Toma Mastnak - Godly Democracy

Democracy is a central, if overlooked, question in Behemoth. Hobbes’s attitude toward democracy was fairly consistent in all his writings. But in Behemoth, he shifts focus from the forms of governments, of which democracy is one, to democracy in practice. He also hones in on the close connection between democracy and religion. Hobbes’s views clash with dominant historiographical interpretative models today and with political sensibilities of our era. But that does not mean that his views are irrelevant to our own times. Precisely in our era of democratic regime change and the encroachment of organized religion into the political sphere, Behemoth needs to be read and re-read carefully.

War for democracy and seduction

The English civil war, in Hobbes’s view, was a war for democracy. That was a view from the Devil’s Mountain. The Devil’s Mountain was where, in the very beginning of Behemoth, the older and more experienced interlocutor A took on the younger interlocutor B, who wanted to understand the civil war:

If in time, as in place, there were degrees of high and low, I verily believe that the highest time would be that which passed between the years of 1640 and 1660. For he that thence, as from the Devil’s mountain, should have looked upon the world and observed the actions of men, especially in England,

would have seen what Hobbes in Behemoth told his readers. In retrospect, efforts of the forces opposing the king to establish democracy were a spectacle ‘of all kinds of injustice, and of all kinds of folly, that the world could afford’, produced by ‘hypocrisy and self-conceit, whereof one is double iniquity, and the other double folly’.[1]

Civil war, in Hobbes’s view, is the worst calamity that can befall human society. ‘All calamities which human industry can avoid arise from war, especially from civil war, for from this come massacres, loneliness, and shortage of all things’, Hobbes wrote in De corpore.

But the cause of these things is not that humans want them; for there is no will except for the good, at least for what appears so; and it is not that they do not know that these things are evils; for who is there who does not realize that massacres and poverty are evil and harmful for themselves? Therefore, the cause of civil war is that people are ignorant of the cause of wars and peace and that there are very few who have learned their responsibilities, by which peace flourishes and is preserved.[2]

In Behemoth, Hobbes depicted that ignorance of the cause of wars and peace, which is itself a cause of war (of which he had written in De corpore), as enamorment with democracy. Usually, democracy is seen as a form of government. In Behemoth, Hobbes portrays democracy as a set of opinions and actions bent on unmaking government. Since actions originate in opinions, the ‘seed’ of the civil war was ‘certain opinions in divinity and politics’.[3] Those who held those opinions endeavored to ‘draw the people to their opinions’.[4] It was easy to draw the people to erroneous opinions because they were ‘ignorant of their duty’.[5] Hobbes described the process through which the people were drawn to erroneous opinions as ‘seduction’. Seducers were those who held ‘certain opinions in divinity and politics’. The people were the seduced.

The language of seduction appears in the first work Hobbes published under his name, his translation of Thucydides’s The Peloponnesian War. Hobbes translated the opening of Thucydides’s ‘Melian Dialogue’ as follows: ‘Since we may not speake to the multitude, for feare lest when they heare our perswasiue and vnanswerable Arguments, all at once in a continued Oration; they should chance to bee seduced, (for we know that this is the scope of your bringing vs to audience before the Few)’.[6] Here, the Athenians were speaking to the Melians. The Athenians, the superpower of the day, came with their army to subjugate Melos. Because the Melians had responded to previous Athenian provocations, the Athens now alleged they had a casus belli, a pretext for war.

After encamping on Melos, the Athenians first wanted to deal with the Melians ‘by way of conference’. That is, they wanted to persuade them to submit without a fight. The Melians had little choice but to do as the Athenians proposed. Their magistrates - ‘the Few’ - went to talk to the invaders. The Athenians scoffed at the Melians because their interlocutors were few. They saw their small number as an expression of Melian weakness. They thought the Melians were afraid of letting their people listen to, and be persuaded by, Athenian orators. In fact, the choice of ‘the Few’ as negotiators was but an expression of the aristocratic form of Melian government. The Athenians, on the other hand, were democrats. As democrats on an imperial mission, they could hardly be expected to respect the government they came to obliterate.[7] But they seemed to believe that their power lay in persuasion. The Melians saw things differently. ‘The equity of a leasurely debate is not to be found fault withall’, they responded to the Athenians,

but this preparation for warre, not future, but already heere present, seemeth not to agree with the same. For we see that you are come to bee Iudges of the conference, and that the issue of it, if we bee superiour in argument, and therefore yeeld not, is likely to bring vs Warre; and if we yeeld, seruitude.[8]

The context in which ‘seduction’appears here is highly significant.[9] It would reverberate in Hobbes’s later writings, and in Behemoth in particular.[10] Hobbes firmly places rhetoric in the context of war, not of studia humanitatis. Democratic persuasion is not ‘leasurely debate’. It aims at ‘seducing’ the ‘multitude’ to support a regime change. What ultimately counts is not argument but the army behind the arguer’s back. Democratic persuasion is pregnant with violence. Athenian democratic orators, dismissive of their adversary’s political constitution, worked toward destruction of the adversary’s government. Justice is not at issue here. As the Athenians put it, both they and the Melians knew that ‘in humane disputation, iustice is then only agreed on, when the necessity is equall’.[11] Justice is only respected among equally mighty. To put it bluntly, justice is dependent on might.

But might was dependent on opinion. Hobbes went beyond Thucydides and commented directly on his own times, when he famously wrote in Behemoth that ‘the power of the mighty hath no foundation but in the opinion and belief of the people’.[12] This is why opinion played such a key role in Hobbes’s understanding of the English civil war. This is why, in his analysis of and commentary on the English civil war, Hobbes paid such close attention to opinions: to ‘certain opinions in divinity and politics’ and to the efforts to seduce the people to accept them.

Hobbes first turned attention to the king’s inability to prevent the seduction of the people. The king was unable to keep ‘the people from uniting into a body able to oppose him’.[13] Since this is a Baconian definition of sedition - sedition, wrote Bacon, ‘joyneth and knitteth’ people ‘in a Common Cause’ - the king was unable to prevent sedition.[14] But since sedition is seduction beginning to bear fruit, Hobbes simply said that the king was unable to prevent the people from being seduced. The king’s inability was due to his lack of soldiers. He lacked soliders because he did not have enough money. He lacked money because of the strength of ‘his enemies, that pretended the people’s ease from taxes, and other specious things’, and had ‘the command of the purses of the city of London, and of most cities and corporate towns in England, and of many particular persons besides’.[15] Even if Hobbes was right, this was a poor explanation. You cannot explain imbecilitas regni with imbecilitas regni: the king was weak because the king was weak. And Hobbes knew well that soldiers alone could not suppress dangerous opinions. He knew that ‘men’s disagreements about opinions ... cannot be eliminated by arms’.[16] As he made abundantly clear later in Behemoth, one of the king’s weaknesses was the weakness of opinions offered to him by his ‘counsellors’.[17]

Hobbes quickly abandoned this analysis of royal weakness and set out instead to explain the strength of destructive opinions. The strength of those opinions was their seductive force. But the seduced were not innocent. Moreover, the people appear in Behemoth not only as the corrupt object of seduction; they are seducers as well. In setting the stage for his narration, Hobbes describes the people as generally indifferent to the cause of either side that was heading toward civil war. The people ‘would have taken any side for pay or plunder’. Yet even while ‘so corrupted’, the people still needed to be seduced. This led to the question Hobbes wanted to ask: ‘And what kind of people were they that could so seduce them?’[18]

They were, first, ‘ministers, as they called themselves, of Christ’ (the Presbyterians); second, those ‘known by the name of Papists’; third, the Independents and other sectarians (Anabaptists, Fifth Monarchists, Quakers, Adamites and others ‘whose names and peculiar doctrines’ were not worth remembering); fourth, the admirers of ‘the ancient Grecian and Roman commonwealths’, enamored with popular government; fifth, the city of London and other great towns of trade; sixth, the would-be war profiteers; and seventh, ‘the people in general’ who were almost completely ignorant of their duty and had ‘no rule of equity, but precedents and custom’.[19]

Of those who would seduce the people, the would-be war profiteers and the ‘people in general’ were ‘the people’ themselves. Aspiring profiteers who ‘saw no means how honestly to get their bread’ at least partially overlapped with the people who ‘would have taken any side for pay or plunder’. To both categories applied the old adage that Bacon cited in his essay on seditions: ‘multis utile Bellum’.[20] A further distinction of the ‘people in general’, besides being their own seducers, was that they chose members of Parliament from their midst and thereby created an elite that was to seduce them.

Democracy, clericalism, and forms of government

Having described a motley of advocates and disseminators of ‘certain opinions in divinity and politics’, and before he turned to discussing some of those seducers of the people in detail, Hobbes asked another question. ‘I desire to know’, the younger interlocutor B proclaimed, ‘first, the several grounds of the pretences, both of the Pope and of the Presbyterians, by which they claim a right to govern us, as they do, in chief: and after that, from whence, and when, crept in the pretences of that Long Parliament, for a democracy’.[21] That double question interrupted the narration in order to spell out its organizing principles. The two leading questions that were to organize Hobbes’s narration in Behemoth were the question of clerical power in secular affairs and the question of democracy. From the start, Hobbes interlinked those questions.

If the English civil war was war for democracy, then democracy was intimately connected with clericalism. Hobbes made this clear when, in his discussion of the Papists as ‘one of the distempers of the state of England in the time of our late King Charles’, he made a passing judgment on the English reformation. The reformation of Henry VIII and the Elizabethan settlement were for Hobbes a model solution to the centuries long struggle between spiritual and temporal power. All ‘Kings and States of Christendom’ should have done ‘within their own respective dominions’ what Henry VIII did. They should have made themselves heads of the Church to free themselves from clerical ‘tyranny’.[22] The English civil war was a temporary disruption of the reformation settlement. Hobbes called it ‘the interruption made in this late rebellion of the presbyterians and other democratical men’.[23] They undermined the proper relation between secular and spiritual power. As such, they subverted the power of the sovereign.

