be made by men from natural wholes. Thus the concern of political philosophy is not so much knowledge of the artificial body as the production of that body. Political philosophy analyses the existing State into its elements only in order that by a better synthesis of those elements the right State may be produced. Political philosophy thus becomes a technique for the regulation of the State. Its task is to alter the unstable balance of the existing State to the stable balance of the right State. The introduction of Galileo’s method into political philosophy from the outset renounces all discussions of the fundamental political problems, i.e. the elimination of the fundamental question as to the aim of the State.

Hobbes doesn’t question the necessity of political philosophy, i.e. he doesn’t ask first, ‘What is virtue?’ and ‘Can it be taught?’ and ‘What is the aim of the State?’, because for him, these questions are answered by tradition, or by common opinion. The aim of the State is for him as a matter of course peace, i.e. peace at any price. The underlying presupposition is that violent death is the first and greatest and supreme evil. After finding this presupposition as a principle when he analysed the existing State, he proceeds to deduce from it the right State; opposed to Plato, whose consideration of the genesis of the State seems superficially akin, but has the character of reflection, of deliberate questioning of what is good and fitting. Convinced of the absolutely typical character of the mathematical method, according to which one proceeds from axioms to self-evident truths/conclusions, Hobbes fails to realize that in the ‘beginning’, in the ‘evident’ presuppositions whether of mathematics or of politics, the task of ‘dialectic’ is hidden. Hobbes considers it superfluous, even dangerous, to take as one’s point of departure what men say about justice and so forth: ‘the names of virtues and vices…can never be true grounds of any ratiocination’. The application of the ‘resolutive-compositive’ method to political philosophy is of doubtful value as it prevented Hobbes from asking the questions as to the standard. He begins his political philosophy with the question as to the nature of the man in the sense of that which falls to all men before education. If the procedure of deducing the right State is to be significant, the principles themselves contain the answer to the question as to the right State, as to the standard. Hobbes characterizes the two principles viz., limitless self-love on the one hand and that of violent death on the other as he principles of the wrong and the principles of the right. But this characterization does not arise from the analysis, for the analysis can only show the principles of the existing State, and cannot, therefore, teach anything about the rightness and wrongness of those principles, and, on the other hand, this characterization is the presupposition of the synthesis, which as a synthesis of the right State cannot arise until it has been established what is the right. This qualification, which follows the analysis and precedes the synthesis, is certainly into the frame of the ‘resolutive-compositive’ method; but it is not to be understood from this method, either in general or even in particular. The justification of the standard, which is the fundamental part of the political philosophy, is hidden by the ‘resolutive-compositive’ method and even made unrecognizable.

What is justified in this way is indeed not a standard, an obligation; but a right, a claim. According to Hobbes, the basis of politics is not the ‘law of nature’, but the ‘right of nature’. This right is the minimum claim, which as such is fundamentally just, and the origin of any other just claim; more exactly, it is unconditionally just because it can be answered for in face of all men in all circumstances. A claim of this kind is only the claim to defend life and limb. Its opposite is the maximum claim, which is fundamentally unjust, for it cannot be answered for in face of any other man. The maximum claim, the claim man makes by nature, i.e. as long as he is not educated by ‘unforeseen mischances’, is the claim to triumph over all other men. This ‘natural’ claim is checked by fear of violent death and becomes man’s rational minimum claim, and thus ‘right of nature’ comes into being, or atleast comes to light. That is to say, the ‘right of nature’ is the first juridical or moral fact, which arises if one, starts from man’s nature i.e. from man’s natural appetite. The ‘law of nature’ belongs to a much later stage of the progress from human nature to the State: ‘natural right’ is dealt with in the first chapter of De Cive, ‘natural law’ in the second and third chapters.

The ‘law of nature’ owes all its dignity simply to the circumstances that it is the necessary consequence of the ‘right of nature’. We may ask the question as to what is the peculiarity of modern political thought in relation to the classical political thought?  While modern thought starts from the rights of the individual, and conceives the State as existing to secure the conditions of his development, Greek thought starts from the right of the State. Modern and classical political philosophy are fundamentally distinguished in that modern political philosophy takes ‘right’ as the starting point, whereas classical political philosophy has ‘law’ as its starting point.

Hobbes marked an epoch not only by subordinating law to right. He was at the same time ‘the first writer to grasp the full importance of the idea of sovereignty…he must take the credit of being the first to see that the idea of sovereignty lies at the very root of the whole theory of the State; and the first to realize the necessity of fixing precisely where it lies, and what are its functions and its limits’. By this also Hobbes stands in contrast to classical political philosophy: ‘Amongst the most notable omissions of Greek philosophy is the absence of any clear attempt to define the nature of sovereignty, to determine its seat, or settle the ultimate sanction on which it rests’. In classical times, the question, ‘who or what shall rule?’ has the antiquity answer running, ‘the law’. Philosophers who could not acquiesce in the Divine origin of the law justify this answer in the following way: the rational should rule over the irrational (the old over the young, the man over the woman, the master over the slave) and therefore law over men. Granting that there are men who by force of reason are undoubtedly superior to others, would those others submit to them merely on this ground, and obey them? Would they recognize their superiority? But doubt does not stop at that. It is denied that any considerable difference in reasonableness exists between men. Because reason is essentially impotent, it is not enough to reply that reason is the origin and the seat of sovereignty. Thus it becomes fundamentally questionable, which of the men who are equal and alike is to rule over the others, and under which conditions and within which limits, they have a claim to rule. Because all men a re equally reasonable, the reason of one or more individuals must arbitrarily be made the standard reason as an artificial substitute for the lacking natural superiority of the reason. Because reason is impotent, the rational ‘law of nature’ also loses its dignity. In its place we have the ‘right of nature’ which is, indeed, according to reason but dictated not by reason but by the fear of death. The break with rationalism is thus the decisive presupposition for the concept of sovereignty as well as for the supplanting of ‘law’ by ‘right’.

Hobbes in his writings conceives sovereign power not as reason but as will. Hobbes expressly turns against the view still predominant in his age that the holder of the sovereign power is in the same relation to the State as the head to the whole man. The holder of the sovereign power is not the ‘head’, that is, the capacity to deliberate and plan, but the ‘soul’, that is, the capacity to command, in the State. The explicit break with rationalism is thus the reason for the antithesis of modern political thought to classical and is characterized thusly: ‘the Greeks believed in the need of education to tune and harmonize social opinions to the spirit and tone of a fixed and fundamental law. The modern belief is the need of a representation to adjust and harmonize a fluid and changing and subordinate law to the movement of a sovereign public opinion or ‘general will’.

