Mortal Gods: Science, Politics, and the Humanist Ambitions of Thomas Hobbes

MORTAL GODS

Science, Politics, and the Humanist Ambitions of Thomas Hobbes

TED H. MILLER.

The Pennsylvania State University Press,

University Park, Pennsylvania

Chapter 3 is a revised version of Thomas Hobbes and the Constraints that Enable the Imitation of God,

Inquiry 42, no. 2 (1999): 149–76.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Miller, Ted H., 1965– Mortal gods : science, politics, and the humanist ambitions of Thomas Hobbes / Ted H. Miller.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Summary: Argues against the accepted idea that Thomas Hobbes turned away from humanism to pursue the scientific study of politics. Reconceptualizes Hobbes's thought within early modern humanist pedagogy and the court culture of the Stuart regimes—Provided by publisher.

ISBN 978-0-271-04891-8 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Hobbes, Thomas, 1588–1679.

I. Title.

II. Series.

B1247.M49 2011

192—dc22

Copyright © 2011 The Pennsylvania State University

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press,

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It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material,

ANSI z39.48–1992.

This book is printed on Natures Natural, which contains 50% post-consumer waste.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

1

Introduction

2

The Humanist Face of Hobbes's Mathematics, Part 1

3

Constraints That Enable the Imitation of God

4

King of the Children of Pride:

The Imitation of God in Context

5

Architectonic Ambitions:

Mathematics and the Demotion of Physics

6

Eloquence and the Audience Thesis

7

All Other Doctrines Exploded:

Hobbes, History, and the Struggle over Teaching

8

The Humanist Face of Hobbes's Mathematics, Part 2:

Leviathan and the Making of a Masque-Text

9

Conclusion

Appendix: Who Is a Geometer?

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I have accumulated many debts in writing this book. I can't begin to repay them. I nevertheless wish to thank those who were there from the very beginning, and those who have come along later as the work continued. I am particularly grateful for the assistance I have received from Tracy Strong, who saw this work from its earliest and now distant inception. I also have Gerald Doppelt, Alan Houston, Arthur Lupia, Steven Shapin, and Don Wayne to thank for their early comments and assistance. I've been sustained by good intellectual company as the ideas in this book made it to the page. For this I also owe thanks to Chris Dugan, Elizabeth Ellis, Verna Gehring, Bernard Gert, Christina Haddad, John Hughes, Nancy Luxon, Utz McKnight, James Murphy, James Philipp, Hans von Rautenfeld, John Richardson, Arlene Saxenhouse, Verity Smith, Pat Snyder, Marek Steadman, and Elizabeth Wingrove. Chris Laursen's encouragement and comments from afar have always been more than helpful. I offer especially heartfelt thanks to Samantha Frost. She and Dean Mathiowetz were steadfast in their assistance. They allowed this work to reach a safe harbor.

I owe particular thanks to Terry Royed for her companionship and encouragement. She has kept me going. J. David and Susan Miller were always there, interested and patient. Karen, Alan, Elana, and Michael Rubinstein were rooting for me.

I also wish to single out Sandy Thatcher for his interest, and his integrity as an editor. Dan O'Neill gets the credit for sending me to Sandy. I have also had the good fortune to work with Kendra Boileau and Stephanie Lang. I'm grateful for their invaluable assistance.

I thank those institutions whose support was crucial to the completion of this project. This study would not have been possible were it not for the generous grant and institutional assistance I received from the Huntington Library, the British Academy, the Earhardt and Mellon Foundations, Dartmouth College, and the University of Alabama. I also wish to thank the Chatsworth Devonshire Collection, in particular Andrew Peppitt and Peter Day, the librarians at Chatsworth, and Diane Naylor for her assistance in procuring the images from the collection used in this book.

1

INTRODUCTION

Alexis de Tocqueville is not, perhaps, the first name readers of an interpretation of Thomas Hobbes would expect to see. For some, it will correctly stand as a marker of the eclecticism of North American political theory. Nevertheless, every interpretation must have an origin, and this one is no exception. It emerges from within the broad, relatively fragmented and freewheeling constellation of curiosities of political theory as it is primarily practiced in departments of political science in the United States and Canada. These departments are staffed by a community of practitioners long interested in Hobbes, but often resistant to those readings which celebrate him as a pioneer of social science, or hold up his work as an early model of analytic philosophy.¹ This reading is, in part, an extension of that tradition of resistance.

