‘Great Columbus of the golden lands of new philosophies’
(Abraham Cowley, ‘To Mr. Hobbes’, Poems, 1656)
The strife-torn years of the 1640s and 1650s inevitably brought disruption to intellectual life. Nevertheless the conflicts of these decades provided a spur for debate on political and religious questions. It was as a contributor to those debates that Thomas Hobbes first came to public notice as a thinker of first importance, and Hobbes’s years of displacement in Paris proved to be the most philosophically stimulating and productive of his life. Hobbes’s political writings were designed to address the political theories in circulation at this turbulent time, yet they transcend partisan categories. Both Hobbes’s natural philosophy and his political philosophy constitute the most original application of new mechanical principles to philosophy by an English philosopher. Hobbes’s achievement was to have offered a self-consistent, demonstrable philosophy in line with contemporary developments in mathematics and mechanics. By applying the same methodological and philosophical principles in both natural and political philosophy he proposed a viable alternative to Aristotelianism. In many respects his most original contribution to philosophy resulted from his departure from the tripartite system which he had originally planned. His greatest philosophical legacy is his political masterpiece, Leviathan, which was not originally conceived as part of his system, but was produced in response to the turn of political events. Hobbes’s contribution was such that he redefined the issues for political philosophy, not just in England, but in Europe (principally through their uptake and adaptation by Pufendorf). It also made him extremely controversial, with the result that few were willing to acknowledge a debt to him. Hobbes’s impact was so widespread in seventeenth-century philosophy that it is impossible to do justice to him in a single chapter. But that also means that Hobbes’s immediate context gives us a remarkable window on seventeenth-century philosophy in action. Through the debates with which he engaged we have a glimpse of the circulation of ideas in the context of when they were produced. Before discussing Hobbes’s philosophy, it will be appropriate to give some account of the background in seventeenth-century political thought.
Political thought of the 1640s draws on the legacy of debates earlier in the century, when issues of sovereignty as well as resistance theory were aired in James VI and I’s debates with his Calvinist subjects and his Catholic detractors.1 These earlier debates dealt with themes such as the nature and rights of sovereignty, whether and on what grounds a tyrant might be opposed, and the relationship between spiritual and temporal authority. In his De jure regni apud Scotos (1579) George Buchanan had argued that kings derive their power by transference from the people: rulers owe their position to free people who create monarchs for their own protection. If rulers breach the laws that bind them, subjects are released from their obligation of obedience. The Catholic William Barclay entered the lists with his De regno et regali potestate (Paris, 1600), which attacks Buchanan and other ‘monarchomachs’ such as the Huguenot Vindicia, contra tyrannos (1579) (attributed to François Hotman). Barclay did, however, argue that in certain extreme circumstances subjects may oppose their ruler—for example if a ruler makes war on his subjects. Other European contributors to these debates were, first, Hadrian Saravia (c.1532–1613), a Protestant convert and naturalized Englishman who argued in his De imperandi authoritate (1593) that kingly power is of divine origin, challenging resistance theorists like Buchanan. Basing his claims on the bible, Saravia argued that governmental authority derived from God, not man, and that the first governments were paternal. He denied that men are by nature born free, since ‘by law of nature the son is in the power of the father’.2 The issue of sovereignty is also handled by the Venetian Marc’Antonio de Dominis (1560–1624). In his De republica ecclesiastica (1617)3 De Dominis defended James I against the Jesuits, arguing that monarchy was by divine institution, and does not derive from transference of power from subject to ruler. Kings are therefore accountable to God alone, and not their subjects. He also took an Erastian position subordinating ecclesiastical to regal power.4 Another foreigner important for the resistance argument was the Frenchman Jean Bodin, the influence of whose Les Six Livres de la république (1576) continued well into the seventeenth century, with English translations by Richard Knolles in 1606 (reprinted 1635). Bodin also argued that the formation of political community by association of individuals is voluntary.5
In the 1640s these arguments were refocused on to the dispute between crown and parliament. New to the debates of the 1640s is an emphasis on natural law, but the seeds of this, along with other themes, were already sown in earlier controversies. Particularly important in pre-Civil War political theory was the Spanish Jesuit Francisco Suarez, whose major synthesis of scholastic political theory, Tractatus de legibus, ac Deo legislatore (1612) was foundational for discussions of natural law and a frequent point of reference in political debates. Also important for the context within which Hobbes engaged with natural law was the Dutchman Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) whose De jure belli ac pacis [On the Law of War and Peace, 1625] (see Chapter 3) anticipates aspects of Hobbes’s political philosophy. Like Hobbes, Grotius envisaged a pre-civil state of man in which the only law in operation was natural law: Grotius identified self-preservation as the fundamental principle of natural law. However, in his account, self-interest is qualified in three ways which mitigate its harshness: respecting the property of others, keeping promises, compensating injury. Unlike Hobbes, Grotius argued that there was a necessary link between reason and morality, and allowed that the supreme authority might rest in a republic rather than monarchy.6
Very little of the polemical literature generated by the troubles of the 1640s can be characterized as philosophical. However, insofar as writers presuppose a theoretical framework, the point of reference is Aristotelian and scholastic political theory. Even the more substantial defences of both sides make extensive use of the bible. There was also a revival of interest in Machiavelli, whose works were translated into English at this time, the Discourses in 1636 (with several editions later on) and The Prince in 1640. The republican Henry Neville translated Machiavelli’s complete works (though this was not published until 1688), and Machiavelli was a major source for James Harrington’s republican political theory.
Royalists redeployed claims that monarchy was of divine institution or Adamic origin. Perhaps the best-known defender of royal absolutism was Robert Filmer (1588–1653), an exact contemporary of Hobbes, who would later attack Hobbes, as well as Milton and Grotius, in 1652. Filmer polemicized on behalf of the monarchy in the 1640s. His fullest statement of his position is his posthumously published Patriarcha, or the Natural Power of Kings (1680), which dates from this time or possibly earlier.7 Filmer’s defence of the hereditary right of kings was indebted to Bodin’s République. In Patriarcha he picks up on the themes of the Jacobean debates over kingly supremacy, and attacks the idea that men are naturally free as a novel invention introduced by ‘the subtle Schoolmen’ in support of the Pope. He proffers the biblically based argument that monarchy originated in the paternal authority of Adam over his family. Filmer denied the natural liberty of men since Adam’s posterity are born into a state of subjection to paternal authority. Patriarchal and monarchical authority being the same, Adam’s monarchical authority over his family descends to his posterity. Patriarcha is best known nowadays for the uses to which it was put in late Stuart political debates. Originally written to support the claims of the crown before the Civil War, Filmer’s theory was revived to bolster the position of the crown in the 1680s. It thus became a natural target for opponents of absolute monarchy, most famously in James Tyrell’s Patriarcha non monarcha (1681) and Locke’s critique in Two Treatises of Government (written c.1683) (see Chapter 9).