The view of classical rationalism, that only reason justifies dominion, found its most radical expression in Plato’s saying that the only necessary and adequate condition for the weal of a State is that the philosophers should be Kings and Kings philosophers. This amounts to stating that the setting up of a perfect commonwealth depends exclusively on ‘internal policy’ and not at all on foreign policy. From here on, Plato’s theory of justice can be summed up thus: there is no happiness for men without justice; justice means attending to one’s own business, bringing oneself into the right disposition with regard to the transcendent unchanging norm, to which the soul is akin, and not meddling into other people’s affairs; and justice in the State is not different from justice in the individual, except that the State is self-sufficient and can thus practice justice; attending to its own business; incomparably more perfectly than can the individual who is not self-sufficient. The citizens of the perfect State, for this very reason to foreigners, happen to be either allies to be esteemed or foes to be feared. Let us take Plato’s example; if the essence of the thing is to be preferred to its external conditions, to the self-realization and self-assertion of that thing against its external conditions, then, for instance, the right constitution of the body, its health, is to be preferred to its return to its health, to its recovery after its loss of health. By this example, Plato makes clear that the good statesman carries out his legislation with an eye to peace, which is to the good internal constitution of the State, and not with an eye to war, that is, to the assertion of the State against external conditions. Hobbes differs from Plato and asserts that the recovery of health is to be preferred to the undisturbed possession of health. While for Plato and to an extent for Aristotle, and in accordance with the primary interest they attach to home policy, the question of the number of inhabitants of the perfect State, that is, the limits set to the State by its inner necessity, is of decisive importance; Hobbes brushes this question aside in these words: ‘The Multitude sufficient to confide in for our security, is not determined by any certain number, but by comparison by the enemy we feare…’ The primacy of foreign policy is not specifically taught by Hobbes, but it is an integral part of all of modern political philosophy. Immanuel Kant in one of his works has a phrase, which runs like: ‘The problem of establishing a perfect civil constitution is dependent on the problem of a lawful external relation between the States and cannot be solved independently of the solution of the latter problem’.

The antithesis between Platonic and Hobbesian political philosophy, reduced to principle, is that the former orientates itself by speech and the latter from the outset refuses to do so. This refusal originally arises from what may be called natural valuations. While Plato goes back to the truth hidden in the natural valuations and thereof seeks to teach nothing new and unheard of, but to recall what is known to all but not understood, Hobbes, rejecting the natural valuations in principle, goes beyond, goes forward to a new a priori political philosophy, which is of the future and freely projected. Measured by Aristotle’s classical explanation of morals, Platonic moral philosophy is as paradoxical as Hobbes’. But whereas the paradoxical nature of Platonic moral philosophy is as irreversible as the  ‘cave’ existence of men bound to the body, Hobbes’ moral philosophy is destined sooner or later to change from paradox to an accepted form of public opinion. The paradoxical nature of Hobbes’ moral philosophy is the paradox of the surprisingly new, unheard of venture. Whereas Plato retraces natural morals and the orientation provided by them to their origin, Hobbes must attempt in sovereignty, and without this orientation, to discover the principles of morals. Hobbes travels the path, which leads to formal ethics and finally to relativist skepticism. The enormous extension of the claims made on political science leads at least to a denial of the very idea of political science and to the replacement of political science by sociology. Plato does not question the virtue character of courage, to which speech bears witness but simply opposes the over-estimation of courage, which underlies the popular opinion. Hobbes, because he renounced all orientation by speech, goes so far to deny the virtue character of courage. And just as disdain of speech finally leads to relativist skepticism, the negation of courage leads to the controversial position of courage, which becomes more and more acute on the way from Rousseau by Hegel to Nietzsche and is completed by the reabsorption of wisdom by courage, in the view that the ideal is not the object of wisdom, but the hazardous venture of the will.

Relinquishing orientation by speech does not mean that Hobbes ‘forgets’ the question of standards, but that he poses this question only as an afterthought, and, therefore, inadequately. Whereas Plato distinguishes between two kinds of reasons, the good and the necessary, Hobbes recognizes only one kind, the necessary. Since as a result of this he is obliged to take into account the inevitable difference between the good and the necessary within the necessary itself, the question of the standard, of the good, becomes for him the question of what is par excellence necessary, and he discovers the retreat from death as the necessary par excellence. For Hobbes, the denial of natural standards was irrefutably evident on the basis of his materialist metaphysics. Thus this metaphysics is the implicit pre-supposition even of his turning to Euclid, provided that the acceptance of the ‘mathematical’ method presupposes the negation of absolute standards. For the question arises; why did Hobbes decide in favour of materialism? On the ground of what primary conviction was materialism so vividly evident for him? The answer can be based on rough indications i.e. Hobbes’ turn to natural science is to be explained by his interest not so much in nature as in man, in self knowledge of man as he really is, i.e. by the interest that characterized him even in his humanist period. His scientific explanation of sense perception is characterized by the fact that it interprets perception of the higher senses by the sense of touch; and the preference for the sense of touch, which this presupposes is already implied in Hobbes’ original view of fundamental significance of the antithesis between vanity and fear. If Hobbes’ natural science is dependent on his ‘humanist’, that is moral, interests and convictions, on the other hand a particular conception of nature is the implicit basis of his views on moral and political philosophy. It is certain that the conception of nature, which is the presupposition of his political philosophy and the conception of nature, which he explains in his scientific writings, has a kinship and which in principle are to be kept separate. It is for these reasons that his scientific investigations could exert a powerful influence on the evolution of his political philosophy. He could not have maintained his thesis that death is the greatest and supreme evil but for the conviction vouched for by his natural science that the soul is not immortal. His criticism of aristocratic virtue and his denial of any gradation in mankind gains certainty only through his conception of nature, according to which there is no order, that is, no gradation in nature. From this standpoint we can understand the difference between Hobbes’ conception of Pride and the traditional conception. ‘Pride’ in the traditional sense means rebellion against the gradation of beings; it presupposes, therefore, the existence and the obligatory character of that gradation. Hobbes’ conception of ‘Pride’, on the other hand, presupposes the denial of natural gradation; this conception is, indeed, nothing other than a means of ‘explaining’, i.e. of denying that gradation: the allegedly natural gradation concerning the faculties of the mind proceeds from a ‘a vain concept of ones own wisdom, which almost all men think they have in a greater degree, than the Vulgar’. The idea of civilization achieves its telling effect solely by reason of the presupposition that the civilization of human nature can go on boundlessly, because what tradition in agreement with common sense had understood as given and immutable human nature is for the main part a mere ‘natural limit’, which may be over passed. Very little is innate in man; most of what is alleged to come to him from the nature is acquired and therefore mutable, as conditions change; the most important peculiarities of man; speech, reason, sociality are not gifts of nature, but the work of his will. This example creates a duality in his political philosophy. The idea of civilization presupposes that man, by virtue of his intelligence, can place himself outside nature, can rebel against nature. The antithesis of nature and human will is hidden by the monist (materialist-deterministic) metaphysic, which Hobbes found himself forced to adopt simply because he saw no other possibility of escaping the ‘Kingdom of darkness’. This signifies that the moral basis of his political philosophy becomes more and more disguised, the farther the evolution of his natural science progresses. In other words, with the progressive evolution of his natural sciences, vanity, which must of necessity be treated from the moral standpoint, is more and more replaced by the striving for power, which is neutral and therefore more amenable to scientific interpretation. But Hobbes took great care not to follow this path as he thought that consistent naturalism would ruin his political philosophy. To compare Spinoza with Hobbes, Spinoza was more naturalistic than Hobbes. Spinoza relinquished the distinction between ‘might’ and ‘right’ and taught the natural right of all passions. Hobbes, on the other hand, by virtue of the basis of his political philosophy asserted the natural right only of the fear of death. On the other hand, if we consider Montesquieu, who carried the naturalistic analysis of the passions to its logical conclusion, came forward with the result that the State of nature cannot be the war of all against all this clearly exemplifies that if inconsistent naturalism is compatible with Hobbes’ political philosophy, the consistent naturalism, which Hobbes displays in his scientific writings cannot be the foundation of his political philosophy. This foundation must be another conception of nature, which although being related to naturalism is by no means identical to it.