De Tocqueville declared history's trajectory to be the inevitable growth and progress of equality. Equality was an irresistible revolution advancing century by century.² There is a straightforward way to connect Hobbes to this master narrative. By making men equals in the state of nature, Hobbes rejected the premises that sustained the hierarchical ways of understanding the natural, social, and political orders rooted within the doctrines of the schools, churches, and courts. As such, he is a part of the history of equality's progress.³

As de Tocqueville insisted, though, that progress was (and still is) haphazard. One can imagine, says de Tocqueville, an extreme point where liberty and equality would meet and blend.⁴ All having an equal right to participate in government, and all being equal, no one would be able to exercise tyrannical power. Along the way, however, the two principles are realized neither at the extreme nor simultaneously, but distinctly and unevenly. Here again, a connection to Hobbes can be made. Hobbes moved from the equality of his state of nature to the gaping inequality embodied in the absolute sovereign's relation to his or her subjects. In accord with the ideology of absolutism, Hobbes declares that the sovereign must outshine all the other subjects like the sun outshines the stars.⁵ The thirst for equality, de Tocqueville thought, could bring about tyranny. It could be of the absolutist variety, or the tyranny of the majority, which he feared most. Both the absolute sovereign and the sovereign majority might be compared to gods; they are likened to entities that dwarf all others with their power (and make them more equal to each other in their common subjection).⁶ When Hobbes speaks of his sovereign as a Mortal God,⁷ it is useful to think of what he hoped to assemble, but also, with de Tocqueville, what he was taking apart. His work was also an assault on the intermediary institutions between the sovereign and the people such as the established church,⁸ the nobility, and the courts. In so far as his philosophy insisted upon a unified form of sovereignty that need not take the form of an assembly, it was also an assault on Parliament.

For my immediate purposes, however, these initial points of connection to de Tocqueville can give way to another, perhaps less straightforward link. It concerns not merely de Tocqueville, but also the sometimes tangled relationship between some committed Tocqueville scholars and the audiences that make use of de Tocqueville for their own purposes. Alan S. Kahan, author of Aristocratic Liberalism: The Social and Political Thought of Jacob Burckhardt, John Stuart Mill, and Alexis de Tocqueville, wrote of de Tocqueville (and his two other subjects) that the interpreters of aristocratic liberals are all too often ready to ignore the issues and circumstances … [these thinkers] thought crucial. Instead of asking the three what their questions were, we ask them our own questions, and as a result get an answer that is distorted and misunderstood.⁹ Hobbes scholars have undertaken their own reclamation efforts. Hobbes, they have declared, must be spared our purposes and given back to his own. Among Hobbes scholars, these sentiments will bring to mind the contextualist approach of the Cambridge School historians. I will discuss the relationship between contextualist readings and the status of his own below.

In light of the goals of this interpretation, de Tocqueville's would-be rescuers offer a more poignant dynamic. They, of course, resist certain presentist readings by insisting that we understand de Tocqueville as a man of the nineteenth century (if not a man whose life was primarily determined years before by the French Revolution). They also, and more interestingly, caution against reading de Tocqueville as if his intended audience was in fact (or at least necessarily) the society of relative equals within the United States. They urge us to consider that his foremost audience may have been the frightened aristocrats of his native France. In short, they raise the possibility that Democracy in America was not aimed toward the sensibilities of our time and the political events that consume us. Democracy in America is not ours, they suggest, because it was not written to appeal to today's egalitarians, much less those whom it describes. The book critically defends democratic ways to an inegalitarian aristocratic culture still trying to find its footing in early nineteenth-century France.¹⁰

For whom did Thomas Hobbes write? My purpose is not to duplicate the reservations urged upon readers by the de Tocqueville scholars. Hobbes is not warning one class that another is coming to replace it. The differences between our society and Hobbes's are in many ways unlike the differences between our society and de Tocqueville's. In both cases, however, our democratic sensibility is offended by the suggestion that the texts of these two men are not immediately ours.¹¹ Nevertheless, the example of de Tocqueville should prompt useful questions about how to approach Hobbes. Why should we be more attentive to where Hobbes's audiences stood within the hierarchical cosmos of seventeenth-century Britain? In short, because doing so gives us a better appreciation of Hobbes's politics. We should therefore ask: what did it mean to address oneself, or to offer a philosophical doctrine, to a sovereign one would make absolute? We can gain new and important insights into Hobbes's politics if we try to discern how he negotiated (in the full sense) these distinctly seventeenth-century contexts and their attending practices. More specifically, I will read Hobbes in light of the practices of humanist education, patronage, and what I call the high culture of practical mathematics that were a part of seventeenth-century Britain's most imaginative plastic arts.

Against the trajectory of this—or any contextual—approach one might raise a hermeneutic objection. Any reader—in fact, all readers, whether they acknowledge it or not—will reveal that the text they interpret is always for them because it cannot be otherwise.¹² My interpretation always makes a book mine, and your interpretation makes it yours. In a broader historical frame, we, today, make the books we interpret ours. This argument seems to me undeniable, but if we must always make an author ours, the example of de Tocqueville suggests that one of the more fruitful ways to make an author ours is to make him untimely: acting counter to our time and thereby acting on our time.¹³ That is, the interpreted author who will necessarily be made ours can be ours in the way we make them not theirs. In this case "not theirs" does not mean denying authors their contexts, or more aptly, what we think of as their contexts. It means working from those contexts to pull him or her away from some of our contemporaries. In fact, this reading works toward a doubly untimely Hobbes. I make arguments for taking Hobbes away from his scientific admirers,¹⁴ and for bringing him, I hope, too close for comfort to those who typically think of themselves as having achieved maximal distance from him.

