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Tuck on Hobbes, another thought

 


I wrote here recently about Richard Tuck's book on Hobbes. I mentioned that Tuck is also the author of a PHILOSOPHY AND GOVERNMENT: 1572 - 1651, a broad work on the development of European political thought in those fascinating decades, and I suggested that I would have something more to say about how Tuck's broad approach feeds into his study of Hobbes. This is that more.

Tuck is fascinated by the cross-channel connection between the Brits and the Dutch. The Brits were happy to support lowland rebels against the Spanish empire, when THAT was the central opposition in their world. But once the Dutch became an empire themselves, the Brits' attitude turned hostile. 

Hobbes, especially on Tuck's reading, owed a lot to the Lowlanders in the development of his own thought Consider Justus Lipsius, a Flemish classicist, (1547 - 1606) on the one hand and Hugo Grotius (1583 -1645) the escapee from a Dutch prison who defined the modern notion of a "just war," on the other.  

Lipsius is renowned for giving classical Stoicism a modern form. Hobbes was much influenced by Stoicism in the form Lipsius gave it. The only true liberty, Lipsius said, is obedience to God, which is to say, a life in accord with nature. Hobbes had to imagine the creation of an earthly God, the State, to allow is true obedience, but the idea of submission-as-freedom is much the same. 

Grotius based much of his legal theorizing on the proposition that, in his words, "he who wills the attainment of a given end, wills also the things that are necessary to that end." Humans inevitably will to protect ourselves, obtain that which is due to us, and punish transgressors. For these purposes, it is sometimes necessary to go to war. Thus, in willing the former we actually will the latter, we cannot fail to regard such wars as just. 

Hobbesianism is implicit in precisely that argument. For it is by the creation of a state that we (if "we" can identify ourselves with that state, as Hobbes thought we must) acquire the ability to fight these just wars. Against foes foreign or domestic.  

That is Grotius' visage above. 


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