Hobbes's Creativity 3031277325, 9783031277320

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Hobbes’s Creativity James J. Hamilton

Hobbes’s Creativity

James J. Hamilton

Hobbes’s Creativity

James J. Hamilton Alexandria, VA, USA

ISBN 978-3-031-27732-0    ISBN 978-3-031-27733-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27733-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To the memory of my parents

Preface

This book is unique. It approaches the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes from a new perspective, his creativity. It identifies and explains his creativity by focusing on his development, personality, and motivation in the context of his culture and environment, and on his creative cognition as inferred from his writings. First, the book considers Hobbes’s life and how it relates to his creativity—his education, intellectual development, mentors, role models, promoters and support system, his psychological strengths and personality traits, and his motivation. Then, the book analyzes his creativity in four areas of his philosophy: his theory of cognition and account of the passions; his theory of moral relativity; his theory of the state of nature; and his theory of the civil state, and his attack on the theory of popular sovereignty. The study concludes that Hobbes became a great philosopher because of his creative virtuosity, because he thought creatively in so many ways in different contexts. In the early 2000s I began to think about what I would do after my retirement from the U.S. Foreign Service, which occurred in 2006. I had no particular special skills other than research skills and those I had learned in a career in diplomacy. I decided to go back to Hobbes, whose thought I had studied as a graduate student and which still stirred my interest, despite total ignorance of the state of research about him and his thought. To my great surprise I found that that research had exploded over the previous decades. I left academe just before a renaissance in Hobbes studies began. Without the advances which have been made this work would not have been possible. Ultimately I chose to study Hobbes’s creativity drawing on the literature of the psychology of creativity, which also made vii

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great strides and became a respectable discipline in the second half of the twentieth century. I wish to express my appreciation to Richard (Larry) Merkel for reviewing Chapter 2, and to Michael Millman, Cheryl B. Welch and an anonymous reviewer for reading and providing invaluable comments on the entire text. They have improved its exposition and saved me from some egregious errors. I would also like to express my appreciation for the enhancements which my niece, Stacie Plassche, made to the portrait of Hobbes by Samuel Cooper. Finally, I would like to thank my partner, Rayford Kytle, for his tolerance, patience, and support over many years. I am indebted to them all. I have revised and repurposed three journal articles for use here. The second half of Chapter 3 uses material from “Hobbes on Felicity: Aristotle, Bacon and Eudaimonia,” Hobbes Studies, 29 (2016): 129–47. Chapter 4 is based on “Pyrrhonism in the Political Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 20 (2012): 217–47; copyright © BSHP, reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd., http://www. tandfonline.com on behalf of BSHP. Chapter 5 uses material from “The Origins of Hobbes’s State of Nature,” Hobbes Studies, 26 (2013): 152–70. I wish to thank Brill for permission to use the first and third articles, and Taylor & Francis for permission to use the second one. I also wish to thank the journals’ editors and anonymous reviewers for their help and comments. Alexandria, VA

James J. Hamilton

Thomas Hobbes Miniature watercolor by Samuel Cooper c. 1660 Cleveland Museum of Art

Note on Editions of Hobbes’s Works

I have used the following editions of Hobbes’s chief works, and the pagination and orthography of each edition, as described. Elements of Law Anti-White

De Cive Philosophicall Rudiments

Leviathan (English)

The Elements of Law Natural and Politic, ed. Ferdinand Tönnies, 2nd ed. (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1969). Critique du “De mundo” de Thomas White, ed. Jean Jacquot and Harold Whitmore Jones (Paris: Librairie philosophique J. Vrin, co-edition with the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1973). All citations are to this edition. De Cive: The Latin Version, ed. Howard Warrender (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983). All citations are to this edition unless specified otherwise. De Cive: The English Version entitled in the first edition Philosophicall Rudiments concerning Government and Society, ed. Howard Warrender (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983). All quotations are from this edition. Leviathan, or The Matter, Forme, and Power of a Common-wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill (London: Andrew Crooke, 1651). All English citations and quotations are from this edition, which is often paginated alongside the pagination of modern editions.

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Leviathan (Latin) De homine On Man

EW LW

Leviathan, ed. Noel Malcolm, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2012). All Latin citations are to this edition. De homine (London: Andrew Crooke, 1658). All citations are to this edition unless specified otherwise. On Man, in Man and Citizen, ed. Bernard Gert, trans. Charles T. Wood, T. S. K. Scott-Craig and Bernard Gert (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1972). All quotations from De homine are from this edition. The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, ed. Sir William Molesworth, 11 vols. (London: John Bohn, 1839–45). Opera philosophica quae Latine scripsit omnia, ed. Sir William Molesworth, 5 vols. (London: John Bohn, 1839–45).

Complete information on all Hobbes’s works to which I have referred may be found in the Bibliography. Citations to Hobbes’s works provide part or chapter number, section number, and page number or numbers, wherever available. My pagination for all citations generally follows the recommendations of The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition. Volume number, when it occurs, is expressed in Arabic numerals, followed by a colon and the page number or numbers. Occasionally I have added the conventional abbreviations for page or pages (p., pp.) when it seemed prudent to do so to avoid confusion.

Contents

1 The Psychology of Creativity and Hobbes  1 2 Hobbes’s Development, Personality, and Motivation 17 3 Cognition and the Passions 63 4 Moral Relativity and the Sovereign101 5 The State of Nature127 6 The Civil State and Popular Sovereignty155 7 Hobbes’s Creative Virtuosity201 Bibliography219 Index247

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The Psychology of Creativity and Hobbes

1.1   Overview Although Thomas Hobbes is famous mainly for his political philosophy, he is considered one of the greatest and most innovative philosophers in the history of Western culture. His stature is uncontested.1 One distinguished scholar credits him with creating English-language philosophy.2 Another calls him “the greatest of British political thinkers, and the boldest, most exciting, and most compelling writer on politics in the English language.”3 A third believes that his work on theology, metaphysics, science, history, and psychology, as well as political theory, “entitles him to be described as one of the true founders of modernity in Western culture.”4 Two others regard his Leviathan as the greatest work of political thought in the English language.5 If Hobbes may be considered to have “created” Anglophone philosophy, it is natural that commentators have expended enormous time and effort studying his philosophy. But they have neglected his creativity. This book addresses that scholarly gap. It presents a study of Hobbes’s philosophy from a new perspective. Its focus is not an examination of his philosophical “system” as a whole, nor of the meaning of its principal concepts and theories, nor of its philosophical problems, nor of its meaning in its historical context, nor of neglected areas of his thought. There are many other works on these subjects. Our primary interest is Hobbes’s philosophic creativity. Our study will serve to introduce the psychology of © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. J. Hamilton, Hobbes’s Creativity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27733-7_1

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creativity to students of the philosophy of Hobbes, and the creativity of a great philosopher to the field of the psychology of creativity. It begins to fill a virtual vacuum in the study of the creativity of philosophers. It provides an account of the influence of Hobbes’s development, personality, and motivation on his creativity. And it offers an assessment of his creative thinking in different areas of his thought. We need to ask, first, why analytical philosophers, intellectual historians, historians of philosophy and political thought, and political theorists who study Hobbes would benefit from learning about the psychology of creativity. Second, we need to ask why psychologists would care about Hobbes and his philosophy.

1.2  Interest to Scholars Though the field of philosophy has begun to take note of creativity,6 the study of Hobbes suffers from the stove-piping typical of the specialization of academic disciplines. There has been no cross fertilization from the psychology of creativity and there has been no direct discussion of how and why Hobbes was extraordinarily creative. The nature of his creativity and its development, what makes him so distinctive a philosopher and how he got that way, are an integral but overlooked part of our understanding of him and his thought. Many commentators are fascinated by his astonishing deviation from philosophical tradition but seem to be unaware of or uninterested in how the literature on the philosophy of creativity can yield important insights about it. We need to understand why his views radically challenged the traditional views of his contemporaries, what motivated him, how his personality, intelligence and education, intellectual development, mentors and role models prepared him for his creative achievements, what types of thinking led him to a philosophy so unconventional that it generated both admiration and disgust among his readership, which of his ideas are most creative and why. The psychology of creativity will provide new insights on each of these matters and open up further avenues of investigation. It is also remarkable how little work psychologists of creativity have done on philosophy and philosophers.7 The standard studies usually mention philosophy only as an afterthought, if at all. The Encyclopedia of Creativity, which contains material on virtually every aspect of the study of creativity, contains entries on acting, advertising, architecture, art, dance, design, leadership, music, poetry, political science, science, sports, writing, and individual artists, composers, scientists, inventors, poets and

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writers, among other subjects. But there are no entries on philosophers, and the subject index makes no mention of philosophy as a recognized area of human accomplishment, that is, as a domain.8 Those few psychologists who have discussed philosophy have assumed that it is a domain, but do not explain in a consistent way precisely what kind of domain it is. Paul Thagard treats philosophy as one of the arts, a branch of literary non-­ fiction, which while true may be too broad, combining rigorously logical with other types of literary endeavors.9 Arthur J. Cropley considers philosophy a brand of science, which seems unlikely without more explanation than he gives us since philosophy, unlike science, may or may not be solidly grounded on empirical observation.10 Dean Keith Simonton groups philosophy with the humanities, which he situates between the sciences and the arts in a hierarchy of disciplines, with the most logical, formal, precise, and objective disciplines in concepts and methods at the top (the hard and soft sciences) and the most intuitive, imprecise, ambiguous, and subjective at the bottom (the arts).11 But it is difficult to understand how philosophy can be less logical, formal, and precise in concepts and method than the soft sciences (psychology, sociology) and many philosophers— especially Marxists—will think that it is no less objective. A study of the creativity of a great philosopher should help clarify matters and reveal similarities and differences with creativity in other domains. The highly abstract nature of philosophy must count as a central feature in evaluating its standing.