We should therefore consider that Hobbes's works were written for a different society, and likewise for someone other than ourselves. We may hold to this effort even while acknowledging that this other and the historically distinct society are never independent of ourselves because we (and not the dead) are the ones who declare and articulate these differences. Hobbes can and should be useful to us, but it does not mean that we need assume that his purposes are our purposes. This interpretation has been developed with this thought in mind, and with particular focus on Hobbes's claim to offer his readers a science.

Returning to de Tocqueville, I would like to suggest an inversion of the audience question as it applies to Hobbes. Both raise the question of unequal audiences. De Tocqueville was trying to convince one audience of how the world need not be so horrid once it is forced to give up some of its powers. Hobbes was trying, in part, to convince another audience of how, with his help, it might claim a tighter grip upon power. Hobbes was not defending democracy to aristocrats; rather, he was defending a democratic moment of authorization of (and to) an absolutist sovereign. In other words, Hobbes had set himself the task of convincing a would-be absolute sovereign, a ruler who might have imagined his or her rule legitimated by other means, such as divine right, to accept power from the bottom up.¹⁵ In this respect Hobbes can be seen as the beginning of a de Tocquevillian nightmare: a man who joins the mandate of a dedifferentiated society in the state of nature to a central sovereign power who will rule without challenge.

As such, the greatest and first burden—and the central orientation—of Hobbes's work is the sovereign his doctrine would create. Leviathan, in particular, is a mirror for a prince, if an unconventional one. It is a grand, scientifically constructed mirror. It offers a gift to the sovereign-in-potential, who—if he likes his gift—will find his likeness in it. That gift is to become the soul of a mortal god. This sovereign does not exercise its power merely over its subjects, but over all matter within its reach. Hobbes was a court philosopher who offered a would-be sovereign (and patron) a form of control that we in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have not yet fully imagined. And it is this sovereign that is the as yet unimagined other that we need to consider not only in Leviathan but also in all of Hobbes's major works.

In this book I try to reason through what I believe to be the most surprising implications of this concept of sovereignty and to show how it extends to domains of Hobbes's thought not yet considered in the Hobbes literature.¹⁶ The most contentious claims will violate some contemporary scientific pieties, but I also hope to disturb some of the pieties among modernity's critics that have been a long-standing part of political theory. Sovereignty, in Hobbes's thought, was more than merely political in the conventional sense. Others have noted how the political in Hobbes's thought expands to exert its control over other domains of civil society, such as science, commerce, law, and religion, such that these domains lose whatever autonomous internal logic we might imagine they had. Such encroachments do indeed occur, and have been described by Carl Schmitt.¹⁷ Nevertheless, Schmitt and others (including Leo Strauss)—while mindful of Hobbes's mortal god claim—did not fully appreciate just how thoroughly Hobbes proposed to make man the imitator of God through his science.¹⁸ God's sovereignty over nature, as creator, was an implicit model for the activity of Hobbes's science. His concept of philosophical inquiry, I will argue, was not so much a science of discovery as we often imagine it today, but a science of creation.

Although my purpose is not to make extensive comparisons of Hobbes and Francis Bacon, the broad outlines of this interpretation can be sketched in light of some fundamental differences and similarities. Hobbes embraced Copernicus and mathematics. Francis Bacon embraced neither. Because of this Hobbes is thought to have not been strongly influenced by him, in spite of his early employment as Bacon's amanuensis. The differences between Hobbes and Bacon are substantial, but where they were alike is in their understanding of the purpose of knowledge. Each thought the end of knowledge was power, and more specifically state-power.¹⁹ Both men also advocated a new and total beginning to philosophy itself.²⁰ Both men embraced conceptions of the practice of science to which the power and resources of the state were integral. Bacon imagined an army of investigators, each meticulously doing a small part in a collective effort to make nature yield up its secrets to the political elite. Hobbes, by choosing mathematics—and geometry in particular—imagined the state as a grand manipulator of all matter. Science was what taught this manipulator of matter to build the effects it desired and to maintain its own body politic in a state of peace and prosperity. God was a grand geometer. So might be the mortal god. Those who reverence both Hobbes and a notion of science as a systematic means of discovering, verifying, or even merely investigating and disconfirming inaccurate accounts of a reality independent of ourselves will be disinclined to agree with this reading of Hobbes.