Therefore, the foundation of Hobbes’ political philosophy, which is the moral attitude to which it owes its existence, is objectively prior to the mathematical scientific founding and presentation of that philosophy. The mathematical method and the materialistic metaphysics each in their own way contributed to disguise the original motivation to undermine Hobbes’ political philosophy. Hence, Leviathan is by no means an adequate source for an understanding of Hobbes’ moral and political philosophy, although the presuppositions and conclusions dealing with moral attitude are clearly manifest in the Leviathan.

Role and Nature of Religion in Thomas Hobbes

Hobbes’ three presentations of political philosophy may be with less justice called theological-political treatises. Hobbes with dual intentions becomes an interpreter of the Bible, in the first place in order to make use of the Scriptures for his own theory, and in the second place in order to shake the authority of the Scriptures. When Hobbes grants the theological motivation of political philosophy a last refuge in the discussion, which treats of the natural State, he indicates the connection between theology and the natural State in particular. As the natural State becomes less and less important to Hobbes, the theological arguments also become less and less important. Originally, when he had not yet conceived the idea of an artificial State, he was incomparably more under the spell of the theological tradition.

The space devoted to the criticism of religion increases considerably on the way from the Elements of Law to Leviathan and is accompanied by the deepening of the criticism. The fundamental question: On what authority does one believe that Scripture is the word of God? Is answered differently in different presentations. In the Elements of Law: On the authority of the Church, the successors of the Apostles. In De Cive: Not on the authority of the Church, but on that of Jesus. In the Leviathan: On the authority of the teachers whose teaching is permitted and organized by the sovereign power, i.e. one confesses verbally, for thoughts are free, that Scripture is the word of God, because secular authority commands this confession. But in all three presentations, Hobbes contends that all that is needed for salvation is the belief in Jesus as Christ. In earlier presentations, the belief in the immortality of soul belongs to these premises; whereas in the later works, the resurrection of the body is tacitly substituted for the immortality of the soul. The Leviathan finally openly opposes the resurrection of the body to the immortality of the soul and admits only the first as grounded in the Scriptures. Hobbes declares that unconditional obedience to the secular power is the bounden duty of every Christian. His question: is the Christian obliged to obey the secular power when that power forbids him the profession of his faith? is answered in the earlier presentations with the finding that the right and duty of the Christian in such a case is only passive resistance and martyrdom, while the Leviathan denies the obligation and even the right of martyrdom to the ordinary Christian who has not the special vocation of preaching the Gospel. In the De Cive it is a Christian dogma that Christ’s Kingdom is not of Earth but that of Heaven; in the Leviathan on the other hand, the Kingdom of God under the Old and also under the New Covenant is to be understood as a purely earthly Kingdom. In the Elements of Law, Hobbes defends the Episcopal constitution of the Church, whose rightness is proved by the fact that Christ in virtue of his sovereignty enthroned his Apostles. He also denies that in the Christian hierarchy there was a high priest to whom the individual bishops were subordinate. In the later presentations he rejects the Episcopal constitution, even the view that officials of the Church can be instituted by any ecclesiastical authority which is not in every respect dependent on the secular authority. The apparent contradiction of the general tendency of the Elements of Law on the one hand and of the later presentations on the other, is explicated by the fact that in the later writings, Hobbes attaches much less value to conformity with the teachings of the Scriptures. That Scripture vouches for priestly rule is from now on not an argument for priestly rule, but an argument against Scripture. Thus the single apparent exception is in reality the strongest corroboration of the assertion that on the path from the elements of Law via De Cive to the Leviathan Hobbes drew farther and farther away from the religious tradition. One may say, that Hobbes kept pace in his way, which was not very edifying, with the development from Anglican Episcopalianism to Independentism.

In the earlier presentation of his political philosophy, Hobbes is relatively close to Anglican Episcopalianism. Hobbes’ personal attitude to positive religion was at all times the same: religion must serve the Sate and is to be esteemed or despised according to the services or disservices rendered to the State. This view may be seen as early as the introduction to the translation of Thucydides where Hobbes defends his author:

In some places of his History he noteth the equivocation of the oracles; and yet he confirmeth an assertion of his own, touching the time this war lasted, by the oracle’s prediction. He taxeth Nicias for being too punctual in the observation of the ceremonies of their religion, when he overthrew himself and his army, and indeed the whole dominion and liberty of his country, by it. Yet he commandeth him in another place for his worshipping of the gods…So that in his writings, our author appeareth to be, on the one side not superstitious on the other side not an atheist’.

The fact that Hobbes accommodated utterances of his unbelief to what was permissible in a good, prudent subject justifies the assumption that in the decades before the Civil war, Hobbes for political reasons hid his true opinions and was mindful of the maintenance of theological convention. He says:

‘I long infinitely to see those books of the Sabbaoth, an am of your mind they will put such thoughts into the heads of the vulgar people, as will confer little to their good life. For when they see one of the Ten Commandments to be jus humanum merely, (as it must be if the Church can alter it), they will hope also that the other nine may be so too. For every man hitherto did believe that the Ten Commandments were the moral, that is, the eternal law’. It is noteworthy that Elements of Law defend a much more conservative ecclesiastical policy than do other writings.

As for the natural religion, he was skeptical originally and throughout which is more than the maintained its skeptical outlook. He considered any natural knowledge of God, which is more than the knowledge that a First Cause exists, completely impossible. Thus he systematically excluded revealed and natural theology from philosophy. To keep up an appearance that he attacked only scholastic theology and not the religion of the Scripture itself, Hobbes fought his battle against natural theology in the name of strict belief in the Scriptures and at the same time undermining that belief by his historical and philosophical criticism of the authority of the Scriptures. An apparent progress in his Biblicism indicated of his real progress in his criticism of natural theology, and thus was a proof that he originally judged natural theology more favourable than revealed theology. According to the Elements of Law, the binding force of natural law is based on natural knowledge of God; according to the later presentations it is based on revelation. The Elements of Law bring forward the proofs of the existence of God more emphatically and in more detail than does the Leviathan; for if one compares the formulation of these two works, one positively begins to suspect that in the Leviathan the argument is not seriously meant. The connecting link in this case as so often is in De Cive, where Hobbes says that without revelation atheism is almost inevitable. The traditional arguments for the supremacy of the monarchy, which are atleast mentioned in the earlier presentations, rest on assumptions of natural theology. Finally: in the elements of Law, there is a remark countering the ‘supernaturalists’ hostility to reason, to, which there is practically no parallel in the later works. Hobbes also fought his battle against supernaturalism with his weapons of materialism. At all events, as early as in 1641 in his correspondence with Descartes he defends the conclusions of his materialism with reference to God and the Soul. Before the complete elaboration of his materialism and particularly during his humanist period, when he had not yet freed himself from the authority of Aristotle, he in principle recognized natural theology.

Hobbesian Morality and State

Political Philosophy, as that branch of knowledge which consists of moral philosophy on the one hand and, and politics on the other, was treated systematically and in details by Hobbes in three different pieces of work viz., Elements of Law (1640), in the second and third parts of the Elementa Philosophiae, and in the Leviathan (1651). In all of these three presentations, his political philosophy shows traces of Galilean science and more so of Galileo’s ‘resolutive – compositive’ method. Everyone who has written about Hobbes’ political philosophy has interpreted his treatises as heavily dependent upon natural science, either for his material or method, which he heavily incorporates through out his works. However, the recognition of this fact on closer and meticulous scrutiny proves to be extremely questionable.