1.3  What Is Creativity? Creativity is responsible for the greatest advances in all areas of human endeavor and achievement in all cultures, in art and science, literature and philosophy, industry and commerce, politics and leadership. According to the standard definition, creativity requires originality and value or effectiveness. It also requires creative cognition, a special form of thinking, and “the construction of meaning” is central to the concept.12 There is a broad range of creativity—from everyday creativity to the work of an eminent creator like Hobbes. Creativity begins with existing knowledge, ideas, facts, and experiences. One of the most potentially productive ways of thinking creatively, and one which we will encounter in Hobbes, is conceptual combination, the merger of two or more existing ideas which have never been combined.13 This requires expertise. As Johann Sommerville once described Hobbes’s argumentation, he seems to hint at this

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requirement. “Hobbes frequently adopted or adapted familiar materials … [O]ne of his most characteristic techniques was to take commonly held views and, by introducing a few changes, employ them to reach unfamiliar conclusions.”14 Sommerville is describing features of the creative process without thinking of them in relation to the study of creativity. Another common approach to understanding the notion of creativity is socio-cultural. According to this approach, creativity is reflected in a product that some knowledgeable socio-cultural group, the field, considers new and valuable.15 Only a social group which is knowledgeable about the domain in which the work was created can determine if a product has these characteristics, particularly when evaluating the work of an eminent thinker like Hobbes. We cannot accept the subjective view of the creator on these points because he or she might be biased or deluded.16 Works of genius can be judged only interpersonally. By genius I mean the creator of at least one product widely considered a masterwork.17 By common agreement Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) is a masterwork. One consequence of the socio-cultural approach is that over time the creative reputation of a person or product may change and therefore may not be a good indicator of creativity. Another problem is that a masterwork may not receive recognition, but someone whose work is not important or of high quality may be awarded the accolade of genius instead.18 The field is not infallible. But after the initial mixture of admiration in some quarters and shock and revulsion in others, after 350 years and thousands of commentaries, we may fairly conclude that Hobbes’s place is secure. The field has made its final decision and it considers him a giant. The proof lies in the huge volume of commentary on his work. The prevailing creative ideals of the Western cultural model are either rationalist or Romantic. Both models still exert enormous influence. According to the rationalist model, creativity is the result of “conscious, deliberating, intelligent, rational” mental activity. A creative contribution such as a scientific breakthrough is just the outcome of superlative algorithmic or rules-based thinking.19 According to the Romantic model, a vestige of the nineteenth-century Romantic movement, creativity emerges from the irrational unconscious, which escapes the constraints of convention by expressing the creator’s inner self drawing on her emotions and instincts. The artist is the model of the Romantic ideal. There may be greater interest in science and the creative arts than in philosophy among psychologists for historical, economic, and political

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reasons. In the United States psychologists reinvigorated the study of creativity in the second half of the twentieth century under the influence of the Cold War, particularly in 1959 after Sputnik raised questions about the national state of the sciences. Large amounts of Federal funding swiftly followed for research and improved public education. American business has also been interested in research and education on innovation and leadership. The findings of subsequent scientific studies, which overwhelmingly plumb the nature of artistic and scientific creativity, have undermined both the rationalist and Romantic ideals.20 The Romantic ideal is probably still the most common opinion today, and the rationalist ideal holds sway among many philosophers. The greatest progress in a domain is most likely to come from wrestling with things that do not fit the standard paradigm. But there has been no constituency or funding for the study of creativity in philosophy and virtually no interest in it until recently. The most common opinion among philosophers and historians is that creativity is simply a function of intelligence. Hobbes was highly intelligent. Catherine Morris Cox, in her classic study of the IQs of 300 geniuses, gives 165 as a crude approximation of Hobbes’s IQ based on the judgment of a panel of three experts and her adjustment of their view for the incompleteness of the historical record. She believed that 165 was the lowest his true IQ could have been.21 Her study has been criticized as subjective,22 but Simonton argues that she showed nonetheless that there appears to be a positive relationship between genius and general intelligence.23 Psychologists agree, however, that there is no strict correlation between intelligence and creativity. Creativity requires general intelligence but it is not enough. They are separate psychological constructs which have no necessary relationship to each other. Not all people with high IQs are creative. While intelligence is heritable, creativity is not. According to Keith Sawyer, intelligence accounts for much less than half of creative performance.24 Some psychologists believe that creativity and intelligence are correlated below but not above an IQ level of about 120 (the threshold hypothesis).25 Other psychologists argue that most of the evidence severely qualifies or  does not appear to support this hypothesis, and that much creativity is domain-specific and does not require general intelligence.26 We must therefore consider other factors contributing to Hobbes’s genius.

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1.4  Approach A classic framework for considering creativity is “the four Ps” (and sometimes more Ps). They are creative person, creative process (creative cognition), creative press (culture, environment), and creative product (what the creator creates). Robert J. Sternberg and Todd I. Lubart assert that six personal resources contribute to the creative work of the person: intelligence, knowledge, thinking style, personality, motivation, and environmental context.27 They argue, for example, that styles of thought can encourage or discourage creativity, and that the most conducive style is what they call “legislative.” Individuals who have this style make their own rules and set their own course independently of social convention and the views of others. They want to think about things in a different way, their own way.28 Hobbes, who is notorious for starting discussions by defining terms to suit himself, conforms to this description. It is necessary, he writes, “for any man that aspires to true Knowledge, to examine the Definitions of former Authors; and either to correct them, where they are negligently set down, or to make them himselfe.”29 This study will adopt an approach based on the four Ps. We will focus on Hobbes (person) in the context of his culture and environment (press), and his creative cognition (process) as inferred from his writings (products). Products are the least studied of the four Ps, but some believe that they are the most objective way to study a person’s creativity.30 The range of issues raised by Hobbes’s works is enormous and far more than a single book could address. Of necessity, limits must be placed on its subject matter. We will consider first his psychological, intellectual, educational, and career development, the contribution of his environment to the psychological resources that made his eminent philosophical contributions possible, the relationship between his personality and his creativity, and his motivation. It takes a special personality to challenge received wisdom and cultural expectations, and to risk social opprobrium in exchange for creative achievement. Courage and even audacity are often necessary when one defies tradition, and Hobbes’s experience conforms to this rule despite his famous claim that he and fear were born twins. Early family life, education, and interpersonal relationships which nurture and challenge are important to the development of a creative thinker’s cognition. Another psychological requirement for eminent creative achievement is motivation. An individual may have the necessary intelligence and personality traits to become a great philosopher, but without the motivation

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he  or she will not realize his or  her potential. Next, we will address Hobbes’s creative products in four areas that have proved to be of enduring interest to commentators and that reveal different aspects of his creativity. These are his theories of cognition and the passions, especially his most original account of a passion, that of felicity; his theory of moral relativity (the idea that each person determines her own good and bad); his theory of the state of nature (life before creation of the state); and his theory of the civil state and his attack on the theory of popular sovereignty. Many of his ideas recur in different philosophical contexts and we will encounter them more than once. This approach inevitably will omit other important areas which have received much attention such as his use of classical rhetoric (creative presentation, a fifth P), but which do not fall within the domain of philosophy or otherwise violate the parameters of our study. The book will conclude that Hobbes’s creative virtuosity encompassed a wide range of associative and other thought processes in different contexts.

