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Hobbes Today

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2014

C. B. Macpherson
C. B. Macpherson*
Affiliation:
The University of Toronto
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Extract

Hobbes is as renowned a name in political science as is Adam Smith in economics. Accordingly, prevailing notions of what Hobbes meant to say have varied from time to time. While his materialist utilitarianism has been a strong current since he propounded it, Hobbes's modern reputation dates from the re-emphasis on sovereignty and utilitarian morals by the Benthamists. The reaction against Benthamism led to strong criticism of Hobbes by English idealists such as T. H. Green. Their criticism of his materialist metaphysics and of his behaviourist ethics set the tone of the standard treatment of Hobbes, and seemed to have rendered his political views harmless. As long as Hobbes was regarded as primarily a materialist and his political doctrines were seen as consistent deductions from his materialist position, it was relatively easy to dispose of his unpleasant theory of the state, for materialism has had little standing in English political thinking since the eighteenth century when the historical materialism of Millar, Ferguson, and Robertson enjoyed some prestige.

Hobbes's stature, however, was too great for his political ideas to be tidied away in this fashion. Later generations of scholars set out to detach Hobbes's political theory from his materialism. Croom Robertson in 1886, John Laird in 1934, and Leo Strauss in 1936 have taken the position that Hobbes's political philosophy was not derived from his materialism or decisively influenced by his concept of science. While it is possible to show that Hobbes might have reached his political conclusions from certain moral attitudes and preconceptions unrelated to materialism or science, this position raises other difficulties. In view of the emphasis which Hobbes placed on his materialism and in view of his insistence on the scientific nature of his method it seems unsatisfactory to dismiss these attributes of his thought as merely his share in the current intellectual fashion, especially when the result is to say, as does John Laird, that his thought is mediaeval, or, as with some current text-book writers, to leave his theory rootless and unexplained except as the reaction of a timid man to the disturbed political conditions of his time.

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Articles
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Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science/Revue canadienne de economiques et science politique , Volume 11 , Issue 4 , November 1945 , pp. 524 - 534
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association 1945

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References

1 See Pascal, Roy, “Property and Society, the Scottish Historical School of the Eighteenth Century” (The Modern Quarterly, vol. I, no. 2, 03, 1938).Google Scholar Pascal points out (p. 178) that their emphasis on property relationships as the basis of society took on a different significance in the nineteenth century with the development of an organized proletariat, and so was avoided by bourgeois writers.

2 Robertson, G. C., Hobbes (London, 1910), p. 57 Google Scholar; Laird, John, Hobbes (London, 1934), p. 57 Google Scholar; Strauss, Leo, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, Its Basis and Genesis (Oxford, 1936), p. xiii, 170.Google Scholar Stephen, Leslie in his pleasant volume (Hobbes, London, 1904) dismisses the problem as of no importance (p. 73).Google Scholar Taylor, A. E. (Thomas Hobbes, 1908), while praising Hobbes as a “consistent philosophical materialist,” argues that there is “no real logical connection between Hobbes's metaphysical materialism and his ethical and political doctrine of human conduct” (pp. 44-5) and concludes that “the only advantage which Hobbes really derives from his materialism is that it furnishes him with a plausible excuse for his refusal to take theology seriously” (p. 45).Google Scholar

3 Laird, , Hobbes, p. 57.Google Scholar

4 (1) The Elements of Law Natural and Politic, circulated in manuscript in 1640, published in 1650 as two treatises (Human Nature, and De Corpore Politico), edited and published under its original title by F. Tönnies, Cambridge, 1928 (subsequent references are to this edition)Google Scholar; (2) De Cive, 1642, of which an English Version was published in 1651 under the title Philosophical Rudiments Concerning Government and Society (subsequent references are to the Rudiments as published in vol. II of the English Works of Hobbes edited by Molesworth, , London, 1841)Google Scholar; (3) Leviathan, 1651 (references are to the Everyman Library edition).Google Scholar

5 Especially Strauss, ; The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, p. 121.Google Scholar

6 Rudiments, pp. 3-4.

7 Ibid., p. 3.

8 Ibid., pp. 4-6.

9 The importance of vanity in Hobbes's analysis has not been sufficiently emphasized except by Strauss who argues that it is the most important postulate. Leviathan is the king of the proud.

10 Rudiments, ch. i, sects. 2-5; Elements, part i, chs. 9, 14; Leviathan, pp. 27, 50, 64.

11 Leviathan, p. 64.

12 Cf. Burckhardt's, analysis of the desire for personal fame as a product of Renaissance society in Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (London, 1928)Google Scholar, part ii, ch. 3.