Hobbes linked democracy and clerical pretensions to power even more closely when he discussed ‘that other distemper by Presbyterians’. Presbyterians strove for ‘popular government in the Church’ as eagerly as ‘a great many gentlemen’ desired ‘popular government in the civil state’. Popular government, democracy, was their common denominator and shared goal. They both envied the existing authorities in church and state. So the ‘democratical gentlemen’ inveighed ‘against tyranny’ and the ministers ‘preached frequently against oppression’. In that way, they drew ‘the people to their opinions’ and worked together to execute the ‘design of changing the government from monarchical to popular’.[24]

When Hobbes wrote of the ‘design of changing the government from monarchical to popular,’ he was more interested in the process of bringing about that change than in the changing forms of government. Democracy here means designing a process of change and implementing that design more than it refers to an outcome - a particular form of government. In his earlier works, Hobbes as a rule treated democracy as a form of government.[25] In Behemoth, he parts with that conventional discussion of democracy that prevailed in English political treatises and historiography from the early sixteenth century onward. That convention resulted from what some have called a ‘domestication of the classical-humanist constitutional terminology’.[26] Hobbes said more than once in Behemoth that reading of ‘the glorious histories and the sententious politics of the ancient popular governments of the Greeks and Romans’ had made many gentlemen ‘enamored’ with democracy.[27] Hobbes energetically dismissed those ancient doctrines and their authors. Moreover, he joined to that dismissal an attack on the universities, which he saw as disseminating seditious doctrines.

In Behemoth, the doctrine of forms of government was of little importance. Here, Hobbes had said most of what he had to say about democracy before he even mentioned the three classical forms of government. The first substantial reference to those forms of government, to monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy, appeared only at the beginning of the Fourth Dialogue, in the last section of the book. At the close of the Third Dialogue, the narrative reached the establishment of the Rump Parliament. The Rump was the issue of the abolition of the House of Lords, which was considered the institution of democracy: ‘And thus the kingdom is turned into a democracy,’ commented Hobbes in the voice of the older interlocutor, only to immediately subvert the idea by adding: ‘or rather an oligarchy’.[28] For, as Hobbes explained, the parliament was ‘presently’ purged of the dissenting members of the House of Commons. What was left was the Rump.

Hobbes continued this polemics, turning the language of the forms of government against the regicides, in the opening of the Fourth Dialogue. ‘Tell me first, how this kind of government under the Rump or relic of a House of Commons is to be called,’ asked the younger interlocutor B. The older interlocutor, A, was happy to oblige:

It is doubtless an oligarchy. For the supreme authority must needs be in one man or in more. If in one, it is monarchy; the Rump therefore was no Monarch. If the authority were in more than one, it was in all, or in fewer than all. When in all, it is democracy; for every man may enter into the assembly which makes the Sovereign Court; which they could not do here. It is therefore manifest, that the authority was in a few, and consequently the state was an oligarchy.[29]

In the classical doctrine of the forms of government, oligarchy was the corrupt form of the rule of the few. By pointing out that a hardly established democracy had already turned into oligarchy, Hobbes was not giving a compliment. But his critique did not stop there. Since, by English definition, parliament was ‘a meeting of the King, Lords, and Commons’, the very use of ‘parliament’ for the assembly in power was questionable. To style the Rump - a regicide assembly in which the Lords were eliminated and the dissenting Commons purged - a ‘Parliament’, as ‘some’ did, was a pathology of language inseparable from war. ‘Men may give to their assembly what name they please, what signification soever such name might formerly have had’, wrote Hobbes.[30] There is an echo of Thucydides here: in war, the ‘receiued value of names imposed for signification of things, was changed into arbitrary’.[31] Thucydides’s words, translated by Hobbes, applied to the war for democracy. Democracy, ‘set up ... with an army’,[32] was eroding its own governmental form. Worse still, because language was becoming arbitrary, democracy was losing its meaning. Hobbes masterfully played that language game to undermine the faith in democracy.

When Hobbes first mentioned ‘monarchy, aristocracy, or democracy’ in Behemoth as forms of ‘commonwealth’, he let these formal distinctions immediately collapse. He used ‘commonwealth’ both as generic and specific term. As a specific term, ‘commonwealth’ was distinct from monarchy: ‘The Greeks had for awhile their petty kings, and then by sedition came to be petty commonwealths; and then growing to be greater commonwealths, by sedition again became monarchies.’[33] Here, Hobbes let the multivalence of the term commonwealth assert itself. Was this due to his own inattentiveness or his wish to show how imprecise was the language of the forms of government itself? It does not really matter. Elsewhere, Hobbes made the forms of government an object of derision, as when he alluded to those ‘men of the better sort’ who, in their youth, read famous Greek and Roman authors and ‘became thereby in love with their forms of government’.[34] He represented the distinctions between the forms of government as a matter of sentiment rather than thought.

Hobbes pointed out another aspect of the conceptual instability of the forms of government. Once those ‘fine men’, or ‘men of the better sort’, were enamored with the forms of government, they became averse not only to ‘absolute monarchy’ but ‘also absolute democracy or aristocracy, all which governments they esteemed tyranny’. And aversion to tyranny, thus understood, gave birth to another love affair. They were ‘in love with mixarchy’.[35] Since none of the simple forms of government was absolutely preferable to the other two, the notion had emerged to combine what were considered the good qualities of each of the forms. The idea goes back to the Greeks, who invented the simple forms of government. The notion of mixing was made famous by Polybius, who was the first to describe the Roman republic as a mixed regime.[36] Polybius credited Lycurgus, ‘the first to draw up a constitution’, with having figured out ‘by a process of reasoning’ the perfect combination of the strengths of the ‘three forms of state’, whereas the Romans arrived at the same final result - a beneficial mixture of kingship, aristocracy, and democracy - through experience. By the time that Polybius wrote, the Romans had ‘the best of all existing constitutions’.[37] That was a respublica mixta. In Hobbes’s England, those who believed in mixed government thought of modified monarchy. They ‘used to praise’ mixarchy ‘by name of mixed monarchy, though it were indeed nothing else but pure anarchy’.[38]

What the king’s counselors failed to understand, in Hobbes’s account, was that mixed monarchy undermined royal authority. Mixed monarchy was a politically dangerous idea. It was also philosophically untenable since it implied division of sovereignty.[39] Sovereignty, for Hobbes, was indivisible. The advocates of mixarchy did not consider ‘that the supreme power must always be absolute, whether it be in the King or in the Parliament’.[40] Hobbes did not say that the supreme power must be monarchical but that it had to be absolute, regardless of who held it. The forms of government were basically irrelevant for the formulation of the central concept of Hobbes’s political theory. Sovereignty was as a matter of principle indifferent to forms of government. If Hobbes was ‘not committed to any form of government’, this was because he was, rather, ‘committed to government, or to sovereignty itself’.[41]

In Hobbes’s own presentation, his idea of sovereignty - and thus his civil science, the ‘science of just and unjust’ - was articulated against that ancient ‘vain philosophy’ of which the doctrine of forms of government was an essential element. He singled out Aristotle as particularly odious. As Hobbes put it in Leviathan, ‘scarce any thing’ could be ‘more repugnant to Government’ than the Politics.[42] Anti-Aristotelian declarations notwithstanding, the forms of government retained a honorable place in Leviathan. In Behemoth, their standing deteriorated. They are an object of criticism rather than a tool of analysis. Their practical value and relevance was in helping those who embraced the doctrine of the forms of government to subvert sovereignty.

I have said that Hobbes was interested more in the process of bringing about change in government than in the form of government per se. But democracy as a form of government was crucial for imagining and designing government change. As the design of democratic change began to produce results, however, democracy unmade the government more than it changed its form. In Hobbes’s analysis of the English civil war, democracy was less an alternative to monarchy than a threat to government as such. When the ‘democratical gentlemen’ advocated mixed monarchy, they promoted ‘pure anarchy’. Hobbes’s charge against the Presbyterians was the same: they ‘reduced this government into anarchy’. When the Presbyterians pulled down the existing government, they faced a problem they were unable to solve. They were incapable of establishing government in any form.[43] Democracy was a set of ideas that legitimized and directed undoing of the government and civil order. Democracy was a practice of anti-governmentality.