The propensity of natural sciences in his political philosophy is questioned, because Hobbes very well knew the fundamental differences between the two disciplines in the contest of material and method. On this awareness lay his basic conviction that political philosophy is essentially independent of natural science. This independence is corroborated because the principles of political philosophy are not borrowed from natural science, and indeed not from any sciences, but borrowed from experience, which one has of him, or to put it more accurately, are discovered by the efforts of self-knowledge and self-examination of everyone. The evidence of political philosophy on the one hand, is much easier to understand: its subjects and its concepts are not so remote from the average man as are the subjects and concepts of Mathematics which form the basis of natural science. On the other hand, ‘the politiques are the harder study of the two’; by reason of their passions, men obscure the, in itself, clear and simple knowledge of the norms which political philosophy builds up. Moreover, man with his passions and his self-seeking is the particular subject of political philosophy, and man opposes by every kind of hypocrisy the self-knowledge on which the proof of these norms rests.

Hobbes considered both political philosophy and the natural sciences as the main components of human knowledge. It can be said that Hobbes’ classification of the sciences is based on a classification of existing things into natural and the artificial. It is not so much the artificially produced things that are basically different from all natural things as the production, the human activity itself, i.e. man as an essentially productive being, especially as the being who by his art produces from his own nature the citizen or the State, who, by working on himself, makes himself into a citizen. In so far as man works on himself, influencing and changing his nature, so that he becomes a citizen, a part of that artificial being called the State, he is not a natural being. ‘Manners of men’ are something different from ‘natural causes’. The basic classification of existing things which in truth underlies Hobbes’ classification of the sciences is classification under nature on the one side, and under man as productive and active being on the other.

The question whether his political philosophy is intended to be naturalistic or anthropological, bears not only on the method, but above all on the matter selected. The significance of the antithesis between naturalistic and anthropological political philosophy for the matter becomes fully apparent if one grasps that this antithesis is only the abstract form of a concrete antithesis in the interpretation of and judgment of human nature which extends throughout the whole of Hobbes’ work. Hobbes summed up his theory of human nature as it underlies his political philosophy in ‘two most certain postulates of human nature’. The first postulate being that of ‘natural appetite’. Eclectic as he was, this postulate takes its roots as rooted in man’s sensuousness, in his animal nature. Like that of all animals, his is constant movement. But, the specific difference between man and other animals is that of reason. Thus man is less at the mercy of momentary sense impressions, he can envisage the future much better than can animals; for this very reason he is not like animals hungry only with the hunger of the moment, but also with future hunger, and thus he is the most predatory, the most cunning, the strongest, and most dangerous animal. This view of human appetite is a specifically Hobbesian view, but then is contradicted in Hobbes’ writings by his repeated and emphatic statement that human appetite is infinite in itself and not as a result of the infinite number of external impressions. Seeing this, one can note that human appetite is essentially distinguished from animal appetite in that the latter is nothing but reaction to external impressions, and, therefore, the animal desires only finite objects as such, while man spontaneously desires infinitely and this corresponds to the intention of Hobbes’ political philosophy. The two conceptions viz., mechanistic and vitalistic conceptions differ not only in substance, but also in method. The mechanistic conception is based on the mechanistic explanation of perception and on the general theory of motion; on the other hand, the apparently vitalistic conception is based not on any general scientific theory, but on insight into human nature, deepened and substantiated by self-knowledge and self-examination. In spite of these differences, the two conceptions below the surface have something in common, which allows us to characterize them both  as naturalistic. 

The naturalistic conception of human appetite is clearly expressed in the proposition that man desires power and ever greater power, spontaneously and continuously, in one jet of appetite, and not by reason of a summation of innumerable isolated desires caused by innumerable isolated perceptions

‘…in the first place, I put for a generall inclination of all mankind, a perpetuall and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in Death’. And the cause of this, is not alwayes that a man hopes for a more intensive delight, than he has already attained to; or that he cannot be content with a moderate power: but because he cannot assure the power and the means to live well, which he hath present, without the acquisition of more’.

According to him, only the irrational striving after power, which is found more frequently than the rational striving, is to be taken as the natural human appetite. The only natural striving after power, and thus man’s natural appetite, is described by Hobbes as follows: ‘men from their birth, and naturally, scramble for everything they covet, and would have all the world, if they could, to fear and obey them’.¹ In the case of man, animal desire is taken up and transformed by a spontaneous infinite and absolute desire which arises out of the depths of the man himself.

We find a more detailed definition of the irrational striving after power:

‘because there be some, that taking pleasure in contemplating their own power in the acts of conquest, which they pursue farther than their security requires; if others, that otherwise would be glad to be at ease within modest bounds, should  not by invasion increase their power, they would not be able, long time, by standing only on their defence, to subsist. And by consequence, such augmentation of dominion over men, being necessary to a man’s conservation, it ought to be allowed him’.

It is clearly seen here that rational permissible striving after power is in itself finite. The man guided by it would remain ‘within modest bounds’, would ‘be content with a moderate power’. Only the impermissible, irrational, lustful striving after power is infinite.

In four different arguments, Hobbes designated the characteristics in the difference between man and animal as the striving after honour and positions of honour, after precedence over others and recognition of this precedence by others, ambition, pride, and the passion for fame. Since man’s natural appetite is a striving after precedence over others and recognition of this precedence by others, the particularities of natural appetite, the passions, are nothing other than particular ways of striving after precedence and recognition. Speaking about the cause of madness, Hobbes says: “The Passion, whose violence, or continuance maketh Madnesse, is either great vaine-glory; which is commonly called Pride, and selfe-conceipt; or great Dejection of mind”. All passions and all forms of madness are modifications of conceit or of a sense of inferiority, or in principle, of the striving after precedence and recognition of that precedence.

The same conclusion is reached if one compares the arguments by which Hobbes in the three presentations of his political philosophy proves his assertion that the war of everyone against everyone arises of necessity from man’s very nature. Every man for that reason is the enemy of every other man, because each desires to surpass every other and therefore offends every other. The discrepancies between the three presentations shows that Hobbes himself never completed the proofs of his fundamental assertion, and, as is seen on closer inspection, did not complete them simply because he could not make up his mind explicitly to take as his point of departure the reduction of man’s natural appetite to vanity. At the end of the most important part of his work, “Leviathan”, Hobbes says:

‘Hitherto I have set forth the nature of Man, (whose Pride and other passions have compelled him to submit himselfe to Government;) together with the great power of the Governour, whom I compared to Leviathan, taking that comparison out of the last two verses of the one and fortieth of Job; where God having set forth the great power of Leviathan, called him the King of the Proud’.

The state is compared to Leviathan, because it and it especially is the ‘King of all the children of pride’. Only the State is capable of keeping pride down in the long run, indeed it has no other raison d’etre except that man’s natural appetite is pride, ambition, and vanity. 

Why could not Hobbes take man’s natural appetite, which is vanity as the basis of his political philosophy?  If this conception of natural appetite is right, if man by nature finds his pleasure in triumphing over all others, then man is by nature evil. But he did not dare to hold this consequence of his theory. For this very reason, in the Leviathan, he puts vanity in the end. Because man is by nature animal, he is not by nature evil, therefore he is as innocent as the animals; thus vanity cannot characterize his natural appetite. Hobbes in defence against the reproach that according to his theory man is by nature evil does not mention vanity at all. In laying the foundations of his political philosophy, Hobbes puts vanity more and more into the background in favour of innocent competition, innocent striving after power, innocent animal appetite, because the definition of man’s natural appetite in terms of vanity is intended as a moral judgment. He is finally obliged to attribute to the judges the wickedness which he disallows in the case of the guilty, the criminals; he betrays particularly in his description of the striving after power itself, that the innocence, neutrality, and moral indifference of that striving is only apparent. The apparent moral indifference arises simply and solely through abstraction of the necessary moral difference. Hobbes’ political philosophy rests not on the illusion of an amoral morality, but on a new morality, or, so to speak according to Hobbes’ intention, on a new grounding of the one eternal morality.