I hope that this reading will also trouble and provoke in a friendly way those who have faulted Hobbes for having trod the path of modernity condemned by Heidegger and many others. That is, those who condemn him for having taken this independent reality for granted, for having duplicated the presuppositions that give us the Cartesian subject.²¹ If my Hobbes troubles them, it might be a kind of guilt by association. For against those who hope to master the world through grasping its inherent and inalterable principles, many critics have argued that the world is contingent, conditioned, and always already constituted by our gaze and our discourse. Nowadays these arguments seem a bit moldy, and those of us who are in sympathy with their self-appointed task of thwarting hidden sources of domination in modernity must, nevertheless, ask whether or not something has been overlooked in this struggle, since so many robust sources of domination exist and continue to reproduce themselves.

In the conclusion I will approach this question more systematically. In spite of many efforts to convince others that the wish for sovereignty is an impossible and dangerous dream, we have not fully understood what it has meant to aspire to sovereignty. A different understanding of Hobbes can help us address this problem. In his time and in his own way Hobbes was more aware of the fluxious character of the world than most of his contemporaries. We are too facile if we declare ourselves his mental, political, or ethical superiors because we know that no amount of scientific inquiry will ever exhaustively describe the world that we ourselves are always constituting. Showing the scientific world its reflection in Procrustes is often apt, but the shock value would have been lost on Hobbes. Those who chop into pieces in this philosophy are not looked upon so harshly, provided they know how to construct what they will out of the basic elements.²² In spite of his materialism, his seemingly reductionist assumptions about human nature, Hobbes cannot be chastened by the figure of Procrustes. This is not merely because his conceptions of human activities often reveal themselves as more sophisticated than the stereotypical visions of homo economicus, his predecessors, or his new replacements. It is because Hobbes's will to dominate nature pursues a more direct path toward its end than anticipated in our cautionary tales about the unintended, or even devious, consequences of reductionism.

After positing, rather than defending, his assertions about the material universe, Hobbes never, conceptually, denied the world its contingency, its sheer protean possibility. On the contrary (as I shall argue) there were times when he insisted upon it in the face of rival conceptions of philosophy—especially natural philosophy—that claimed knowledge of creation, of its secret powers or its mechanisms. Hobbes's goal was not to offer a superior account of nature (that which God is said to have created) but to teach the foremost member of his audience, the sovereign, to be like a creator god in mustering the causes necessary to produce desired effects—peace instead of the reigning chaos, as well as the things that make for commodious living. De Tocqueville offered his (aristocratic) foremost audience laments and reassurances in the world of increasing equality. Hobbes in his grand translation of all into matter in motion promised the foremost member of his audience the chance to be a god. The mediating institutions de Tocqueville (later) hoped to preserve (and some he did not) were the very ones that Hobbes threatened. These institutions, the universities, churches, and other elements of existing political and social authority, fought back.

Hobbes's language of mortal gods has been available to us for some time.²³ Discerning the grand scope of his ambition, however, requires more than an apprehension of the social and historical dynamics that de Tocqueville brings to our attention. We must also dispense with a modern presupposition that has informed most Hobbes scholarship. Hobbes was said to have discovered geometry in a library in France in midlife.²⁴ We have assumed that when Hobbes moved toward geometry, he was moving away from his earlier humanist training. Hobbes is thus said to have had two phases, an early, prescientific humanist phase, and a second, (New) scientific phase that began when he discovered geometry. Others maintain that Hobbes, upon further reflection, decided that philosophy alone was unable to accomplish its task in the real world, and so, especially with Leviathan, he reconciled with humanism, and with its most important political tool, rhetoric.²⁵ That would constitute a third phase.

My contention against such readings is that Hobbes had a single phase, that is to say, no such distinct scientific and humanist phases, in his thinking. Like most humanists, he had disagreements with other humanists—especially those who used their eloquence for popular oratory—but what we have assumed regarding the relationship between mathematics on the one hand and humanism on the other is anachronism. The Renaissance humanists, who were especially good at pointing to the likeness between human excellence and divinity, were always a part of Hobbes's intellectual repertoire.²⁶ It is correct to say that unlike prior humanists, who located man on a great chain of being—somewhere above the beasts but beneath God—Hobbes's thoroughgoing materialist metaphysic radically leveled this hierarchy. This is because he no longer counted upon Nature or God to enforce its hierarchy and orders upon the world, including the political realm. Hobbes can be folded into the narrative of the modern world's disenchantment and secularization. On the other hand, Hobbes came from a world in which order and the promise of peace took the form of a divinely ordered hierarchy. If Hobbes lost faith in an animate nature that would restore itself and its order, he nevertheless proposed to those who might find themselves at the top that he had the means of creating a substitute, a grand artifice,²⁷ which might even be superior to what nature was once said to have created. In a world of divinely sanctioned hierarchies, Hobbes's philosophy was one of do it yourself. (Strauss is therefore correct in linking him with Machiavelli, but incorrect when he asserts that Hobbes's science somehow masks the decision to do it himself.) When nature (and God's) false promise of order failed, Hobbes proposed a philosophy that would establish human sovereignty over chaos.