Democracy in practice

Hobbes’s focus in Behemoth was on democracy in practice. There are some precedents for such an approach in his earlier works. In the introduction to his translation of the Peloponnesian War, Hobbes pointed out that Thucydides characterized the Athenian democracy as ‘the emulation and contention of the Demagogues, for reputation, and glory of wit’. Democratic demagogues crossed ‘each others counsels to the dammage of the Publique’. Athenian democracy was also fickle. It was characterized by ‘the inconstancy of Resolutions, caused by the diuersity of ends, and power of Rhetorique in the Orators; and the desperate actions vndertaken vpon the flattering aduice of such as desired to attaine, or to hold what they had attained of authority and sway amongst the common people.’ Through the working of democracy ‘it came to passe amongst the Athenians, who thought they were able to doe any thing, that wicked men and flatterers draue them headlong into those actions that were to ruin them’. Small wonder that, in Thuchydides’s ‘opinion touching the gouernment of the State, it is manifest that he least of all liked the Democracy’.[44]

However, in at least one aspect, aristocracy appeared to Thucydides as more unstable than democracy. He had reservations with regard to the ‘authority of the Few’, wrote Hobbes, ‘amongst whom he saith euery one desireth to be chiefe, and they that are vnderualued, beare it with lesse patience then in Democracy; whereupon sedition followeth, and dissolution of the gouernement’. He even praised a ‘mixarchy’, to use Hobbes’s term from Behemoth, that is, ‘the gouernement of Athens, when it was mixt of the Few and the Many’. But most he commended the Athenian government when it was under the rule of one: under Pisistratus and ‘when in the beginning of this Warre, it was Democraticall in name, but in effect Monarchicall vnder Pericles’. In conclusion, Thucydides seems to have ‘best approued of Regall Gouernment’.[45]

Hobbes symapthized with Thucydides. He did not change his judgment of the Greek historian and the importance of his work. In his own biography, published fifty years after the appearance of the translation, Hobbes made it be known again that among the Greek historians he esteemed Thucydides more than the rest and that he had devoted his leisurely hours to translating Thucydides’s history into English ‘in order to make clear to his fellow citizens the follies of the democratic Athenians’.[46] In his Verse Life, written between April 1672 and April 1673 and published in an anonymous English translation in 1679[/1680], Hobbes reasserted that he shared with Thucydides his aversion to democracy: ‘There’s none that pleas’d me like Thucydides./ He says Democracy’s a Foolish Thing,/ Than a Republick wiser is one King.’[47] Modern historians have followed Hobbes’s lead when they considered his ‘distrust of democracy’ to be influenced by ‘the lessons of Thucydides’, or when they described his translation of the Peloponnesian War as, for example, mounting ‘a sustained argument against republican democracy’.[48]

In the Elements of Law, Hobbes characterized democracy as, ‘in effect, no more than an aristocracy of orators, interrupted sometimes with the temporary monarchy of one orator’.[49] This is very close to Hobbes’s description of Thucydides’s view of the Athenian government as ‘Democraticall in name, but in effect Monarchicall.’[50] In De cive, a feature of democracy was that, under

popular control [dominatio], there may be as many Neros as they are Orators who fawn on the people. For every Orator wields as much power as the people itself, and they have a kind of tacit agreement to turn a blind eye to each other’s greed (my turn today, yours tomorrow), and to cover up for any of them who put innocent fellow citizens to death arbitrarily or because of private feuds.[51]

In Leviathan, Hobbes remembered how destructive of peace and safety were the factions of ‘Aristocraticalls and Democraticalls of old time in Greece’, and how seditions finally undermined the ‘antient Roman Common-wealth’.[52]

But the closest Hobbes comes to his Behemoth-like take on democracy was in the Latin version of Leviathan. That translation was published in 1668 and was probably written at least in part in the same period as Behemoth.[53] Here, Hobbes tackles democracy directly as an English problem. In the substantially rewritten last chapter of Leviathan latinus, Hobbes gives the following lapidary characterization of the English civil war: ‘The democrats won, and they established a democracy; but they paid the price of their great crimes by losing it in no time at all.’[54] The downfall of democracy was first brought about by Cromwell, that ‘single tyrant’ who seized control of England, Scotland, and Ireland and ‘confounded’ the anti-royalists’ ‘democratic prudence (both that of the laity and that of the ecclesiastics)’. The collapse of democracy was completed by the restoration of the ‘legitimate king’, whom the people ‘asked for pardon (i.e., acknowledged their foolishness)’.[55] In Behemoth, Hobbes named this sequence of events a ‘revolution’.[56] That was, of course, not the ‘democratic revolution’, nor was it a ‘revolution’ in today’s conventional meaning of the word.[57] It was a cyclical movement of political events, in which democracy was but a temporary disturbance.

The rise and fall of democracy in England of the mid-seventeenth century was part of a broader phenomenon ‘of those civil wars concerning religion in Germany, France, and England’. The origin of those wars in general and the beginning of English troubles in particular were democratic ‘principles’, derived from ‘the ethical and political philosophy of Aristotle and of those Romans who have followed Aristotle’. The opposite of those principles was Hobbes’s own teaching.[58] Leviathan was both the expounding of the sound, and rejection of seditious, doctrine, written

at the time when civil war, born in Scotland over the issue of ecclesiastical discipline, was raging in England also and in Ireland, when not only the bishops, but also the king, the law, religion and honesty had been abolished, and treachery, murder, and all the foulest crimes dominated (but masked as something else).[59]

But Hobbes’s own efforts, as he noted in retrospect, were ‘of little benefit then’, when he intervened in the English civil war with the English Leviathan. He hoped that his work ‘would be of more benefit after the war was over’. For this reason he translated Leviathan into Latin:

Who will believe that those seditious principles are not now completely destroyed, or that there is anyone (except the democrats) who wishes the suppression of a doctrine whose tendency toward peace is as great as that of my teaching? So that this would not happen, I wanted it to be available in Latin. For I see that men’s disagreements about opinions and intellectual excellence cannot be eliminated by arms. In whatever way evils of this kind arise, they must be destroyed in the same way.[60]

Democracy of the English civil war had collapsed but, in Hobbes’s view, the democratic threat persisted. If the Latin translation of Leviathan was declared a contribution to the struggle against the democrats, I am tempted to regard Behemoth as well as part of the same permanent struggle: as a text whose aim it was to help wash away ‘that democratic ink’.[61]

In Behemoth, Hobbes’s treatment of democracy was not at all systematical. Hobbes did not start with a definition of democracy but rather, in the course of his discorsi, produced a number of equivalences and oppositions that determine our understanding of democracy. The democrats make their most memorable appearance as the ‘democratical gentlemen’. Who were they? The first and easiest answer is that they were parliamentarians. The parliament was a specimen of ‘democratical assemblies’[62] and was, from another perspective, an assembly intent on establishing a democracy,[63] in which it eventually succeeded.[64] As such, the democrats were to be met in the parliament, like those gentlemen who, by their ‘harangues in the Parliament’, made the people ‘in love with democracy’.[65] But at times they also had to work for the parliament to meet, such as when they pressured the king to call the parliament. A case in point were those English ‘democraticals’ who, when the enforcement of the new Scottish Prayer Book in 1637 led to rebellion in Scotland, encouraged the Scottish Presbyterians to attack the Church establishment. They knew that the king could only hope to suppress the rebellion if he were able to raise an army, for which he lacked money. To collect the money, he needed the consent of the parliament, but he had dissolved it years ago. In Hobbes’s own words, ‘the thing which those democraticals chiefly then aimed at, was to force the king to call a Parliament, which he had not done for ten years before, as having found no help, but hindrance to his designs in the Parliaments he had formerly called’.[66]

The crucial defining element of the ‘democraticals’ is the Presbyterian connection. Hobbes generally has the ‘democraticals’ coupled with the Presbyterians. But he does not uniformly define that relationship. When Hobbes attributes ‘this late rebellion’ to ‘the presbyterians and other democratical men’,[67] the Presbyterians area subset of the democrats. The democrats are also represented as an incorporating category when Hobbes comments on the 1628 Parliament. Then, the ‘democratical gentlemen had received’ the Presbyterians ‘into their counsels for the design of changing the government from monarchical to popular, which they called liberty’.[68] Consequently, Hobbes portrayed the Presbyterians as the originators of the vices and crimes on which the majority of the members of the Long Parliament rested their democracy.[69]

Hobbes most often sees the relationship between the ‘democraticals’ and Presbyterians as one between equals. The Presbyterians, for example, ‘had the concurrence of a great many gentlemen, that did no less desire a popular government in the civil state than these ministers did in the Church’.[70] There was a clear affinity and agreement between the aims of the two groups, and both ‘those preachers and democratical gentlemen’ were teaching ‘rebellion and treason’.[71] They favored, animated, and assisted each other. Thus, in the prelude to the civil war, after the king had agreed that the Scots abolish episcopacy, ‘the English Presbyterians and democraticals’ together took steps to obtain ‘the assistance of the Scotch for the pulling down of bishops in England’.[72] Both ‘the democratical and Presbyterian English’ had animated the Scottish Covenanters to escalate the pressure on the king.[73] To the degree they were distinct groups, the ‘democratical gentlemen’ and Presbyterians were allies, working together and exerting influence together.[74]

The ‘democraticals’ and Presbyterians were, on the one hand, either jointly opposed, or supported each other in their opposition, to the Elizabethan religious settlement, ecclesiastical government, and episcopacy.[75] On the other hand, they joined forces in their opposition to the civil government, the king, and the king’s interests.[76] They jointly inveighed against tyranny and extolled liberty, which they equated with popular government.[77] In fact, they strove for their own absolute government. They were the cause of disturbance of the commonwealth.[78] They founded their democracy on vices, crime, and folly, established it with an army, and ultimately failed because they had no army to maintain it.[79]

Democracy was the outcome of the ‘democraticals’ action and it was indelibly marked by those who had produced it. While ‘democratical’ action was a ‘disturbance of the commonwealth’ and a cause of the dissolution of government, the government it might produce, or maintain, was unstable itself and often ‘democratical’ only in name. In effect, it was a reign of orators and ‘Neros’, of ambitious men seeking ‘absolute power’ for themselves. No nobler in its foundation than other governments, democracy was a spectacle ‘of all kinds of injustice, and of all kinds of folly.’

Interpreting Hobbes’s ‘Democraticals’

Hobbes first made public his understanding of democracy in his translation of The Peloponnesian Wars. That understanding of democracy culminates in the pages of Behemoth. Hobbes’s understanding of democracy was not unique in his times. It was likely to upset, but not to puzzle, his contemporaries. But it was certainly not the element of Hobbes’s political thought that upset his contemporaries most. Today, his understanding of democracy jars our political sensibilities. It seems alien to much of our political thinking. Hobbes’s preoccupation with religion, ecclesiastical power, and jurisdictional claims of the clergy have long been pushed to the margins of what the modern age has made of Hobbes. His views of democracy continue to be neglected, if not ignored. Small wonder that Behemoth - a work that focuses on both these issues - has been neglected, too.

