Thomas Hobbes
English philosopher
born April 5, 1588, Westport, Wiltshire, Eng.
died Dec. 4, 1679, Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire
Main
English philosopher, scientist, and historian, best known for his
political philosophy, especially as articulated in his masterpiece
Leviathan (1651). Hobbes viewed government primarily as a device for
ensuring collective security. Political authority is justified by a
hypothetical social contract among the many that vests in a sovereign
person or entity the responsibility for the safety and well-being of
all. In metaphysics, Hobbes defended materialism, the view that only
material things are real. His scientific writings present all observed
phenomena as the effects of matter in motion. Hobbes was not only a
scientist in his own right but a great systematizer of the scientific
findings of his contemporaries, including Galileo and Johannes Kepler.
His enduring contribution is as a political philosopher who justified
wide-ranging government powers on the basis of the self-interested
consent of citizens.
Early life
Hobbes’s father was a quick-tempered vicar of a small Wiltshire parish
church. Disgraced after engaging in a brawl at his own church door, he
disappeared and abandoned his three children to the care of his brother,
a well-to-do glover in Malmesbury. When he was four years old, Hobbes
was sent to school at Westport, then to a private school, and finally,
at 15, to Magdalen Hall in the University of Oxford, where he took a
traditional arts degree and in his spare time developed an interest in
maps.
For nearly the whole of his adult life, Hobbes worked for different
branches of the wealthy and aristocratic Cavendish family. Upon taking
his degree at Oxford in 1608, he was employed as page and tutor to the
young William Cavendish, afterward the second earl of Devonshire. Over
the course of many decades Hobbes served the family and their associates
as translator, traveling companion, keeper of accounts, business
representative, political adviser, and scientific collaborator. Through
his employment by William Cavendish, the first earl of Devonshire, and
his heirs, Hobbes became connected with the royalist side in disputes
between the king and Parliament that continued until the 1640s and that
culminated in the English Civil Wars (1642–51). Hobbes also worked for
the marquess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, a cousin of William Cavendish, and
Newcastle’s brother, Sir Charles Cavendish. The latter was the centre of
the “Wellbeck Academy,” an informal network of scientists named for one
of the family houses at Wellbeck Abbey in Nottinghamshire.
Intellectual development
The two branches of the Cavendish family nourished Hobbes’s enduring
intellectual interests in politics and natural science, respectively.
Hobbes served the earls of Devonshire intermittently until 1628;
Newcastle and his brother employed him in the following decade. He
returned to the Devonshires after the 1640s. Through both branches of
the Cavendish family, and through contacts he made in his own right on
the Continent as traveling companion to various successors to the
Devonshire title, Hobbes became a member of several networks of
intellectuals in England. Farther afield, in Paris, he became acquainted
with the circle of scientists, theologians, and philosophers presided
over by the theologian Marin Mersenne. This circle included René
Descartes.
Hobbes was exposed to practical politics before he became a student
of political philosophy. The young William Cavendish was a member of the
1614 and 1621 Parliaments, and Hobbes would have followed his
contributions to parliamentary debates. Further exposure to politics
came through the commercial interests of the earls of Devonshire. Hobbes
attended many meetings of the governing body of the Virginia Company, a
trading company established by James I to colonize parts of the eastern
coast of North America, and came into contact with powerful men there.
(Hobbes himself was given a small share in the company by his employer.)
He also confronted political issues through his connection with figures
who met at Great Tew; with them he debated not only theological
questions but also the issues of how the Anglican church should be led
and organized and how its authority should be related to that of any
English civil government.
In the late 1630s Parliament and the king were in conflict over how
far normal kingly powers could be exceeded in exceptional circumstances,
especially in regard to raising money for armies. In 1640 Hobbes wrote a
treatise defending King Charles I’s own wide interpretation of his
prerogatives. Royalist members of Parliament used arguments from
Hobbes’s treatise in debates, and the treatise itself circulated in
manuscript form. The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic (written in
1640, published in a misedited unauthorized version in 1650) was
Hobbes’s first work of political philosophy, though he did not intend it
for publication as a book.
The development of Hobbes the scientist began in his middle age. He
was not trained in mathematics or the sciences at Oxford, and his
Wiltshire schooling was strongest in classical languages. His interest
in motion and its effects was stimulated mainly through his conversation
and reading on the Continent, as well as through his association with
the scientifically and mathematically minded Wellbeck Cavendishes. In
1629 or 1630 Hobbes was supposedly charmed by Euclid’s method of
demonstrating theorems in the Elements. According to a contemporary
biographer, he came upon a volume of Euclid in a gentleman’s study and
fell in love with geometry. Later, perhaps in the mid-1630s, he had
gained enough sophistication to pursue independent research in optics, a
subject he later claimed to have pioneered. Within the Wellbeck Academy,
he exchanged views with other people interested in the subject. And as a
member of Mersenne’s circle in Paris after 1640, he was taken seriously
as a theorist not only of ethics and politics but of optics and
ballistics. Indeed, he was even credited with competence in mathematics
by some very able French mathematicians, including Gilles Personne de
Roberval.
