Hobbes's Kingdom of Light: A Study of the Foundations of Modern Political Philosophy

Hobbes’s Kingdom of Light

Hobbes’s Kingdom of Light

A Study of the Foundations of Modern Political Philosophy

DEVIN STAUFFER

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2018 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2018

Printed in the United States of America

27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-55290-3 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-55306-1 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226553061.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Stauffer, Devin, 1970– author.

Title: Hobbes’s kingdom of light : a study of the foundations of modern political philosophy / Devin Stauffer.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017044569 | ISBN 9780226552903 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226553061 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Hobbes, Thomas, 1588–1679. | Hobbes, Thomas, 1588–1679—Political and social views. | Political science—History—17th century. | Church and state.

Classification: LCC B1247 .S73 2018 | DDC 320.01—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017044569

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Acknowledgments

Editions and Abbreviations

Introduction

1  Of Darkness from Vain Philosophy

2  Hobbes’s Natural Philosophy

3  Religion and Theology I: Of Religion

4  Religion and Theology II: Hobbes’s Natural Theology

5  Religion and Theology III: Hobbes’s Confrontation with the Bible

6  Hobbes’s Political Philosophy I: Man and Morality

7  Hobbes’s Political Philosophy II: The Hobbesian Commonwealth

Appendix. The Engraved Title Page of Leviathan

Bibliography

Index

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

Much of the work on this book was done during the academic year of 2013–14, while I was on a fellowship in Munich. I would like to thank the Carl Friedrich von Siemens Foundation for that extraordinary opportunity and its director, Heinrich Meier, for his support and friendship. I would also like to thank David Bolotin, Christopher Bruell, Timothy Burns, Eric Buzzetti, and Hannes Kerber for reading and commenting on my manuscript as it was in the works.

My deepest debt is to my wife, Dana Stauffer, for the many hours she devoted to reading and discussing drafts of chapters, as well as for the love, wisdom, and patience she showed during the years I was working on this book. Diomedes was right when he said that it is better when two go together.

An earlier version of chapter 1 appeared as ‘Of Darkness from Vain Philosophy’: Hobbes’s Critique of the Classical Tradition, American Political Science Review 110 (August 2016): 481–94, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055416000812, © American Political Science Association 2017. A few paragraphs from chapter 2 appeared in earlier form in an essay, Hobbes on Nature and Its Conquest, in Mastery of Nature: Promises and Prospects, edited by Svetozar Y. Minkov and Bernhardt L. Trout (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), © 2018 University of Pennsylvania Press. An earlier version of a part of chapter 3 appeared as "‘Of Religion’ in Hobbes’s Leviathan," Journal of Politics 72 (July 2010): 868–79, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022381610000228, © Southern Political Science Association, 2010. Chapter 4 is a revised version of an essay, Hobbes’s Natural Theology, published in Political Philosophy Cross-Examined: Perennial Challenges to the Philosophic Life, edited by Thomas L. Pangle and J. Harvey Lomax (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 137–51, © Thomas L. Pangle and J. Harvey Lomax, 2013, with permission of Springer Nature. The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin provided the photograph of the engraved title page of Hobbes’s Leviathan that appears in the appendix.

Editions and Abbreviations

Below is a list of the editions of Hobbes’s works I cite in my text, beginning in each case with the abbreviation by which the work is cited. If a work contains article numbers within each chapter, that is the form in which I cite it (e.g., De Cive 1.7). In the case of Leviathan (that is, the English Leviathan), I have followed Edwin Curley’s creation of a similar system, based on the paragraph divisions in the Molesworth edition, which are almost identical to those in the original Head edition. Although these paragraph numbers are not present in the recently published Clarendon edition of Leviathan, which is now the authoritative edition and the source from which I draw direct quotations, I use Curley’s chapter and paragraph system rather than the page numbers of the Clarendon edition because the former allows readers to see immediately what chapter is being cited and thus to locate a given passage in one of the numerous other editions of Leviathan. For all works besides Leviathan, if a work cannot be cited by chapter and article, it is cited either in a specified form (for example, by letter number in the case of Hobbes’s Correspondence) or, in all unspecified instances, by page number.