Calvinist resistance theory was deployed to justify opposition to the monarch. A precedent had been set by George Buchanan’s justification of the deposition of Mary Queen of Scots in his De jure regni apud Scotos, which was cited by Cromwell when justifying the execution of Charles I.8 In the 1640s the Covenanters led the argument for resistance to tyranny on the grounds that the authority of the ruler derived from a compact between citizens and the king. Such arguments were pursued most energetically by Samuel Rutherford, whose Rex Lex or, The Law and the Prince (1644), combined Calvinist resistance theory with scholastic political theory to argue that legitimate government was grounded in a covenant between king and people. His book largely consists of argument by biblical example, with a philosophical point of reference in Aristotle, who is the source for his view that man is ‘a sociall creature’, and ‘domestick societie is by natures instinct, so is civill societie naturall’. He cites Bodin to argue that political society is formed by voluntary association between men, and he cites Suarez on the natural origins of law, that ‘a power of making Laws, is given by God as a property flowing from nature, Qui dat formam, dat consequ[e]ntia ad formam’.9 Rutherford’s Lex Rex was directed against what he called ‘anti-magistratical royalists’, among whom he listed Hugo Grotius, Marc’Antonio De Dominis, William Barclay, and ‘the doctors of Aberdeen’.
A more democratic variant on the resistance theories in circulation at this time can be found in the Leveller Richard Overton. In his Arrow against Tyranny (1646) and his An Appeal from the Commons (1647), both written while he was imprisoned, Overton maintained that all men are equal by birth. Although more of a visionary than a systematic thinker, Overton proposed a theory of government based on the consent of free men who place their trust in a single ruler in order to secure peace. This freedom, being a ‘propriety’ in nature, cannot be rescinded by men. Overton’s materialism is suggestive of parallels with Hobbes, while his conception of property seems to anticipate Locke.
Explicitly republican theory begins to be aired post regicide, by figures such as Marchmont Nedham, James Harrington, and John Milton, whose Ready and Easy Way (1660) critiques Plato redivivus by Henry Neville, translator of Machiavelli.10 In the 1670s republican thought focuses on the defence of common liberty against tyrants: the most influential republican theorist, Algernon Sidney (1623–83) picks up the anti-tyrant theme in his posthumously published ‘Court Maxims’ (written 1665–6), which attacks monarchy and justifies insurrection against tyrannical government, themes he recapitulates in his anti-Filmerian Discourses Concerning Government (written 1681–3, published 1698). Post-1688 republican ideas also circulated through the publication of the writings of earlier republicans (Ludlow, Milton, Sidney, Neville, and Harrington). John Toland would play a major role in editing these writings, which were to form the basis of the eighteenth-century canon for Whigs and republican sympathizers.
Hobbes’s first entry into the public philosophical arena was his Elements of Law both Natural and Politic (1640), which was originally written as a defence of absolute sovereignty in response to the crisis in relations between the Crown and Parliament that eventually deteriorated into civil war and regicide. This anticipates arguments of his major work of political philosophy, Leviathan (1651). Written in the aftermath of the execution of Charles I, this too was a response to contemporary political circumstances. The impact of Hobbes’s political philosophy was immediate and profound. His books changed the terms of political theory for decades to come. Not surprisingly, therefore, he tends to be regarded as primarily a political philosopher, and his natural philosophy has received less attention. However, as the architecture of his grand philosophical design of his Elements of Philosophy shows, he regarded his political and natural philosophy as parts of a unitary whole. For Hobbes held that in all branches of philosophy, everything is ultimately explicable in terms of mechanical principles, that is to say in terms of bodies in motion. He devoted considerable time to the ‘mathematical’ study of natural philosophy throughout his philosophical career, from his earliest writings on optics until old age. His main work of natural philosophy, De corpore (1655), which incorporates his earlier investigations, was delayed by his writing Leviathan. Long after he ceased to write on political theory, he continued to publish on physics and to defend his methodology, in writings such as Problemata physica (1662) (on gravity, vacuum, heat, the tides, and other natural phenomena), De principiis & ratiocinatione geometrarum (1666), and Decameron physiologicum: or Ten Dialogues of Natural Philosophy (1678).
Educated at Elizabethan Oxford, Hobbes spurned the Aristotelian philosophy which formed the backbone of his Oxford studies. He criticized the teaching of Greek and Latin authors both at school and university, for generating destructive disputes and false ideas about political entitlement. His strictures about humanistic education notwithstanding, his own humanist training served him well and he remained a lifelong humanist, as evidenced by his translations of Thucydides (1629) and Homer (1677, 1681) and by his compendium of Aristotelian rhetoric.11 He conformed to custom by publishing in Latin for a scholarly and international readership, but he is one of the first philosophers to publish major works in English. His great work of political philosophy, Leviathan, is a masterpiece of English prose. In the context of the political debates raging among his fellow countrymen, his use of the vernacular ensured the book a wide audience.
Hobbes’s philosophical career started late. He was over 40 years old when he made his first public venture into philosophy. His philosophical achievement is the more remarkable for the fact that the period of his greatest productivity was one of political turbulence and exile. Both the content and publication history of his political and philosophical writings register the divisive and disruptive political circumstances of the Civil war and its aftermath. The political reverses experienced by the Royalist cause, to which he was linked through his patrons in the Cavendish families, help to explain the fact that his system of philosophy, his tripartite Elements of Philosophy, was not published in the order which he originally planned: the third part, De cive was published first (in Paris, in 1642, with a Latin version in 1647),12 while the first and second parts (De corpore and De homine) were published considerably later, in 1655 and 1658 respectively. He interrupted work on these to publish his most famous book, Leviathan (1651). After the peaceful Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, the adverse reaction to his philosophy in England led to a moratorium being imposed on further publication of his views as the price of royal protection from his enemies. Thereafter he had to rely on translations of his works in order to answer his critics. By contrast with his notoriety in England, he enjoyed a positive reception in Europe, where he came to be regarded as the greatest living philosopher.
Hobbes was well acquainted with new currents of thought as a result of direct contact with the most innovative thinkers of his time, both at home and overseas. On his travels to Europe in his capacity as tutor to the Devonshire family he met Galileo Galilei in Florence and developed links with the anti-papal group of Venetians around Paulo Sarpi, Marc’Antonio de Dominis (who had translated Bacon’s Essays), and Fulgenzio Micanzio (with whom he corresponded). Of particular importance in Paris were the group around the Minim Friar Marin Mersenne and the Montmor academy. Here he participated in discussions of new mathematical and mechanistic methods of philosophizing and came into contact with, among others, Samuel Sorbière, René Descartes, and Pierre Gassendi. It was in Paris that he met Thomas White and Sir Kenelm Digby. During his self-imposed exile between 1640 and 1650 Hobbes had a period of sustained close association with Parisian groups. Although he shared their interest in the new mechanical philosophy, it is clear from his Objections to Descartes’s Metaphysics (Objectiones tertiae), that Hobbes’s position was from the beginning distinct from that of Descartes. In his Objections he accepts the cogito but denies Descartes’s conclusion that the thinking subject is mind, arguing instead that thinking is a corporeal process, and that all we can know is body. He is also critical of Descartes in his early manuscript writings on optics and in letters to Descartes sent via Mersenne which comment on Descartes’s Dioptrique.