If we do not want to push them aside, then how should we understand Hobbes’s views of democracy in Behemoth? Most serious recent interpretations of Hobbes’s ‘democratical gentlemen’ discuss these figures in the framework of ‘republicanism’. But Hobbes’s view of the English civil war fits badly into this interpretative model, which offers the current dominant interpretation of political thought in Hobbes’s times. Within the consensus about the central importance of republicanism, the following question arises: If ‘republican thought only came of age in England with the appearance of James Harrington’s The Commonwealth of Oceana in 1656’, how can ‘Hobbes’s claims about the headway made by republicanism before the war be reconciled with these findings of its belatedness?’[80]

This question assumes a lot. Its premise is that ‘the group of malcontents later stigmatised by Hobbes in his Behemoth as the ‘Democratical Gentlemen’[81] were republicans, or proto-republicans. But were they? Hobbes did claim that ‘two groups above all’ were to be blamed for ‘the catastrophe of the 1640s’: the Presbyterians and the ‘democratical gentlemen’.[82] Presbyterians tend to be of no great interest for these historians. They identify ‘democratical gentlemen’ as members in the House of Commons or as the gentry.[83] But their focus is the ideas those ‘democratical’ members of the parliament advocated. Hobbes’s treatment of those ‘democratical gentlemen’ was both wrong and right, in their view. On the one hand, Hobbes gave the misleading impression that ‘the gentlemen in question were self-conscious exponents of a radical ideology designed to limit the powers of the crown’. In fact, the ‘democratical gentlemen’, according to this interpretation, were only concerned to uphold ‘their traditional privileges’. But Hobbes was right to see ‘that their reliance on classical arguments about freedom and servitude eventually pushed them into adopting a standpoint so radical as to be virtually republican in its constitutional allegiances’.[84]

This interpretation has the merit of drawing attention to Behemoth and Hobbes’s critique of democracy. But is it defensible to translate Hobbes’s ‘democraticals’ into republicans? What assumptions does such a translation bring into play? Republicanism, in the telling of Quentin Skinner and his colleagues, was the result of ideological radicalization. Royal power was challenged on the basis of the principles drawn (even ‘entirely drawn’) from the ‘legal and moral philosophy of ancient Rome’.[85] Royalism is usually equated with monarchy. So republicanism becomes anti-monarchism and, as such, a constitutional position. Skinner’s conclusion was that, from the ‘Parliamentary perspective, the civil war began as a war of national liberation from servitude. If there was any one slogan under which the two Houses finally took up arms, it was that the people of England never, never, never shall be slaves’.[86]

Salutatory a notion as ‘national liberation’ might be, it is not the most convincing description of the English civil war. I wonder if Hobbes could even understand such a term. If he could not, then how could such a characterization help us understand Hobbes? Hobbes would surely like Skinner’s emphasis on the importance of classical political sensibilities and ideas in England’s troubles. But Hobbes spoke of ‘democratical’ - not republican - ‘principles’.[87] Does this matter?

Before the republican turn in the history of political thought, historians from Eduard Bernstein and G. P. Gooch to Perez Zagorin would accept Hobbes’s characterization of the ideas he criticized as democratic.[88] True, describing the English civil war, or its particular aspects and protagonists, in democratic terms has often been an act of appropriation. That has been the general pattern: ‘Much modern historical discussion of the English revolution has been governed by attempts to appropriate it’. The ‘historiography of English republicanism, despite its quality, is no exception’.[89]

Since the republican turn was an offspring of the linguistic turn in the history of political thought, speaking of republicanism where historical actors themselves did not, strikes me as inconsistent with the methodological guidelines of this historiography. What assumptions does the slogan, emblematic for the ‘virtually republican’ constitutional position, that ‘the people of England never, never, never shall be slaves’, import into the historical situation under discussion? What is assumed when one assumes that Hobbes’s ‘democraticals’ were republicans?

One assumption is clearly that the civil war was fought for the people. But the anti-royalist parliamentarians, whether we choose to call them ‘democratical’ or ‘republican’, did not have much to do with ‘the people’. They tended to disregard the people, just like their critic Hobbes did. But Hobbes was perhaps more respectful of the people. He saw them as helpers: With their help the Parliamentarians were to set up democracy.[90] When the people entered democratic politics, they did so as ‘hands’. They ‘understood not the reasons of either party’. But, paradoxically, those ‘hands were to decide the controversy’.[91] That is why the people had to be seduced and, as an ‘ignorant multitude’, could be seduced.[92] Instrumentalized by the seducers, the (common) people appear on the scene and act as a ‘tumultuous party’, ‘insolent rabble of the people’, or ‘great multitudes of clamorous people’, characterized by their ‘fury’.[93] Hobbes cited a declaration of the parliament that ‘the people, under God, are the original of all just power’.[94] He happily denounced that statement as part of the game played by ambitious, glory-seeking men.[95]

Hobbes did not have the highest opinion of the people in politics but important ‘democratical gentlemen’ disdained them outright. Henry Parker was a key figure in emerging neo-classical/Roman denunciation of royal policy[96] who had ‘an almost mystical sense of the identity of people and parliament’.[97] But he shuddered at the idea that ‘Mechanicks, bred up illiterately to handy crafts’, would be ‘placed at the helm’, that ‘ignorance, and sordid birth ... be lifted up to the eminent offices, and places of power’, that that ‘which was the Foot’ would be made ‘the Head’, ‘and that the foot, which was the Head’.[98] Marchamont Nedham was another important propagandist during the civil war. From his perspective, liberation of the people would have been one of those notorious liberations against the will of the to-be-liberated, for ‘the more ignorant sort of People’ were declaimers against ‘all alterations of Government’.[99] To have people in power (which Nedham associated with democracy, not with republicanism) was a nightmarish vision.

Such a Democratick, or Popular Forme, that puts the whole multitude into an equall exercise of the Supreme Authority, under pretence of maintaining Liberty, is, in the Judgment of all States-men, the greatest enemy of Liberty; For, the Multitude is so Brutish, that (as the Empereur Claudius said) they are ever in the extreames of kindnesse or Cruelty; being void of Reason, and hurried on with unbridled violence in all their Actions, trampling down all respects of things Sacred and Civill, to make way for their Liberty, which Clapmarius calls a most dissolute licentiousnesse, or licence to doe even what they list.[100]

A pamphleteer shortly before the Pride’s Purge best formulated the prevalent opposition to the liberty of the people for whom the alleged republicans supposedly fought: ‘It is not vox, but Salus populi that is the supream law’.[101] This anonymous anti-royalist pamphleteer saw the people as dim-eyed and dull and knew that they were not to be trusted. Because the people, or the majority of them, were a ‘giddy multitude’, ‘sensual, ignorant, and inconsiderate’, foolish and ‘mad men’, expected to be ‘bestial in their Votes’ (because they supported the king), the reasonable, tyranny-hating and liberty-loving minority was not to submit to them: ‘it is major reason ... and not the major voice’ that was to rule.[102] Vox populi has a connection with populus, the people; but salus populi, the safety or well-being of the people, is decided by the voice of the sovereign, whether the sovereign is the people or not. Safety of the people, the pamphleteer declared, is ‘the chiefest Lord, Rule, Reason, and Law’.[103] He did not say that the people were ‘the chiefest Lord’.

There is nothing inherently republican - or radical or democratic - in the salus populi formula.[104] Hobbes used that formula without a problem. For him, salus populi was a guideline for specifically royal policy or for the policy of any supreme power. On the other hand, he condemned the Long Parliament’s use of salus populi as a pretext for rebellion.[105] Neither is salus populi suprema lex a constitutional position. ‘Lex’ in the formula is ‘the supreme principle’ rather than ‘law’ in the literal sense of the word.[106] More importantly, salus populi is the language of emergency - and necessitas knows no law.[107] A historian of the early modern English political thought has characterized parliamentary sovereignty during the English civil war as absolutism based on permanent emergency.[108] For Hobbes, the idea of ‘supreme law’ was probably no more commendable than the idea of ‘fundamental laws’. For Hobbes, ‘the only fundamental law in every commonwealth is to obey the laws from time to time, which he shall make to whom the people have given the supreme power’. All other was nothing but an abuse of the people.[109]

One cannot accept without reservations, I hope to have shown by now, that English civil war was fought along republican principles for the liberation of the people from servitude. So why did Hobbes call the men who, in his view, challenged royal government on the basis of the principles drawn from the classical legal, moral, and political philosophy ‘democraticals’?

In the pamphlet war of the early 1640s, calling the opponents of the king ‘democratical gentlemen’ would have been an effective polemical device. That was precisely the designation to which they objected. In his polemics with the royalists, Henry Parker, for example, ‘did all he could to minimize the imputation of democracy to the House of Commons’. For him, democracy was ‘the greatest irritant’.[110] Why did Hobbes use that name after the event?