Translations from Hobbes’s Latin works are my own. In my quotations of Hobbes’s English works, I have taken the liberty, where it has not already been done by an editor, of modernizing Hobbes’s spelling, punctuation, and capitalization, except where doing so runs the risk of distorting his meaning. Although this modernization sacrifices something of the texture of Hobbes’s writing, it makes for greater readability and avoids unnecessary distractions. All remaining instances of emphasis, whether by italics or by capitalization, are from Hobbes himself, unless otherwise noted.

229–78: Of Liberty and Necessity

279–384: An Answer to a Book Published by Dr. Bramhall, called the Catching of the Leviathan

385–408: An Historical Narration concerning Heresy, and the Punishment thereof

409–40: Considerations upon the Reputation, Loyalty, Manners, and Religion of Thomas Hobbes

1–68: Seven Philosophical Problems

69–177: Decameron Physiologicum, or Ten Dialogues of Natural Philosophy

181–356: Six Lessons to the Savilian Professors of the Mathematics

443–48: Considerations upon the Answer of Dr. Wallis

Introduction

For a man who preferred humility to pride and even took a certain pleasure in describing himself as a worm born a twin with fear (Vita [verse], lxxxv–lxxxvi), Thomas Hobbes was remarkably bold in proclaiming the groundbreaking significance of his own thought. Hobbes claimed that he had established a new science of morality and politics, the first such science worthy of the name. Although he was well aware that others before him had devoted themselves to political philosophy and that there was an august tradition going back at least to Socrates, Hobbes was convinced that the pretentions of traditional political philosophy concealed an abject failure. Traditional political philosophy, in all its forms, was as unscientific as it was dangerous to peace and civic stability.¹ Thus, while he acknowledged that geometry had an impressive history, and that natural philosophy had begun to flourish with Galileo, Hobbes proclaimed that political philosophy was no older than his own De Cive (see De Corp., Ep. Ded.). But what exactly did he mean by this remarkable claim? And why should we take it seriously?

Let me begin with the second of these questions, since the first can be answered only through a detailed interpretation of Hobbes’s works. We find ourselves today at the culmination—or at any rate well along the path—of a civilizational development that Hobbes helped to launch. But that civilizational development has resulted in a bewildering predicament that he would not have predicted. On the one hand, what has emerged out of the theoretical revolution that Hobbes and others initiated is now a shining structure: the modern liberal state, dedicated to human rights, equality, and the continual progress of humanity toward ever greater security, prosperity, and freedom. Modern liberalism and modern secularism continue to spread and deepen their influence, expanding a victory of already immense scope. Do not most people in the West continue to believe, even if they are sometimes reluctant to say it, that our modern Western civilization is a tremendous advance on the ways of the past and far superior to any living alternative? On the other hand, serious doubts about the goodness of the victorious principles and the way of life produced by them have arisen and are not disappearing. If anything, they seem to be spreading and intensifying. Our sense of superiority as moderns is often accompanied by a sense of loss and by an awareness, perhaps only dim, that for all of our advances, our lives have been somehow diminished and our souls deprived of something essential to their flourishing. The doubts in question, then, can be found not only among those who stand outside the modern West and wish to keep it at bay or yearn for its destruction; they also dwell within. These internal doubts have a long history in the West, going back as far as Rousseau. Almost as soon as the tide was turned, they began to emerge. Their persistence today finds expression in such surprising developments as Jürgen Habermas’s recent talk of a postsecular culture, not only as something that is upon us, but even as something to be welcomed in our longing to fill a void left by secular liberalism.² Or consider the force with which Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s criticism of the spiritual emptiness of modern humanism struck many of those who first heard it and continues to strike many who read it today.³ Even the widespread loss of faith in modern rationalism itself—is that not traceable, at least in part, to doubts about the vitality of the civilization that has arisen from it?