The second of the ‘two most certain postulates of human nature’ is ‘the postulate of human reason’. In accordance with the naturalistic reasoning this postulate is reduced to the principle of self-preservation: since the preservation of life is the condition sine qua non for the satisfaction of any appetite, it is the ‘primary good’. As a logical conclusion of this thought, Hobbes attempts to deduce natural right, natural law, and all the virtues from the principle of self-preservation. It is noteworthy that Hobbes prefers the negative expression ‘avoiding death’ to the positive expression ‘preserving life’. That preservation of life is the primary good is affirmed by reason alone. On the other hand, that death is the primary evil is affirmed by passion, the passion of fear of death. And as reason itself is powerless, man would not mind to think of the preservation of life as the primary and the most urgent good, if the passion of fear of death did not compel him to do so. According to Hobbes, the preservation of life is the primary good, an unhindered progress to ever further goals, a ‘continuall prospering’, in a word, happiness is the greatest good, but there is no supreme good in the enjoyment of which the spirit might find repose. On the other hand, death is the primary as well as the greatest and the supreme evil. For death is not only the negation of the supreme good; but at the same time, it is the negation of all the goods. Only through death has man an aim, the aim that is forced upon him by the sight of death, the aim of avoiding death. For this reason, Hobbes uses the negative expression ‘avoiding death’ to the positive expression ‘preserving life’. This is also because we fear death infinitely more than we desire life. 

But Hobbes also does not adhere to the theory of death as the supreme evil, since for him the tortured life is a greater evil as compared to death. So for him, an agonizing death is much more evil than death. But in contradiction, if Hobbes had considered agonizing death as the supremest evil, he would have attributed an ever-greater importance on medicine, which he tends to forget. When he says of an agonizing death that it is the greatest evil, he thinks exclusively of violent death at the hands of other men. This fear of getting killed at the hands of other men, is a mutual fear, i.e. it is a fear each man has of every other man as his potential murderer. This fear of a violent death, pre-rational in its origin, but rational in its effect, and not the rational principle of self-preservation, is, according to Hobbes, the root of all right and of all morality. He finally denied the moral values of all virtues which do not contribute to the making of the State, to consolidating peace, to protecting man against the danger of violent death, or, more exactly expressed, of all virtues which do not proceed from the fear of violent death.

Since, Hobbes reduces man’s natural appetite to vanity, he cannot but recognize the fear of a violent death, not the fear of a painful death, and certainly not the principle of the preservation of life as the principle of morality. The ever-greater triumph over others, and not the ever-increasing, but rationally increasing, power is the aim and happiness of natural man. ‘Continually to out-go the next before is felicity’. Man’s life may be compared to a race: ‘but this race we must suppose to have no other goal, nor other garland, but being foremost’. Absorbed in the race after the happiness of triumph, man cannot be aware of his dependence on the insignificant primary good, the preservation of life and limb; failing to recognize his bodily needs, man experiences only joys and sorrows of the mind, i.e. imaginary joys and sorrows. Living in the world of his imagination, he need do nothing, in order to convince himself of his superiority to others, but simply think out his deeds for himself; in this world, in which indeed ‘the whole world obeys him’, everything is accomplished according to his wishes. He can awaken himself from this dream world only when he feels in his own person, by bodily hurt, the resistance of the real world. ‘Men have no other means to acknowledge their own Darknesse, but onely by reasoning from the unforeseen mischances, that befall them in their ways’. Because man by nature lives in the dream of the happiness and triumph, of a glittering, imposing, apparent good, he requires a no less imposing power to awaken him from his dream: this imposing power is the imperious majesty of death.

The ideal condition for self-knowledge is, therefore, unforeseen mortal danger. The vain man, who, in his imagination, believes himself superior to others, cannot convince himself of the rightness of his estimate of himself; he requires the recognition of hiss superiority by others. He therefore steps outside his imagination. Now, either the others take his claim seriously and feel themselves slighted, or they do not take his claim seriously and he feels himself slighted. In either case the making of the claims leads to contempt. The one slighted longs for revenge. In order to avenge him he attacks the other, indifferent whether he loses his life in so doing. Unconcerned as to the preservation of his own life, he desires, however, above all that the other should remain alive; for ‘revenge aimeth not at the death, but at the captivity and subjection of an enemy…revenge aimeth at triumph, which over the dead is not’. The struggle which thus breaks out, in which, according to the opinion of both opponents, the object is not the killing, but the subjection of the other, of necessity becomes serious, because it is a struggle between bodies, a real struggle. From the beginning of the conflict, the two opponents have, without realizing and foreseeing it, completely left the imaginary world. At some point in the conflict, actual injury, or, more accurately, physical pain, arouses a fear for life. Fear moderates anger, puts the sense of being slighted into the background, and transforms the desire for revenge into hatred. The aim of the hater is no longer triumph over the enemy, but his death. The struggle for pre-eminence, about ‘trifles’, has become a life and death struggle. In this way natural man happens unforeseen upon the danger of death; in this way he comes to know this primary and greatest and supreme evil for the first time, to recognize death as the greatest and supreme evil in the moment of being irresistibly driven to fall back before death in order to struggle for his life. Only for a moment can he free himself from the danger of death by killing his enemy, for since every man is his enemy, after killing of the first enemy he is ‘again in the like danger of another’, indeed of all others. The killing of the enemy is thus the least far-sighted consequence of the withdrawal from death. In order to safeguard his life, not only for the moment, but also in the long run, man needs companions, with whose help he can successfully defend his life against the others. Companions can be gained in two ways, by force or by agreement. The former appears as if it stands in the midway between the killing of the enemy and agreement with him; so it is natural enough for him to try out the latter. Since fear can hardly be made manifest, but by some action dishonourable, that betrayeth the conscience of one’s own weakness; all men in whom the passion of courage or magnanimity have been predominated, have abstained from cruelty…In one word, therefore, the only law of actions in war is honour. Thus arises the relationship of master and servant. The victor who has safeguarded his honour becomes the master. The vanquished, who ‘submitteth…for fear of death’, who admits his weakness and with that has forfeited his honour, becomes the servant. The dominion of the master over the servant, despotic rule, is one form of the natural State, and as the other part of the natural State, patriarchy, is construed by Hobbes entirely according to the pattern of despotic rule, we may even say: despotic rule is the natural State. The artificial State, which is as such more perfect, arises when the two opponents are both seized with fear for their lives, overcome their vanity and shame of confessing their fear, and recognize as their real enemy not the rival, but ‘that terrible enemy of nature, death’, who, as their common enemy, forces them to mutual understanding, trust, and union, and thus procures them the possibility of completing the founding of the State for the purpose of providing safeguards for the longest possible term, against the common enemy. And while in the unforeseen life-and-death struggle, in which vanity comes to grief, the futility of vanity is shown, it is revealed in the concord of living, and of living in common, to which their pre-rational fear of death leads them, that the fear of death is appropriate to human conditions, and that it is ‘rational’. It is even ostensibly shown that it is only on the basis of fear of death that life comes to concord and that the fear of death is the only ‘postulate of natural reason’.