One reason may lie in the greater precision of the language of democracy (as compared with the language of republicanism) when it comes to talking about public authority. Democracy is a form of government. Republic is not. Republic can mean, among other things, a kingless government. Such has been the common meaning of the term since the French revolution. But that was not the predominant meaning of ‘republic’ in England of the sixteenth and seventeen centuries.[111] A prominent historian has called the reign of Elizabeth I a ‘Monarchical Republic’. In Renaissance England, the term respublica did not mean ‘a type of constitution incompatible with monarchy’ and was ‘an acceptable term for a variety of political systems’.[112] The English subtitle of Thomas Smith’s Republica anglorum, for example, was ‘The maner of Gouernement or policie of the Realme of England’. Republica was the generic term for political or civil community, ‘politique body’ or ‘Citie’. In this sense, wrote Smith echoing Cicero, ‘common wealth is called a society or common doing of a multitude of free men collected together and vnited by common accord & couenauntes among themselues, for the conservation of themselves aswell in peace as in warre’.[113] The main species of the republica were monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. Specifically, republica anglorum, English ‘common wealth’, was a ‘Monarchia’, that is, a republica ‘where one alone doth gouerne’, ‘King or Queene’.[114]

Notable diversions from this usage were few. Thomas Elyot did not want Respublica to be understood as the rule of the multitude, the plebs, which ‘in englisshe, is called the communaltie’ and contained ‘the base and vulgare inhabitantes, not auaunced to any honour or dignitie’. He wanted Respublica to be understood as the rule of the public, publike, which ‘is diriuied of people’, populus, meaning ‘all the inhabytantes of a realme or citie’. He proposed a distinction between a publike weale and a commune weale, corresponding to the Latin Res publica and Res plebeia respectively.[115] Walter Ralegh named ‘monarchy or kingdom’, aristocracy, and ‘a free state or popular state’ the forms of the state. He reserved the name commonwealth ‘or government of all the common or baser sort’ for the degenerated form of the popular state.[116] But in his Cabinet-Council, published by Milton in 1658, Ralegh went back to the more conventional usage: ‘All commonwealths are either monarchies, aristocracies, democracies’ (also called popular government).[117] That was the usage conforming to the classical Roman sources, even though they lacked uniformity, as Thomas Smith had observed.[118]

Since Cicero defined kingdom as the republic in which the supreme authority is in the king’s hands,[119] and accepted the contemporary custom of calling the authority of the people ciuitas popularis,[120] Hobbes was truer to the neo-classical/Roman literary conventions than are some of our contemporary historians. The convention in the mid-seventeenth-century England was to use the ‘republic’ as a generic term, of which monarchy was a species, and not as a synonym for kingless government. One can get an intimation of how strong were these terminological conventions from a parliamentary document issued after the beheading of the king, in the period when historians today agree republicanism did exist in England. The Rump required ‘engagement’ by the members of the Council of State to ‘a Republic, without King or House of Lords’.[121] The document did not refer to a ‘Republic’ without qualification but to a republic that had undergone ‘unkinging’ (as Baxter would say).[122] The language of the document does not depict a transition from monarchy to republic but rather a transformation of republic.

Admittedly, parliamentary language was vacillating in that period. Let me cite just a few examples: England was defined as a nation whose government was ‘now settled in the way of a Commonwealth’; it was famously declared to be ‘a Commonwealth and Free State’; but the engagement to be taken by ‘all men of the age of eighteen’ spoke, again, of the ‘Commonwealth of England, as it is now established, without a King or House of Lords’.[123]

Hobbes did not think much of the ‘Commonwealth and Free State.’ That phrase simply meant that ‘neither this king, nor any king, nor any single person’, but only the Rump themselves ‘would be the people’s masters’.[124] The adjective ‘free’ is easy to use. It does not need to mean much since it can mean so many different things. When King James I, for example, wrote about ‘free monarchies’, he was explaining his idea about the true monarchy: a Common-wealth in the ‘trew paterne of Diuinitie’ in which the king thinks himself ‘onely ordained’ for the weal of his people who, in turn, are his ‘louing and obedient subiects’.[125] ‘Free’ is not a constitutional term in itself. But, meaning different things to different people, it can be emotionally charged and express strong political sentiments, just like the vocabulary, images, and models conveyed by the classical literature in general.

Hobbes, as must be clear by now, thought that classical learning had played a fateful role in the outbreak of the civil war. He did not give particular credit to the neo-Roman legitimation of parliament’s claims. He regularly spoke of Grecian and Roman political literature and, in Behemoth, named Aristotle more often than any other classical author, Cicero included.[126] The point Hobbes repeatedly made was that reading the ‘glorious histories and the sententious politics of the ancient popular governments of the Greeks and Romans, amongst whom kings were hated and branded with the name of tyrants, and popular government (although no tyrant was ever so cruel as a popular assembly) passed by the name of liberty’, had led to rebellion.[127]

The reading of the classical literature that, as Hobbes claimed, had led to rebellion was only one possible reading of that literature. The principles Hobbes’s contemporaries drew from the classical literature were neither necessarily nor exclusively democratic or republican. Royalists, for example, used the classics to ridicule parliamentarian apologists and to argue the royal cause.[128] In the 1650s, the royalists came to praise no other than William Prynne as the ‘Cato of his Age’.[129] The examples are multiple.[130] Hobbes himself in his younger years sought to ‘enlist the intellectual tradition of Greece and Rome behind a monarchist philosophy’ in order to ‘counter enthusiasm for democracy’.[131]

In Behemoth, Hobbes no longer fought within that shared discursive field of classicism. He rejected the political language that in his view paved the way to the rebellion. One could not be ‘a good subject to monarchy’, Hobbes believed, if one derived his principles from ‘the enemies of monarchy, such as were Cicero, Seneca, Cato, and other politicians of Rome, and Aristotle of Athens, who seldom speak of kings but as of wolves and other ravenous beasts’.[132] What the Englishmen drew ‘out of the works of Aristotle, Plato, Cicero, Seneca, and out of the histories of Rome and Greece’ were ‘arguments for liberty’. Those arguments equipped them ‘for their disputation against the necessary power of their sovereigns’.[133] But to undermine the ‘necessary power’ of the sovereign is to threat the dissolution of the government.

State democracy and church democracy

It is debatable to interpret Hobbes’s ‘democratical gentlemen’ as republicans (or proto-republicans) in neo-Roman fashion. It is equally questionable to relegate to obscurity the religious component of the opposition to the king. The ‘greatest shortcoming of the modern analysis of English classical republicanism’ is precisely that it ‘has failed adequately to explain that religious dimension’, which was so central to the English civil war.[134] Hobbes was well aware of the key role religion played in the civil war and hardly ever lost it out of sight. The strength of his analysis in Behemoth lies in showing the close connection between those he called ‘democratical gentlemen’ and those he called ‘Presbyterians’, between ‘democratical’ principles and religious claims for power. The mixture of democratic principles and clerical power claims that were driven by ambition and folly (and propelling ambition and folly), created a potent destructive force that brought about the dissolution of the government and thus anarchy.

In his memoirs, Richard Baxter remembered that

many honest Men of weak judgments and little acquaintance with such Matters, had been seduced into a disputing vein, and made it too much of their Religion, to talk for this Opinion and for that; sometimes for State Democracy, and sometime for Church Democracy.[135]

Baxter loathed Hobbes even though, ironically, their books would be publicly burnt together ‘in the court of our Scholes’ at Oxford.[136] But the passage I cited here could have been written by either man (or many others). The passage makes clear that the debate about democracy took place within ‘Religion’. The debate moved easily from considering State Democracy to debating Church Democracy. This passage describes forcefully the embeddedness of democracy in religion.

Religious militants, whom Hobbes occasionally called irreligious, and ‘democratical gentlemen’ do not stand for distinct secular and religious spheres.[137] They are hardly distinguishable in their actions and ideas. At first sight, there is a parallelism between the endeavors of the religious militants, most often personified by the Presbyterians, and the ‘democratical gentlemen’. ‘Democratical gentlemen’ did

not less desire a popular government in the civil state than these ministers did in the Church. And as these did in the pulpit draw the people to their opinions, and to a dislike of the Church-government, Canons, and Common-prayer-book, so did the other make them in love with democracy by their harangues in the Parliament, and by their discourses and communication with people in the country, continually extolling liberty and inveighing against tyranny, leaving the people to collect themselves that this tyranny was the present government of the state.[138]

But that parallelism was only apparent. It collapsed when Hobbes apportioned most of the blame to one side. The bête noire of the English civil war was the group Hobbes called Presbyterians. He maintained that it was the design of the Presbyterian ministers,

who taking themselves to be, by divine right, the only lawful governors of the Church, endeavoured to bring the same form of Government into the civil state. And as the spiritual laws were to be made by their synods, so the civil laws should be made by the House of Commons; who, as they thought, would no less be ruled by them afterwards, than they formerly had been.[139]

Or:

To the end that the State becoming popular, the Church might be so too, and governed by an Assembly; and by consequence (as they thought) seeing politics are subservient to religion, they might govern, and thereby satisfy not only their covetous humour with riches, but also their malice with power to undo all men that admired not their wisdom.[140]

Hobbes’s portrayed the two sets of rebels in very similar terms. They shared the same vices. Among the Presbyterians, ‘every minister shall have the delight of sharing in the government, and consequently of being able to be revenged on those that do not admire their learning and help to fill their purses, and win to their service those that do’.[141] Similarly,

those fine men, which out of their reading of Tully, Seneca, or other anti-monarchics, think themselves sufficient politics, and show their discontent when they are not called to the management of the state, and turn from one side to another upon every neglect they fancy from the King or his enemies.[142]

Actions of different rebel groups stemmed from the same intellectual source. All those rebels embraced the democratic principles that Hobbes identified at the root of European ‘civil wars concerning religion’.[143] They also had the same institutional background. They were all bred at the universities. The ‘democratical gentlemen’ had learned their classics there, and ‘[f]rom the Universities also it was, that all preachers proceeded’. The ‘curious questions in divinity’ as well as ‘all those politic questions concerning the rights of civil and ecclesiastic government’ were ‘first started at the Universities’, the ‘core of rebellion’.[144] Furthermore, the rebels’ actions were mutually reinforcing. Presbyterianism was ‘the very foundation of the Parliament’s treacherous pretensions’. Both ‘seditious Presbyterian ministers’ and ‘ambitious ignorant orators’, making their harangues from the pulpits and in the Parliament, ‘reduced this government into anarchy’.[145]