This puzzling predicament of continued success combined with lingering discontent gives us reason to go back to the origins of the modern development. Our need is not so much to tell the story of how we got to where we are—although that is important too—as it is to recover and reexamine the original arguments and decisions by which the first modern thinkers broke free from the premodern outlook and established something new. There are two features of nearly all modern thought that make the roots of modernity difficult to see. The first is its progressive character. Each stage of the modern development has been understood by its proponents as an advance on the past and a further step in the process of enlightenment once described, by one of its great heralds, as man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity.⁴ The second is its hostility to tradition. At each stage, the modern philosophers and their followers have been less inclined to revere or pay homage to their forebears than to disavow or underestimate their dependence on what has come before. These two features of modern thought, combined with the simple passage of time and the natural tendency of those who live in impressive structures to forget how the foundations were laid, obscure from us the original steps that were taken in full awareness of how novel and in need of justification they were. The leading early modern thinkers, precisely because they were breaking new ground, could not take for granted the answers to basic questions that we who live in the civilization they built now unthinkingly accept as our inheritance. But the recovery of their outlook and arguments is essential for our self-understanding as moderns and for a truly radical—in the original sense of going to the roots—assessment of the problems of modernity that have emerged since they did their work. Were the seeds of those problems planted at the beginning? Or have they arisen because originally sound arguments and doctrines have been forgotten? It would perhaps be unnecessary to ask these questions—they might not even arise—if the progress of modernity had proven to be as unquestionable as it was once expected to be. Yet, since we no longer remain so confident of our superiority and ever-increasing maturity, we must look back to the beginning.

But why to Hobbes? In characterizing the civilizational development that Hobbes helped to launch, I have alluded to its most important and distinctive features: liberalism and secularism. Hobbes, however, would seem too ardent a defender of the absolute power of the sovereign to be regarded as a forefather of liberalism, and it would not be conceded by all Hobbes scholars that he should be considered a secularist. Regarding the latter point, while there are those who would disagree, it is hardly novel or shocking to claim that Hobbes played a crucial role in laying the foundations of modern secularism.⁵ Of course, the proof of the pudding on this disputed question is in the eating. So let me leave it to the study that follows, not only to provide support for the claim in question, but to attempt to show that it is true in a more thorough and radical way than even many of its proponents think. Hobbes himself described the enemy he sought to defeat as the Kingdom of Darkness, by which he ultimately meant more than that confederacy of deceivers, spanning from the early Church Fathers to the later scholastics, whose dark and erroneous doctrines helped the Roman Catholic Church attain so much power over men in this world (see Lev. 44.1). That characterization is only one salvo in a broader struggle against a more deeply entrenched and powerful foe.

As for the question of liberalism, it is certainly true that Hobbes would grant the sovereign far more expansive powers than would anyone we would readily recognize as a liberal. Yet, although Hobbes’s absolutism makes it impossible to regard him without qualification as the first liberal thinker, he did prepare the ground for liberalism in certain key respects.⁶ Most important, he was the first to argue that a rightful claim of the individual as individual—his right to self-preservation—is prior to any moral law or set of duties. This argument implied a departure from stricter and more hierarchical notions of virtue and obligation, and a movement toward greater freedom, equality, and individualism. This moral reorientation, in turn, carried crucial political implications, the clearest and most important of which is the limited end or purpose of the Hobbesian commonwealth. In conscious opposition to the classical tradition, Hobbes sought to limit the end of the state to the protection of rights through the securing of peace. And this is just one feature, if the central one, of a broader political transformation that he sought to initiate. Since the precise character and full dimensions of the interconnected moral and political changes at which Hobbes aimed will be a major theme of this book, suffice it for now to say that, while it can hardly be denied that the work of later thinkers—Locke, Montesquieu, and others—was needed to turn Hobbesianism into full-fledged modern liberalism, Hobbes put the first shovel in the ground, and he remains the thinker in whose thought the foundational arguments are most fully and decisively expressed.

