INTRODUCTION

The contemporary, uninitiated reader perusing the main text of Leviathan is in for quite a surprise: this classic of political philosophy does not begin with a discussion of sovereignty, political laws, the concept of society or other issues contemporary political philosophers get excited about. Quite the contrary, Hobbes commences his work with the genesis and function of sense perception, a topic that contemporary philosophers of whatever denomination would not even dare to touch upon anymore, leaving it safely in the hands of the scientists. An even more striking trait of the first two chapters of Leviathan is that they are so fiercely polemical. Aristotelian philosophy, the so-called philosophy of the 'schools', is accused of 'insignificant speech', 'absurd doctrines' and other intellectual sins. One wonders, why this unusually impolitic start, why these polemics?

This chapter is an attempt to answer these questions, especially the second one. We will reconstruct Hobbes's debate with the Aristotelians on sense perception and the political agenda that underlies it. However, before we can embark on answering these questions we have first to get at least a rough idea of the Aristotelian doctrine Hobbes so vehemently attacked. The first section of this chapter is therefore devoted to a necessarily brief and rather general overview of the Aristotelian position on sense perception and imagination.

From its initial publication, and for centuries thereafter, Hobbes's Leviathan was a notorious book. Censors regularly targeted it and would eventually secure a decades-long ban on its vernacular publication in England. Its infamy prevented Hobbes from publishing on religion or politics after 1660 and cast a shadow of suspicion over his other existing works. The present chapter will examine the earliest efforts to secure the suppression of Leviathan. This censorship campaign occurred soon after the work's appearance and, though unsuccessful in its immediate purpose, was determined and extensive. The details of this censorship campaign throw considerable light on Leviathan's reception among its initial readers, before its reputation for atheism and heresy had fully hardened.

Among Hobbes specialists, the history of the censorship of his major works has been an orphaned subject. To be sure, the general prohibition on Hobbes's political and religious writings that prevailed after the Restoration is ubiquitously acknowledged. But this is typically treated as a natural corollary of Hobbes's general infamy among contemporaries. Historians have made little effort to detail the precise campaigns and factions that tried to gag the author of Leviathan, other than to note (correctly but imprecisely) that such efforts were usually directed by clergymen. The explanation for this lacuna, it might be suggested, is two-fold. First, scholars long treated clerical opposition to Thomas Hobbes as unproblematic.

Hobbes's political thought has often been considered one of the sources of liberalism and Leo Strauss takes his place among famous advocates of this claim. According to him, 'Hobbes was the true founding father in liberalism' because his thought is characterized by two basic assertions: (1) that the fundamental moral fact is the existence of the rights of man, instead of an original duty; and (2) that the office of the state is to preserve natural right in the person of each individual, rather than 'creating or promoting a virtuous existence in humankind'. Moreover, to the extent that a delightful and comfortable life is substituted for the 'good life' as the goal of social existence, Hobbes is not only a founder of liberalism but also of modernity as such.

The Straussian strategy of interpretation takes up one of the crucial points of Hobbes's thought; indeed, the obligation of self-preservation appears to be the sole primary obligation that is acknowledged by natural liberty when it is fully and boundlessly experienced in the state of nature. If there is something like a primary duty it is only towards oneself, to promote one's self-interest, and this duty is immediately translated into a right: 'the RIGHT OF NATURE . . . is the liberty each man hath to use his own power, as he will himself, for the preservation of his own nature, that is to say, of his own life'. But exercising this right in the state of nature is done at the expense of prejudicing the self-interest of others.

INTRODUCTION

The reassessment of Hobbes's theology achieved in the last twenty years has produced three tendencies that now seem well entrenched among scholars. The first is to acknowledge the importance of that part of the philosopher's thinking; second, to admit its indissoluble links with Hobbes's political theory; and third, to recognize its heterogeneous, and in many ways strongly heterodox, nature. Ironically, the recent publication in the German original of Leo Strauss's provocative and illuminating analysis of Hobbes's critique of religion, and its welcome translation into French, appear to be the culmination of this process, although the book was written some seven decades ago. One aspect of Hobbes's religious doctrine has been less frequently addressed, and that is the presence in his writings of various elements of covenant theology. To the extent that it has been treated, this topic has generated several types of commentary that seem to invite discussion. It is my contention that these commentaries rely on a partial and mistaken understanding of what covenant theology is about, and that they consequently fail to establish its proper relation to Hobbes's theory. After a brief outline of covenant doctrine, I will argue here that, to a great extent, Hobbes's consistent although subversive brand of covenant theology shapes the formal structure of his approach to Christian religion; that it cannot be properly understood unless placed in a political perspective; and that its very singularity helps explain the peculiar character of Hobbesian political theology.