In a Protestant country where the king was ‘head of the Church’ and religion was one of the laws of the commonwealth, any challenge to or change in the religious establishment was an unsettling of the civil government as well.[146] Such had been noticed and feared long before the civil war started. When Hobbes was one year old, for example, Bishop Cooper, a defender of the Church of England, published an argument in response to a Puritan attack on episcopacy that is relevant to the point at hand. Puritan principles of ecclesiastical organization and authority, Cooper argued, may have been good ‘where the church was in persecution vnder tyrants; but where the assistance may bee had of a Christian Prince or Magistrate, it is neither necessarie, nor so conuenient, as it may be otherwise’. Commenting on the idea of the common election of ministers, Cooper noted that ‘their whole drift ... is to bring the Gouernment of the Church to a Democracie or Aristocracie’. If the common people were made familiar with such principles, he warned, ‘[i]t is greatly to bee feared, that they will very easily transferre the same to the Gouernment of the common weale’.[147] He disliked Presbyterian schemes because the convulsion they would cause in the state would be damaging to religion:

The reason that mooueth vs not to like this platforme of gouernement, is, that when wee on the one part consider the thinges that are required to be redressed, and on the other, the state of our countrey, people, and commonweale: we see euidently, that to plant those things in this Church, wil drawe with it, so many, and so great alterations of the State of gouernment, and of the lawes, as the attempting thereof might bring rather the ouerthrowe of the Gospel among vs, then the end that is desired.[148]

Anti-episcopalians themselves reflected on the homology between the ecclesiastical and civil government, which made them vulnerable to the charge of subverting monarchy. Thomas Cartwright, one of the most learned sixteenth-century Puritans/Presbyterians denied that the church was ‘popular’ only in the first centuries of Christianity, before there had been Christian magistrates:

For the churche is gouerned wyth that kinde of gouernment, whych the Philosophers, that wryte of the best common wealthes, affirme to be the best. For in respecte of Christe the head, it is a Monarchie, and in respecte of the auncientes and pastoures, that gouerne in common, and wyth like authoritie amongste them selues, it is an Aristocratie, or the rule of the best men, and, in respecte that the people are not secluded, but haue their interest in churche matters, it is a Democratie, or a populare estate. An image whereof appeareth also in the pollicye of thys Realme, for as in respecte of the Queene her majestie, it is a Monarchie, so in respecte of the moste honourable Counsell, it is an Aristocratie, and hauing regard to the Parliament, whych is assembled of al estates, it is a Democraty.[149]

This was dangerous thinking. It implied denial of the supreme power of the prince. John Whitgift, the future archbishop of Canterbury, did not hesitate to raise this point. ‘I know that all these three kinds of government may be mixed together after divers sorts’, he replied to Cartwright, his fellow at the Trinity College,

yet still the state of government is named according to that which most ruleth, and beareth the greatest sway: as, when matters are most commonly governed by the consent of the more part of the people, the state is called popular; when by divers of the best and the wisest, it is called optimorum status; when by one, it is called monarchy.

The conclusion Whitgift wanted to make was that ‘in this realm’ ‘the state is neither “aristocraty”, nor “democraty”, but a “monarchy’’’.[150] Making ‘the government of the church popular’ would be an impediment to civil government. The people ‘are commonly bent to novelties and to factions, and most ready to receive that doctrine that seemth to be contrary to the present state, and that inclineth to liberty’.[151] If those people would elect the ministers, they would ‘usually elect such as would feed their humours,’ and as a consequence ‘the prince neither should have quiet government, neither could be able to preserve the peace of the church, nor yet plant that religion that he in conscience is persuaded to be sincere’.[152] In support of his view that the popular government is ‘the worst kind of government that can be’, Whitgift cited Calvin’s point that ‘the fall from a popular state into a sedition is of all other most easy’.[153]

Hobbes engaged seriously with church, theology, and religion. It is reasonable to assume that he was acquainted with this kind of literature and arguments. It may be pure coincidence that Elizabethan Bishop Edwin Sandys and Hobbes both discredited democracy as a fruit of emulation and contention, but it is a coincidence worth noting.

For Sandys, democracy sprung out of emulation and contention - two ‘great and pestilent infections of the hart’ - that are generated by pride: ‘Pride causeth emulation, and of emulation cometh strife: so that the cursed generation of vice is fruitful’, he preached before the Queen.

Pride made the diuelish Angel enuie that his Lord and God should be aboue him: it made Adam desire to be as full of knowledge as his Creator; Absolon to emulate his father and to thirst after his kingdom. Caesar was so prowde that hee could not abide a superior: Pompey could not beare an equall.

After this characteristic mixture of Scriptural and Roman exempla illustrating pride and rebellion in general, Sandys turned to democracy:

Corah, Dathan and Abiram in the pride of their hearts sought to displace Moses and Aaron, the chiefe magistrate and the chiefe minister. They set downe a handsome platforme of equalitie, and many of the multitude allowed of it as well pleased with a popular estate; where the worst of them might be as good as the best. But GOD brought their deuise and themselues to nought.[154]

Hobbes used the story of Korah, Dathan and Abiram in all his major political treatises to illustrate rebellion against the sovereign. Rebellion here means rebellion against the authority to interpret the Word of God and supreme civil authority, which were united in Moses.[155] In his commentary on Thucydides ‘emulation and contention’ were for Hobbes the wellspring of democracy.[156] Pride, which in Sandys’s words caused emulation and contention, was what in Hobbes’s view the civil government had to bring under control. Leviathan, to whom Hobbes compared the ‘Governour,’ was ‘King of all the children of pride’.[157]

In Behemoth, Hobbes represented democracy as the offspring of the children of pride who succeeded in destroying their king. What destroyed ‘that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMON-WEALTH, or STATE’,[158] was an explosive mixture of Greco-Roman political sentiments and ideas, and religious militancy. The intimate connection between ‘democratical’ principles and religious power claims subverted and collapsed the State on both fronts, ‘civill and ecclesiasticall’. It gave the war for democracy a holy nimbus. In the eyes of the rebels, the destruction of the state was authorized by the Word of God to establish the reign of God. In the Presbyterians’ self-image, ‘where they reign, it is God that reigns’.[159] The sovereign was killed because ‘there ought none to be sovereign but King Jesus, nor any govern under him but the saints’, as believed the Fifth-monarchy-men, ‘of whom there were many’ in the Parliament.[160]

The rebellion against sovereignty was a democratic holy war. If we choose to call classicizing political sentiments and ideas republicanism, that was a republicanism covered with the cloak of godliness. But that cloak was not a disposable garment: it was the tunic of Nessus. If we, rather, stay with Hobbes’s own choice of names, we have to read Behemoth as a critique of democracy. That democracy was not the laudable secularist political pursuit we fancy it to be today. That democracy was driven by a gallery of vices. It was inseparable from religious claims on secular power. It was godly democracy. What democratic regime change brought about was dissolution of government and civil disintegration.

1 Thomas Hobbes, Behemoth, or the Long Parliament, with an Introduction by S. Holmes (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990), 1. This was an elegant inversion of the biblical topos. In the Gospel of Luke, the devil led Christ ‘up into an high mountain, shewed unto him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time./ And the devil said unto him, All this power will I give thee, and the glory of them’ etc. Luke 4: 5-6 (I cite King James version). Hobbes took his readers to the Devil’s mountain not in order to tempt them with glory and power but to denounce such temptations. In the period of his life when he felt threatened by the powerful ecclesiastics who accused him of atheism, Hobbes, with this move, posed as the anti-devil.

2 De corpore I. i. 7, in OL 1. 7; I cite English translation in Thomas Hobbes, Computatio Sive Logica: Logic, translation and commentary A. Martinich, eds I. C. Hungerland and G. R. Vick (New York: Abaris Books, 1981), 185.

3 Behemoth, Epistle Dedicatory.

4 Ibid., 23.

5 Ibid., 4.

6 Eight Bookes of the Peloponnesian Warre Written by Thvcydides the sonne of Olorus. Interpreted with Faith and Diligence Immediately out of the Greeke by Thomas Hobbes Secretary to ye late Earle of Deuonshire (London, 1629), 341. See also Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War: The Complete Hobbes Translation, ed. D. Greene (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989), 364.

7 Jacqueline de Romilly, Thucydides and Athenian imperialism, trans. P. Thody (Oxford: Blackwell, 1963).

8 Eight Bookes, 341 (Greene, 364-5).

9 In RexWarner’s translation of Thucydides V. 85, ‘the mass of the people’ would ‘be led astray’. Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, trans. R. Warner and ed. M. I. Finley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), 400-1. A number of modern translations speak of seduction. The Athenians believed they would ‘deceive the ears of the multitude by seductive arguments’. Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, trans. R. Crawley (London: J. M. Dent, [1910]), 393; similarly Thucydides, trans. B. Jowett (Oxford: Clarendon, 1900), 2. 168. ‘[T]hen people won’t be deceived after listening to a single long, seductive, and unrefuted speech.’ The Peloponnesian Wars, trans. W. Blanco (New York: Norton, 1998), 227.

10 The importance of the Melian Dialogue for our understanding of Hobbes is emphasized in David Wootton, ‘Thomas Hobbes’s Machiavellian Moments,’ in The Historical Immagination in Early Modern Britain: History, Rhetoric, and Fiction, 1500-1800, eds D. M. Kelley and D. H. Sacks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press and Woodrow Wilson Center, 1997).

11 Eight Bookes, 341 (Greene, 365). The Athenians refused to discuss ‘either the justice of their demand or any substantive arguments the Melians may wish to offer’. M. Finley’s note in Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War (Penguin), 614.

12 Behemoth, 16.

13 Ibid., 2.

14 Francis Bacon, ‘Of Seditions and Troubles’, in The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall, ed. M. Kiernan (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), 46.

15 Behemoth, 2.

16 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan: with selected variants from the Latin edition of 1668, ed. E. Curley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), 488; OL 3. 509. See below, n. 60.