1.5  Creative Cognition There is compelling evidence that creative achievement requires expert knowledge in some domain.31 Creativity is based on existing knowledge, ideas, facts, and experiences. That does not mean that creative ideas are not novel. The novelty lies in the new product which results from creative cognition. In addition, without expert knowledge the creative individual would not have the confidence to change the domain, would not be able to understand the novelty or the appropriateness, value or effectiveness of her ideas, and would not be able to identify problems or express solutions to them. Thus it is as important to understand how old ideas influence new ideas as it is to understand their novelty.32 Since there is usually no record of Hobbes’s mental processes other than what appears in his works, it will be necessary to infer his cognitive processes from them. Two of these cognitive processes are analogy and metaphor. Analogy is thought to be especially relevant to creativity. It entails mapping information from a base domain on to a target. Some properties from the former are transferred to the latter.33 Hobbes used two well-known analogies that did not originate with him: that of the universe and a machine, and that of God and an absolute monarch. But he also used an original analogy of the heart’s systole and diastole to explain the nature of light in Tractatus opticus II (Optical Treatise II).34 Analogies fall into three categories, local,

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regional, and remote. In local analogy a conceptual structure in the base domain is applied to a target in the same domain. In regional analogy the structure in the base domain is applied to a target in a different but similar domain. In remote analogy the structure in the base domain is applied to a target in a different but dissimilar domain. Hobbes’s analogy of the pulsating heart and the nature of light is remote because the base domain (anatomy) is different from and dissimilar to the target domain (optics). Remote analogies are considered the most creative. A metaphor, which is related to analogy, is a conceptual combination in which features of a vehicle concept are mapped on to a target concept. Unlike an analogy, a metaphor does not involve mapping a whole structure on to the target concept. Much information is left behind. Analogy and metaphor are types of conceptual combinations.35 A number of other mental processes which will be important to our study are examples of what has been called post-formal cognitive operations. The post-formal stage of human development has been proposed to succeed the developmental psychologist Jean Piaget’s fifth stage, that of formal operations, in which adolescents are able to use formal logic in conjunction with abstract reasoning to perform hypothetico-deductive thought. Three higher order, post-formal operations that are evident in Hobbes’s work merit special explanation: dialectical thinking, relativistic thinking, and sepconic articulation. Dialectical thinking, which is probably the most commonly accepted example of post-formal operations, consists of the integration or synthesis of diametrically opposed or contradictory ideas, facts, or experiences. It occurs especially among philosophers and historians.36 Relativity rejects absolutes in favor of the immediate context and involves the application of multiple points of view to solve problems. Individual viewpoints become more important than universal concepts. Sepconic articulation is a process of conceiving concomitant separation and connection (sepcon).37 Two or more ideas or theories that have previously been considered unrelated or irreconcilable are brought together and create a tension which produces the emergence of new ideas and theories. Some components of thought are integrated but retain their original features, while others are kept separate. Dialectical thinking has been called an old-age style of thinking because younger people tend to rebel against tradition, whereas older people tend to integrate divergent ideas in their thought processes.38 Relativity too has been called an old-age style of thinking because older adults tend to focus on the immediate and to favor the subjective.39

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Other creative processes which are important to Hobbes’s thought include: (1) cross fertilization and integration of ideas from different domains or different parts of the same domain; (2) conceptual combination, the fusion of two or more ideas; (3) concept expansion, or increasing the meaning of a concept; (4) inversion, or reversing the relationship between the terms of an idea or theory; and (5) divergent thinking, the process of exploring multiple possible solutions to a problem. Finally, there is a pattern of reasoning in Hobbes’s philosophy by which he strives to demolish the positions of his opponents using a variety of cognitive processes, or to diminish their force if he cannot demolish them, and which is an integral and distinctive part of his philosophy. I call this pattern adversarial thinking. Hobbes’s adversarial thinking is assisted, among other processes, by co-optation, or borrowing someone else’s idea and subverting it for one’s own purposes, and by blocking the possibility that an idea can be a candidate for serious consideration.

1.6  Evidence The next chapter is a study of the environment that shaped and helped Hobbes, his intellectual and psychological development, his personality, and his motivation, as we seek to understand the personal and other resources that helped to make him an eminent creator. Chapter 2 draws primarily on the psychological literature and biographical evidence from his short autobiographies and from his friend, John Aubrey, who knew Hobbes most of his life. Early modern autobiography and biography emphasize anecdote and episode. Hobbes’s two short autobiographical accounts are summary and in many respects self-promoting, but Aubrey’s accounts are more substantial. All are considered generally reliable, especially when judged against other sources of information about Hobbes. His extant correspondence is also revealing. Chapters 3 through 6, which address the creativity of his theories of cognition and the passions, moral relativity, and the state of nature, as well as his attack on the theory of popular sovereignty, are based on inferences from his writings. Since creativity involves the creation of original meaning from existing ideas; we must try to identify the existing ideas and theories which provided the material from which Hobbes worked. Knowledge of previous writers and ideas on which he drew in developing his philosophy is necessary to determine what was new and what was not, what he created, and how he created it. Howard E.  Gruber was able to meet the

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evidential challenge to a great extent in his psychological study of Charles Darwin’s creativity because, he found, it is possible to trace “thought processes in context as they are reflected in documents such as notebooks and letters produced at or close to the time at which the thought itself took place.”40 But it is not possible to follow the development of Hobbes’s philosophy against the same high level of personal documentation. He proudly proclaimed the originality of his works and left behind little record of his thought processes other than the products themselves. He does suggest that examination of the opinions of others in the past can be useful in one’s thinking if it is done critically. “If in your own meditation you light upon a difficulty,” he writes, “I think it is no loss of time, to enquire what other men say of it, but to rely only upon reason.”41 This statement suggests that he often began from the ideas of others and then changed them if he did not agree with them. This is precisely what one would expect. But he leaves us in the dark about much of his knowledge base. Ronald A. Finke suggests a practical solution. “Even when a new idea consists of extensive transformations of previous ideas, one should still be able to discover a connective path that links the [old and new] structures.”42 This prospect, which is probably more confidently stated than most scholars can accept, does not mean that we must discover a connective path from the new structures to specific authors or works from which a creative philosopher may have formed her novel ideas. There may be little or no historical record of such specific works or their influence. A creative individual may not even be aware of some or all of the influences and therefore may be unable to state them, or she may wish to suppress the information in order to suggest more originality than is warranted—something that Hobbes has been suspected of doing.43 Even with a generous historical record there will never be enough evidence to determine with certainty the sources of a thinker’s existing ideas.44 Some caution has therefore been warranted in approaching this study. Part of the solution to the evidential problem lies in the contents of the Cavendish library at Hardwick Hall, for which Hobbes had been librarian and to which he had ready access during the philosophically formative 1630s. We know from his statements that he read books there45 and that many were purchased for his benefit.46 Another part of the solution is the views of experts. However, in the end the attribution of the influence of any specific author or authors is not crucial. The important thing is to establish that there were ideas which seem to have formed part of his existing knowledge and which he used or could have used in developing his philosophy. Both paths are worth pursuing, and this is the course I have followed.

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Notes 1. Hobbes appears in Charles Murray’s historiometric analysis of human accomplishment among the 20 greatest philosophers at number 16. Historiometric analysis is the quantitative analysis of archival material about “historic personalities” to learn about the connections between them, their environments, and their accomplishments. Charles Murray, Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. To 1950 (New York: Perennial, 2004), 133; Dean Keith Simonton, “Historiometry,” in Encyclopedia of Creativity, ed. Mark A.  Runco and Steven R.  Pritzker, 1st ed., 2 vols. (San Diego: Academic Press, 1999), 1:815–22; 815. 2. Richard Tuck, Hobbes: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), xi. 3. Alan Ryan, On Hobbes: Escaping the War of All Against All (New York: Liveright Publishing, 2016), 43. Also David Runciman, Pluralism and the Personality of the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), xi. 4. Noel Malcolm, “Hobbes, Thomas (1588-1679),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn., 2004), http://oxforddnb.com/article/13400. 5. Michael Oakeshott, Hobbes on Civil Association (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1975), 3; John Rawls, Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy, ed. Samuel Freeman (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 23, 26. 6. For example, Berys Gaut, “The Philosophy of Creativity,” Philosophy Compass, 5 (2010): 1034–46; Elliot Samuel Paul and Scott Barry Kaufman, eds., The Philosophy of Creativity: New Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 7. A point made by two psychologists of creativity, Mark A. Runco, Creativity: Theories and Themes: Research, Development, and Practice, 2nd ed. (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2014), 317; Paul Thagard, “Artistic Genius and Creative Cognition,” in The Wiley Handbook of Genius, ed. Dean Keith Simonton (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2014), 120–38; 130–31. Simonton perhaps has done the most, but his low output on the subject just serves to prove the rule. For example, Dean Keith Simonton, “Philosophical Eminence, Beliefs, and Zeitgeist: An Individual-generational Analysis,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 34 (1976): 630–40; Vincent J. Cassandro and Dean Keith Simonton, “Versatility, Openness to Experience, and Topical Diversity in Creative Products: An Exploratory