There is something strange about Hobbes's Leviathan, something vague and indefinite and contradictory. For in Leviathan, Hobbes only mentions his title monster three times. Yet these three passages actually give us very divergent images of that enigmatic political beast. We will see that the indefinite character of this monster is revealing, and that the mythological image is thus not merely a superfluous, accidental ornament but serves a theoretical purpose in Hobbes's argument. Moreover, we will see that his use of the image, which contradicts his own principles regarding method in philosophy, is in a sense a theoretical and political necessity for him.

The tensions in Hobbes's statements about Leviathan are apparent. Thus in the introduction, Hobbes professes that 'by art is created that great leviathan called a commonwealth, or state (in Latin civitas), which is but an artificial man; though of greater stature and strength than the natural, for whose protection and defence it was intended'. Here Leviathan is the state in its entirety, the organisation created by prehistoric individuals covenanting to obey the new authority. Originally, Leviathan was, of course, a huge beast, a crocodile, a whale, a fish, a snake, or a dragon. But just like the famous frontispiece of the book, Hobbes stresses that this new beast is also a ‘Man’, a person. So Leviathan is a man and an animal at the same time. However, another interesting quality is ascribed to this curious monster. It is ‘Artificiall’: it is, as we will see, a machine.

Hobbes represented himself in various places in Leviathan as a good English Protestant. There are numerous sentences in Leviathan about Christianity, which, if uttered by almost anyone else in seventeenth- century England, would be understood as expressions consonant with Calvinism or Lutheranism. All scholars would agree about that. What scholars disagree about is whether Hobbes's representation was serious or not, honest or not, sarcastic or not, intentionally subversive or not. Most scholars think that he was not being honest, and many of these think that he intended his perceptive readers to see that, in context, he intended to subvert Christianity in particular and revealed religion in general. The minority view, one that I have defended, is that he was serious and honest. This is not to say that he was not also ill-disposed towards various brands of Christianity, especially Roman Catholicism and Presbyterianism, and prone to sarcasm. He was. His views, in my opinion, were intended to justify a narrow space in the broad band of seventeenth-century English Christianity. Leaving aside his views about the Bible, his basic positions would have been perfectly respectable forty years earlier, during the reign of James I and VI: orthodox in doctrine, Calvinist in theology, episcopal in ecclesiology, non-puritan in liturgy, and monarchical in politics. By 'orthodox', I simply mean that he professed belief in the doctrines of the major early creeds and the Thirty-nine Articles.

The early reception and recognition given to Hobbes's philosophy in England and on the continent forms one of the important chapters in English and European intellectual history. A checklist published by Samuel Mintz in 1962 of anti-Hobbes writings and allusions in England during the period 1650-1700 contains nearly 100 titles and indicates not only the magnitude of Hobbes's impact upon the intellectual and cultural life of his time but the breadth of the reaction provoked by his unorthodox ideas. We can be pretty sure that Mintz's checklist is not exhaustive, however, as there must have been other works published in England during this period containing critical references to Hobbes that have not yet come to notice. One of the authors the checklist omits is Gilbert Burnet, who criticized 'the infernal Leviathan' in a sermon he preached in London in December 1674. Another is John Locke. While Locke does not mention Hobbes in his political or philosophical writings, he was much aware of and opposed to a number of Hobbes's basic ideas. In his Second Treatise of Government, for example, the statement in section 57 that 'the end of Law is not to abolish and restrain, but to preserve and enlarge Freedom. . . . Freedom is not, as we are told, A Liberty for every Man to do what he list', pointedly contradicts both Hobbes's conception of freedom in the state of nature and the opinion expressed in Leviathan, chapter xxi, that law is a restraint on freedom.

Hobbes's moral philosophy largely consists of the derivation of what he calls 'the laws of nature' (EL, I, 15, 16, 17; De Cive, chs. 2, 3, and 4; Lev., chs. xiv, xv). There is a sense in which this is a virtue-ethics, though one that radically revises Aristotle. The theory is partly concerned with finding a compelling basis for virtues that correspond to Christian ones, or facsimiles of them. It is also supposed to distinguish basic from nonbasic virtues. The theory also assigns meanings to virtue terms intended to command public agreement, thereby stabilising moral rhetoric at a time when Hobbes thought terms like 'good' and 'evil', 'just' and 'unjust' could mean an alarmingly wide range of things. The theory is supposed to be compatible with pretheoretical disagreements about value, but not, in my view, with anything that deserves to be called moral scepticism or relativism.

THE LAWS OF NATURE

The laws of nature are rational precepts for governing one’s actions in ways that will preserve one’s life (Lev., xiv, 3, 63–4/79). Hobbes did not think that the precepts he outlined call for types of behaviour his readers would find unfamiliar. It was a commonplace, for example, that people should, in the words of the Lord’s Prayer, forgive others their trespasses, and the sixth law of nature is that people pardon the offences of those who, repenting those offences, want pardon. People did not need to be told by Hobbes to pardon people, for that was a familiar enough requirement of Christianity. What was not obvious was the place of the law of pardoning among the general moral precepts. What makes the law of pardon the sixth law of nature, for example? Because it is a near consequence of laws of nature that Hobbes thought he had for the first time identified as fundamental.