To argue, as some have, that the world is never without remainder, always more contingent and chaotic than modern science's categories have allowed, is not incorrect, but here it misses the mark. Hobbes's example illustrates that it is possible both to acknowledge, even trumpet, the world's chaotic and contingent nature, and to wish to impose order upon it, regardless of the futility of searching out a natural order. We have grown accustomed to modern forms of domination that extend their reign over us through a claim of knowledge over what is declared the natural order. Having become accustomed to this, we tend to forget (especially when discussing science) that the will to dominate also operates independently of the will to know. Hobbes can help remind us of this sorry fact where we are most inclined to forget it.

The argument proceeds as follows. Chapter 2 begins to chip away at the dichotomy between humanism and mathematics. Chapter 3 describes how the imitation of God is integral to Hobbes's conception of philosophy. Chapter 4 discusses the will to imitate God in the broader context of Renaissance humanism and speaks to the question of Hobbes's conception of human being. Chapter 5 enters into a discussion of what it meant for Hobbes to reinvent science, and how Hobbes's approach should be understood as his attempt to win an intellectual war on behalf of mathematics (and his own vision of geometry) against natural philosophy. For Hobbes it was a contest for dominance, not a plea to allow mathematics to join in the task natural philosophy had already set for itself. Chapters 6 and 7 address the questions of rhetoric and Hobbes's notion of how his state would actually come into being. Chapter 8 returns to the topic of humanism and mathematics and courtly persuasion. There I argue that Leviathan may be read as equivalent of a grand court-masque, a stage genre cultivated in the Stuart era. The conclusion, Chapter 9, discusses implications for our understanding of sovereignty and the relationship between politics and reason.

2

THE HUMANIST FACE OF HOBBES'S MATHEMATICS, PART 1

In this chapter I intend to start picking up the stakes that mark a false boundary within our understanding of Hobbes. This boundary is between Hobbes's alleged humanist phase and subsequent phases in which Hobbes is said to have (at least for a time) abandoned humanism for mathematical reasoning for more modern scientific endeavors. As regards mathematics and humanism, Hobbes had a single phase. He never ceased to be a humanist. Having not ceased to be a humanist, Hobbes did not make a return journey. I do not deny that his thought changed over time, or that he became increasingly interested in harnessing the power of mathematical reasoning and defending his reputation for possessing this power. I do deny, however, that we can adequately understand Hobbes's affinities for mathematics without understanding the affinity for mathematics of the humanists who had preceded him and which continued to inform his conception of what mathematical, and scientific, thought was meant to achieve. These humanist affinities for mathematics, cultivated among the gentlemanly patrons and pedants, have been known to others, but they have been erased in the grand narratives that inform Hobbes scholarship. They need to be recovered and juxtaposed with Hobbes's thought. In this chapter I undertake to recover some aspects of the humanist face of Hobbes's mathematics. After further consideration of Hobbes's philosophy, Chapter 8 and the appendix on the Hobbes-Wallis dispute bookend the process by adding to the portrait.

Hobbes, Humanism, and Modernity's Abrupt Beginnings

There is a strong temptation to describe the history of Hobbes and geometry as a conversion story.¹ Aubrey's account of Hobbes's discovery of geometry seems to offer a glimpse of a key moment in the history of the scientific revolution. Aubrey writes that he was "40 yeares old before he looked on geometry; which happened accidentally. Being in a gentleman's library in … , [Aubrey's ellipsis] Euclid's Elements lay open, and ‘twas the 47 El. Libri I. He read the proposition.‘By G—,’ sayd he,‘this is impossible!’ So he reads the demonstration of it, which referred him back to such a proposition; which proposition he read. That referred him back to another, which he also read. Et sic deinceps, that at last he was demonstratively convinced of that trueth. This made him in love with geometry."²

There are good reasons to doubt this story of a sudden conversion to the church of mathematical worship. Book 1, proposition 47, of Euclid is the Pythagorean Theorem. Upon its discovery, Pythagoras is said to have sacrificed one hundred oxen to the gods. Aubrey's account, with its reference to divinity and Hobbes's joy upon seeing the truth of something he first thought impossible, may be a creative seventeenth-century inversion allowing us to imagine Hobbes experiencing the same revelation centuries later. This story, which has Hobbes encountering a book of geometry in the same way enthusiasts encounter an open Bible, bespeaks as much humanist continuity as it does sudden transformation.³ Our first doubts, however, should be cast upon our own view of what it must have meant to be mathematical. It is incorrect, in spite of Aubrey's account, to assume that Hobbes's love of mathematical ways and practices truly began with a love affair with Euclid's geometry. This judgment is affirmed by looking into the mathematical affinities of his contemporaries, and indeed Hobbes's own account of his early interests. Hobbes reports his youthful devotion to the things produced by practical mathematicians: maps, celestial charts, and geography were strong preoccupations during his time at Oxford.⁴ In the very year of the supposed conversion, 1629, Hobbes had already made himself an accomplished practitioner of a mode of mathematically informed humanism.