Now, at this point, some readers, especially those familiar with the work of Leo Strauss, will be looking in the other direction, that is, not forward from Hobbes to thinkers such as Locke, but backward to Machiavelli, and wondering why he is not the subject of this book. Is not Machiavelli, as Strauss has convincingly argued, the founder of modern political philosophy?⁷ It is certainly true that, long before Hobbes wrote a word, Machiavelli declared his own break with the classical tradition, which he rejected as hopelessly and dangerously utopian. Machiavelli proclaimed that his new modes and orders would no longer be based, as those of earlier writers had been, on dreams of perfection, but would rest for the first time on the effectual truth of our dire situation.⁸ Machiavelli compared himself to an explorer of new lands, a comparison endorsed by Strauss in his memorable remark: It was Machiavelli, that greater Columbus, who had discovered the continent on which Hobbes could erect his structure.⁹ Yet, as that formulation itself suggests, while Machiavelli discovered the new world, Hobbes was modernity’s first great architect and builder. To put the point less metaphorically, Hobbes developed, in partial but not complete agreement with Machiavelli,¹⁰ a new science of morality and politics, a new doctrine of justice, and a new teaching about the basis of legitimate sovereignty. Whereas Machiavelli left much to the prudence of well advised or properly educated princes, Hobbes attempted to do something more systematic and thus less dependent on chance. In this respect, Hobbes even implicitly raises, whether fully consciously or not, a Machiavellian objection to Machiavelli, who called for the conquering of chance but did not accomplish it. None of these observations are meant to suggest that the study of Machiavelli is not of great importance for understanding the roots of modernity. But they do suggest that it is in Hobbes, not Machiavelli, that one can see most clearly and fully the emergence of the new political science in the form in which it came to transform the world. And finally—to mention here a point the significance of which we will try to grasp later—Hobbes’s political science, because it was developed more than a century after Machiavelli wrote, was developed in light of and in relation to the new natural science that emerged in the interim. The study of Hobbes, then, also allows us to consider the important but perplexing question of the relationship between the new political science and the new natural science.

*

In studying Hobbes, one finds oneself cast upon an ever-widening sea of Hobbes scholarship. One of the pleasures of writing this book has been voyaging on that sea, and I have benefited from the work of many Hobbes scholars, even some encountered in distant harbors. But let me briefly describe my own approach to Hobbes, which differs in important ways from those most prevalent in Hobbes scholarship in recent years.

I have taken an approach to Hobbes that is both broad and exploratory. I have not tried to discover the one key that unlocks all of the mysteries of Hobbes’s thought, nor have I singled out for exclusive attention one of Hobbes’s distinctive doctrines. My aim, instead, has been to take a comprehensive view of Hobbes by examining the main components of his thought and by trying to understand how they fit together and relate to one another. Hobbes is most well known, of course, for his political philosophy, and, like most scholars of Hobbes, I came to him through that aspect of his thought. But I also explore in this book three other essential components of his thought: his critique of the classical tradition, his largely neglected but nevertheless vital natural philosophy, and his critique of religion. I delve into each of these realms of Hobbes’s thought in considerable detail before turning to a direct consideration of his political philosophy. By taking such a broad view of Hobbes’s attempt to put philosophic rationalism on a new, more stable footing—for no less, I believe, was his ultimate aim—I think it is possible to reveal the full scope of Hobbes’s ambitions and to show that Hobbes was a more radical and revolutionary thinker than he is generally taken to have been. In Hobbes’s view, I argue, philosophy in its classical and scholastic forms was untenable. It had to be replaced with a new materialistic physics as well as with a political philosophy rebuilt from the ground up, with new doctrines resting on a new foundation. Hobbes was also, I contend, a thoroughgoing critic of traditional Christianity, the political power of which he wanted to weaken and the theoretical claims of which he wanted to refute. Although there is not a single key to Hobbes’s thought, there is a thread that runs through and unites the whole: the challenge of overthrowing a set of traditional forces and doctrines—a Kingdom of Darkness supported by a corrupted form of philosophy, but at its heart religious—that had long cast a gloom over philosophy and wreaked havoc in politics. The central claim of this book is that Hobbes was offering and trying to promote a new comprehensive outlook—a rational and secular Kingdom of Light—that would dispel the reigning darkness, chasten religion, and bring a new dawn of enlightenment. Because Hobbes was engaged in a broad struggle with multiple fronts, the true dimensions of that struggle can be appreciated only if we consider his project in its totality.