In England, Hobbes was associated with the so-called Welbeck circle around Sir Charles Cavendish and his brother, William, Earl of Newcastle, who were cousins of his first employer, the Duke of Devonshire. The Welbeck circle included the natural philosophers Walter Warner and Robert Payne, who became a close personal friend. This group shared interests in optics, mathematics, and mechanics. Other friends at the cutting edge of scientific investigation were William Harvey, whom Hobbes assisted in dissections, and his sometime amanuensis, William Petty. Hobbes was also acquainted with Herbert of Cherbury, with whom he seems to have discussed an early draft of De corpore. Through the Cavendish family he met Francis Bacon, whom he served as an assistant for a short time, and who may have influenced his thinking on method and his interest in refounding philosophy. Like Bacon, Hobbes set out to provide the foundations of a new philosophy, rejecting the philosophical systems of the past. Unlike Bacon he was a systematizer, with an ambition to provide a unified philosophy which was very different in conception and method, since he set out to construct a demonstrable system of philosophy deduced from first principles. Nevertheless, in the all-encompassing scope of his philosophical ambition, he shares with Bacon a Renaissance sense of the comprehensive unity of philosophy covering all branches of knowledge. He also, like Bacon, underscored the importance of natural philosophy (i.e. science).
According to his biographer Aubrey, Hobbes claimed that it was a reading of Euclid’s Elements which had inspired him to study mathematics, and to develop his own geometric method of argument by deduction from first principles. Hobbes had already embarked on his grand philosophical project some years before his first interventions in philosophical debate. His first excursion into print as a philosopher was the third set of Objections to Descartes’s Meditations (1641), but his earliest philosophical works were written for manuscript circulation. These were his critique of White (the so-called Anti-White) and his aforementioned Elements of Law.13 Together these lay the ground for his mature philosophy. Hobbes’s critique of Thomas White’s De mundo (1642) was perhaps undertaken in order to demonstrate his uncompromising repudiation of received philosophies: by exposing the inadequacy of White’s attempt to incorporate new philosophical and scientific thinking within a broadly Aristotelian framework Hobbes demonstrated not just the shortcomings of Aristotelianism, but the absurdity of trying to integrate it with philosophy founded on very different principles. In this way he signalled categorically that he was on the side of the moderns. His commentary airs some of the key political ideas that he was to develop in Elements of Philosophy, such as the notion that liberty entails the absence of impediments and that government entails the transfer of right for the sake of security. Elements of Law, likewise, puts a distance between his own views and traditional philosophies, especially Aristotelian political philosophy, but also more recent political ideas of figures like Bodin and Machiavelli.
The main branches of Hobbes’s philosophy (natural, moral, and political) are enshrined in the tripartite organization of his Elements of Philosophy, reflecting the fact that Hobbes conceived his philosophy as a unified whole, encompassing the physical world, man and society. Although there is some question of whether and how the three parts of his Elements of Philosophy integrate, there is unquestionably considerable overlap between all the published parts of his philosophy. The subsections of Elements of Law—‘Human Nature’ and ‘De corpore politico’ (On the Body Politic)—anticipate the subdivisions of his Elements of Philosophy. Leviathan recapitulates and develops ideas from De cive and anticipates much of what appeared in De homine. De corpore covers logic, language, method, metaphysics, mathematics, and physics. De homine deals with psychology, the passions, and man’s condition in nature (‘The Estate and Right of Nature’). Hobbes’s broad divisions of philosophy into physics, moral philosophy, and political philosophy subsumes the traditional branches of philosophy. In De cive VI he lists the branches of philosophy as geometry, mechanics (the science of motion), physics, ethics, and political philosophy. However, the branches of philosophy are considerably redrawn, and their content significantly pared down, by comparison with the traditional divisions of philosophy. He eliminates some of the traditional content of philosophy (notably metaphysics, and religion), and revises the character of those divisions which he retains, with the result that his scheme of philosophy bears no resemblance to the traditional Aristotelian organization of the subject. In place of the traditional subject matter of metaphysics, he deals with the definitions of terms from which his arguments are derived. Names, not ideas, are for Hobbes the only universals, and true propositions consist of names united by a copula. He rejected the notion of political philosophy as practical wisdom based on past experience, proposing instead demonstrable philosophy founded on rational principles, by which he sought to provide a foundation for action in political society. And, as we shall see, he radically reconceived moral philosophy, which he classified as a branch of natural philosophy, deriving moral principles from human appetites, and making rational self-interest rather than received notions of virtue its foundation. He claimed that he was the first political philosopher, since, prior to publication of his De cive, what passed for the ‘Civil Philosophy’ was a mere ‘phantasme’ of philosophy, whereas his was based on clear principles. He also claimed to have invented the science of Optics.
The various definitions of philosophy given by Hobbes underscore its rational and deductive character. At its most basic philosophy equates to human reason, which he considers innate (‘Philosophia id est ratio naturalis, in omni homine innata est’).14 Hobbes also defines philosophy as the knowledge of causes and effects obtained through reason. By ‘reason’ is meant analytic reason on a geometric model, according to which, by starting from self-evident first principles, conclusions are deduced by way of a process of analysis or calculation (which he called ‘computation’). This Euclidian method of demonstration derives from his work on optics. The main subject matter of all philosophy is ‘every Body, of whose Generation or Properties we can have any knowledge’.15 Thus everything is ultimately explicable in terms of mechanical principles, that is to say in terms of bodies in motion. He distinguishes two types of body—the works of nature and the works of men, which supply the subject matter of his primary subdivision of philosophy into natural philosophy (or science) and civil philosophy. Since nothing can be known which is not body, there is no place in Hobbes’s system for non-material subject matter, be these abstract essences or spirits, that is to say most of the traditional content of metaphysics and theology. Mental processes, including the exercise of reason, are physical, resulting from the movement of particles of matter
Hobbes’s sense-based epistemology is consistent with the scholastic maxim that there is nothing in the intellect which does not derive from the senses. However, he arrives at this from very different premises and his account of cognition differs in fundamentals. When explaining how we derive our knowledge from the senses, he rejected the Aristotelian explanation of the properties of things in terms of substantial forms. Instead, like the mechanical philosophers, he denied that the perceived properties of things resided in the things perceived. Rather, sense impressions arise from motion. Qualities such as colour, smell, smoothness are the result of motions in the brain triggered during the act of perception. An important difference from Descartes and Gassendi, however, is his rejection of immaterial substance and his denial that direct knowledge of non-corporeal beings (souls, angels, and God) is humanly possible.
Like animals, human beings are bodies, the difference being that human bodies are capable of thought. Mind is not a separate substance, but denotes the processes involved in thinking. Thoughts, emotions, and volitions are motions within the brain. Knowledge derives from the senses, sensations being the movement of particles in the brain resulting from the impact of bodies. Memory consists of the residual impressions made by particles during sensation. Imagination has an important role in the process of cognition as the repository of data that is used in the process of reasoning. Reasoning itself is something to be learned.