In that year he published his translation of Thucydides. This work is rightly viewed as a sign of Hobbes's strong commitment to humanist learning in his early years. Aside from turning Thucydides's ancient Greek into English, Hobbes was particularly proud of having created an accompanying map of ancient Greece. Unlike other maps available, he claimed, his would help readers of the history by adequately locating the regions that corresponded to the place-names in Thucydides.⁵ While the map was not the work of his own surveys, except through Thucydides and other historical accounts of the geography,⁶ it was something we can now recognize as part of a larger element of contemporary humanist culture.

By adding, and boasting of, the map, Hobbes was walking on a path already trod by fellow humanists, one guided by an affinity for the products of mathematical practitioners. It was by this time an intellectual common ground where mathematical practitioners and humanists walked together. They met most often at the points where court patronage might provide sustenance.⁷ (These locations will be further explored in Chapter 8.) It has been argued that the very subjectivity of some key humanists of the preceding era was constituted by and through a cartographic imagination.⁸ Henry Peacham's The Complete Gentleman embodied and promoted humanist ideals of gentlemanly identity. Peacham endorsed an education in mathematics and geometry, and like Hobbes he spent his school days hanging over maps.⁹

Hobbes's early participation in this aspect of a mathematical connoisseurship, however, is not enough to fully refute the view that his career had two phases. This is because it is not merely a matter of chronology, of determining when Hobbes's mathematical and scientific curiosities were first piqued, but a deeper question. We need to consider how to conceive Hobbes's ongoing affinities for mathematics and how these manifest themselves in the works recognized now as his most scientific. The first step is to review the investment we have in an understanding of Hobbes that insists his work had at least two phases, if not more.¹⁰

Those who hold the view that Hobbes's career had multiple phases make Hobbes's own transformation from a classically trained, yet imprecise, intellect to one of mathematical rigor a synecdoche for the transition from one age to the next. A line would seem to have been crossed on the way to the modern world in this library in France. Ferdinand TÖnnies and Richard Peters, for example, purposely set out to link Hobbes to narratives of modernity's abrupt awakening.¹¹ According to this transformation narrative, Hobbes abandons his humanist approach to politics in favor of the search for law-like certainties in political life.

Perhaps the best evidence for the depth of our commitment to this view of Hobbes's career has not been those authors who celebrate him as a member of the scientific revolution. It has, rather, been the way some of Hobbes's interpreters have tried to blur this line between phases. Some attempt this by showing that Hobbes continued to use his humanist skills—particularly his rhetorical skills—after the so-called scientific phase began. Important examples are Leo Strauss and Quentin Skinner, neither of whom easily discounts the influence of humanism.¹² Both, however, maintain that Hobbes discovered geometry, and that this discovery meant his humanist period was on the wane.¹³ Strauss nonetheless held that Hobbes's most important moment—his decision to abandon the morality of the ancients—occurred prior to his discovery of mathematics. On this reading Hobbes's mathematical phase obscures the genesis of his philosophy. This yields a thesis that implicitly accepts and maintains a two-phase view; Strauss's critique is of the conventional assessment of our view of the transition, not on the transition itself.¹⁴

For Strauss's subversion to take place, the transition must occur and our eyes drawn to the wrong side of the divide. This leaves us with a different way to see the origins of modernity (and opens up upon a much larger and more complex part of Strauss's view of the question), but it reinforces the notion that Hobbes's discovery of Euclid moved him outside the humanist orbit. In his recent work, Quentin Skinner makes much of what he sees as key transitions in Hobbes's intellectual career. He argues that Hobbes was forced later in his life to realize the mistake of rejecting humanism's signature political tool, rhetoric, and elected to return to some of resources he once thought he could forgo.¹⁵ Even more radical approaches to the question of the relation between Hobbes's rhetoric and his science, such as Victoria Kahn's, do not efface the distinction between mathematics and humanism. She reveals the rhetorical character of what are considered some of Hobbes's most purely scientific works of political philosophy. The force of Kahn's reading is in compelling Hobbes's contemporary philosophical admirers to acknowledge the rhetorical character of Hobbes's claims to a scientific method.¹⁶ There is a revelatory character to such arguments. Hobbes must be revealed to be dependent on a humanist skill that he (and contemporary positivist admirers) claims to have left behind. Instead of arguing that Hobbes changed his mind, she argues that we ought to change ours. One can agree with the force of this reading and still maintain, as I do, that the links between Hobbes's mathematical ways and his humanism need further investigation. There is, in fact, something other than a covert humanism at work in Hobbes's mathematics. The question we need to ask is why that something, which should be visible to us, has become invisible.