Self-taught in the sciences and an innovator at least in optics,
Hobbes also regarded himself as a teacher or transmitter of sciences
developed by others. In this connection he had in mind sciences that,
like his own optics, traced observed phenomena to principles about the
sizes, shapes, positions, speeds, and paths of parts of matter. His
great trilogy—De Corpore (1655; “Concerning Body”), De Homine (1658;
“Concerning Man”), and De Cive (1642; “Concerning the Citizen”)—was his
attempt to arrange the various pieces of natural science, as well as
psychology and politics, into a hierarchy, ranging from the most general
and fundamental to the most specific. Although logically constituting
the last part of his system, De Cive was published first, because
political turmoil in England made its message particularly timely and
because its doctrine was intelligible both with and without
natural-scientific preliminaries. De Corpore and De Homine incorporated
the findings of, among others, Galileo on the motions of terrestrial
bodies, Kepler on astronomy, William Harvey on the circulation of the
blood, and Hobbes himself on optics. The science of politics contained
in De Cive was substantially anticipated in Part II of The Elements of
Law and further developed in Leviathan; or, The Matter, Form, and Power
of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil (1651), the last—and in the
English-speaking world the most famous—formulation of Hobbes’s political
philosophy (see below Hobbes’s system).
Exile in Paris
When strife became acute in 1640, Hobbes feared for his safety. Shortly
after completing The Elements of Law, he fled to Paris, where he
rejoined Mersenne’s circle and made contact with other exiles from
England. He would remain in Paris for more than a decade, working on
optics and on De Cive, De Corpore, and Leviathan. In 1646 the young
prince of Wales, later to become Charles II, sought refuge in Paris, and
Hobbes accepted an invitation to instruct him in mathematics.
Political philosophy
Hobbes presented his political philosophy in different forms for
different audiences. De Cive states his theory in what he regarded as
its most scientific form. Unlike The Elements of Law, which was composed
in English for English parliamentarians—and which was written with local
political challenges to Charles I in mind—De Cive was a Latin work for
an audience of Continental savants who were interested in the “new”
science—that is, the sort of science that did not appeal to the
authority of the ancients but approached various problems with fresh
principles of explanation.
De Cive’s break from the ancient authority par
excellence—Aristotle—could not have been more loudly advertised. After
only a few paragraphs, Hobbes rejects one of the most famous theses of
Aristotle’s politics, namely that human beings are naturally suited to
life in a polis and do not fully realize their natures until they
exercise the role of citizen. Hobbes turns Aristotle’s claim on its
head: human beings, he insists, are by nature unsuited to political
life. They naturally denigrate and compete with each other, are very
easily swayed by the rhetoric of ambitious men, and think much more
highly of themselves than of other people. In short, their passions
magnify the value they place on their own interests, especially their
near-term interests. At the same time, most people, in pursuing their
own interests, do not have the ability to prevail over competitors. Nor
can they appeal to some natural common standard of behaviour that
everyone will feel obliged to abide by. There is no natural
self-restraint, even when human beings are moderate in their appetites,
for a ruthless and bloodthirsty few can make even the moderate feel
forced to take violent preemptive action in order to avoid losing
everything. The self-restraint even of the moderate, then, easily turns
into aggression. In other words, no human being is above aggression and
the anarchy that goes with it.
War comes more naturally to human beings than political order.
Indeed, political order is possible only when human beings abandon their
natural condition of judging and pursuing what seems best to each and
delegate this judgment to someone else. This delegation is effected when
the many contract together to submit to a sovereign in return for
physical safety and a modicum of well-being. Each of the many in effect
says to the other: “I transfer my right of governing myself to X (the
sovereign) if you do too.” And the transfer is collectively entered into
only on the understanding that it makes one less of a target of attack
or dispossession than one would be in one’s natural state. Although
Hobbes did not assume that there was ever a real historical event in
which a mutual promise was made to delegate self-government to a
sovereign, he claimed that the best way to understand the state was to
conceive of it as having resulted from such an agreement.
In Hobbes’s social contract, the many trade liberty for safety.