Hobbes’s political philosophy is distinctive for his conception of the state of nature, the distinction he makes between ‘right of nature’ and ‘law of nature’, and his account of government based on contract. His claim that he was the first to write on ‘civil philosophy’ ignores the contributions of Grotius and Hooker’s Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Polity. His claim bears analysis to the extent that he can be credited with rethinking political philosophy as a demonstrable science founded on clear principles. He regarded Aristotelian political philosophy and its scholastic legacy as not worthy of the name of philosophy. Hobbes’s rejection of Aristotle is signalled categorically in the preface of De cive, where he repudiates the Aristotelian view of man as zoon politikon, a social animal, naturally fitted for government in society.
Both Elements of Law and Leviathan start with accounts of the constitution and operations of the human mind, its powers, sensation, the passions, temperament, and imagination, which form the basis of his account of the condition of man in a state of liberty (the state of nature) and as regulated by law. The second parts of both Elements of Law and Leviathan move from the constitution of man and society to treat of ‘the constitution of a commonwealth’, discussing pacts/covenants, sovereignty, three forms of government, the powers of rulers, the family unit, religion, the causes of rebellion, the duties of rulers, and the nature of laws. Elements of Philosophy covers the same ground in its second and third sections. The major difference is that the first section is devoted to body (De corpore), in order to lay the ground for the discussions which follow in succeeding books of human nature and the citizen, and ultimately of the state, or body politic.
Human psychology is the key to Hobbes’s political philosophy: he identifies the ‘causes’ of government in the nature of man. Far from being naturally sociable, human beings are naturally inclined to injure one another. Instead of being ruled by reason, men are in thrall to their passions, driven by desire for glory, fear of one another and the imperative of self-preservation. Since human beings are not predisposed towards social and political organization, the condition of being governed is not the natural condition of mankind. As Hobbes observes in De cive, ‘man is made fit for society not by nature, but by education’.16 For Hobbes, political organization arises from the need to reconcile the conflicts which arise from our natural condition as human beings. Although he rejected the Aristotelian view of man as zoon politikon, by nature social or political, he would have agreed with Aristotle that it is only in the context of organized society that human beings can fulfil their full potential. On Hobbes’s analysis, our make-up as human beings is bound to put us into conflict with others. He identifies four faculties of human nature: strength, experience, reason, and passion. Human beings are thus equipped to act rationally on the basis of experience, but they are also subject to emotional drives. Human beings are motivated by a combination of self-preservation, diffidence (fear), and glory. Our impulses to action are the passions which drive us, principally the desire to seek pleasure and avoid pain. Our ability to obtain our desires depends on the power we have to do so, so it follows that every person will seek to increase his/her power.
The extra-social condition of human beings is one of untrammelled individual liberty, where the only impediment to any individual’s exercise of his or her liberty is the exercise by others of their liberty. Every person’s basic right of nature (ius naturale) is ‘the preservation of his own Nature’.17 And it is every person’s natural right to do anything which he/she desires and to avoid anything which might threaten his/her life. These rights are not dependent on laws, but are contingent on our being human. They obtain in the state of nature without restriction, as there is no power capable of imposing restraint. Left to themselves with no law or power to regulate them men will inevitably come into conflict. As a result the extra-social human condition or state of nature is a state of war of all against all—either actual conflict, or potential conflict, which, for Hobbes, is equally miserable because it is a state of perpetual fear. There are variant descriptions of the state of nature in Hobbes’s writings: the most negative one occurs in Leviathan, a state in which every man’s life is ‘solitary, poore, nasty, brutish and short’, ‘a Condition of Warre… of everyone against everyone’.18 In this condition it is rational to seek peace, and from this arises the idea of the first law of nature, a law of nature being ‘a Precept or generall Rule, found out by Reason’.19 And the first of these is for the preservation of life. Thus ‘to seek Peace and follow it’ is ‘the first and Fundamentall Law of Nature’.20
However, even though it is rational to seek peace, human nature is such that we lack the power to do so because we are in thrall to our passions, and our natural rights as human beings inevitably put us into conflict with one another. No single person has the power to prevent this. Peace can only be achieved if there is a power strong enough to maintain it. Political organization in order to set up a power capable of doing that is the solution to this problem. But this requires each individual to surrender power for the sake of self-preservation. The key to achieving that is Hobbes’s contract-based political organization whereby we agree to give up power in order that a greater power (the sovereign) will guarantee our safety. Peace is the condition obtained by surrendering one’s power to another, by means of a contract. Since the keeping of that contract is essential for our safety and well-being, it follows that the foundation of justice is the keeping of promises or covenants, without which the social and political stability essential for peace could not be maintained. The keeping of promises is therefore the second law of nature.
For Hobbes natural law is the same as the moral law. Hobbes deduces the laws of morality from the ‘first and fundamental Law of Nature’ (namely, ‘to seek Peace, and follow it’). All ‘the meanes of peaceable, sociable and comfortable living’ are conducive to peace.21 Likewise, qualities conducive to peace include the virtues ‘Modesty, Equity, Trust, Humanity, Mercy’, all of them consistent with the Christian moral code.22 But they are recommended on pragmatic grounds, rather than because they are inherently good.
Every one of these distinctive features of Hobbes’s political philosophy overturns received political theory. His account of the formation of the state, for example, departs from a widespread view that mankind has always lived in a state of government, even during Adam’s lifetime. (This is the position of Robert Filmer, for example, who in his Patriarcha grounds it in the bible). However, although Hobbes’s political philosophy departs from received theories in fundamentals, in other respects it contains echoes. For example, there is classical precedent for the notion of a pre-social barbaric condition, analogous to Hobbes’s state of nature. The political philosophy of the scholastics Vitoria, Molina, and Mariana also recognizes a pre-governmental condition, which they describe in terms not very dissimilar from Hobbes’s state of nature. However, they did not regard this condition as natural. The terms ‘right of nature’ and ‘law of nature’ were well entrenched in early modern political theory. Unlike others who use these terms (e.g. Vitoria and Molina, or Grotius), Hobbes draws a sharp distinction between a ‘right of nature’ (ius naturale) and a law of nature—the difference between them is that a ‘right of nature’ is liberty to choose or not choose, and while law consists of an obligation or command to follow a certain course of action. The law is imposed by command of ‘him that by right hath command over others’,23 that is to say the sovereign in a state, or, in nature, God. Just as there are no fundamental moral essences, or pre-existing ethical norms, so there is no natural justice, but justice must be constructed. The overriding need to maintain peace means that the sovereign may determine both right and wrong and religious belief. Furthermore, Hobbes’s account of motivation inverts the relationship of reason to the passions. In place of the widely held view that it is the function of reason to mitigate and direct feeling, for Hobbes desire is the primary driver in all our actions. Reason is the servant of passion, since reason may be used in assisting us to achieve our desires. It is passion which motivates us to reason, and our recourse to reason varies with the strength of our desires.