Hobbes's readers generally agree on the centrality of the concept of glory in his system as presented in The Elements of Law and De Cive; but no such consensus exists concerning the relevance of glory in Leviathan. The main aim of this chapter is to argue that the significance of glory in Leviathan cannot be overemphasised as it not only provides the foundation of Hobbes's political theory, but also furthers our understanding of Hobbes's philosophy of man. This chapter is organised in four sections. I argue in section I that, even though the definition of glory given in Leviathan may appear prima facie different from that provided in earlier works, the meaning of glory remains unchanged: glory is the joy of superiority and as such it implies comparisons between individuals. In section II a comparative analysis of the status of glory in The Elements of Law, De Cive, and Leviathan reveals that in the latter Hobbes replaces his former claim that glory is the ultimate motivation of all people with the milder claim that glory motivates some individuals. Section III presents the central claim of this essay that in Leviathan glory is the Archimedean point of Hobbes's theory of the state. The behaviour of glory-seekers is identified as the original source of conflict both in the state of nature and in the political state, as well as the reason why nothing less than the absolute, indivisible and irrevocable power of a Leviathan is required to guarantee internal peace. Section IV concludes by exploring some of the implications of the preceding argument and the function of education in the political state.

Hobbes generated more hostile literature than any other thinker in the seventeenth century. Indeed, if judged by the number of hostile books and pamphlets he generated, he may well be the most maligned philosopher of all time. Books in English or Latin hostile to him in the seventeenth century alone run into hundreds and his name became a byword for sensual license and atheism at a time when England was ruled by a puritanical ethic that, officially at least, and until the Restoration of 1660, allowed no deviation from the strictest moral code. Despite this, Hobbes was to influence almost all later thinkers, either directly or indirectly, through his account of the individual and the state and to leave a mark on political theory that lifts him into the highest ranks alongside the names of Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Locke, Hegel, Marx and Mill. The general hostility to him in England we shall shortly chart. Nevertheless, some of the positions for which he argued attracted a following that owed much to the power of his argument and the way in which his assumptions about the world and human nature fitted with a variety of positions that many in the seventeenth century throughout Europe were coming to see as attractive. Hobbes's relationship to his contemporaries was therefore a complex one. His philosophy was intellectually powerful and seductive to those who were prepared to examine it closely. But it contained many ideas that were undoubtedly politically dangerous, and it was a risk to espouse them too openly, certainly for several decades after they first appeared.

Late in life Hobbes penned a Latin prose autobiography. In it he talked about the composition of Leviathan. He recorded that he had hoped the book would not be displeasing to his fellow-citizens, but 'especially to those who had sided with the bishops' - that is to say, to Anglicans. He claimed that although there was no church government at all in England at the time when he was working on Leviathan, and that everyone had therefore been free to write and publish what they pleased on theological matters, he had in fact been careful to say nothing in it that contradicted the doctrine of the Church of England as it had been constituted by royal authority before the Civil War. He asserted that 'he had always approved the government of the church by bishops before all other forms' and he related how he had refused Catholic rites when he had been gravely ill in France, but had shortly afterwards accepted Anglican rites from John Cosin (later Bishop of Durham). Hobbes also insisted that after he returned to England he had not worshipped in any of the country's puritan churches, where he had encountered only seditious preaching and 'extemporary prayers', but had sought out an Anglican congregation, though it was more than a mile from where he lived. In those times, no law required anyone to attend any church, and the fact that Hobbes had voluntarily, and at considerable inconvenience, gone to an Anglican church was (on his own account, at least) evidence of his Anglicanism and of his sincere Christianity.

The traditional story about the reception of Leviathan was that it was a book that was rejected rather than read seriously. Leviathan's perverse amalgamation of controversial doctrine, so the story goes, earned it universal condemnation. Hobbes was outed as an atheist and discredited almost as soon as the work appeared. Subsequent criticism was seen to be the idle pursuit of a discredited text, an exercise upon which young militant churchmen could cut their teeth, as William Warburton observed in the eighteenth century. We need to be aware, however, that this was a story that was largely the creation of Hobbes's intellectual opponents, writers with an interest in sidelining Leviathan from the mainstream of the history of ideas. Research over the last few decades has pointed increasingly towards a rather different account of the fate of Hobbes's most notorious work. It is true that the book attracted a large amount of hostile comment throughout the latter half of the seventeenth century, but the reason for this was not that Leviathan's arguments were too absurd to be taken seriously. In fact, in many cases Leviathan's critics were more moved to attack the book precisely because it was being read and used by many different individuals and groups. Leviathan's arguments addressed a whole range of religious and political debates in the later seventeenth century, and its dramatic contribution to those debates could not be ignored. As a result, the book remained a live issue in the political discourse of the period, even when it was subject to official condemnation.