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Historiometric Analysis of Scientists, Philosophers, and Writers,” Journal of Creative Behavior, 44 (2010): 9–26. 8. Contents and Index, in Runco and Pritzker, Encyclopedia of Creativity, 1st ed., 1:v–x; 2:805. The contents of the second edition (2011) also make no mention of the domain of philosophy and little mention of philosophers. 9. Thagard, “Artistic Genius,” 130. 10. Arthur J.  Cropley, “Definitions of Creativity,” in Runco and Pritzker, Encyclopedia of Creativity, 1st ed., 1:511–24; 513. 11. Dean Keith Simonton, “Hierarchies of Creative Domains: Disciplinary Constraints on Blind Variation and Selective Retention,” in Paul and Kaufman, Philosophy of Creativity, 247–61. 12. Mark A.  Runco, “Authentic Creativity: Mechanisms, Definitions, and Empirical Efforts,” in The Nature of Human Creativity, ed. Robert J.  Sternberg and James C.  Kaufman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 246–63; 248. Also  Thomas B.  Ward, “Creativity as a Continuum,” in Sternberg and Kaufman, Nature of Human Creativity, 335–50; 337. 13. R. Keith Sawyer, Explaining Creativity: The Science of Human Innovation, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 7. Also Thagard, “Artistic Genius,” 131–32; Hans Eysenck, Genius: The Natural History of Creativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 280–81; Robert A.  Weisberg, Creativity: Understanding Innovation in Problem Solving, Science, Invention, and the Arts (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2006), 52–53; Thomas B. Ward and Yuliya Kolomyts, “Cognition and Creativity,” in The Cambridge Handbook of Creativity, ed. James C. Kaufman and Robert J. Sternberg (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 93–112; 93–94. 14. Johann P.  Sommerville, Thomas Hobbes: Political Ideas in Historical Context (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), 2. 15. Sawyer, Explaining Creativity, 216. 16. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention (New York: Harper Perennial, 1997), 23. 17. Simonton, “Creativity in Highly Eminent Individuals,” in Kaufman and Sternberg, Cambridge Handbook of Creativity, 174–88; 175. Also Robert J.  Sternberg and Stacey L.  Bridges, “Varieties of Genius,” in Simonton, Wiley Handbook of Genius, 185–97; 185. 18. Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity, 29–30; Runco, Creativity, 235–41; Eysenck, Genius, 18. 19. Sawyer, Explaining Creativity, 23–24. 20. One well-known psychologist, Robert A. Weisberg, still supports a version of the rationalist model.

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21. Catherine Morris Cox, Genetic Studies of Genius, vol. 2, The Early Mental Traits of Three Hundred Geniuses (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1926), 52 and Table 12A (between 60 and 61). A panel of three experts gave the young Hobbes an IQ of 135 ± 8 without reference to his later career, and an IQ of 140 ± 8 for his life as a whole. Cox used these assessments as the basis of her rough estimate of true IQ. 22. Robert J. Sternberg, James C. Kaufman, and Jean E. Pretz, The Creativity Conundrum: A Propulsion Model of Kinds of Creative Contributions (New York: Psychology Press, 2002), 102; Eysenck, Genius, 56–59. But Cox’s work was a milestone in the study of general intelligence. Iona Damian and Dean Keith Simonton, “Diversifying Experiences in the Development of Genius and Their Impact on Creative Cognition,” in Simonton, Wiley Handbook of Genius, 375–93; 378.  23. Simonton, “Creativity in Highly Creative Individuals,” 182. Also Eysenck, Genius, 19–36. 24. Sawyer, Explaining Creativity, 52. A better way to explain creative genius is “the expert-performance approach.”  K.  Anders Ericsson, “Creative Genius: A View from the Expert-Performance Approach,” in Simonton, Wiley Handbook of Genius, 321–49; 323. It has been suggested that greater intelligence may account for the avoidance of madness by the highly creative individual with mental problems. Wendy Johnson and Thomas J. Bouchard, Jr., “Genetics of Intellectual and Personality Traits Associated with Creative Genius: Could Geniuses Be Cosmobian Dragon Kings?” in Simonton, Wiley Handbook of Genius, 269–96; 277. 25. Howard Gardner, Creating Minds: An Anatomy of Creativity (New York: Basic Books, 2011), 20. 26. Runco, Creativity, 5–8; Sawyer, Explaining Creativity, 58; Harrison J. Kell and David Lubinski, “The Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth at Maturity: Insights into Elements of Genius,” in Simonton, Wiley Handbook of Genius, 399–421; 401; Kyung Hee Kim, Bonnie Cramond, and Joyce van Tassel-Baska, “The Relationship between Creativity and Intelligence,” in Kaufman and Sternberg, Cambridge Handbook of Creativity, 385–412; 400–402. 27. Robert J. Sternberg and Todd I. Lubart, Defying the Crowd: Cultivating Creativity in a Culture of Conformity (New York: Free Press, 1995), 3–10. 28. Ibid., 179–80. 29. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme, and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill (London: Andrew Crooke, 1651), ch. 4, 15. References to this work are from this edition unless otherwise specified. 30. Aaron Kozbelt, Ronald A.  Beghetto, and Mark A.  Runco, “Theories of Creativity,” in Kaufman and Sternberg, Cambridge Handbook of Creativity, 20–47; 24.

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31. Michael D.  Mumford and Paige P.  Porter, “Analogies,” in Runco and Pritzker, Encyclopedia of Creativity, 1st ed., 1:71–77; 71–72. 32. Thomas B.  Ward, Steven M.  Smith, and Jyotsna Vaid, “Conceptual Structures and Processes in Creative Thought,” in Creative Thought: An Investigation of Conceptual Structures and Processes, ed. Thomas B. Ward, Steven M.  Smith, and Jyotsna Vaid (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 1997), 1–27; 19; Dean Keith Simonton, “Creative Genius, Knowledge, and Reason: The Lives and Works of Eminent Creators,” in Creativity and Reason in Cognitive Development, ed. James C.  Kaufman and John Baer, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 226–45; 240–41; David Cropley and Arthur Cropley, “Functional Creativity: ‘Products’ and the Generation of Effective Novelty,” in Kaufman and Sternberg, Cambridge Handbook of Creativity, 301–17; 307; Ronald A. Finke, Thomas B. Ward, and Steven M. Smith, Creative Cognition: Theory, Research, and Applications (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 17–23. 33. Sawyer, Explaining Creativity, 116, 119. 34. Thomas Hobbes, Tractatus opticus, ed. Franco Alessio, Rivista critica di storia della filosofia, 18 (1963): 147–228; 150; Franco Giudice, “The Most Curious of Sciences: Hobbes’s Optics,” in The Oxford Handbook of Hobbes, ed. A. P. Martinich and Kinch Hoekstra (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 149–68; 156. 35. Runco, Creativity, 12–13; Sawyer, Explaining Creativity, 115–21. 36. Jacques-Henri Guignard and Todd Lubart, “Creativity and Reason: Friends or Foes?” in Kaufman and Baer, Creativity and Reason in Cognitive Development, 282–301; 297. 37. Albert Rothenberg, “Janusian, Homospatial, and Sepconic Articulation Processes,” in Runco and Pritzker, Encyclopedia of Creativity, 2nd ed. (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2011), 1–9. 38. Runco, Creativity, 63; Bernice Yan and Patricia Arlin, “Dialectical Thinking: Implications for Creative Thinking,” in Runco and Pritzker, Encyclopedia of Creativity, 1st ed., 1:547–52. 39. Runco, Creativity, 63. 40. Howard E. Gruber, “Insight and Affect in the History of Science,” in The Nature of Insight, ed. Robert J.  Sternberg and Janet E.  Davidson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 397–431; 412. Also Howard E. Gruber, Darwin on Man: A Psychological Study of Scientific Creativity, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), xiii. 41. Thomas Hobbes, Decameron physiologicum, in The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury [hereafter EW], ed. William Molesworth, 11 vols. (London: John Bohn, 1839–1845), 7:71–180; 72. Also Noel Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford: Clarendon, 2002), 129.

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42. Ronald A. Finke, “Creative Realism,” in The Creative Cognition Approach, ed. Steven M. Smith, Thomas B. Ward, and Ronald A. Finke (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 303–26; 304. 43. Runco, Creativity, 213. 44. Skinner, Visions of Politics, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 1:75–76. 45. James J. Hamilton, “Hobbes’s Study and the Hardwick Library,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, 16 (1978): 445–54; 446. 46. Noel Malcolm, ed., Reason of State, Propaganda, and the Thirty Years’ War: An Unknown Translation by Thomas Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 7–8; Thomas Hobbes, Vita carmine expressa (Verse Life) [hereafter Vita], in Opera philosophica quae Latine scripsit omnia [hereafter LW], ed. William Molesworth, 5 vols. (London: John Bohn, 1839–1845), 1:lxxxv–xcix; lxxxviii; John Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. Richard Barber (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1982), 153.

CHAPTER 2

Hobbes’s Development, Personality, and Motivation

2.1   Overview Creative genius requires intelligence but intelligence is not enough. Most intelligent people are satisfied with mastering and working in a specific domain, not in challenging its received wisdom and striking out on their own. A special personality is required for high creativity. But a person’s personality can be inferred only from examining her behavior and experience from her reactions to the environment. This chapter is about Hobbes and his environment. I will consider his psychological, educational, and intellectual development, the relationship between his personality traits and his creativity, his motivation, and how his environment contributed to the psychological resources which he drew upon in developing his philosophy.