If my approach is broad and exploratory, the primary realms of my exploration are Hobbes’s own writings. Much outstanding work has been done in recent years on the historical context in which Hobbes wrote and on his relationship to some of his leading contemporaries. There can be no doubt that the political storms of his time, as well as his acquaintance with the likes of Galileo, Gassendi, and Descartes, had a profound impact on Hobbes’s thought. Hobbes lived in a time of extraordinary religious, political, and scientific upheaval, and scholars such as Quentin Skinner, Noel Malcolm, and Richard Tuck have illuminated important ways in which Hobbes’s thinking was shaped by the complex, fast-flowing currents of his time. New light has been shed, for instance, on Hobbes’s ideological congruence with the "de facto theorists" who argued for an acceptance of the new Commonwealth in the wake of Charles I’s execution,¹¹ on Hobbes’s relationship to the seventeenth-century European Republic of Letters,¹² and on Hobbes’s contentious but productive interaction with Descartes.¹³ These are only a few examples of the contributions that have emerged from the surge in historical studies of Hobbes; all Hobbes scholars, myself included, have benefited from this development in Hobbes studies.¹⁴ Nevertheless, there are certain dangers or drawbacks that come with the increased attention to Hobbes’s historical context. For the emphasis on such issues runs the risk—and, to some extent, has had the effect—of drawing scholars off the trail of Hobbes’s own fundamental reflections, which he himself almost always presents without direct reference either to England’s immediate troubles or to other thinkers of his time.¹⁵ Moreover, the contextualizing approach often leads to an underestimation of the possibility of dramatic ruptures, and thus to not taking seriously enough Hobbes’s own claim that he was making a radical break and charting a new course. The more pivotal the thinker, the more problematic is the tendency to explain his thought primarily in terms of the historical circumstances in which he wrote.

The alternative to historical contextualization is immersion in Hobbes’s own arguments. This approach need not reject the work of the contextualizers wholesale; rather it can complement it—and sometimes challenge it—by digging into the difficulties in Hobbes’s texts and addressing questions that it is better suited to address.¹⁶ The first task—hardly an easy one—is simply to try to understand Hobbes’s arguments as he presents them. This includes trying to grasp the interconnections between different arguments, distinguishing what is primary for Hobbes from what is secondary, asking what is bedrock and what is more tentative or derivative, and, in general, trying to look at matters through Hobbes’s own eyes, to see problems as they appeared to him and to grasp why he responded to them as he did. Although this is the first task and the one to which this book is primarily devoted, a serious engagement with Hobbes must ultimately involve also questioning the adequacy of his arguments and the solidity of the positions they support. I take that further step in what I regard as the appropriate places, but always with the caution that comes from an awareness of the danger of criticizing what one may not yet adequately understand. That is a danger of which I have tried to stay ever mindful. But it is not one that can be entirely avoided, especially by someone who approaches Hobbes with some skepticism. My own skepticism toward Hobbes arises in large part from my study of and affinity for the classical authors whom he opposes. Still, I have tried at every step of the way to give Hobbes a full hearing, in order to remain open to learning from him, to face squarely the challenges he poses, and to avoid the ridiculous spectacle of whacking a straw man named Hobbes who bears little resemblance to the great man himself.

Let me say a final word here about the structure and approach of this book. The book has seven chapters, but, as I have indicated, there are four main themes: Hobbes’s critique of the classical tradition, his natural philosophy, his critique of religion, and his political philosophy. Because my approach is so broad, I have been forced to be selective in the passages I have chosen to discuss. I have tried to find a path through Hobbes’s works that focuses on his key arguments and reflections, not one that burrows into every nook and cranny. My aim throughout has been to capture the fundamental and decisive, not to achieve the complete or exhaustive. That inevitably means that many questions, themes, and passages have been left out. If a reader familiar with Hobbes thinks that important details or considerations are missing, he or she will likely be right. I have also not tried to write anything like a comprehensive commentary on any single work of Hobbes. Instead, I have drawn from passages in nearly all of Hobbes’s works as they have seemed most illuminating to the questions at hand. No single work of Hobbes contains the fullest expression of his deepest thinking on every important matter; Hobbes himself, at any rate, never raised such a claim on behalf of any of his works or set one of them clearly apart from and above the rest. To be sure, Leviathan is justly regarded as his masterpiece, and, like most Hobbes scholars, I have drawn from that work more than from any of the others. But on some questions, such as the problems and possibilities of natural philosophy, other works are more revealing of key aspects of Hobbes’s thought.