Hobbes distinguishes no precisely than any other moralist between legality and morality. Not the legality of the action, but the morality of the purpose, makes the just man. That man is just who fulfils the law because it is law and not for fear of punishment or for the sake of reputation. Although Hobbes states that those are ‘too severe, both to themselves, and others, that maintain, that the First motions of the mind, be Sinnes’, he yet ‘confesses’ that ‘it is safer to erre on that hand, than on the other’. In believing that the moral attitude, conscience, intention, is of more importance than the action, Hobbes is at one with the Christian tradition. He differs from this tradition at first sight only by his denial of the possibility that just and unjust actions depend wholly on the judgment of the individual conscience. In the state of nature every action is in principle permitted which the conscience of the individual recognizes as necessary for self-preservation, and every action is in principle forbidden which according to the judgment of the individual conscience does not serve the purpose of self-preservation. If, then, in the state of nature, any and every action is permitted, even in the state of nature not every intention is permitted, but only the intention of self-preservation. Thus the unequivocal distinction between just and unjust intentions holds even for the state of nature and is, therefore, absolute.

Hobbes expressly denies the existence of a law, as if it were a natural law, which obliged man unconditionally, and therefore obliged him even in the state of nature. He says: ‘These dictates of Reason, men use to call by the names of Lawes; but improperly: for they are but Conclusions, or Theoremes concerning what conduceth to the conservation and defence of themselves; whereas Law, properly is the word of him, that by right hath command over others’. Law as an obligation is the basis of a covenant between formerly free and unbound men. Thus ‘where no Covenant hath preceded, there hath no Right been transferred, and every man has right to everything…But when a Covenant is made, then to break it unjust: And the definition of injustice, is no other than the not Performance of Covenant’. The just attitude cannot be anything but earnest striving to keep one’s given word; and is therefore far from being obedience that it is, on the contrary, nothing else but proud self-reliance. From the Leviathan, it is clearly noticeable that opinion, far from being the origin of just attitude, is rather the only origin of the unjust attitude. Not pride, and still less obedience, but fear of violent death, is according to him the origin of the just intention. It makes possible the distinction between the attitude of an unjust man who obeys the laws of the State for fear of punishment, and the attitude of the just man, who for fear of death, and therefore from inner conviction, as it were once more accomplishing in himself the founding of the State, obeys the laws of the State. 

Since man is by nature fast in his imaginary world, it is only by unforeseen mischance that he can attain to knowledge of his own darkness and at the same time a modest and circumspect knowledge of the real world. That is to say: the world is originally revealed to man not by detachedly and spontaneously seeing its form, but by involuntary experience of its resistance. The least discriminating and the detached sense is the sense of touch. This explains the place of honour which is tacitly granted to the sense of touch in Hobbes’ physiology and psychology of perception; all sense-perception, particularly that of the most discriminating and detached sense, the sense of sight, is interpreted by experience of the sense of touch.

Thus it can be seen, that the moral and humanist antithesis of fundamentally unjust vanity and fundamentally just fear of violent death is the basis Hobbes’ political philosophy. As an objection, it can be called to effect that this antithesis is to be found in Hobbes’ political philosophy only because Hobbes had not yet completely freed himself from the influence of the Christian Biblical tradition. This antithesis is the ‘secularized’ form of the traditional antithesis between spiritual pride and fear of God, a secularized form which results from the Almighty God having been replaced by the over-mighty State, ‘the Mortall God’. Is this affiliation to the antithesis in Hobbes’ moral work right by itself?

On the contrary, this antithesis is an essential indispensable element, or, more accurately, the essential basis of, Hobbes’ political philosophy. Political philosophy deprived of its moral foundations is, indeed, Spinoza’s political philosophy, but not Hobbes’. Spinoza made might equivalent to right. Thanks to the moral basis of his political philosophy, Hobbes kept the possibility of acknowledging justice as such and distinguishing between right and might. Hobbes’ political philosophy is really based on knowledge of men, which is deepened and corroborated, by the self-knowledge and self-examination of the individual, and not on a general scientific and metaphysical theory. And because it is based on experience of human life, it can never, in spite of all the temptations of natural science, fall completely into the danger of abstraction from moral life and neglect of moral difference.

The contention is that Hobbes’ humanist moral motivation of his political philosophy is more original than the naturalistic motivation. The important points of his moral motivation were firmly established well before he turned his attention to natural science and especially to Euclid’s Elements. This discovery of Euclid was an epoch in his life; everything he thought and wrote after that is modified by this happening. His discovery lent maturity to his later works and whether this is the case, can be decided only after the sparse remnants of his youthful philosophy is meticulously studied. 

 

 

Monarchy in Hobbes, or The Role of Sovereign

Hobbes took up to History and carried on his historical studies with a view of politics in mind. He always considered Thucydides as his favourite author and commented on him as ‘the most political historiographer that ever writ’. Hobbes wished to communicate to his fellow citizens that Democracy is faulty and Monarchy is to be preferred. In the introduction to the translation of Thucydides, Hobbes summarizes Thucydides, ‘opinion touching the Government of the State’ to the effect that ‘Thucydides ‘least of all liked the Democracy’ and ‘best approved of the regal Government’.  Thus from the very outset, Hobbes was an ardent opponent of Democracy and an upholder of a monarchic form of Government. This view he held till the rest of his life. In the introduction to the translation of Thucydides, he formally considers the monarchic Government of Peisistratos and the nominally democratic but monarchic Government of Pericles as equivalent.  But he considers in all his expositions of political philosophy the possibility of elective monarchy, comparing it with the Roman institution of dictatorship, under which the people is ‘sovereign in property’, but not ‘in use’. Hobbes regarded absolute monarchy and dictatorship as the only practical form of Government.

Hobbes’ position with regards to monarchy never changed throughout his life, but his conception of the term ‘monarchy’ did change. In earlier presentations, Hobbes makes mention of the traditional arguments, according to which monarchy is the only natural, original form of authority, the only form which corresponds to the nature’s original order, whereas Aristocracy and Democracy are artificially produced by men, namely ‘cemented’ by human wit. Moreover, he maintained till the end of his life that paternal authority and consequently patrimonial monarchy is, if not the legal, nevertheless the historical origin of all or majority of the States. 

Hobbes at all times maintained the distinction between the natural and the artificial State. He distinguished between ‘Commonwealth by acquisition’, which is based on natural force, and ‘Commonwealth by institution’, which comes into being by voluntary subjection to an elected Government i.e. artificially. In discussing the artificial State he treats of institutional and therefore artificial State monarchy. But a noteworthy difference is compounded in the Leviathan, the right of succession is treated as a specific problem of monarchy in the discussion of ‘Commonwealth by institution’, but in the earlier presentations it is mentioned only in connection with the distinction of the natural State. Since in Hobbes’ original point of view, monarchy and the natural State were identical, this specific problem of monarchy was included in the discussion of the basis for a natural State.