2.2   Childhood, Youth, and Education Thomas Hobbes was born on April 5, 1588, in his family home in Westport, near Malmesbury in Wiltshire. He was the second of three children. He had an older brother and a younger sister. Girls usually were not educated and, according to Aubrey, his brother Edmund did not have his intellect.1 Hobbes tells us nothing about how he felt toward his parents.2 We know little of his early family life, but it may have been troubled and tense. His father was a poorly paid, semi-educated curate in Brokenborough © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. J. Hamilton, Hobbes’s Creativity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27733-7_2

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who was short-tempered, “disesteemed learning” and was distinguished by his “ignorance and clownery.”3 He was professionally irresponsible and got into trouble for not performing his clerical duties. Although he has been suspected of alcoholism, Aubrey reports that he was a “good fellow,” which meant that he drank wine every day but was not a drunk.4 We know virtually nothing about Hobbes’s mother, but she must have been the most important source of emotional stability in his childhood. Young Thomas was “playsome enough”5 and there is no evidence that he was rebellious or troublesome, at home or at school, unless the achievement of academic success itself can be considered a rebellious act against a father who did not value it or valued it only as a necessary means to follow himself in the church. Hobbes may have come to see school as a way to escape from his home life and demonstrate to himself and others his unusual capabilities in an environment that he grew to love. He also may have been able to minimize conflict with his father by subservience, obedience and keeping his doubts, disagreements, and resentments to himself—which found their way into his doctrine of the duty of subjects toward their governors decades later. Hobbes was lucky in his educational opportunities. He went to school in Westport from age four to eight, where he learned to read, write, and count. After a further year or two at a school in Malmesbury, at about age nine or ten, perhaps in recognition of his early promise, he entered the private school of Robert Latimer who “delighted in his scholar’s company”6 and became, in Noel Malcolm’s assessment, “an intellectual and moral father-figure”7 who provided perhaps Hobbes’s first inspiring male role model. Latimer, who had received his B.A. from Magdalen Hall and his M.A. from Magdalen College, Oxford,8 was a good Greek scholar, a rarity around Malmesbury. Hobbes flourished under Latimer, who gave extra attention to Hobbes and a few other bright boys.9 He got a good grounding in Greek and Latin, part of the Elizabethan humanist grammar school education that included grammar and rhetoric, which made it possible for him to go to Oxford.10 He loved studying Greek and Latin, and at the end of his studies with Latimer he made a translation of Euripedes’ Medea from Greek into Latin verse and gave it to Latimer, presumably as a token of his esteem and gratitude, a precocious achievement for a 14-year-old that peaked Hobbes’s curiosity in old age.11 Probably in 1603, a bad plague year at Oxford,12 Hobbes matriculated at Magdalen Hall, perhaps with the help of Latimer’s contacts and with the financial support of a childless uncle. Wealthy relatives sometimes

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financed the university educations of family boys, and Magdalen Hall, one of the five largest societies in the University, was a common choice for Wiltshire boys.13 Later that year, Hobbes’s father was convicted of slandering a local vicar and was excommunicated, thereby endangering his livelihood. In early 1604 he struck the vicar in a churchyard, a crime which could have led to corporal punishment. As a consequence he fled, abandoning his family and disappearing from the records,14 depriving Hobbes, who never saw him again, of the chance to know his father as an equal and freezing his childhood relationship with him. In later life Hobbes had little to say about him beyond the basic fact of his paternity as shame, resentment, and bitterness lingered. The Oxford undergraduate education, based on guided individual study requiring strong self-discipline, was predominantly humanist, emphasized a general education, and instilled a permanent interest in classical literature. The invention of print books had marginalized the traditional university lecture system because it was no longer necessary for students to take dictation from books being read to them. The foundation of the educational process was the study of Latin (written and conversational) and Greek language and literature, though Hobbes may also have been exposed to modern languages (for teaching and the grand tour of the Continent as a prospective tutor to the sons of the aristocracy).15 During the first year students concentrated on the study of rhetoric and (primarily)  Aristotelian-scholastic logic, which Hobbes ridiculed much later and most students found tedious because of the emphasis on memorization, though they were not expected to use it later on.16 Basic mathematics, involving geography and the fundamentals of cosmography, was taught as an adjunct to logic and an additional means of training the mind. More advanced mathematics was available but there is no evidence that Hobbes availed himself of it. Students received regular religious instruction since about half of the common students were bound for the church. Ethics, history, Aristotelian-scholastic physics, and natural philosophy also formed an important part of undergraduate instruction.17 After the tedium of memorization, drilling, and composition during the first year, the course of study became more engaging as students began to prepare for the disputations, a series of refereed public debates which were required for the final “determination.” A good performance in the disputations could launch a good career and we have reason to believe that Hobbes’s performance was a success, both because of his later employment and because he thought he was a good disputant.18 “By cultivating

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the employment of language, wit, and quickness of parts instead of the virtuous (if dry) technical skills previously emphasized, the disputations helped inculcate the new objectives of learning while at the same time securing unprecedented popularity.”19 A formal scholastic disputation consisted of three parts. A respondent answered or interpreted a question put by the moderator or determiner. An opponent or opponents offered contradictory propositions and a critique of the respondent’s view. Then the determiner summed up, pointed out problems, and rendered a decision on the question. Students prepared by active cooperation among themselves beginning in the second year, by observation of the practice  exercises of older students, and later  by their own exercises. In the formal determination each student participated in two disputations, first as respondent and then as opponent. Controversy and paradox could land a student in hot water but Hobbes had no such problem—which was a far cry from his future writings.20 He was not yet ready to challenge convention. A. P. Martinich has made a plausible case that Hobbes was a loner and unpopular at Oxford. He was younger upon entry, at 14 or 15 years old, than most other students, he was “unhealthy,” and he may have been the subject of ridicule and other forms of adolescent cruelty.21 The case for his unpopularity becomes less plausible as, in later years, he proved his wit and talent at disputation, but there is reason to believe that he was still a loner. Years later his outstanding memories of leisure activities were of rising early in the summer to catch jackdaws and of poring over maps in the bookbinders’ shops dreaming of the exciting voyages of explorers and fantasizing about what strange people and animals lurked in those parts of the maps marked by monsters and caves.22 He seems to have been a hard worker with an active imagination and records no group social activities. Hobbes received his B.A. in 1608 after five years rather than the statutory four. Delays were not uncommon as poorer students took longer to gather the necessary funds for fees (about £10),23 but we do not know why he took an extra year. Martinich suggests that the problem was the plague but cites no evidence of college closures.24 It was expected that students would continue their humanist studies after graduation, reading the ancient poets and ancient and modern historians, usually focusing more on the content of what they were reading and less on philological and grammatical issues.25 After a hiatus of several years that is precisely what Hobbes did.

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2.3  The Cavendishes Upon graduation Hobbes was recommended to William (I) baron Cavendish of Hardwick, a member of a family of great power, social prestige, land and wealth, as tutor to his son, William (II) Cavendish, who was two years younger than Hobbes. William (I) became the first earl of Devonshire in 1618 and was succeeded upon his death by William (II) in 1626. Hobbes was close to the Cavendish family for most of the rest of his life, serving at various times as tutor, secretary, agent, adviser, confidant, and pensioner. William (II) involved him in important political, governmental, business, and personal affairs and entrusted him with financial transactions worth large sums of money.26 Hobbes states in his prose autobiography that the Cavendishes appreciated his diligence and thus presumably his conscientiousness.27 He was entrusted with the welfare of three young men on a number of trips to the Continent and became fluent in Italian and French. He probably accompanied William (II) on a short trip to France in early 1610.28 Then he accompanied him to France and Italy on the grand tour in 1614–1615, and the son of a prominent neighbor on another grand tour to France and Switzerland in 1629–1630. William (II) Cavendish died in 1628 and in 1630, after a brief separation from the Cavendishes, Hobbes became tutor to William (III), son of William (II) and the third earl of Devonshire. On a third grand tour in 1634–1636, which was especially important to Hobbes’s intellectual development, he accompanied William (III) to France, Italy, and Switzerland. He was responsible in the 1630s for all instruction, religious and moral guidance, oversight of travel arrangements, and financial dealings. As the companion of an English lord he met many important people. On the first grand tour he met Paolo Sarpi, the controversial intellectual leader of Venice, then writing his hostile history of the Counter-­ Reformation Council of Trent, as well as Sarpi’s assistant, Fulgencio Micanzio, with whom William (II) subsequently corresponded on European events for many years. On the third grand tour Hobbes probably met Galileo, whom he admired greatly, under Inquisition-imposed “house arrest” in Florence for challenging the orthodox earth-centered theory of the universe. Hobbes had many varied interests during his lifetime—history, poetry, music, astronomy, optics, psychology, rhetoric, logic, geometry, physics, metaphysics, anatomy, chemistry, political and moral philosophy, theology, and law. In 1610 he assisted in surveying some Cavendish lands,