Liberty, with its standing invitation to local conflict and finally
all-out war—a “war of every man against every man”—is overvalued in
traditional political philosophy and popular opinion, according to
Hobbes; it is better for people to transfer the right of governing
themselves to the sovereign. Once transferred, however, this right of
government is absolute, unless the many feel that their lives are
threatened by submission. The sovereign determines who owns what, who
will hold which public offices, how the economy will be regulated, what
acts will be crimes, and what punishments criminals should receive. The
sovereign is the supreme commander of the army, supreme interpreter of
law, and supreme interpreter of scripture, with authority over any
national church. It is unjust—a case of reneging on what one has
agreed—for any subject to take issue with these arrangements, for, in
the act of creating the state or by receiving its protection, one agrees
to leave judgments about the means of collective well-being and security
to the sovereign. The sovereign’s laws and decrees and appointments to
public office may be unpopular; they may even be wrong. But unless the
sovereign fails so utterly that subjects feel that their condition would
be no worse in the free-for-all outside the state, it is better for the
subjects to endure the sovereign’s rule.
It is better both prudentially and morally. Because no one can
prudently welcome a greater risk of death, no one can prudently prefer
total liberty to submission. Total liberty invites war, and submission
is the best insurance against war. Morality too supports this
conclusion, for, according to Hobbes, all the moral precepts enjoining
virtuous behaviour can be understood as derivable from the fundamental
moral precept that one should seek peace—that is to say, freedom from
war—if it is safe to do so. Without peace, he observed, man lives in
“continual fear, and danger of violent death,” and what life he has is
“solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” What Hobbes calls the “laws
of nature,” the system of moral rules by which everyone is bound, cannot
be safely complied with outside the state, for the total liberty that
people have outside the state includes the liberty to flout the moral
requirements if one’s survival seems to depend on it.
The sovereign is not a party to the social contract; he receives the
obedience of the many as a free gift in their hope that he will see to
their safety. The sovereign makes no promises to the many in order to
win their submission. Indeed, because he does not transfer his right of
self-government to anyone, he retains the total liberty that his
subjects trade for safety. He is not bound by law, including his own
laws. Nor does he do anything unjustly if he makes decisions about his
subjects’s safety and well-being that they do not like.
Although the sovereign is in a position to judge the means of
survival and well-being for the many more dispassionately than they are
able to do themselves, he is not immune to self-interested passions.
Hobbes realizes that the sovereign may behave iniquitously. He insists
that it is very imprudent for a sovereign to act so iniquitously that he
disappoints his subjects’s expectation of safety and makes them feel
insecure. Subjects who are in fear of their lives lose their obligations
to obey and, with that, deprive the sovereign of his power. Reduced to
the status of one among many by the defection of his subjects, the
unseated sovereign is likely to feel the wrath of those who submitted to
him in vain.
Hobbes’s masterpiece, Leviathan (1651), does not significantly depart
from the view of De Cive concerning the relation between protection and
obedience, but it devotes much more attention to the civil obligations
of Christian believers and the proper and improper roles of a church
within a state. Hobbes argues that believers do not endanger their
prospects of salvation by obeying a sovereign’s decrees to the letter,
and he maintains that churches do not have any authority that is not
granted by the civil sovereign.
Hobbes’s political views exerted a discernible influence on his work
in other fields, including historiography and legal theory. His
political philosophy is chiefly concerned with the way in which
government must be organized in order to avoid civil war. It therefore
encompasses a view of the typical causes of civil war, all of which are
represented in Behemoth; or, The Long Parliament (1679), his history of
the English Civil Wars. Hobbes produced the first English translation of
Thucydides’ History of the Pelopponesian War, which he thought contained
important lessons for his contemporaries regarding the excesses of
democracy, the worst kind of dilution of sovereign authority, in his
view.
Hobbes’s works on church history and the history of philosophy also
strongly reflect his politics. He was firmly against the separation of
government powers, either between branches of government or between
church and state. His ecclesiastical history emphasizes the way in which
power-hungry priests and popes threatened legitimate civil authority.
His history of philosophy is mostly concerned with how metaphysics was
used as a means of keeping people under the sway of Roman Catholicism at
the expense of obedience to a civil authority. His theory of law
develops a similar theme regarding the threats to a supreme civil power
posed by common law and the multiplication of authoritative legal
interpreters.
Return to England
There are signs that Hobbes intended Leviathan to be read by a monarch,
who would be able to take the rules of statecraft from it. A specially
bound copy was given to Prince Charles while he was in exile in Paris.
Unfortunately, Hobbes’s suggestion in Leviathan that a subject had the
right to abandon a ruler who could no longer protect him gave serious
offense to the prince’s advisers. Barred from the exiled court and under
suspicion by the French authorities for his attack on the papacy (see
below), Hobbes found his position in Paris becoming daily more
intolerable. At the end of 1651, at about the time that Leviathan was
published, he returned to England and made his peace with the new regime
of Oliver Cromwell. Hobbes submitted to that authority for a long time
before the monarchy was restored in 1660.