1

Of Darkness from Vain Philosophy

To begin to understand Hobbes’s claim that he was the first to put political philosophy on a sound and scientific footing, we must first consider his dissatisfaction with the long-standing tradition of political philosophy in place before he began his work. Hobbes was well aware, of course, that there was such a tradition. How could he not have been, when he regarded it as one of the sources of the storms that destroyed the peace in England? By Hobbes’s own account of it, the tradition in question began with Socrates, whose turn to political philosophy not only inspired the likes of Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero to direct their attention to civil science but also attracted leisured gentlemen, who were enticed by the dignity of politics and the apparent ease of its study (De Cive, Pref.; cf. Hist. Eccles., lines 341–73). When Hobbes raised his claim, then, that natural philosophy had begun only with Galileo and that political philosophy was born in his own De Cive, he knew all too well the objection that claim would provoke. Rather than leave it to others to raise the objection, he stated it himself: But what? Were there no philosophers, either natural or civil, among the ancient Greeks? (De Corp., Ep. Ded.).

Hobbes’s response to this objection is not to deny that there were men in the ancient world who went by the name of philosophers. But from the presence of men called philosophers, it does not necessarily follow that there was philosophy. Instead of genuine philosophy, there roamed in ancient Greece, according to Hobbes, a certain phantasm with a superficial gravity (though inside full of fraud and filth) that somewhat resembled philosophy (De Corp., Ep. Ded.). If true philosophy is the wisest mistress of human life and the singular glory of human nature, it was not that beauty that was born in ancient Greece, but rather, in her place, that painted and garrulous harlot who was for so long taken for philosophy (Latin Lev., 1053). Such remarks—to which further examples could easily be added—suffice to provide an initial sense of Hobbes’s contempt for classical thought.

We must be careful, however, not to let his vivid expressions of that contempt carry us all the way to the conclusion that his contempt was simple or total. Hobbes’s first scholarly work, after all, was a translation of Thucydides. And if his respect for Thucydides could perhaps be attributed to his affinity for a classical historian who displayed the tough realism he found lacking in the more idealistic classical philosophers, Hobbes at times spoke admiringly of Plato as well. Plato was the best philosopher of the Greeks (Lev. 46.11), and it is with good reason that his thought has always found favor with the better sort of men (A Dialogue, 124; see also EW VII, 346). Hobbes occasionally acknowledges that even Aristotle at least half-deserves his glorious reputation and that he should be regarded as a true philosopher after all, if only because his genuine love of truth and virtue distinguished him from the fawning and ignorant sectaries who followed in the wake of the classical masters (Latin Lev., Appendix, 1191; see also A Dialogue, 123; EW IV, 387; EW VII, 72, 76). More important than these occasional expressions of admiration for the classical philosophers, which serve at least to temper the more striking expressions of contempt, is the fact that the influence of Aristotle, in particular, left its mark on Hobbes’s own thought. For instance, Hobbes’s analysis of the passions, as Strauss has shown in painstaking detail, is modeled on, and in some places repeats almost verbatim, Aristotle’s analysis in his Rhetoric.¹ And in his presentation of his natural philosophy in De Corpore, Hobbes sometimes approves of Aristotle’s definitions and relies on his framework—for example, in his discussion of time (see De Corp. 7.3), or in his account of the relationship between accidents and their subjects (see De Corp. 8.3).²

It is likely this last fact—that Hobbes sometimes draws on Aristotle in De Corpore—that led Frithiof Brandt to claim, in his classic work Thomas Hobbes’ Mechanical Conception of Nature, that when Hobbes refers throughout his works to Aristotle, it is most frequently in agreement and always respectfully.³ But that claim goes much too far. If we must be careful not to overestimate Hobbes’s disdain for Aristotle, so too must we avoid an excessive swing back in the other direction. After all, many of Hobbes’s harshest remarks about classical philosophy are reserved for Aristotle. Let one example, from the chapter of Leviathan titled Of Darkness from Vain Philosophy and Fabulous Traditions, suffice: "I believe that scarce anything can be more absurdly said in natural philosophy than that which is now called Aristotle’s Metaphysics; nor more repugnant to government than much of that which he hath said in his Politics; nor more ignorantly than a great part of his Ethics" (Lev. 46.11).⁴