Hobbes is not strictly identical to his mathematically inclined humanist precursors (and they do not, in any case, speak with one voice), nor is his debt to his humanist predecessors total. I am not denying Hobbes's originality or his radicalism in pushing for a mathematicized philosophy. I argue that Hobbes took a set of preexisting humanist arguments in favor of mathematical learning and pushed them yet further. Just how far he pushed them will be most apparent against the background of the sixteenth-century educator Richard Mulcaster's boosterism for education in mathematics. We can, therefore, have it another way. Instead of showing the humanism masked by Hobbes's mathematical face, we can show that his mathematics has a humanist face. The place to begin, however, is with the early work by Hobbes that most clearly establishes his beginnings in Renaissance humanism.

Although Hobbes's first widely recognized publication, De Mirabilibus Pecci (The Wonders of the Peak) in 1627,¹⁷ is relevant to our concerns, the work that put Hobbes on the map as an accomplished man of letters was his translation of Thucydides in 1629. This work, again in print, is recognized as a particularly fine translation,¹⁸ and it alone has often been enough to establish Hobbes's bona fides as a humanist. He was, notably, proud to claim another distinction for his work. Other English translations of Thucydides at the time were translations of translations, from either Latin or French sources. Hobbes's was a translation directly into English from the Greek. This is one of the hallmarks of humanist accomplishment as it has been traditionally understood. Hobbes was a part of the ongoing project to unearth the ancient texts either lost, or in this case inadequately preserved, by earlier scholars because they lacked the requisite competency in the text's original language.

Indeed, Hobbes himself and Aubrey testify to what a fine humanist he was going to become from the earliest known point of his education under the young Oxford scholar Richard Latimer. In his autobiography, Hobbes boasts that prior to entering Oxford's Magdalen Hall at age fourteen¹⁹ (in 1603) he had had six years of Latin and Greek, and could speak four languages. Aubrey records that Mr. Latimer delighted in his scholar, T. H.'s company, and used to instruct him, and two or three ingenious youths more, in the evening till 9 a clock. He further boasts that Hobbes had "turned Euripedes' Medea out of Greek into Latin iambics, which he presented to his master."²⁰

But skills with ancient languages were not all that might make a humanist, and here too we can see in the materials that accompany Hobbes's translation a solid marker of his participation in the practices associated with humanists. Hobbes writes in the prefatory writings and dedicatory that it is not merely that he loved Thucydides and wished to make the text available to others (in the way he himself experienced it in the Greek).²¹ It is also that Thucydides's History of the Peloponnesian War was a text that could do something for, and indeed to, the reader who approached it in the right way. In the dedicatory he recommends it to his new young charge, William Cavendish, in this way:

I could recommend the author unto you, not impertinently, for that he had in his veins the blood of kings; but I choose rather to recommend him for his writings, as having in them profitable instruction for noblemen, and such as may come to have the managing of great and weighty actions. For I may confidently say, that notwithstanding the excellent both examples and precepts of heroic virtue you have at home, this book will confer not a little to your institution; especially when you come to the years to frame your life by your own observation. For in history, actions of honour and dishonour do appear plainly and distinctly, which are which; but in the present age they are so disguised, that few there be, and those very careful, that be not grossly mistaken in them.²²

It seems likely that Hobbes intended his translation of Thucydides (whom he celebrates as an antidemocratic hero in his accompanying essay, Of the Life and History of Thucydides)²³ as a commentary on Charles I's conflicts with Parliament amidst efforts to assert personal rule.²⁴ Hobbes's elitist (and promonarchical) politics carry over into his prefatory To the Readers, where he tells the multitude that his translation has already passed muster with those whose judgments, unlike theirs, he truly respects. It is only out of prudence, he tells them, that he begs the terrible multitude to read his work with an open mind.²⁵ This element of Hobbes's self-presentation as a humanist who teaches virtue to the select few capable of acquiring it relates to what I stated in the introduction concerning Hobbes and questions of audience, but for the moment I wish to dwell on Hobbes's pedagogical claims in this translation.

His translation, Hobbes asserts, could do something for the young nobleman Cavendish's institution. Reading this book for what it was, rather than its (evidently, still not impertinent)²⁶ source, might make him a better, more worthy, nobleman. If the world of Great Britain in the 1620s was perhaps a time in which honor and dishonor had become confused, a good history such as this could remove their disguise, unmask false honor and separate the authentic from the counterfeit. Reading Thucydides might therefore make a nobleman live up to his responsibility, especially if he is the kind to take on great and weighty actions.

I wish to focus on how Hobbes frames the value and character of useful learning. It is already well known that humanists valued learning that aided persons in the domain of the vita activa; it is clear that Hobbes wishes to provide learning that makes a nobleman capable of participating in political life, although not the political life designed to sustain a self-governing republic. It is not merely the domain that must interest us, but what Hobbes, as a humanist, suggests about the characteristics of useful learning itself. For Hobbes and humanists before him, such learning is a particular kind of possession. Moreover, it was meant to be a possession that conferred, or more aptly, generated specific powers and advantages.