13 Rudiments, p. 8; cf. Elements, part I, ch. 14, sect. 5, and Leviathan, p. 63.

14 Tawney in his Religion and the Rise of Capitalism has given a classic picture of the contrast, in discussing the assumptions from which the mediaeval writers could start when building a social doctrine to cope with the effects of the growth of commercial economy within the mediaeval structure. “Their fundamental assumptions … were two: that economic interests are subordinate to the real business of life, which is salvation, and that economic conduct is one aspect of personal conduct, upon which, as on other parts of it, the rules of morality are binding …. At every turn, therefore, there are limits, restrictions, warnings against allowing economic interests to interfere with serious affairs” (pp. 31-2). That such restrictions and warnings were necessary is an indication of the extent to which commerce was disrupting mediaeval society in the later Middle Ages; that the restrictions could be, with some success until the Reformation, based on the assumption that economic interests are subordinate, is an indication of the basically different mediaeval attitude.

15 Leviathan, p. 44.

16 Ibid., p. 44, 47.

17 The specifically economic relations of man with man are also reduced to terms of the free market and free contract. “The value of all things contracted for, is measured by the Appetite of the Contractors; and therefore the just value, is that which they be contented to give” (Leviathan, p. 78)Google Scholar; and “a mans Labour also is a commodity exchangeable for benefit, as well as any other thing” (ibid., p. 130).

18 Leviathan, p. 184.

19 Rudiments, p. 173, 159.

20 Rudiments, p. 174

21 Elements, part ii, ch. 9, sect. 5; cf. Rudiments, p. 174, and Leviathan, p. 184.

22 Cf. James, M., Social Problems and Policy during the Puritan Revolution (London, 1930), p. 245.Google Scholar

23 These and other points are conveniently brought together by Strauss, , The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, pp. 118–23.Google Scholar

24 Leviathan, p. 177.

25 Leviathan, p. 112.

26 Strauss in the work cited, while saying that Hobbes founded “the ideal of civilization in its modern form, the ideal both of the bourgeois-capitalist development and of the socialist movement” (p. 1), is concerned mainly to argue that Hobbes's fundamental view of human life has its origin in his actual experience of how men behave in daily life, which experience in turn “must be traced back to a specific moral attitude which compels its holder to experience and see man in Hobbes' particular way” (p. xiv). I am suggesting that the moral attitude itself is to be explained in terms of Hobbes's experience of a society in which bourgeois morals had been making their way since the beginning of the Renaissance.

27 Leviathan, p. 47, 46.

28 Leviathan, p. 49.

29 Elements of Philosophy, English Works (ed. Molesworth, ), vol. I, p. 74.Google Scholar

30 Ibid., pp. 73, 74; cf. Leviathan, introduction, p. 2.

31 Elements of Law Natural and Politic, Epistle Dedicatory and ch. 1. Cf. his references in Behemoth (Tönnies's edition) to the duties of rulers and subjects as “a science … built upon sure and clear principles” (p. 159), and to “the infallible rules and the true science of equity and justice” (p. 70). Cf. Leviathan, p. 110 and p. 197. Hobbes's classification of science as not absolute but conditional knowledge (Leviathan, p. 31) is not inconsistent with his belief in the possibility of reaching principles which are absolute in the mathematical sense: cf. Leviathan, p. 41 “Knowledge of the Consequence of one Affirmation to another … is called Science; and is Conditionall; as when we know, that, If the figure showne be a circle, then any straight line through the Center shall divide it into two equall parts.” Hobbes calls mathematical propositions conditional; I have referred to them as absolute, or absolutely demonstrable, to distinguish them from the propositions of inductive natural science.

32 Elements, part I, ch. 13, sects. 3, 4.

33 Leviathan, introduction, p. 2.

34 Political Philosophy of Hobbes, p. 170.

35 Leviathan, p. 23.

36 As it was by the eighteenth century. Cf. Morley's Diderot and the Encyclopedists.

37 See the provocative argument of Caudwell, Christopher, Studies in a Dying Culture (London, 1938).Google Scholar

38 Capital (Kerr edition), vol. 1, ch. 1, sect. 4. Cf. Sweezy, Paul, The Theory of Capitalist Development (New York, 1942), pp. 34–40.Google Scholar

39 Hobbes sees this as true not only for his fiction, the “state of nature,” from which all social motives are omitted by abstraction, but also for man in society. Cf. Rudiments, pp. 3-4 and Leviathan, p. 65.