Hobbes distinguishes between two kinds of natural State: the despotic State, which is based on conquest, and the patrimonial monarchy, which is based on paternal authority. The monarchy, which, Hobbes originally identified with the natural State, was patrimonial monarchy and not despotic monarchy. For Hobbes, monarchy and patrimonial kingdom were originally identical. Later on, he did come to consider, the monarchy based on paternal authority and the monarchy based on conquest as identical. This turn is the result of his conception of the idea of an instituted monarchy; compared with all forms of authority, which are not of artificial production and are not based on voluntary delegation, seem natural. In the ‘Elements of Law’, it is said in passing: ‘the monarch’s subjects are to him as his children and servants’. Monarchy is to cease to be personal Government in any higher degree than Democracy and Aristocracy. The more sharply Hobbes elaborates the idea of representation, the more clarity he achieves as the essence of institutional monarchy and the differences between the King as the natural person and the King as the political person, the less important does the natural State, patrimonial monarchy, and the affinity between monarchy and the paternal authority become for him. Towards the end, despotic Government and monarchy are diametrically opposed: ‘The King though as a father of children, and a master of domestic servants command many things which bind those children and servants; yet he commands the people in general never but by a precedent law, and as a politic, not a natural person’.

Initially, Hobbes considered Democracy as a primary form of the artificial State. In the Elements of Law, it is said: ‘Democracy precedeth all other institutions of Government’. Aristocracy and institutional monarchy are developed from the original Democracy. Thus, according to Hobbes’ original opinion, the artificial State is primarily democratic, as the natural State is the patrimonial monarchy.

It happens that the earliest systematic exposition of Hobbes’ views is the most democratic. That the precedence of Democracy over the other artificial forms of state is addressed most decisively in the Elements of Law. In the Elements of Law, Aristotle’s assertion that the object of Democracy is freedom meets with more justice at Hobbes’ hands, in spite of his rejection of that opinion, than it does later. In the Elements of Law, there is a remark about the artificial State which seems to be a residue of an argument in favour of democracy. In the Elements of Law, he says,

The subjection of them who institute a commonwealth amongst themselves, is no less absolute, than the subjection of servants. And herein they are in equal estate; but the hope of those is greater than the hope of these. For he that subjecteth himself uncompelled, thinketh there is a reason he should be better used, than he that doth it upon compulsion; and coming in freely, calleth himself, though in subjection, a Freeman; whereby it appeareth, that liberty is…a state of better hope than theirs that have been subjected by force and conquest.

From this, this opinion seems to be implied: the motive that leads to the natural State is fear; the motive that leads to the artificial State is hope or trust. This antithesis, in so far as Democracy is the primary form of an artificial State, means the preference for Democracy over patrimonial monarchy.

It is probable from the outset that Hobbes was open to democratic ideas in his humanist period. In the later years he always named the classical authors as the chief causes of democratic ideas in his age. It is not to be assumed that, at a time when he was occupied with these authors, before he could confront their authority with his own political philosophy which raised a claim to mathematical certitude, and when only the authority of Thucydides was on his side, he was as steady in his rejection of the democratic tradition as he later became, to say nothing of the fact that Thucydides after all was not an absolutely indisputable authority for Hobbes’ view in favour of absolute monarchy. The earliest presentation of Hobbes’ political philosophy is at one and the same time the one most in favour of patrimonial monarchy and Democracy. The paradox disappears if one reflects that the ideas of patrimonial monarchy and of Democracy, which are brought out most clearly in the Elements of Law, are traditional ideas, that the untraditional union of these ideas, was not fully successful until the Leviathan, and that, therefore, these ideas are of necessity imperfectly united in the earlier presentations, and as a result, stand side by side in self-contradiction. In his humanist period, Hobbes had not yet found the means of reconciling these opposed traditional ideas i.e. he had not yet developed his final conception of institutional artificial monarchy with sufficient clarity. From the starting, Hobbes’ theory of the State represents the union of two opposed traditions. Hobbes follows the monarchist tradition, in so far as he contends that patrimonial monarchy is the only natural, and thus the only legitimate form of State. In its contrast, the democratic State contends that all legitimacy has its origin in the decree of the sovereign people. With reference to natural states he follows to the end the monarchist tradition, at least as far as the historical origin of already existing states is concerned. With reference to artificial states, he follows, at least to begin with, the democratic tradition, taking pains from the beginning to show that Democracy can do no better than to transform itself into an absolute monarchy.

As far as sovereignty is concerned, Hobbes reconciles two fundamental theories of sovereignty. In one, sovereignty is the right, which is finally based on the authority of the father, thus completely independent of the will of the individual. In second, all sovereignty is to be traced back to the voluntary delegation of authority on the part of the majority of free citizens. In Hobbes’ final theory of sovereignty, the involuntary as well as the voluntary nature of subjection is more systematically reconciled; the individuals and not the fathers; at the founding of the artificial State delegate the highest power to the man or an assembly from mutual fear, in itself compulsive, is consistent with freedom. Compulsive mutual fear is voluntarily replaced by the again compulsive fear of a neutral third power, the Government, and thus they substitute for an immeasurable, endless, and inevitable danger; the danger threatened by an enemy; a measurable, limited and avoidable danger which threatens only the law breakers from the courts of law. When Hobbes reconciled the two opposed theories of sovereignty, he did reject as illegitimate those governments whose foundations could be explained neither by the traditional monarchy, nor by the traditional democratic principles. He says in the translation of Thucydides: Thucydides ‘commandeth (the Government of Athens), both when Peisistratos reigned (saving that it was an usurped power), and when in the beginning of the war it was democratical in name, but in effect monarchical under Pericles’. So Hobbes could distinguish between legitimate and usurped power and thus he originally considered only the patrimonial monarchy as the natural State, and not the despotic rule of the conqueror. His final theory is effective in the sense that it is legitimate in nature thus paving way for ‘tyranny’ and ‘despotism’ to lose all significance.

Hobbes also assumed legal limits to sovereign power. He did mention in the introduction to the translation of Thucydides that a mixed contribution of Democracy and Aristocracy deserves primacy over Democracy on the one hand and over Aristocracy on the other. In the Elements of Law, he admits the possibility not of a division of sovereignty but of the division of the administration of sovereignty into monarchist control and an aristocratic and a democratic council. His original opinion was based on the fact that the absolute monarch is by no means obliged, but would do well, to set up an aristocratic or a democratic council, and thus unite the advantages of monarchy with those of Aristocracy and Democracy. Hobbes did recognize the obligatory limitations of sovereignty. Although it is true that in all the three presentations he rejected the view that sovereign is bound by Civil laws, and even the view that the sovereign nay be under given conditions be called to account by the subjects; but originally he did not espouse sovereignty as nearly so absolute as it is seen in the Leviathan. Finally he considered that the sovereign has no obligation of any kind; for the law of nature, which is apparently binding on the sovereign, takes on full binding force only by the command of the sovereign; and no one can be bound to himselfe; because he that can bind, can release; and therefore he that is bound to himselfe onely, is not bound. Hobbes asserts that the law of nature is obligatory not only on the basis of a sovereign command but also as ‘delivered in the word of God’. But later, according to his own assertion, the word of God itself becomes binding only on the basis of sovereign command. The theory of the Elements of Law contradicts this; as according to it natural law is binding not only by the reason of revelation but also on account of the natural knowledge of God, and thus obliges all men as rational beings and in particular the sovereign. As far as the duties of the sovereign are concerned, Hobbes originally mentions solicitude for the eternal salvation of the subjects.

Aristotelian Influence on Hobbes

Let us begin by surveying the forces, which exercised a decisive influence on Hobbes before he turned to Mathematics and Natural Sciences. From 1603 to 1608 he studied at Oxford. During this time, dissatisfied with academic teaching, he turned to classical texts, which he had already read. He read them with the interpretations of grammarians. His purpose in this study was to develop a clear Latin style. The continuation and conclusion of this study was the English translation of Thucydides, which was gradually published in 1628.