From the time of the Restoration in 1660, Hobbes enjoyed a new
prominence. Charles II received Hobbes again into favour. Although
Hobbes’s presence at court scandalized the bishops and the chancellor,
the king relished his wit. He even granted Hobbes a pension of £100 a
year and had his portrait hung in the royal closet. It was not until
1666, when the House of Commons prepared a bill against atheism and
profaneness, that Hobbes felt seriously endangered, for the committee to
which the bill was referred was instructed to investigate Leviathan.
Hobbes, then verging upon 80, burned such of his papers as he thought
might compromise him.
Optics
Hobbes’s most significant contributions to natural science were in the
field of optics. An optical theory in his day was expected to pronounce
on the nature of light, on the transmission of light from the Sun to the
Earth, on reflection and refraction, and on the workings of optical
instruments such as mirrors and lenses. Hobbes took up these topics in
several relatively short treatises and in correspondence, including with
Descartes on the latter’s Dioptrics (1637). The most polished of
Hobbes’s optical works was A Minute or First Draught of the Optiques
(1646).
In its mature form, Hobbes’s optical theory held that the dilations
and contractions of an original light source, such as the Sun, are
transmitted by contact with a uniform, pervading ethereal medium, which
in turn stimulates the eye and the nerves connected to it, eventually
resulting in a “phantasm,” or sense-image, in the brain. In Hobbes’s
theory, the qualities of a sense-image do not need to be explained in
terms of the qualities of a perceived object. Instead, motion and
matter—the motion of a light source, the disturbance of a physical
nervous system, and sensory membranes—are all that have to be invoked.
In contrast, traditional optics—optics as developed within Aristotle’s
framework—had held that seeing the colour of something—the redness of a
strawberry, for example—was a matter of reproducing the “form” of the
colour in the sense organs; the form is then abstracted from the sense
organs by the mind. “Sensible forms,” the characteristic properties
transmitted by objects to the senses in the act of perception, were
entirely dispensed with in Hobbes’s optics.
Hobbes’s system
Theories that trace all observed effects to matter and motion are called
mechanical. Hobbes was thus a mechanical materialist: He held that
nothing but material things are real, and he thought that the subject
matter of all the natural sciences consists of the motions of material
things at different levels of generality. Geometry considers the effects
of the motions of points, lines, and solids; pure mechanics deals with
the motions of three-dimensional bodies in a full space, or plenum;
physics deals with the motions of the parts of inanimate bodies insofar
as they contribute to observed phenomena; and psychology deals with the
effects of the internal motions of animate bodies on behaviour. The
system of the natural sciences described in Hobbes’s trilogy represents
his understanding of the materialist principles on which all science is
based.
The fact that Hobbes included politics as well as psychology within
his system, however, has tended to overshadow his insistence on the
autonomy of political understanding from natural-scientific
understanding. According to Hobbes, politics does not need to be
understood in terms of the motions of material things (although,
ultimately, it can be); a certain kind of widely available
self-knowledge is evidence enough of the human propensity to war.
Although Hobbes is routinely read as having discerned the “laws of
motion” for both human beings and human societies, the most that can
plausibly be claimed is that he based his political philosophy on
psychological principles that he thought could be illuminated by general
laws of motion.
Last years and influence
Although he was impugned by enemies at home, no Englishman of the day
stood in such high repute abroad as Hobbes, and distinguished foreigners
who visited England were always eager to pay their respects to the old
man, whose vigour and freshness of intellect remained unquenched. In his
last years Hobbes amused himself by returning to the classical studies
of his youth. The autobiography in Latin verse with its playful humour,
occasional pathos, and sublime self-complacency was brought forth at the
age of 84. In 1675 he produced a translation of the Odyssey in rugged
English rhymes, with a lively preface, “Concerning the Virtues of an
Heroic Poem.” A translation of the Iliad appeared in the following year.
As late as four months before his death, he was promising his publisher
“somewhat to print in English.”
Hobbes’s importance lies not only in his political philosophy but
also in his contribution to the development of an anti-Aristotelian and
thoroughly materialist conception of natural science. His political
philosophy influenced not only successors who adopted the
social-contract framework—John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and
Immanuel Kant, for example—but also less directly those theorists who
connected moral and political decision making in rational human beings
to considerations of self-interest broadly understood. The materialist
bent of Hobbes’s metaphysics is also much in keeping with contemporary
Anglo-American, or analytic, metaphysics, which tends to recognize as
real only those entities that physics in particular or natural science
in general presupposes.
Tom Sorell