The important task, however, is not to gauge the precise level of Hobbes’s hostility to Aristotle, but to discover the reasons for it. Although the aim of this chapter is to examine Hobbes’s critique of the classical tradition as such, the figure who continually comes into view as the primary target of that critique is Aristotle. Why did Hobbes direct so much of his powerful arsenal of rhetoric and argument against Aristotle? A few preliminary considerations can provide some orientation, if not yet a complete answer. As Hobbes emphasizes time and again, Aristotle’s thought, more than that of any other classical philosopher, eventually became fused with Christian doctrines. If Aristotle was only one of the Greek philosophers whose thought was influential in the early church, and not the most influential one at that, his influence surpassed all others with the later emergence and development of scholasticism. By the time Hobbes wrote, the Empusa of scholasticism—a specter not with one leg of bronze, the other of an ass, but rather with one leg of heathen philosophy, the other of Christian theology (De Corp., Ep. Ded.)—had become so dominant in the European universities that what was studied there, Hobbes says, was not properly philosophy . . . but Aristotelity (Lev. 46.13; see also Elem. 17.1; EW VII, 348; Hist. Eccles., lines 381–84). One might presume that the blame for the degeneration of philosophy into dogmatic Aristotelity should be laid at the feet of the appropriators, not those of the appropriated; but Hobbes argues that it is not as simple as that, because Aristotle’s teaching readily lent itself to such an appropriation. In other words, there was already a problem at the roots, and so it is no surprise that the tree that emerged, albeit after being watered by sources that Aristotle could not fully have anticipated, proved to be a tangled growth bearing poisonous fruit. Furthermore, insofar as Hobbes thought that Aristotle’s teaching had been corrupted by its appropriation, he must have regarded Aristotle—as indeed he did—as the serious core of the scholastic tradition and the philosophic rival most in need of confrontation.

These preliminary considerations begin to indicate the importance of Aristotle for Hobbes. Let us turn, then, to a closer examination of Hobbes’s critique of classical thought in general and of Aristotle and his scholastic followers in particular. In examining the objections and arguments in Hobbes’s critique, I will start from those that appear most prominently on the surface of his texts and that speak most directly to moral and political questions. But one cannot leave matters at Hobbes’s relatively straightforward moral-political critique of the classical tradition, because he also criticizes what may provisionally be called the metaphysics of Aristotle. Moreover, Hobbes’s arguments against Aristotle’s metaphysics—we will later see why this term should be regarded as merely provisional—prove to have a bearing on politics, because Aristotle’s metaphysical framework, Hobbes contends, had problematic political implications, or at least unintended political consequences. The character of this connection between the metaphysical and the political, as well as its entanglement with issues of religion and theology, will emerge in the course of our consideration of Hobbes’s critique. We will thus begin to see, albeit in a negative or indirect way initially, since we are starting from Hobbes’s rejection of an outlook that is not his own, the breadth of Hobbes’s venture and the necessity of allowing the connections between its different aspects to disclose themselves gradually.

The Moral-Political Critique

Hobbes attributes extraordinary power for good as well as for ill to political philosophy or, as he tends to call it, moral philosophy.⁵ The extraordinary power for good, however, is described primarily by way of a promise, as it must be, according to Hobbes, since the moral philosophy of the past and the present (Hobbes’s present) has been a disaster. By considering the damage and danger of the false and loquacious semblance of moral philosophy that has so far prevailed, then, Hobbes seeks to indicate the benefits that will flow from his own revolution in moral philosophy (De Cive, Pref.; see also Elem., Ep. Ded.; De Corp. 1.7). Hobbes’s primary charge against all prior moral philosophy—or, at any rate, his most direct and evident charge—is that it has been a source of chaos and conflict in political life. Indeed, according to his most extreme expressions of the charge, moral philosophy has been the source of all chaos and conflict in political life: The two-sided dogmas of the moral philosophers, partly correct and attractive, partly irrational and brutish have been, Hobbes says, the causes of all quarrels and killings (De Cive, Pref.). Now, Hobbes is surely well aware that this statement is a vast exaggeration. A man whose first publication was a translation of Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian War, and who is known above all for his teaching that outside of civilization the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short, can hardly have seriously thought that the world enjoyed peace and a golden age before the moral philosophers unleashed the forces of destruction. Hobbes exaggerates in order to amplify an accusation that he puts more simply elsewhere: The sophists of the past—among whom he identifies by name Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, and Plutarch—have been the champions of anarchy (De Cive 12.3). But what did these philosophers teach that could warrant such a description?