It is not just that Cavendish will now have a copy of the history by Thucydides on his shelves. If he actually reads the work when he's ready, Hobbes suggests, it will do something to him, to his institution. He will possess it in a different sense than mere claim right on the physical entity as property. It can, with his effort, have an impact upon who he is, or who he might become. This particular sense of learning as a possession that also helps craft an identity is also to be found in the passages where Hobbes praises (possibly falsely)²⁷ Cavendish's recently deceased father. The dead earl employed Hobbes, thereby having created the debt of gratitude he references in the dedicatory. Nevertheless, he tells his student there could be no better person to dedicate the book to than his father even if that debt did not exist. This is because there was not any, who more really, and less for glory's sake favoured those that studied the liberal arts liberally. This general virtue, which redounded to Hobbes's benefit particularly, is in part a reference to the library Hobbes was able to use and build while in the previous earl's employ. Hobbes tells the son that it created a house in which no man should less need the university than his own. Here again, however, Hobbes is careful not to attribute mere superficial possession to the previous earl's learning. He writes: For his own study, it was bestowed, for the most part, in that kind of learning which best deserveth the pains and hours of great persons, history and civil knowledge: and directed not to the ostentation of his reading, but to the government of his life and the public good. For he read, so that the learning he took in by study, by judgment he digested, and converted into wisdom and ability to benefit his country: to which also he applied himself with zeal, but such as took no fire either from faction or ambition.²⁸ Possessed learning becomes a part of an identity constituted by virtues when it is digested, internalized, and converted into wisdom and ability for the country's sake. And he continues with further testimony to the virtues the elder Cavendish possessed as a result of his studies. He could give sound advice, express himself clearly, and handle difficult matters both public and private. He was one whom no man was able either to draw or justle out of the straight path of justice (EW, 8:iv).

Nor is this notion of learning as an internalized possession restricted to the praise of Cavendishes. In his opening remarks in To the Readers, the same concepts are at work. Thucydides himself is to be ranked among the most highly regarded ancients, for he is a workman no less perfect in his work in history than Homer in poesy, Aristotle in philosophy, Demosthenes in eloquence (ibid., vii). History's principal and proper work is to instruct and enable men, by the knowledge of actions past, to bear themselves prudently in the present and providently toward the future (ibid.). No one, says Hobbes, does this more naturally and fully than Thucydides. Just as readers of histories may come to possess various virtues, so historians may also be compared. Do they possess the virtues necessary to the production of worthy histories? Other histories may delight with fantastic stories, or reflect the historian's talents in speculating on motives, but Thucydides's history is most instructive because he filleth his narrations with that choice of matter, and ordereth them with that judgment, and with such perspicuity and efficacy expresseth himself, that, as Plutarch saith, he maketh his auditor a spectator (ibid.). Here we can recognize some of the forms of eloquence Hobbes is said to have reconciled himself to after having returned to rhetoric and humanism after supposedly having largely spurned them for geometry and a scientific approach to politics.²⁹ Thucydides is one who makes word-pictures, a technique Hobbes is said to have used himself in Leviathan and Behemoth.

Without wishing to disagree with the claim that Hobbes admired and used word-pictures, my argument is that this hook is too weak to hold the claim that Hobbes abandoned the humanism that informed works like his translation of Thucydides when he took up mathematics. There are, to be sure, elements of this translation's accompanying material Hobbes no longer embraced after he offered the world a science of politics. This would include, obviously, the praise of Aristotle and the assertion that honor and dishonor might be discerned merely on the basis of a superior character, rather than by the fiat of a sovereign. This, however, does not amount to an abandonment of humanism, or humanism's understanding of learning. Still, if the basis for sustaining the view that Hobbes moved from a humanist phase to a mathematical phase is weak—and I will argue that it is weaker still—there is a need for a more positive case.

Why should we believe that Hobbes remained a humanist in his approach to mathematics? The straightforward answer is as follows: First, and contrary to another implicit and flawed presupposition of the phased view of Hobbes, being a humanist in the seventeenth century and before did not mean being amathematical. It is (according to the phased view) as if picking up mathematics meant that Hobbes had to put down his humanist understanding of what it meant to possess useful learning. In fact, as I will argue momentarily, mathematical skills were also skills that many humanists understood one could possess in the way I have described, just as one might possess other moral or intellectual talents. Second, Hobbes continued to participate in this way of praising and practicing mathematical knowledge skills himself. Third, the possession of these skills was sufficient for Hobbes to claim a science of politics. Importantly, he was willing to make this claim on a basis quite foreign to the announced (if not implicit) contemporary standards of the scientific (and in some cases philosophical) knowledge of politics. Finally, and as mentioned earlier, the humanist affinities for mathematics translated into a high culture of mathematical products, not least as a refined Stuart and Elizabethan appreciation for the