The history of the reception of Hobbes’s philosophy is a subject which has filled many volumes. The most there is space for here is a cursory sketch.24 In Britain, Hobbes’s reputation as a philosopher was clouded by the controversies occasioned by his published views, especially his materialism, his defence of political absolutism, and his extreme Erastianism. These controversies were inflamed by his attacks on the universities and institutional religion in Leviathan, and they fed largely on reductive and distorted accounts of his philosophical views. His ethics was interpreted as extreme conventionalism, cynically devoid of any basis in accepted moral codes or moral norms, and entirely a matter of human invention. He was widely decried as a determinist, who reduced human beings to mere mechanisms devoid of freedom of action—despite the fact that he himself took a compatibilist view of the relationship between human freedom and material determinism. It was wrongly believed that he propounded a negative view of human nature as power-hungry and egotistical, devoid of moral principles (a view which persists today). His political and materialist views were conflated with Spinoza’s, thereby helping to father the notion that Spinoza was a materialist. And he was almost universally pilloried as an atheist.
Furthermore, in England, Hobbes’s reputation as a natural philosopher and mathematician was damaged by his dispute with John Wallis on squaring the circle, in which Wallis convincingly demonstrated the failure of Hobbes’s claims. This dispute, at times vituperative, was one to which Hobbes kept returning for the rest of his life. His very last publication, Decameron physiologicum (1678) continues his war with Wallis. Hobbes also took issue with the experimental method of the newly fledged Royal Society, particularly Robert Boyle’s air-pump experiments (see Chapter 8). Hobbes’s criticisms did not endear him to the Royal Society, to whose ranks he was not admitted, despite being the eminent natural philosopher of Europe at the time of its founding.
The controversy which probably did more than any other to sully Hobbes’s reputation in Britain was his quarrel with the exiled Royalist bishop John Bramhall. The philosophical importance of the Hobbes–Bramhall debate about Liberty and Necessity is that it elicited from Hobbes elucidations of his conception of freedom, which have a direct bearing on his political philosophy. But the theological furore it created drowned out rational argument. The debate originated as a discussion instigated by their patron, the exiled Marquess of Newcastle in 1645. It became a very public dispute after the unauthorized publication in 1654 of Hobbes’s notes with the title Of Liberty and Necessity by his Welsh admirer John Davies of Kidwelly. This work was to become the most widely read of all Hobbes’s writings, and its publication brought about an instant change of tone. Believing Hobbes to have authorized its publication, Bramhall responded by publishing his side of the debate as A Defence of True Liberty from Antecedent and Extrinsecall Necessity (1655). Hobbes replied with The Questions Concerning Liberty, Necessity and Chance (1656), to which Bramhall countered with Castigations of Mr Hobbes (1658). Hobbes and Bramhall were at odds in fundamentals. Bramhall’s position was fairly standard for a rational churchman at this time. His belief in free will was consistent with the Arminian theology to which he subscribed, and the arguments which he put forward in support of his position are in line with the kind of natural theology to which as a university-educated clergyman of the Church of England he had been trained. As such he represents a tradition of philosophical theology that goes back through Suarez and Molina to Augustine. For Bramhall will is choice or ‘election’ (Latin arbitrium). Free will is free choice (liberum arbitrium). Choosing involves ‘an act of judgement and understanding’. In accordance with traditional faculty psychology, Bramhall conceived the will to be a separate faculty of the mind, and that willing involved exercising this faculty of the will in concert with the judgements of a separate faculty of intellect. Hobbes denied this. For Hobbes, the actions which we call voluntary are merely the last in a chain of antecedent causes. For Bramhall freedom and necessity are incompatible, freedom being by definition freedom from necessity. For Hobbes, ‘Liberty and necessity are consistent’.25 By contrast, Bramhall held that to be subject to necessity is not to be free. Since to be necessitated is to be compelled by external causes, it follows that freedom is absence of external compulsion. For Bramhall the will is a self-determining power, and therefore not subject to external cause. In accordance with late scholastic accounts of the will (e.g. those of Suarez and Molina) he held that the cause of free actions lies within the agent—namely the will, which he held to be self-determining because it is not constrained by external causes. For a metaphysical materialist, like Hobbes, it did not make sense to talk in terms of faculties of the soul. Nor did he accept the distinction made by Bramhall and late scholastics between will and desire. For Hobbes, it is our desires, or appetites, that drive us. For Hobbes, freedom is absence of impediment to action. As a determinist, he held that everything happens as the necessary effect of antecedent cause. But this does not lead him to deny freedom of action. Rather, he argued that freedom is logically consistent with necessity: any voluntary action is a free action. A free man is ‘he that…is not hindered to do what he has a will to’; ‘a free agent is he that can do if he will, and forbear if he will’.26 Bramhall invoked the support of ‘the greater part of Philosophers and Schoolmen’. For Hobbes, however, scholasticism was a form of contaminated philosophy and terms like ‘free will’ an example of the empty jargon of school-learning. For his part, Bramhall derided Hobbes’s terminology as ‘obscure and confused’, ‘the common conceptions of the vulgar’ and accused him of setting himself up as ‘an universal dictator among scholars’.27
Much of the ensuing Bramhall–Hobbes quarrel was a war of words, in which the participants traded insults about each other’s terminology, with Hobbes ridiculing the empty chimeras of Bramhall’s scholastic formulations, and Bramhall hectoring Hobbes for his use of ‘vulgar’ and ‘common’ terms. Although Bramhall’s arguments were largely traditional, and although Hobbes skilfully exposed their weaknesses, Bramhall drew attention to his determinism and to the destructive consequences of his philosophy for theology. By focusing on these issues, and by pursuing them relentlessly, he succeeded in damaging Hobbes’s reputation among churchmen and laymen alike. In this way this undignified dispute contributed significantly to the adverse reception of Hobbes’s philosophy in Restoration Britain. In Scotland he was denounced by Robert Baillie as ‘a professed Atheist’. Henry Scougal condemned his ‘debauched sentiments’. Gilbert Burnet spoke of the ‘pestiferous spawn’ of the ‘infernal Leviathan’.28
Not all Hobbes’s critics were blinkered by prejudice, though most read him from within a different philosophical framework, working from very different sets of premises. Hobbes certainly had his British admirers—in fact the early reception of Hobbes’s philosophy, including Leviathan, was positive. John Selden was a friend, Walter Charleton an early admirer. Henry Stubbe commenced a translation of Leviathan (which he abandoned in the face of the disapproval of his patron, John Owen). Sir Kenelm Digby owned several of his works, including Leviathan. In his Idea of Education, Hobbes’s friend John Aubrey recommends for politics Hobbes’s Leviathan (also Harrington’s Oceana), and for ethics ‘Hobbes’ Human Nature which is the best’ (he also recommends Charon, Bacon’s Essays, and Pufendorf’s De justitia et jure). Seth Ward, later a founder member of the Royal Society and Bishop of Sarum, was initially impressed by Hobbes’s Euclidian method. So were Ralph Bathurst, Thomas Barlow, and Edward Bagshaw.29 Some critics of Hobbes were impressed by his philosophical acumen. Henry More for example acknowledged Hobbes’s ‘extraordinary Quicksightedness in discerning of the best and most warrantable ways of salving all Phaemonena from the ordinary allowed properties of Matter’.30 Others regarded Hobbes’s intellectual skills as the more dangerous because of the conclusions which he drew: both Robert Boyle and Joseph Glanvill feared that Hobbes’s ‘demonstrative way of philosophy’ would seduce his readers into accepting his dangerous views.31