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which required a basic knowledge of geometry.29 Around 1615 he seems to have taken up his humanist studies again, the studia humanitatis (grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry, and politics), availing himself, in his leisure time, of the library of the Cavendishes.30 In 1618 he observed a comet, the first evidence of his interest in natural history and philosophy.31 He may have provided editorial assistance for a volume of essays published by William (II) Cavendish in 1620, though it is unlikely that he was author of any of them.32 In the early 1620s he may have witnessed or taken part in some of Francis Bacon’s natural history experiments.33 He also wrote a Latin poem about a trip that he, Cavendish and others had taken in 1626 to the Derbyshire Peak District, which reveals a Baconian interest in natural history and philosophy.34 In 1628 he published the first English translation of Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian war directly from Greek, and contributed his own maps of Greece and his views on historiography, a major achievement which established his reputation as an important Greek scholar but which did not yet evidence the extraordinary creativity that lay ahead.35 Aubrey reports that Hobbes loved music and at about this time played the bass viol (between the legs like a cello) and later in life sang for his health.36 In the late 1620s he translated into English a Latin reason of state pamphlet on the political and strategic position of the Elector Palatine in the Thirty Years’ War, which was never printed.37 In the early 1630s he was studying optics, light and the nature of sight, geometry, and psychology.38 Some scholars believe that during this period he wrote the so-called Short Tract on First Principles, an attempt to develop a human psychology based on mechanistic principles, but others disagree.39 In 1634 he was working on the sine law of refraction,40 and during his third grand tour he began to study the principles of physics under the intellectual sway of Galileo. By 1636 Hobbes was an expert on ancient philosophy, rhetoric, poetry and history, and had made strides in mathematics, psychology, and natural philosophy. The period of 1636–1640 was one of the most important and creative of his life. He took great pleasure in his work and threw himself into it, concentrating on physics, metaphysics, optics, psychology, epistemology, logic, and politics.41 In 1636, perhaps, he completed an English summary of Aristotle’s Rhetoric.42 Sir Kenelm Digby, a friend and something of a philosopher himself, wrote to Hobbes in 1637 that he knew “more then all men liuing.”43 At about this time he thought of a scheme to integrate his varied interests into a new tripartite philosophy encompassing body (metaphysics, physics, and logic), man (epistemology, optics,

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and psychology), and citizen (politics and moral philosophy).44 By 1640 he had completed his first authenticated scientific treatise, the Latin Optical MS.45 In May 1640 he finished his first important work of political philosophy, The Elements of Law Natural and Politic, which circulated widely in manuscript. British politics had entered a period of conflict and confrontation between parliament and the Crown, and Hobbes became concerned that the manuscript, which was politically unconventional and therefore controversial, would land him in trouble with parliament. Shortly after the Long Parliament was seated in November 1640 and the arrest of Charles I’s principal adviser, the earl of Strafford (whose high-­ handed policies The Elements of Law could be read as supporting), he secretly fled to Paris, writing to the English ambassador that he was seized “violently wth a resolution of comming hither.”46 He famously wrote in his verse autobiography that he was born the twin of fear, and explained further in De cive that by fear he meant suspicion, distrust, and precaution as well as fright.47 But he was never abashed to defy traditional public views on politics, morals, and religion by publishing his own unusual doctrines, and there is evidence that he had been planning the move to Paris for some time for political and career reasons, to become part of Parisian intellectual circles. It may not have been as impulsive as it appears.48 His verse autobiography also suggests that the anxiety he experienced waiting for his real or imagined fears to play out was interfering with his work.49 For most of the decades following his departure from Oxford, the Cavendish family had provided a safe harbor—leisure time, security, status, and a livelihood—within which his studies flourished and he prepared himself for future achievement. Without the Cavendishes he may have been condemned to a lifetime of drudgery and the history of philosophy may have been very different.

2.4   Other Facilitators Four individuals, three social networks, and the competition of a great rival were essential in providing role models, sounding boards, intellectual stimulation, psychological support, and the challenge of an exceptional thinker during the crucial years of Hobbes’s philosophic preparation and the establishment of his reputation: Francis Bacon; William Cavendish, earl (later marquis and duke) of Newcastle and the “Welbeck academy”; Lucius Carey Viscount Falkland and the Great Tew circle; Marin Mersenne

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and his network of collaborators and European correspondents; and the great French philosopher René Descartes. I will discuss them in turn. Francis Bacon was Hobbes’s first eminent philosophic role model. He learned from observing Bacon how to be a philosopher, the mechanics of philosophic work, high-level functioning in philosophy and science, and the pleasures and fruits of successfully challenging intellectual conventions. Although their mature philosophies diverged, Hobbes was deeply influenced by Baconian science and humanism throughout his most creative years.50 He became involved with Bacon through William (II) Cavendish in the mid- to late-1610s, and helped to translate some of Bacon’s works into Latin, including some of the Essays and part of The Advancement of Learning.51 Bacon’s working habit was to take walks and meditate in the morning accompanied by a young man who would take down his thoughts. He liked to talk to Hobbes, who was one of these young men,52 and appreciated his help more than that of other assistants because Hobbes understood what he was saying and took intelligible notes. Hobbes claimed later that he knew more than others because he thought more and read less than others.53 This was something he had observed in Bacon and he may have modeled his work style, whether consciously or not, on Bacon’s. He meditated on morning walks, took notes on his thoughts, and then wrote them out in the afternoon. Sometimes he would contemplate a single subject for a week or two at a stretch. He reportedly adopted this method in the composition of Leviathan and for many years afterward, but he probably had done it even earlier.54 It is difficult to know how much Bacon’s attentions may have encouraged Hobbes to become a philosopher, or how much Bacon’s interest in political and natural philosophy influenced Hobbes’s intellectual interests, but his personal knowledge of Bacon demystified the process and made the practice of creative philosophy accessible to him. He also learned from Bacon the importance of questioning traditional ideas and theories, and of replacing them with new ideas of his own. They had the advantage of living in an age—which was the beneficiary of the revolutionary achievements of Gutenberg, Columbus, Luther, and Galileo—when novel ideas in themselves were considered strong indications of their validity.55 Four years after Bacon’s death Hobbes experienced a crystallizing event, something that had such a great influence on him and his thinking that he never forgot it.56 He recalled that in 1630 he chanced on a copy of Euclid’s Elements open at the Pythagorean theorem. He was struck by Euclid’s elegant logic and became enthusiastic about geometry. Experts

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agree that Hobbes probably knew some geometry before this incident and what really impressed him was the power of its deductive method of reasoning from principles that no one would deny.57 Geometry and syllogistic logic were often viewed at the time as identical reasoning processes.58 The question we must ask ourselves is, why was this a crystallizing experience? The answer, I suggest, is that it provided Hobbes a way out of the Pyrrhonist conundrum of early seventeenth-century philosophy. Pyrrhonism was an ancient skeptical philosophy which held that all truth claims are equally plausible and rejected any knowable truth. It had been revived during the Renaissance and had long produced intense debates about whether philosophy or science was even possible. It had a corrosive epistemological effect on all empirical observations, rational generalizations, and philosophical and scientific reasoning and conclusions.59 Hobbes may have encountered this philosophy in his work for Bacon, who sympathized with the ancient skeptics’ suspicion of universals and their use in syllogistic reasoning.60 He must also have been exposed to it during the six years (perhaps 1622–1628) that Charles du Bosc, a follower of the French Pyrrhonist Michel de Montaigne, lived with the Cavendishes. Du Bosc became Hobbes’s friend and may have tutored him and the Cavendish family in French. We know that the Cavendishes had copies of Montaigne’s Essais (Essays) and Pierre Charron’s De la sagesse (On Wisdom) at around this time.61 Pyrrhonist ideas would figure importantly in Hobbes’s own mature philosophy.62 The crystallizing experience of Euclid may help explain why Pyrrhonism became philosophically useful and not a stumbling block to him, opening the possibility of a fruitful philosophical career and giving it a push. The earl of Newcastle, cousin and neighbor of William (II) Cavendish, is the second important influence on the development of Hobbes’s career as a major philosopher. Newcastle patronized a small network of scientists and mathematicians which included his brother Sir Charles Cavendish, an amateur mathematician and enthusiast of physics; Robert Payne, Newcastle’s chaplain and secretary, Oxford mathematician and possible author of The Short Tract; Walter Warner, who previously had belonged to the circle of Thomas Hariot, astronomer, mathematician, and cultural anthropologist; and Hobbes. Newcastle was interested in science, philosophy, and literature, especially the work of Galileo, and his patronage gave an early impetus to Hobbes’s engagement with science and mathematics. It was at his request that Hobbes wrote The Elements of Law and other works. Sir Charles maintained a regular exchange of correspondence with