Hobbes assigns this title, the champions of anarchy, as he is discussing the seditious doctrine that tyrannicide is licit and sometimes even laudable (De Cive 12.3). Hobbes repeatedly points to the danger posed by this teaching, as well as by a prior teaching that prepares it as a premise prepares a conclusion. The prior teaching is, in its narrow form, that private men may and even should judge of the justice of the commands of kings or, in its broad form, that private men may claim for themselves a knowledge of good and evil independent of the sovereign’s dictates (see De Cive, Pref., 12.1–2; Elem. 27.4; Lev. 29.6). If this teaching is considered in its narrow form, it is not hard to see the danger that concerns Hobbes, or the way in which the conclusion follows from the premise: to teach men to judge the justice of the commands of kings is to lay the basis for the condemnation and the attempted overthrow of kings whose commands are judged to be unjust. Aristotle, for instance, as part of his famous division between correct regimes and their perversions, drew a distinction between kingship and tyranny (see Politics 1279a17–b10). Yet is it not but a mere step, Hobbes asks, from that distinction to the belief in a right to revolution and even in the justice of tyrannicide (De Cive 12.3; Elem. 27.10; Lev. 19.2, 29.14)?⁶

That the premise in question has a broader form, however, indicates that Hobbes blames the classical philosophers for more than the dangerous distinction between kingship and tyranny. The original error, which was the root of this particular doctrine, was that the philosophers let themselves be seduced by the oldest of the Devil’s temptations, the prospect of knowing good and evil for oneself (De Cive 12.1–3). Moreover, Hobbes criticizes Aristotle directly and by name for teaching that democracy is the only form of government compatible with liberty and thus with justice, and for teaching that rulers ought to be bound, as their subjects are, by the civil laws. Aristotle—Hobbes’s Aristotle, at any rate—put the force of his philosophic authority behind the democratic conception of justice and the belief in the sanctity of the rule of law (see, e.g., De Cive 12.3–4; Elem. 27.2–6; Lev. 21.9, 46.35–36; Beh., 43). But these, Hobbes argues, are problematic and dangerous teachings: the former encourages resistance against all nondemocratic governments; the latter ties the hands of the sovereign and puts the power of judgment back in the hands of the subjects, who are taught to see themselves as guardians of the laws against their transgression by the sovereign.

Now, it comes as a surprise to anyone familiar with Aristotle’s Politics to hear Aristotle criticized for his excessive commitment to democracy and the rule of law. Is it not a central lesson of Aristotle’s political science that, as valuable as the rule of law may be as a check on the passions of men, laws are always derivative from the regime that makes them? Does not Aristotle himself thus stress that it is the regime, not the laws, that is ultimately authoritative in every city (see Politics 1281a34–39, 1282b1–13)? And as for the claim that he regarded democracy as the only just form of government, Aristotle surely indicates that the democratic claim of the many (the poor) to deserve to rule is as problematic as the oligarchic claim of the few (the rich), to say nothing of its merits relative to the claims of the virtuous and the single outstanding individual. Is it not because none of these claims is without problems, both in principle and in practice, that Aristotle argues for a regime that mixes democratic and oligarchic elements while trying to carve out at least some role in ruling for the virtuous (consider Politics 1281a11–33, 1281a39–b37, 1293b31–1294b17)?

Hobbes cannot have been unaware that Aristotle was not an unambiguous supporter of democracy who thought that democratic principles require only the check provided by the rule of law. After all, Hobbes criticizes Aristotle elsewhere for his view that some men are by nature superior to others and thus more deserving of rule (see, e.g., Elem. 17.1; De Cive, 3.6, 3.13; Lev. 15.21).⁷ When one takes this criticism, too, into consideration, what seems at first to be a straightforward critique becomes more complicated and even begins to appear contradictory: How can Aristotle be criticized for being at once too democratic and too inegalitarian? Nor is