Others adopted elements of Hobbes’s philosophy without acknowledgement. John Hall of Richmond, for example, was something of a closet Hobbist. His Of Government and Obedience (1654) reasserts the claims of monarchy on quasi-Hobbesian lines (but without acknowledging Hobbes). And his views are the more intriguing because he was evidently a Platonist. He argues that only the monarch is truly free, whereas subjects, being by definition in subjection, are not free. His position is predicated on a more positive view of human nature, and unlike Hobbes he credits God with much emphasizing his perfection and goodness which is manifested in his creation which is ‘positively good, [and] so, proportionable to the impression of Divine favour’. There is a hierarchy of beings (‘Golden chain and rank of Subordination’). The principle of self-love or ‘Philautia’ is fundamental to the law of nature (‘Natures Law, to preserve themselves and creatures of life [living beings]…was necessary to be kept up by this appetite of self-seeking’). Originally ‘philautia’ was a ‘happy estate of innocent coveting and enjoying’, but the unlimited appetites of men led to conflicts of self-interest. So, by the same logic as Hobbes, he argues for ‘Politique submission’ to a single ‘grand Politique body’.32
The republican political theorist James Harrington, on the other hand, was a critic of Hobbes who was politically opposed to Hobbes, but nevertheless predicts that Hobbes would in the future be thought the best writer of his time ‘for his Treatises of Humane Nature, and of Liberty and Necessity, they are the greatest of New Lights’.33 At the other end of the political spectrum, Robert Filmer agreed with Hobbes on the ‘rights of exercising government’ and thought the ‘rights of sovereignty…amply and judiciously handled’ in De cive and Leviathan. He nevertheless noted the irony that ‘I should praise his building, and yet mislike his foundation’.34
The application of Hobbesian ideas is, surprisingly, to be found in ecclesiastical contexts. The Restoration Anglican churchman Samuel Parker praises De cive for emphasizing divine dominion, insisting that God exercises his will in accordance with right reason. Parker’s receptivity to Hobbes’s Calvinism on this point was probably influenced by his anti-intellectualist agenda which targets the anti-Calvinist Platonizing theologians whom he had in mind when he objects to the idea that ‘all the effects of Gods power be a natural Emanation of his goodness’ on grounds that scripture only mentions his power.35 Another clerical application of Hobbesian political concepts was by Edward Stillingfleet, whose Irenicum adopts the logic of contractarianism to argue for religious comprehension: both dissenters and the Church itself might relinquish some of their claims for the greater good of religion as a whole.36
Many of Hobbes’s early admirers subsequently revised their views, especially in the light of the religious controversy which his views aroused. But there were others who responded to his radical views on the role of religion by using it to support more radical views of their own. The most striking instance was Charles Blount, a member of the radical Whig Green Ribbon Club, and self-professed deist. Blount drew on Hobbes in his anticlerical Great is Diana of the Ephesians (1680) and presented him with a copy of the work. He quotes from him freely in his 1683 Miracles, No Violations of the Laws of Nature.
One of the most intriguing engagements with Hobbes’s philosophy is that of Margaret Cavendish, wife of his patron the Duke of Newcastle.37 Although she was aware of Descartes, she probably owed more to Hobbes, Charleton, and the Welbeck circle for her induction into philosophy. The Duchess had wide-ranging interests extending from drama and poetry to philosophy and science. Her first published philosophy came in a collection of poetry and prose entitled Philosophicall Fancies (1653). This was followed by several semi-discursive prose writings Philosophical and Physical Opinions (1655), The World’s Olio (1655), Orations (1662), Sociable Letters (1664). She did not address religious or ethical issues, but focused instead on natural philosophy and also, to some extent, political philosophy. Her most systematic account of her philosophical and scientific views is contained in three works: Philosophical Letters (1664) (which critiques Descartes, Van Helmont, and Henry More, as well as Hobbes), Observations on Experimental Philosophy (1666) (which attacks the experimentalism of the Royal Society), and Grounds of Natural Philosophy (1668) (which contains her most fully stated natural philosophy).
Although she denied ever having conversed with Hobbes, she had certainly read Elements of Law. Her response to Hobbes in her Philosophical Letters is strikingly free of the slanders and prejudices displayed by so many of his detractors. There are parallels between her ideas and Hobbes’s, though there are also clear differences. Like Hobbes, she was a materialist who sought to explain all phenomena in terms of matter in motion. But unlike Hobbes she attributed life and motion to matter. Her political philosophy too contains echoes of Hobbes. In Orations she propounds an essentially Hobbesian theory of absolute monarchy as the best way of maintaining security and peace. The liberty of subjects is guaranteed by their submission to regal authority, but Cavendish does not offer a contractarian account of the subjection of citizens. Another difference between Cavendish and Hobbes is that while the sovereign must be prepared to use force when necessary, it is virtue, not force, which sustains the body politic. The successful monarch is a benevolent dictator, ‘careful and loving’ towards his subjects, impartial, honest, and honourable in his dealings. Unlike Hobbes, she also discusses the liberty of women, which she deals with in the context of marriage, opting for a compromise on the model of Hobbesian absolute monarchy: wives are guaranteed liberty by accepting subordination to their autocratic husbands.
Another female critic of Hobbes was Anne Conway (see Chapter 7), whose principal objection to Hobbes centres on his materialism. In her Principia philosophiae she couples Hobbes with Spinoza, interpreted as materialists who failed to register the ontological divide between God and the created world.
The most searching philosophical critics of Hobbes at home were the Cambridge Platonists Henry More and Ralph Cudworth and the natural law theorist Richard Cumberland. Cudworth and More (see Chapter 7) were concerned with the atheistic implications of Hobbes’s materialism but their critique of Hobbes is remarkable for its balanced tone, free of the vituperation which colours more polemical responses. Henry More expressed high regard for Hobbes’s acumen and attempted to frame his arguments in his adversary’s terms.38 His key argument against Hobbes was metaphysical. In his Immortality of the Soul (1659) More took up Hobbes’s claim that the idea of immaterial substance is unintelligible. Homing in on Hobbes’s definition of body, he counterposed a definition of incorporeal substance which, he believed, met the same criteria of intelligibility—the properties imputed to spirit being essentially the obverse of the properties imputed to matter by Hobbes: against the mechanical definition of matter as ‘a substance impenetrable and indiscerpible [i.e. indivisible]’. More defines immaterial substance as ‘a substance penetrable and discerpible’.39 More’s case rests on his spatialized conception of spirit, which was not widely shared, that incorporeal substance, like corporeal substance, is extended.