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important European mathematicians and philosophers to keep abreast of developments. Malcolm believes that Payne, with whom Hobbes seems to have been especially close, may have tutored him in geometry.63 Warner, whom Hobbes treated as an early rival, was, like Hobbes, working on optics, geometry, and psychology in the early 1630s. Hobbes claimed later that he himself had outlined a materialist explanation of the sensation of light to Newcastle and his brother as early as 1630.64 These men corresponded with one another, occasionally met, criticized each other’s work, and discussed the work of other mathematicians and philosophers. They must have had the sense that they were part of a European movement for the advancement of science. The next important factor in Hobbes’s mature intellectual development was Lucius Carey Viscount Falkland and the network of theologians, lawyers, and poets called the Great Tew circle, which J. C. Hayward has characterized as more of an “ethos” than a group.65 The only evidence that Hobbes actually visited Great Tew, Falkland’s estate near Oxford, comes from Anthony Wood, seventeenth-century author of a history of distinguished Oxford alumni. Hobbes probably did not visit often.66 Most came from Oxford. He may have met Falkland through mutual friends— the poet Ben Jonson, business acquaintances, or friends of the Cavendish family—and may have become involved with the network as early as 1634, the year the circle began.67 It was also the year that William Chillingworth, the theological controversialist, took up residence at Great Tew, where he worked on The Religion of Protestants: A Safe Way to Salvation, a book which seems to have been seminal to Hobbes’s version of the theory of absolute sovereignty and to his eirenical theology.68 Areas where Hobbes, Chillingworth, and other members of the network had shared attitudes were episcopal corruption, religious rationalism, adiaphorism, eirenicism, and a humanist attitude toward scripture.69 A number of Tevians eventually turned against Hobbes because of the unorthodoxy of his political and religious views.70 The final and perhaps most important supportive figure to Hobbes’s philosophic career and later intellectual development was Marin Mersenne, the Minim friar who was at the center of perhaps 200 regular correspondents, held regular scientific and mathematical meetings at the Convent of the Annunciation in Paris, and has been called a “one-man scientific journal.”71 He was a classic example of an influential gatekeeper,72 the tireless, knowledgeable, and trusted intermediary between European experts on science, philosophy, and mathematics. He published compilations of

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examples of promising work by various thinkers to promote intellectual exchange and advance the mechanistic and mathematical approach to natural philosophy with which he sympathized.73 He admired Hobbes, engaged intellectually with him, encouraged him, promoted his career, and introduced his work to his friend Descartes.74 Hobbes remembered becoming acquainted with Mersenne on his third grand tour, but he may have first attended Mersenne’s meetings during his second in 1629–1630 and then become more intimate in 1634–1636,75 when Hobbes says he communicated his intellectual progress to Mersenne on a daily basis.76 Among those who attended Mersenne’s meetings were Giles Personne de Roberval, who held the prestigious Ramus chair of mathematics at the Collège Royal and to whom Hobbes seems to have become especially close; the English Catholic philosophers Sir Kenelm Digby and Thomas White, who sought to integrate Aristotelian and Galilean physics; and a number of young Huguenot intellectuals who were to become Hobbes’s disciples. Through Mersenne, Hobbes also became friends with the important French Catholic-Epicurean philosopher Pierre Gassendi in 1641. In 1642 Mersenne was responsible for the printing and private distribution of Hobbes’s De cive (On the Citizen), the first installment and third part of his projected tripartite revision of science and philosophy, which made his reputation among European intellectuals. Later Hobbes touted its originality and boasted that it brought him the fame and recognition which he had wanted. Perhaps at Mersenne’s request he wrote a lengthy refutation of White’s De mundo (On the World) in 1642–1643. In 1644 Mersenne published summaries of portions of Hobbes’s critique of White and Hobbes’s optics and cited him in a geometrical problem.77 We must also consider the intellectual and psychological stimulus provided by Hobbes’s rivalry with Descartes, the other great mid-­seventeenth-­ century philosopher. It is perhaps too much to say that Hobbes developed his early philosophical work largely in response to Descartes.78 Hobbes had accomplished much before he read anything by Descartes. Their views were similar in some important respects and different in others.79 They both believed that the universe is mechanistic, but Descartes also believed, unlike Hobbes, that humans have free will and that the human soul is immortal. Each wanted to reinvent philosophy according to the principles of the new science and to do it himself.80 Hobbes was not yet well known when their philosophic paths first crossed. Descartes was already established and well regarded. It was perhaps inevitable that two such

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independent and self-confident geniuses would clash. Much of Hobbes’s Latin Optical MS, completed in 1641 or early 1642, was a detailed critique of Descartes’ Dioptrique.81 He wrote a long, blunt, and arrogant response to Descartes’ views (with perfunctory expressions of admiration) at Mersenne’s request in 1641 correspondence, which Descartes treated with thinly veiled contempt and refused to read in full.82 In the midst of these exchanges Hobbes disparaged Descartes’ philosophic ability in a letter to Sir Charles Cavendish.83 Martinich has described their sparring as “one of the great episodes of talking-past-one-another in the history of philosophy.”84 Hobbes was one of the thinkers to whom Mersenne circulated the manuscript of Descartes’ Meditations and requested critical comments. When the Meditations and comments were published together with Descartes’ replies in 1641, Hobbes and Descartes continued to treat each other’s views with arrogance and contempt.85 Hobbes refused to meet Descartes when he visited Paris in 1644, seems to have had a successful reconciliation dinner with him and Gassendi in 1647, and quarreled again with him at a meeting in 1648, the year of Descartes’ death. When Hobbes’s own natural philosophy finally appeared in 1655 there were implicit criticisms of Descartes.86 Hobbes did not admit publicly until a year before his own death that Descartes was “a very ingenious man.”87 His competition with Descartes added an extra impetus to his intrinsic motivation as a philosopher and his positive reaction to task activities for their own sake, and may have made him more creative by providing important opposing ideas to push against.88

2.5  Intellectual Industry With the printing of De cive, even in its first, restricted distribution, Hobbes was established as an important philosopher. The next three decades would witness the composition of his greatest achievement as well as his greatest failures. By the end of 1644 he had turned his efforts to the composition of the first part of his tripartite division of philosophy, that on body (De corpore).89 But he encountered great difficulty and many interruptions and distractions, such as his tutelage of Prince Charles (later Britain’s King Charles II) in mathematics from 1646–1648, and it would not be completed for over a decade.90 By 1645 he had acquired a reputation as a mathematician. John Pell, who held the chair in mathematics at Amsterdam, asked for Hobbes’s help in his attack on the attempt of a Danish astronomer to prove the quadrature of the circle, to construct a

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square using a ruler and compass whose area is equal to the area of the circle, an ancient geometrical problem which cannot be solved. Hobbes provided a demonstration in Pell’s support and secured demonstrations from other mathematicians.91 Newcastle asked Hobbes to debate Bishop John Bramhall on liberty and necessity or determinism, and the debate took place in the summer of 1645. Afterward Newcastle asked Hobbes to write down his views, which he completed in 1646.92 Newcastle also requested that Hobbes write a treatise on optics in English, which he worked on during the winter of 1645 and the spring of 1646.93 Also in 1646 Hobbes completed a revised version of De cive with many new notes, which was published in Amsterdam in 1647, circulating his political philosophy more widely and contributing to his fame.94 If all these projects were not enough to keep him occupied, in the latter half of the 1640s he studied chemistry and Vesalius’s anatomy and dissected with William Petty.95 When Prince Charles left Paris in 1648 Hobbes was finally able to concentrate fully on his treatise on body again and in 1649 it was nearing completion. But he suddenly broke off work on it and in the autumn began instead to write his political masterpiece, Leviathan.96 While he was writing Leviathan he followed closely the progress of William Davenant’s composition of his heroic poem Gondibert, provided running comments as Davenant was drafting it, and contributed an answer to Davenant’s preface containing his own views on heroic poetry.97 Hobbes completed Leviathan in Spring 1651 and it was published in London in May. The striking feature of this whole period is that he often seems to have been working on more than one project drawn from different domains at the same time.