At Oxford Hobbes was introduced to scholastic philosophy. He himself recounts that he studied Aristotle’s logic and physics. He makes no mention of studying Aristotle’s morals and politics. According to the traditional curriculum, the formal disciplines viz., grammar, rhetoric, and logic were in the foreground. We may therefore assume that scholastic studies were for Hobbes in the main formal training, and that he acquired the more detailed knowledge of scholasticism, which he afterwards needed for the polemical defence of his own theories. Later on, he did not take up the studies of scholastic studies as he defected to the studies of humanities.

There were four major influences on Hobbes viz., humanism, scholasticism, Puritanism, and aristocracy. But humanism in Hobbes’ youth was the most prominent of all the influences. Hobbes after the end of his university studies read not only classical poets and historians but also classical philosophers. Which philosophers? In a foreword to his translation of Thucydides he say:

It hath been noted by divers, that Homer in poesy, Aristotle in philosophy, Demosthenes in eloquence, and others of the ancients in other knowledge, do still maintain their privacy: none of them exceeded, some not approached, by any in these later ages. And in the number of these is justly ranked also our Thucydides; a workman no less perfect in his work, than any of the former.

Hobbes later considered Plato to be the best philosopher, not the best philosopher of all, but the best philosopher of antiquity. But at the end of his humanist period he repeats without raising any objection the ruling opinion according to which Aristotle is the highest authority in philosophy. The break with Aristotle was completed only when Hobbes took to the studies of mathematics and natural sciences. The polemic against Aristotle is definitely not as violent as it is in Hobbes’ Leviathan and De Cive. In the Elements of Law, in his definition of the State, Hobbes asserts the aim of the State to be, along with peace and defence, common benefit. With this he tacitly admits Aristotle’s distinction between the reason of the genesis of the State and the reason of its being. In the later stages, Hobbes rejects the common benefit and thus defects from the above mentioned Aristotelian distinction. The linkage of Aristotle with Homer, Demosthenes, and Thucydides provides the answer i.e. Aristotle seen from the humanist point of view. Fundamentally it means the shifting of interests from Aristotle’s physics and metaphysics to his morals and politics. It also means the replacement of theory with the primacy of practice. Only if one assumes a fundamental change of this kind does Hobbes’ turning away from scholasticism to poetry and history cease to be a biographical and a historical peculiarity. Even after natural science had become Hobbes’ favourite subject of investigation, he still acknowledged the precedence of practice over theory and of political philosophy over natural science. The joys of knowledge for him was not the justification of philosophy, but rather the justification only in relation of being beneficial to man, i.e. the safeguarding of man’s life and the increase of human power. Where Hobbes develops his own view connectedly, he manifestly subordinates theory to practice. He did not, like Aristotle, attribute prudence to practice and wisdom to theory. He says: ‘Prudence is to wisdom what experience is to knowledge; wisdom is the knowledge ‘of what is right and wrong and what is good and hurtful to the being and the well-being of mankind… For generally, not he that hath skill in geometry, or any other science speculative, but only he that understandeth what conduceth to the good and Government of the people, is called a wise man’. The contrast with Aristotle has its ultimate reason in Hobbes’ conception of the place of man in the universe, which is diametrically opposed to that of Aristotle. Aristotle justified his placing of the theoretical sciences above moral and political philosophy by the argument that man is not the highest being in the universe. This ultimate assumption of the primacy of theory is rejected by Hobbes; in his contention man is ‘the most excellent work of nature’. In this strict sense Hobbes always remained a humanist, and only with the essential limitation which this brings could he recognize Aristotle’s authority in his humanist period.

Even when Hobbes had come to the conclusion that Aristotle was ‘the worst teacher that ever was’, he excepted two works from his condemnation: ‘but his rhetorique and discourse of animals were rare’. It would be difficult to find other classical work whose importance for Hobbes’ political philosophy can be compared with that of the Rhetoric. The central chapters of Hobbes’ anthropology, those chapters on which, more than on anything else he wrote, his fame as a stylist and as one who knows men rests for all time, betray in style and contents that their author was a zealous reader of the Rhetoric. In the 10^th chapter of Leviathan, Hobbes treats under the heading ‘Honourable’ with what Aristotle in the Rhetoric discusses. Aristotle says ‘And honourable are the works of virtue. And the sign of virtue. And the reward whereof is rather honour. And those things are honourable which, good of themselves, are not so to the owner…And bestowing of benefits…And honourable are…victory…And things that excel. And what none can do but we. And possessions we reap no profit by. And those things which are had in honour…And the signs of praise’. In reply to this Hobbes comments ‘…victory is honourable…Magnanimity, Liberality, Hope, Courage, Confidence, are Honourable…Actions proceeding from Equity, joyned with losse, are Honourable’.

Let us try to chart out a dependence of Hobbes’ theory of the passions on the Rhetoric. In the Rhetoric, Anger is desire of revenge, joined with grief, for that he, or some of his, is, or seems to be neglected. While in the Elements of Hobbes, Anger hath been commonly defined to be grief proceeding from an opinion of contempt. To kill is the aim of them that hate, revenge aimeth at triumph. In the Rhetoric Pity is a perturbation of the mind, arising from the apprehension of hurt or trouble to another that doth not deserve it, and which he thinks may happen to himself or his. And because it appertains to pity to think that he, or his, may fall into the misery he pities in others; it follows that they may be most compassionate: who have passed through misery. And such as think there be honest men…Less compassionate are they that think no man honest and who are in great prosperity. In Hobbes’ Elements, Pity is imagination or fiction of future calamity to ourselves, proceeding from the sense of another man’s present calamity; but when it lighteth on such as we think does not deserve the same, the compassion is the greater, because then there appeareth the more probability that the same may happen to us. The contrary of pity is the hardness of heart, proceeding from extreme great opinion of their of their own exemption of the like calamity, or from hatred of all, or most men.

In Rhetoric, indignation is the grief for the prosperity of a man unworthy. In the Rhetoric, envy is grief is for the prosperity of such as ourselves, arising not from any hurt that we, but from the good that they receive. Emulation is grief arising from that our equals possess such goods as are had in honour, and whereof we are capable, but have them not; not because they have them, but because not also we. No man therefore emulates another in things whereof himself is not capable. In the Elements, Emulation is grief arising from seeing one’s self exceeded or excelled by his concurrent, together with hope to equal or exceed him in time to come.

Hobbes in his later writings uses passages from the Rhetoric, of which he had made no use of in his earlier writings, it follows that when composing all his systematic expositions of anthropology he studied Aristotle’s Rhetoric afresh each time. Hobbes’ pre-occupation with the Rhetoric can be traced back as far as about 1635. in 1635, Hobbes had considered the writing of personal exposition of the theory of the passions and as just seen, his earliest treatment of the theory of the passions was clearly influenced by Aristotle’s Rhetoric. In addition, he himself recounts that he instructed the third Earl of Devonshire in rhetoric.

Hobbes’ closer study of Aristotle’s Rhetoric may be proved with certainty only for the 1630s, i.e. in the time in which he had overtly completed the break with Aristotelianism. Moreover, one gathers from his introduction to the translation of Thucydides that the phenomenon of eloquence on the one hand, and of the passions on the other, occupied his mind even in the humanist period of his. On the whole, it seems to us more correct to assume that the use and appreciation of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, which may be traced in Hobbes’ mature writings, are the last remnants of the Aristotelianism of his youth. Hobbes after exclusive pre-occupation with poets and historians