Cudworth’s is the most extensive and philosophical of contemporary responses to Hobbes whom he critiques in both his published and unpublished writings, tackling both his political and natural philosophy. Hobbes’s Elements of Philosophy are explicitly targeted in his unpublished writings ‘On Liberty and Necessity’. Cudworth’s only critique of Hobbes to be published in his lifetime comes in his The True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678), a work which is directed at materialists and atheists of all types. At the very end of The True Intellectual System, in a section which may have been added shortly before publication, Cudworth targets first Hobbes’s materialist epistemology and secondly his political theory. In Cudworth’s various arguments against atheism Hobbes figures among ‘the Democritick and Epicurean Atheists’. He never names Hobbes but refers to him as ‘the writer of De cive’ and as Leviathan. He dismisses Hobbes’s claims to novelty by identifying parallels between the tenets of Hobbes’s philosophy and the philosophers of antiquity, particularly Protagoras and Epicurus. Cudworth objects to Hobbes’s ‘villanizing of human nature’, his treatment of justice as a ‘Factious or Artificiall thing’, with no foundation in natural justice.40 He identifies three areas of contention: the claims that religion and politics don’t mix because religion is incompatible with the interests of the sovereign, that the civil sovereign rules by fear, and that morality is a matter of convention. Cudworth’s anti-voluntarism committed him to deny that justice may be legislated. Even for God: ‘the right and authority of God himself is founded in Justice’.41 The burden of Cudworth’s objections to Hobbes’s natural law theory is that it is ‘artificiall Justice’ without foundation in natural goodness. Cudworth charged that Hobbes’s negative conception of human nature renders civil government a necessary evil, void of natural justice. This explains why ‘Atheistick Politicians’ invoke laws of nature in order to give their covenants force. But with no foundation in true justice, ‘covenants without natural justice are nothing but words and breath’.42 This is a topic to which Cudworth returns in his posthumously published Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality, which probably originates from the 1650s. This contains an extensive discussion of natural justice by way of a commentary on Plato’s Theaetetus which critiques the ethical conventialism of Protagoras and Hobbes, and refutes command morality.
Richard Cumberland’s De legibus naturae (1672) was primarily targeted at Hobbes, whose moral conventionalism he sought to refute by demonstrating the objective character of morality by means of a new theory of morality, based on natural law. In contrast to Hobbes, Cumberland founds natural law in the common good, which promotes maximum happiness secured through benevolence. Cumberland directly targets Hobbes by adopting the premises and methods of argument used by his adversary. He accepts the principle of self-preservation, and employs deductive reasoning, grounding his argument in mechanistic natural philosophy. He defines bodies in terms of ‘Extension, Figure and variously-compounded motions’,43 and makes no appeal to non-corporeal agents. (In point of fact, the cosmology which he invokes is Cartesian, complete with its vortical theory of planetary motion. He also draws on his own knowledge as an anatomist: his account of human physiology is informed by the research of Willis and Lower). But Cumberland takes the appeal to natural philosophy in a very different direction. At every turn he rejects Hobbes’s principles, claims flaws in his reasoning, and repudiates his conclusions. He refashions rational self-interest to align it with benevolence, and argues that on the basis of what we learn from experience, in their natural state human beings are not fundamentally anti-social, but have a strong inclination to benevolence. Human behaviour does not conform to the Hobbesian picture of conflict and expropriation, in the ‘Right of every man’s warring against all, and of arrogating everything to himself’. Thus, although Cumberland deduces his ethical theory from human nature, he employs a radically different account of human beings as naturally social and benevolent. The purpose of his close analysis of the structure of the body is to destroy Hobbes’s grounding of his arguments on the physical nature of man.
Hobbes’s European legacy was extensive. Dissemination of his philosophy was assisted by Latin editions and translations of his works. His Opera philosophica was published by Blaeu in Amsterdam, while a Latin translation of Leviathan was printed in London (1676 and 1681). De corpore politico was translated into French (published in Amsterdam in 1649)44 by his friend and admirer Samuel Sorbière, who was his most consistent advocate in the Republic of Letters and who also oversaw publication of the first edition of De cive and the Latin edition of Leviathan in 1668. There were also Dutch translations of De cive (De erste beginselen van een burger-staat, 1675) and Leviathan (Leviathan of Van de Stoffe, 1667).45 D’Holbach published a French translation of Hobbes’s Human Nature in 1772.
Hobbes’s natural philosophy earned him respect and admiration abroad, especially in France, where, even before publication he was well received in the Paris academies. But not everyone was so positive about it: among them Christiaan Huygens was not, apparently, impressed by Hobbes’s natural philosophy (he was sent copies of De corpore, Dialogus physicus, and Problemata physica). It was Hobbes’s political philosophy that had the most lasting influence.46 There was early interest from the Dutch thinkers Van Velthuysen, Heerebord, and De Raey, though none took up his ideas. Johan Pieter de la Court by contrast helped to disseminate Hobbes’s political ideas in publications like Consideratien en Examplen van Staat (1660). Pierre Bayle’s theory of human society and human nature are indebted to Hobbes. Although critical of his defence of absolutism, in his Dictionnaire entry on Hobbes Bayle expresses high regard for him as a political philosopher.47 The French defender of political absolutism, Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, drew on Hobbes without acknowledgement for his account of the origin of government. Bossuet argued in his Politique (1682) that the original state of man was an anarchic state of war of everyone against everyone. The solution required a renunciation of natural liberty in the interest of peace, though this did not entail a renunciation of sovereignty. In Lutheran Germany, the great German jurist Samuel Pufendorf was introduced to Hobbes’s writings in Jena in 1657 by his teacher Erhard Weigel. Pufendorf’s De jure naturae et gentium registers the depth of his response to Hobbes, though he modifies Hobbes’s theories, for example by insisting that God’s right of command derives not just from his omnipotence, because that is not consonant with God’s goodness. Pufendorf made such extensive use of Hobbes that Leibniz dubbed him Hobbes’s poodle.
As these examples show, Hobbes was considered a thinker to be reckoned with among European philosophers. At home, Hobbes set the terms of debate in political philosophy, ethics, and natural philosophy even for his opponents. British political thought turned on Hobbesian themes—natural law, natural rights, the state of nature, freedom and necessity, the contractarian origins of government are all topics of discussion. For all their divergence from him, Hobbes’s successors in natural law theory address these topics, even while they assert sociability of man, and the objective grounds of morality and monarchical accountability. Refutation of Hobbes is a routine feature of political and moral writing (for example, James Tyrell’s A Brief Disquisition of the Law of Nature was printed with his Confutations of Mr. Hobbs’s Principles). Natural philosophers too, strove to retain the mechanical model, without Hobbes’s materialism—Boyle being a case in point. Philosophers of religion rose to the defence of all things immaterial. This is not to say that philosophers danced to Hobbes’s tune. He was not the only philosopher to absorb and respond to new philosophies. However, the success of Hobbes’s engagement with it and the conclusions which he drew raised the stakes for others. For what Hobbes had shown was that it was possible to construct a philosophical system on the basis of a few agreed principles, independently of the entire apparatus of Aristotelian metaphysics. He was not the first to do so, of course: Descartes had led the way. But to many of his readers, by taking the new ‘mechanical’ philosophy to its logical extreme, he exposed the destructive potential for received ideas (especially for religion) of the mechanical model first promoted by Descartes. Hobbes’s materialism was interpreted as atheistic. In the eyes of his detractors, its dangers were confirmed when Spinoza took this one step further, positing a single universal substance and equating God with nature. No forward-thinking philosopher wanted to be tarred with these brushes. The next two chapters will discuss two important strands of non-Hobbesian philosophy which were receptive to Cartesianism, both of which had to reckon with Hobbes: Cambridge Platonism and the experimental philosophy of the Royal Society.