17 See especially Behemoth, 114, 116, 125.

18 Ibid., 2.

19 Ibid., 2-4.

20 Lucan I. 182; Bacon, ‘Of Seditions and Troubles’, 45.

21 Behemoth, 4-5.

22 Ibid., 21.

23 Ibid., 20.

24 Ibid., 23, 26.

25 See Elements of Law II. xx. 3; xxi. 1-2; xxiv. 1; De cive vii. 1-2, 7-11; Leviathan (Tuck), 129-30, 133, see also. 378-9. I cite Thomas Hobbes, Human Nature and De Corpore Politico, ed. J. C. A. Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); Thomas Hobbes, On the Citizen, ed. and trans. R. Tuck and M. Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. R. Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

26 Michael Mendle, Dangerous Positions: Mixed Government, the Estates of the Realm, and the Making of the Answer to the xix propositions (University, Alabama: The University of Alabama Press, 1985), 59; for historiography, see also F. Smith Fussner, The Historical Revolution: English Historical Writing and Thought, 1580-1640 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), 166-7,169.

27 Behemoth, 23.

28 Ibid., 155. Paul Seaward in a note ad loc. in his forthcoming critical edition of Behemoth for Clarendon edition of Hobbes, called to attention that the second part of Heath’s Brief Chronicle, beginning its narrative at this point in time, was entitled The Democracy or, Pretended Free State.

29 Behemoth, 156.

30 Ibid., 157.

31 Eight Bookes, 198 (Greene, 204). For a modern translation and commentary, see Simon Hornblower, A Commentary on Thucydides: Vol. I, Books I-III (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), 483; P. J. Rhodes, Thucydides, History III (Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1994), 236-7. In relation to Hobbes, Thuc. III. 82 is refered to in Onofrio Nicastro, ‘Le vocabulaire de la dissolution de l’État’, in Hobbes et son vocabulaire: Études de lexicographie philosophique, ed. Y. Ch. Zarka (Paris: Vrin, 1992), 260; the Italian text, ‘Il vocabulario della dissluzione dello Stato,’ is printed in Onofrio Nicastro, Politica e religione nel seicento inglese: Racolta di scritti (Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 1995), here 198.

32 Behemoth, 155, alluding to the Pride’s Purge.

33 Ibid., 70.

34 Ibid., 3.

35 Ibid., 116.

36 Paul Pedech, La méthode historique de Polybe (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1964), 319.

37 Polybius VI, iii-x. I cite Polybius, The Histories, trans. W. R. Paton (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960), 3. 271-93. See commentary ad loc. in F. W. Walbank, A Historical Commentary on Polybius (Oxford: Clarendon, 1957), 1. 643-63. For a very helpful brief discussion, see Fergus Millar, The Roman Republic in Political Thought (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2002), 23 ff.

38 Behemoth, 116-17.

39 Ibid., 33, 112, 114, 125.

40 Ibid., 112.

41 Geoffrey M. Vaughan, ‘Behemoth’ teaches ‘Leviathan’: Thomas Hobbes on Political Education (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2002), vii.

42 Leviathan (Tuck), 461-2, 470.

43 Behemoth, 109.

44 Eight Bookes, ‘Of the Life and History of Thucydides’ (Greene, 572).

45 Ibid. (Greene, 572-3).

46 T. Hobbes Malmesburiensis Vita, OL 1. xiv. Reproduced in English in Anthony Wood, Athenae oxonienses: An Exact History of all the Writers and Bishops who have had their Education in the University of Oxford. To which are added the Fasti, or Annals of the said University, ed. P. Bliss (London: Printed for F. C. and J. Rivington et al., 1813-20), 3: col. 1206.

47 The Life of Mr. Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury. Written by himself in Latine Poem. And now Translated into English (London, 1680; reprint Exeter: The Rota, 1979), 4. See also T. Hobbes Malmesburiensis Vita, OL 1. lxxxviii: ‘Sed mihi prae reliquis Thucydides placuit./ Is Democratia ostendit mihi quam sit inepta,/ Et quantum Coetu plus sapit unus Homo.’ In ms., lines 82-3 are written as follows: ‘Sed mihi prae reliquis Thucidides placuit./ Is Democratiam docuit me quam sit inepta.’ See a critical edition in Jean Terrel, Hobbes: vies d’un philosophe (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2008), 140.

48 George Klosko and Daryl Rice, ‘Thucydides and Hobbes’s State of Nature’, History of Political Thought 6 (1985), no. 3, 405; David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627-1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 62.

49 Elements of Law II. xxi. 5.

50 See n. 45.

51 De cive x. 7.

52 Leviathan (Tuck), 164, 222.

53 On the composition date see editor’s note in Leviathan (Curley), lxxiii-iv. Hobbes’s views of the English civil war play a role in the debate on the date of composition of Leviathan latinus. But the comparison has been made only between the English 1651 edition and the Latin translation, not between the Latin translation and Behemoth. See Z. Lubienski, Die Grundlagen des ethisch-poilitischen Systems von Hobbes: Mit kurzem Literaturüberblick (München: Ernst Reinhardt, 1932), 263 ff.; François Tricaud, ‘Introduction du traducteur’, in Thomas Hobbes, Léviathan, trans. F. Tricaud (Paris: Sirey, 1971), XXV-XXVI; G. A. J. Rogers and Karl Schuhmann, ‘Introduction’, in Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan: A Critical Edition, eds G. A. J. Rogers and K. Schuhmann (London: Continuum, 2005), 1. 231-4.

54 Leviathan (Curley), 488; OL 3. 509.

55 Ibid.

56 See also Behemoth, 204.

57 As suggested in Quentin Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 178. For a good brief discussion of this ‘revolution’, see Nicastro, ‘Le vocabulaire de la dissolution de l’État’, 269-73; ‘Il vocabulario della dissluzione dello Stato,’ 205-8.

58 Leviathan (Curley), 476, 488; OL 3. 502, 509.

59 In the conclusion of this sentence, an observer ‘brought here from a remote part of the world’ fulfills the function of the view from the Devil’s Mountain in Behemoth. Leviathan (Curley), 488; OL 3: 508-9; see also Appendixad Leviathan III, OL 3: 559-60; Leviathan (Curley), 538-9.

60 Leviathan (Curley), 488; OL 3. 509.

61 ‘Itaque atramentum illud democraticum, praedicando, scribendo, disputando eluendum est.’ OL 3. 509-10; cf. Leviathan (Curley), 488.

62 Behemoth, 68.

63 Ibid., 5, 89.

64 Ibid., 155-6.

65 Ibid., 23; see also 68, 89, 155.

66 Ibid., 28-9.

67 Ibid., 20.

68 Ibid., 26.

69 Ibid., 155.

70 Ibid., 23.

71 Ibid., 39.

72 Ibid., 30.

73 Ibid., 31.

74 See also, ibid., 193.

75 Ibid., 20, 22-3, 30, 88-9.

76 Ibid., 22-3, 28, 88-9.

77 Ibid., 23, 26.

78 Ibid., 22, 68.

79 Ibid., 155.

80 Martin Dzelzainis, ‘Ideas in Conflict: Political and Religious Thought during the English Revolution’, in The Cambridge Companion to Writing of the English Revolution, ed. N. H. Keeble (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 36.

81 Quentin Skinner, ‘Classical Liberty and the Coming of the English Civil War’, in vol. 2 of Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, ed. M. van Geldern and Q. Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 15.

82 Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 431-2; see also Martin Dzelzainis, ‘Milton’s Classical Republicanism’, in Milton and Republicanism, eds D. Armitage, A. Himy, and Q. Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 3-4.

83 Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, 432, 433; Dzelzainis, ‘Milton’s Classical Republicanism’, 3.

84 Skinner, ‘Classical Liberty’, 15.

85 Ibid., 14-18.

86 Ibid., 28.

87 Behemoth, 43 (naming Aristotle and Cicero).

88 Eduard Bernstein, Sozialismus und Demokratie in der Grossen Englischen Revolution (Berlin: Dietz, 1895); G. P. Gooch, English Democratic Ideas in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Harper & Row, 1959; first published 1898); Perez Zagorin, A History of Political Thought in the English Revolution (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1997; first published 1954), especially page 2.

89 Jonathan Scott, England’s troubles: Seventeenth-century English Political Instability in European Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 290.

90 Behemoth, 89.

91 Ibid., 115-16.

92 Ibid., 68, 116, 188.

93 Ibid., 64, 69, 71, 88, 97, 98.

94 Ibid., 152.

95 See Deborah Baumgold, Hobbes’s Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), ch. 7; idem, ‘Hobbes’s Political Sensibility: The Menace of Political Ambition’, in Thomas Hobbes and Political Theory, ed. M. G. Dietz (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1990); see also Mary Dietz, ‘Hobbes’s Subject as Citizen’, ibid., 97; Gabriella Slomp, Thomas Hobbes and the Political Philosophy of Glory (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), especially ch. 5. For Hobbes’s frequently used language of acting and gaming, see also Behemoth, 24, 38, 136-7, 159.

96 Skinner, ‘Classical Liberty’, 15-16, 21 ff. But see J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975), 369, who denies Parker the title of a classical republican and speaks, instead, of an ‘Aristotelian populism’. Michael Mendle, ‘Parliamentary Sovereignty: A very English Absolutism’, in Political discourse in Early Modern Britain, eds N. Phillipson and Q. Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 118, also speaks of Parker’s populism.

97 Mendle, Dangerous Positions, 132.

98 [Henry Parker,] A letter of due censure, and redargution to Lieut: Coll: John Lilburne (London, 1650), 21, 22; see also W. K. Jordan, Men of Substance: A Study of the Thought of Two English Revolutionaries, Henry Parker and Henry Robinson (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1942), 156.

99 Marchamont Nedham, The case of the Common-VVealth of England, Stated: or, The Equity, Vtility, and Necessity, of a Submission to the present Government, etc. (London, 1650), 92.

