I mentioned here earlier this week that, in college, I was taught a Straussian version of Thomas Hobbes. That is: the typical Straussian position in interpreting a wide range of early modern political thinkers is that X was secretly an atheist but was pretending to believe in God because of the whole fear-of-persecution thing. The political philosophy can be understood only once one penetrates beneath the veneer of winking conformism about religion. Just a quick further note along those lines today. That is (despite contrary views such as the one I discussed here Tuesday) a fairly easy sell as to Hobbes. And Hume. A little more difficult (IMHO) with regard to Spinoza, and much more difficult with regard to Montesquieu and Locke. And it is almost impossible to look at Maimonides in the manner that the Straussians want. The founder of the Straussian view was, as one might imagine, Leo Strauss (1899 -1973), and the grand name for his characte...
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In anthropology, Hobbes was a thorough-going materialist. He didn’t believe in a ‘ghost within the machine,’ only in the machine. In metaphysics, again, he was a thorough-going materialist. This meant that he disbelieved in any notion of God that would involve a Being transcending in any way the material world. It is possible that he believed in a God in SOME sense, but he statements on the subject are confusing and subject to a lot of interpretive controversy. They may be confusing because he wanted them to be so: his Stuart patrons would hardly have smiled on open atheism. In epistemology, Hobbes was a nominalist and empiricist. “There is nothing universal but names,” he said, and that notion was in his mind a sword with which to slay nonsense. In ethics, Hobbes was of two views. In a state of nature, there is only generalization from psychological egoism. I want power. I have to expect that you, too, want power. What is right for me then is to dominate and perhaps to kill you....
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 o...
Tuck's book on Hobbes is part of the Past Masters series. Tuck was certainly qualified to write it. He was professor of government at Harvard. He was the author of Natural Rights Theories (1979) and Philosophy and Government 1572-1651 (1993). Now, wait a second. The book was published in 1989, how can its About the Author page cite a 1993 book? I gather I'm looking at a reprint. Anyway, the title of the 1993 book intrigues me. It gives the terminal dates of its coverage as 1572 to 1651. What events do the terminal dates reference? In 1572, fifteen hundred English volunteers under Humphrey Gilbert (an adventurer, shown above, not acting officially on behalf of the Queen) fought the Spanish/Hapsburg forces in the Netherlands, on behalf of the Dutch resistance, known at this time as the Sea Beggars. That seems to be an important date in Tuck's understanding of British intellectual history, because it helped set England on the road to more direct confrontation...
A word about Robert Filmer. His name makes an occasional appearance in this blog, mostly in contexts in which I'm warning about abuse of, or excessive claims for, supreme executive power. I noticed years ago that many libertarians invoke Thomas Hobbes in contexts like that. The dangerous proposed new regulation or evidentiary privilege is "Hobbesian," gasps the writer. I generally agreed that it -- whatever had provoked this outburst on a given day -- is a bad thing, but I grew tired of the ritual invocations of Hobbes there, especially where they didn't fit all that well. After all, Hobbes was a very secular thinker. He was wary of religion because in his own lifetime he had seen religious fervor lead to an open challenge to the sovereign, and he had seen THAT challenge lead to a civil war that must have looked a bit like a war of "all against all" to him. He was a member of the Church of England, but he clearly explained that he was so because his ...
I'm working my way carefully through Fiona Cowie's book, WHAT'S WITHIN? NATIVISM RECONSIDERED (1999), a book I've only skimmed until now. I believe I've mentioned it here a time or two on the basis of the skimming and its reviews. The book, which began life as a doctoral dissertation, is a look at Fodor and Chomsky in particular, and their revival of elements of classical rationalism, especially with regard to a priori ideas. Today I'll focus on an early point, within Cowie's historical discussion. She asks: what exactly was the classical debate, the one featuring Descartes and Leibniz on one side, figures such as Hobbes and Locke on the other, really about? It is not easy to pin in down. The empiricists sometimes wrote as if the rationalists were saying that a baby comes into the world already knowing, say, what a triangle is, or what constitutes a prime number. Babies clearly don't. And the old rationalists denied this is what they meant. D...
With no small content I read Mr. Hobbes’ book De Cive , and his Leviathan , about the rights of sovereignty, which no man, that I know hath so amply and judiciously handled. I consent with him about the rights of exercising government, but I cannot agree to his means of acquiring it. It may seem strange that I should praise his building and yet mislike his foundation, but so it is. That was Robert Filmer, the divine-right-of-kings theorist, apologist for the whims of the Stuart family. I take the quote from Yves Charles Zarka's book about Hobbes, newly translated into English by James Griffith. Griffith also contributes an introduction, stressing that though Leo Strauss is "to some degree an ally of Zarka's in the argument against historicism, they are not involved in identical projects." I have a full review of Zarka's book in a forthcoming issue of The Federal Lawyer. I go into more particulars about the Filmer/Hobbes contrast there, as ...
So: what was Chesterton really saying when he wrote this? "Since the modern world began in the sixteenth century, nobody's system of philosophy has really corresponded to everybody's sense of reality: to what, if left to themselves, common men would call common sense. Each started with a paradox; a peculiar point of view demanding the sacrifice of what they would call a sane point of view. That is the one thing common to Hobbes and Hegel, to Kant and Bergson, to Berkeley and William James. A man had to believe something that no normal man would believe, if it were suddenly propounded to his simplicity: as that law is above right, or right is outside reason, or things are only as we think them, or everything is relative to a reality that is not there. The modern philosopher claims, like a sort of confidence man, that if once we will grant him this, the rest will be easy: he will straighten out the world, if once he is allowed to give this one twist to the mind." ...
In a famous passage, G.K. Chesterton described the philosophy of medieval Catholicism as the common sense of the human race, the philosophy to which we all tend when we aren't poisoned by ... any of the alternatives. "Since the modern world began in the sixteenth century, nobody's system of philosophy has really corresponded to everybody's sense of reality: to what, if left to themselves, common men would call common sense. Each started with a paradox; a peculiar point of view demanding the sacrifice of what they would call a sane point of view. That is the one thing common to Hobbes and Hegel, to Kant and Bergson, to Berkeley and William James. A man had to believe something that no normal man would believe, if it were suddenly propounded to his simplicity: as that law is above right, or right is outside reason, or things are only as we think them, or everything is relative to a reality that is not there. The modern philosopher claims, like a sort of confidence ma...
Are there loose threads in the fabric of the thought of Thomas Hobbes? If you pull hard at one of these threads, does the whole thing (and especially the goal of delegitimizing the Cromwellian revolution and revolutions in general) unravel? Hobbes was a much more fascinating guy than the cartoon versions of him suggest. and these loose threads make him more so. Hobbes was sufficiently logical that he had to admit there was such a thing as a right to rebel. Or something quite analogous, anyway. Logic compels Hobbes to write things like this: "If the sovereign command a man, though justly condemned, to kill, wound, or maim himself; or not to resist those that assault him; or to abstain from the use of food, air, medicine, or any other thing without which he cannot live; yet hath that man the liberty to disobey." I take this to mean: if you are on death row, no contract or duty rationally deters you from resisting your executioner or seeking escape. Further, the resistanc...