1 Robert M. Kingdon, ‘Calvinism and Resistance Theory’, and J. H. M. Salmon, ‘Catholic Resistance Theory, Ultramontanism, and the Royalist Response, 1580–1620’, in CHPT, pp. 214–53.
2 Hadrian Saravia, De imperandi authoritate (London, 1611), pp. 125, 167; J. P. Sommerville, ‘Absolutism and Royalism’, in CHPT, pp. 347–73, p. 358.
3 Published in London when De Dominis was resident in England, and reprinted in 1620.
4 The Venetian Republic attracted interest from the Protestant north for its resistance to papal domination, and for its success in combining liberty with stability. See Noel Malcolm, De Dominis (1560–1624): Venetian, Anglican, Ecumenist and Relapsed Heretic (London: Strickland & Scott, 1984).
5 Julian H. Franklin, ‘Sovereignty and the Mixed Constitution: Bodin and his Critics’, in CHPT, pp. 298–328.
6 For different assessments of the importance of Grotius for Hobbes, see Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories: Their Origins and Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Perez Zagorin, ‘Hobbes as a Theorist of Natural Law’, International History Review, 17 (2003): 239–55; Noberto Bobbio, Thomas Hobbes and the Natural Law Tradition (Chicago & London: Chicago University Press, 1993).
7 Haakonssen dates it from the 1640s, Tuck from 1612–13. See Richard Tuck, ‘A New Date for Filmer’s Patriarcha’, Historical Journal, 29 (1986): 183–6.
8 Stuart Brown, ‘The Sovereignty of the People’, in Sarah Hutton and Paul Schuurman (eds), Studies on Locke: Sources, Contemporaries, and Legacy (Dordrecht: Springer, 2008), pp. 45–57.
9 Samuel Rutherford, Lex Rex or, The Law and the Prince (London, 1644), p. 22.
10 Blair Worden, ‘English Republicanism’, in CHPT, pp. 443–75.
11 Thomas Hobbes, A Briefe of the Art of Rhetorique (London, [1637]).
12 This was a private printing organized by Mersenne. The Latin version was printed in the Netherlands, at the behest of Samuel Sorbière (Noel Malcolm, ‘Sorbière, Samuel’, ODNB).
13 Printed a decade later as Philosophicall Rudiments Concerning Government and Society (London, 1651).
14 Hobbes, De corpore (1655), Part 1, ch. 1, p. 1.
15 Hobbes, The Elements of Philosophy Concerning Body (London, 1656), pt 1.1, section 10, p. 7.
16 Hobbes, Philosophicall Rudiments, p. 7.
17 Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 14, ed. Malcolm, vol. 2, p. 198.
18 Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 14, p. 192.
19 Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 198.
20 Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 200.
21 Leviathan, ch. 15, ed. Malcolm, vol. 2, p. 242.
22 Hobbes, Philosophicall Rudiments, p. 56. Cf. Leviathan, ch. 17, ed. Malcolm, vol. 2, p. 254.
23 Leviathan, ch. 15, ed. Malcolm, vol. 2 p. 242.
24 The fullest account of the contemporary British reception of Hobbes is Jon Parkin, Taming the Leviathan: The Reception of the Political and Religious Ideas of Thomas Hobbes in England 1640–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). See also Samuel I. Mintz, Hunting of Leviathan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962).
25 Leviathan, ch. 21, ed. Malcolm., vol. 2, p. 326.
26 Thomas Hobbes, ‘Of Liberty and Necessity’, in Hobbes and Bramhall on Liberty and Necessity, ed. Vere Chapell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 39. Cf. Leviathan, ch. 21, ed. Malcolm, vol. 2, p. 324.
27 Castigations of Mr Hobbes, in John Bramhall, The Works of Archbishop Bramhall (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1842–4), vol. 4, pp. 208 and 228.
28 M. C. T. Simpson, ‘The Library of the Reverend James Nairn (1629–1678): Scholarly Book Collecting in Restoration Scotland’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Edinburgh, 1987).
29 Mordechai Feingold, ‘Mathematical Sciences’, in HUO, vol. 4, p. 414.
30 Henry More, Immortality of the Soul, Preface, p. 59 in A Collection of Several Philosophical Writings (London, 1662).
31 Quentin Skinner, ‘Thomas Hobbes and his Disciples in France and England’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 8 (1966), 153–67.
32 John Hall of Richmond, Of Government and Obedience, as they Stand Directed and Determined by Scripture and Reason (London, 1654). See J. T. Peacey, ‘Nibbling at Leviathan: Politics and Theory in England in the 1650s’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 61.2 (1998), pp. 241–57.
33 James Harrington, Prerogative (London, 1657), p. 36; Harrington, The Political Works, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 423.
34 Robert Filmer, Observations Concerning the Original of Popular Government (1652), in Filmer, Patriarcha and Other Writings, ed. J. P. Sommerville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
35 Samuel Parker, An Account of the Nature and Extent of the Divine Dominion and Goodness (Oxford, 1666), p. 26. See Parkin, Taming the Leviathan, pp. 252–3.
36 See also Parkin, Taming the Leviathan, pp. 207–8.
37 See Eileen O’Neill’s Introduction to her edition of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, Observations upon Experimental Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Susan James’s Introduction to her edition of Cavendish’s Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Also Sarah Hutton, ‘Women, Freedom and Equality’, in Peter Anstey (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 501–8; Sarah Hutton, ‘In Dialogue with Thomas Hobbes: Margaret Cavendish’s Natural Philosophy’, Women’s Writing, 4 (1997): 421–32.
38 More, Immortality, p. 59 in More, A Collection (1662).
39 More, Immortality, p. 21, in More, A Collection (1662).
40 Ralph Cudworth, True Intellectual System of the Universe (London, 1678), p. 890.
41 Cudworth, True Intellectual System of the Universe, p. 896.
42 Cudworth, True Intellectual System of the Universe, pp. 891, 892, 894.
43 Richard Cumberland, A Treatise of the Laws of Nature, trans. John Maxwell ed. Jon Parkin (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2005), p. 507.
44 Le Corps politique ou les éléments de la loi, trans. Samuel Sorbière (1649), followed by an anonymous translation of the Elements of Law, Le Corps politique ou les éléments de la loi morale et civile (n.p., 1652). A translation of the first two parts of De cive by Hobbes’s friend and correspondent Francois Du Verdus was printed in Paris in 1660 with the title Elemens de la politique. On Sorbière and Du Verdus, see Malcolm in Hobbes, Correspondence, ed. Malcolm, vol. 2, pp. 893–9, 904–13.
45 C. W. Schoneveld, Intertraffic of the Mind (Leiden: Leiden University Press for the Sir Thomas Browne Institute, 1983).
46 Skinner, ‘Thomas Hobbes and his Disciples in France and England’; Quentin Skinner, ‘The Ideological Context of Hobbes’s Political Thought’, The Historical Journal, 9 (1966): 286–317; Noel Malcolm, ‘Hobbes and the European Republic of Letters’, in Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 457–545.
47 Skinner, ‘The Ideological Context of Hobbes’s Political Thought’.