100 Nedham, The case of the Common-VVealth of England, Stated, 71.

101 Salus populi solus rex: The peoples safety is the sole soveraignty, or The royalist out-reasoned (London, 1648), 19; see David Underdown, Pride’s Purge: Politics in the Puritan Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), 266.

102 Salus populi solus rex, 1, 18, 19.

103 Ibid., 18.

104 Skinner, ‘Classical Liberty’, 12, cites first ‘salus populi suprema lexesto’ from Cic. Leg. III. iii. 8 as one of the golden rules of a ‘free state,’ and then (ibid., 18 ff.) frequent references to that rule in the parliamentary documents of the early 1640s to demonstrate the process of radicalization leading to republicanism. See Lorenz Winkler, Salus: Vom Staatskult zur politischen Idee. Eine archäologische Untersuchung (Heidelberg: Archäologie und Geschichte, 1995).

105 Behemoth, 68, 73, 108, 180, 198.

106 Andrew R. Dyck, A Commentary on Cicero, De Legibus (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2004), 459.

107 See also ibid., 458-9.

108 Mendle, ‘Parliamentary Sovereignty’, 118-19. Mende worked on the same material as Skinner in ‘Classical Liberty’ but came to a very different conclusion.

109 Behemoth, 158.

110 See Mendle, Dangerous Positions, 182; and [Henry Parker,] Observations upon some of his Majesties late Answers and Expresses (London, 1642), 22-3. See also Jordan, Men of Substance, 155, that Parker made it plain that the civil war was not to inaugurate the evil of an ‘irresponsible democracy’.

111 Neither was that the case on the Continent during Hobbes’s lifetime. See, for example, Herbert H. Rowen, John de Witt, Grand Pensionary of Holland, 1625-1672 (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1978), 380 ff.; James. D. Tracy, The Founding of the Dutch Republic: War, Finance, and Politics in Holland, 1572-1588 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), Epilogue.

112 Patrick Collinson, ‘The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library of Manchester 69 (1987), no. 2, 400-1. I was not able to consult The monarchical republic of early modern England: Essays in Response to Patrick Collinson, ed. J. F. McDiarmid (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007) in time for print.

113 Thomas Smith, De Republica Anglorum. The maner of Gouernement or policie of the Realme of England (London, 1583), I. 10; see also Cic. Rep. I. xxv. 39.

114 Smith, De Republica Anglorum, I.1. 7; II. 3, 4.

115 The boke named the Gouernour, deuysed by syr Thomas Elyot knight, 1537, I. i.

116 Walter Ralegh, Maxims of State, in vol. 8 of The Works of Sir Walter Ralegh, kt, now first collected, to which are prefixed the lives of the author, by Oldys and Birch (Oxford: The University Press, 1829), 1-2.

117 The Cabinet-council: Containing the Chief Arts of Empire and Mysteries of State, in vol. 8 of The Works, 37.

118 ‘[T]he rule of the multitude which the Greeks called : the Latines some Respublica by the generall name, some populi potestas, some census potestas, I cannot tell howe latinely.’ De Republica Anglorum I. 14.

119 ‘Quare cum penes unum est omnium summa rerum, regem illum unum uocamus et regnum eius rei publicae statum.’ Cic. Rep. I. xxvi. 42. I cite Cicéron, La république, ed. and trans. E. Bréguet, Collection des Universités de France (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1980), 1. 223.

120 ‘Illa autem est ciuitas popularis (sic enim appellant), in qua in populo sunt omnia.’ Cic. Rep. I. xxvi. 42. See commentary ad loc. in Karl Büchner, M. Tullius Cicero De re publica: Kommentar (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1984), 126, that ‘sic enim appellant’ refers to discussions in Cicero’s time, not to the Greek philosophers. Ciuitas popularis was thus not a translation for, which would have been a ‘very awkward’ translation.

121 The Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution, 1625-1660, ed. S.R. Gardiner, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1899), 384.

122 Baxter cited in William Lamont, Richard Baxter and the Millenium: Protestant Imperialism and the English Revolution (London: Croom Helm, 1979), 98.

123 Gardiner, The Constitutional Documents, 387, 388; further instances of ‘Commonwealth’ at 390-9.

124 Behemoth, 164. See also ibid., 157, Hobbes’s comment on the Rump’s calling themselves Custodes Libertatis Angliae: ‘B. I do not see how a subject that is tied to the laws, can have more liberty in one form of government than in another. A. Howsoever, to the people that understand by liberty nothing but leave to do what they list, it was a title not ingrateful.’

125 The Trew Law of Free Monarchies: or the Reciprock and mvtvall Dvetie betwixt a Free King, and His Natural Subjects, in The Political Works of James I, ed. C. H. McIlwain (Cambridge. Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1918).

126 See also Scott, England’s Troubles, 293: ‘Aristotle was the most ubiquitous renaissance classical source and there is a republican Aristotle. It is because Aristotle was a key source for English humanist moral philosophy that Hobbes aimed his criticism particularly in this direction.’ Among today’s historians of seventeenth-century English republicanism, Scott in particular insists on the importance of the Greek ingredient. See his England’s Troubles, ch. 13; and ‘Classical Republicanism in Seventeenth-century England and the Netherlands’, in vol. 1 of Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, 61-2, 66.

127 Behemoth, 23; see also 3, 43, 56, 95, 158.

128 See also Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640-1660 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 103; Mendle, Dangerous Positions, 15, 18; idem, ‘Parliamentary Sovereignty’, 116.

129 William Lamont, Puritanism and Hstorical Controversy (London: UCL Press, 1996), 23.

130 See, e.g., Smith, Literature and Revolution, 102 ff., 207 ff.; Malcolm Smuts, ‘Court-Centred Politics and the Uses of Roman Historians, c. 1590-1630’, in Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England, eds K. Sharpe and P. Lake (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1993), especially 39 ff.; David Norbrook, ‘Lucan, Thomas May, and the Creation of a Republican Literary Culture’, ibid., especially 56 ff.; see also idem, Writing the English Republic, ch. 1.

131 Smuts, ‘Court-Centred Politics’, 42; see also Norbrook, ‘Lucan, Thomas May’, 58; idem, ‘The English Revolution and English Historiography’, in Keeble, The Cambridge Companion to Writing of the English Revolution, 246-7; and, generally, Quentin Skinner, Hobbes and Civil Science, vol. 3 of Visions of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

132 Behemoth, 158.

133 Ibid., 56.

134 Scott, England’s Troubles, 252.

135 Reliquiae Baxterianae, or, Mr. Richard Baxters narrative of the most memorable passages of his life and times, ed. M. Sylvester (London, 1696), 53.

136 Charles Ripley Gillett, Burned Books: Neglected Chapters in British History and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932; reprint Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1964), 2: 517-19.

137 See Behemoth, 155.

138 Ibid., 23.

139 Ibid., 75.

140 Ibid., 159.

141 Ibid., 89.

142 Ibid., 155-6. Hobbes denounces Cicero himself as being moved in his actions ‘out of love to himself.’ Ibid., 72.

143 See n. 58. Aristotle, for example, was an ‘ingredient in religion’, and the clergy was versed in the babbling philosophy of Aristotle. Behemoth, 41, 95.

144 Ibid., 41, 56, 58.

145 Ibid., 82, 109.

146 Ibid., 46, 53.

147 T[homas] C[ooper], [Bishop of Winchester], An Admonition to the People of England, 1589, ed. E. Arber (Birmingham: English Scholar’s Library, 1883], 70. Partly cited in Mendle, Dangerous Positions, 82.

148 Cooper, An Admonition, 65.

149 T. C., A replye to an ansvvere made of M. Doctor VVhitgifte, Against the admonition to the Parliament, [1573], 51. In his section by section refutation of Carthwright, Whitgift cited this locus in his The Defense of the Aunsvvere to the Admonition, against the Replie of T.C. (London, 1574), in The Works of John Whitgift, D.D., Master of Trinity College, Dean of Lincoln, &c., Afterwards successively Bishop of Worcester and Archbishop of Canterbury, ed. J. Ayre, The Parker Society (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1851), 1: 390; see also Mendle, Dangerous Positions, 64-8.

150 The Works of John Whitgift, 1. 393.

151 Ibid., 466.

152 Ibid., 466-7.

153 Ibid., 467. See Calvin, Institutes of the Chrtistian Religion IV. xx. 8 (Allen’s translation, Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1949, 2: 778, has ‘democracy’ at this place). Whitgift’s reference is misleading, for Calvin states that, of the ‘forms of government, which are stated by philosophers’, aristocracy or a mixture of aristocracy and democracy was the best to his mind, and that the ‘vice and imperfection of men ... renders it safer and more tolerable for the government to be in the hands of many’, since they can assist, admonish, censor, and restrain each other. (Ibid.) See also The Decades of Henry Bullinger, minister of the Church of Zurich, translated by H. I., ed. Th. Harding, The Parker Society (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1849 [originally published 1587]), 1. 311: ‘none can deny, but that great perils and infinite incommodities are in the aristocracy, but far more many in the democracy’.

154 Sermons Made by the most reuerende Father in God, Edwin, Archbishop of Yorke, Primate of England and Metropolitane (London, 1585), 118-19. In another sermon, Sandys likened Korah, Dathan, and Abiram’s episode with our muttering ‘against our good and lawfull magistrates, against our iudges, and against Lordes ministers’. Ibid., 272.

155 Elements of Law II. xxvi. 2; De cive xvi. 13; Leviathan (Tuck), 325-6; see also Numbers 16.

156 See n. 44. On emulation, see also Elements of Law I. ix. 21; Leviathan VI. 48; on contention, Leviathan XI. 3; on pride, VIII. 19.

157 Hobbes, Leviathan (Tuck), 221, citing Job 41: 34: ‘he is a king over all the children of pride’ (King James version).

158 Hobbes, Leviathan, The Introduction.

159 Behemoth, 50, 167.

160 Ibid., 182.