2.6   Controversy and Vitriol In late 1651 or early 1652 Hobbes returned to England, made his peace with the new republic, and returned to his studies and, in 1653, to the household of the earl of Devonshire.98 His principal objective was to revise and complete his treatise on body, De corpore, which he had interrupted in 1649.99 The next decade was characterized not only by a number of important publications but also by some vitriolic debates with other men of letters, and he became more arrogant, intemperate, and intellectually reckless. In 1654 Hobbes’s Of Liberty and Necessity, from his 1645 debate with Bramhall, was published without his authorization, unleashing an angry response from Bramhall and prompting a defense by Hobbes, a

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subsequent reply by Bramhall with a general attack on Hobbes’s political philosophy, and a final response by Hobbes written after Bramhall’s death.100 During this period he was highly regarded in England and on the Continent as an important man of science. But this reputation gradually dissipated as he opposed some important innovations in mathematics and science, produced some misguided mathematics, and became the target of increasing attacks from important Oxford figures who sought to discredit him mainly because of his unorthodox political and religious views and the animus which he had brought on himself.101 In 1654 Seth Ward, Savilian Professor of Astronomy, and John Wilkins, Warden of Wadham College, tried to discredit him as unoriginal and out of touch because he had advocated reform of the universities in Leviathan.102 He replied with Six Lessons to the Professors of the Mathematiques in 1656. He finally published De corpore in 1655 (followed by an English translation in 1656) and the last installment of his tripartite plan, De homine (On Man), in 1658. But he had made the mistake of trying to prove his own quadrature of the circle in De corpore, had realized that he had made a mistake and had replaced it with another (equally mistaken) demonstration while the book was in the press. John Wallis, Savilian Professor of Mathematics at Oxford, got the book and the original version of the quadrature which had been removed, and initiated a long exchange of vitriolic attacks and counter-attacks which soon destroyed Hobbes’s reputation among professional mathematicians and tarnished his scientific reputation as well.103 He lost all credibility with his claims to have solved several classical geometric problems based on his own philosophical principles and the new method of infinitesimals, which together marked a radical departure from the traditional philosophy of mathematics.104 He opened a second front, this time against scientific innovation, with the publication of Problemata physica (Physics Problems) in 1662, criticizing Robert Boyle’s experiments on the elasticity of air and the experimentation without a philosophic framework that was practiced by the Royal Society.105 Boyle responded in 1662, and again, in 1674, to Hobbes’s further criticisms in Principia et problemata (Principles and Problems). Hobbes was never asked to join the Royal Society, though its members shared many of his principles, and he came to regard its members as his enemies.106 Hobbes’s exchanges with Bramhall were defenses of his philosophy; they did not break important new ground. His criticisms of Wallis and Boyle on mathematics and science, however, were not only defenses of his own ideas but an assault on innovations which would have far-reaching

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implications (algebra, analytic geometry, the greater importance of arithmetic compared to geometry, practical experimentation). His geometric demonstrations made him ridiculous to the cognoscenti and his opposition to experimentalism was viewed as dogmatic. He had become more invested in defending his work and applying his own philosophy than in embracing the creative ideas of others. In this sense he had become more intellectually conservative, an attitude associated with a new asperity with all opposition to his principles or criticism of his views. In 1664, after a visit to England Hobbes’s friend Samuel Sorbière praised his “goodness,” “courtesy,” “temperament,” and the “gaiety” of their conversations, but he agreed with Charles II, who had been restored to the throne in 1660, that Hobbes was dogmatic.107 Aubrey characterized Hobbes as “naturally of a cheerful and pleasant humour” and reported that he “was marvelous happy and ready in his replies, and that without rancour (except provoked).”108 By this time he was easily provoked. He was still willing “to instruct anyone that was willing to be informed and modestly desired it,”109 but Wood reports that Hobbes was “obstinate, and not able to endure contradiction”110 and his arrogance angered many of his old friends and acquaintances from Great Tew.111 In 1663 Robert Hooke found Hobbes “to lard and seal every asseveration with a round othe, to undervalue all other men’s opinions and judgments, to defend to the utmost what he asserted though never soe absurd, to have an high conceipt of his own abilities & performances.”112 He no longer had the patience or the inclination to be civil to those who refused to accept his views.

2.7   Productive Old Age Hobbes generally retained his mental and physical powers into his eighties though he suffered from memory decline, a worsening “shaking palsy,” probably a benign essential tremor, and had his share of illnesses.113 In 1663 Sorbière thought that he had changed little after 14 years114 and Aubrey observed in 1673 that he was “strangely vigorous, for his understanding, still.”115 In addition to his exchanges with Bramhall, Ward, Wallis, and Boyle, he wrote several important works on history, law, and religion which the king would not permit to be published after the Print Act of 1662 because of the controversial nature of Hobbes’s views on those subjects. By the mid-1660s he had completed A Dialogue between a Philosopher and a Student, of the Common Laws of England, which presented Hobbes’s interpretation of English common law and attacked that

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of the great common law jurist Sir Edward Coke.116 Also by Summer 1666 Hobbes had probably begun Behemoth, a history of England in the 1640s and 1650s which he believed confirmed the theories of Leviathan, and finished it between April 1667 and April 1669.117 In 1668 a collection of Hobbes’s complete Latin works was published in Amsterdam, including his Latin translation of Leviathan, which he had been working on in 1667–1668.118 Periodically he seems to have feared prosecution for heresy, especially after the House of Commons ordered an inspection of Leviathan as a cause of the plague and Great Fire of 1665–1666.119 He wrote several works explaining in effect why he thought that he should not and could not be prosecuted. In 1671 he completed a Latin verse ecclesiastical history, Historia ecclesiastica, some of which dated as far back as 1659.120 In the early to mid-1670s he published an English verse translation of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, but they are not highly regarded today. The last 30 years of Hobbes’s life were very productive, but the second half of the 1660s was especially busy, as he worked on A Dialogue of the Common Laws, Behemoth, An Answer to Dr. Bramhall, A Historical Narrative Concerning Heresy, two works on geometry,121 and the Latin translation of Leviathan with its new appendix. It seems likely that he was working on two or more of them simultaneously. But the high level of his creativity of the 1640s and 1650s diminished in the 1660s and gradually disappeared. He died on December 4, 1679 after a stroke at the age of 91, an especially long lifetime in the seventeenth century. By the end of the seventeenth century Hobbes had become a caricature in his own land, the self-interested, atheistic, immoral libertine of Restoration drama. The attacks on him by Bramhall, Ward, and Wallis helped to shape his reception after the mid-1650s. Politically he was seen simultaneously as a dangerous absolutist and a dangerous spokesman for rebellion. His materialism and unorthodox approach to scripture laid him open to charges of atheism. But people also had found some of his ideas useful, particularly during periods of political crisis, and Jon Parkin has pointed out that it was these people, ironically, who attacked Hobbes most. They needed to establish that they had nothing in common with him, that he had not tainted them. Those to whom he most appealed were young gentlemen and university students, those who in every age question accepted ideas and traditions. However, Hobbes was convinced that he would receive increasing respect and acclaim among scholars.122 A few intelligent men like the young Isaac Newton took him seriously.123 He had a loyal band of French disciples, principally men like Sorbière who knew

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him through Mersenne and who considered him the greatest living philosopher after Descartes’ death.124 As in England, there were clerics and academics on the Continent who attacked him for atheism, but there were others who embraced and propagated his views to varying degrees. There were radicals who wanted to use his unorthodoxy for their own purposes. There were thinkers who gave intellectual respectability to some of his ideas, such as Dutch republicans and German and Dutch natural law theorists.125 And a few great philosophers came along who studied Hobbes and built aspects of their own theories upon his—including Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, Rousseau, and Kant.

2.8   Mental Illness? Among the more controversial claims in the study of eminent creativity has been that it tends to bear a functional relationship to psychopathology.126 The idea is an ancient one and has been influential historically.127 Many psychologists still consider eminent creativity to be associated with mental illness. Hans Eysenck’s theory was once particularly influential. He postulated that creative geniuses display cognitive features (especially cognitive disinhibition, to admit more information into active consciousness than is customary, which increases the potential for unusual combinations of ideas) like those of schizophrenia and manic depression, because they have “the dispositional trait of psychoticism” (which he believed was the underlying condition of schizophrenia and manic depression), without actually succumbing to functional psychosis.128 Some psychologists consider Hobbes to have had a personality disorder, though this is only a conjecture since clinical diagnosis of a historical figure is impossible.129 Louis Sass claims that creativity in philosophy sometimes may be associated with a schizoid personality.130 But the evidence for the claim about Hobbes is weak. He was reportedly eccentric; Charles II considered him extremely odd.131 He wore some unusual clothing, had a number of deep, long-lasting interests, and was motivated by curiosity (which he called, presumably from personal experience, “a perseverance of delight in the continuall and indefatigable generation of Knowledge”132). He was witty, opinionated and, in later life, abrasive and convinced that he was right. There is apparently a correlation between eccentricity and originality, but eccentric individuals often do not fulfill the criteria of schizotypy or schizoid personality.133

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In addition, a case can be made that Hobbes would not score highly on most of the four common measures of schizotypy: unusual experiences (unusual perceptions, magical thinking); cognitive disorganization (lack of attention); introvertive anhedonia (inability to experience pleasure and maintain intimacy); and impulsive nonconformity (urges to violate social norms, violent behavior).134 First, he did not believe that people have unusual perceptions under normal waking conditions. In his writings he looked for naturalistic explanations of miracles (such as the “miracle” of the first observed rainbow) and he questioned the validity of other people’s claims to have had visions, seen ghosts or supernatural beings, or had communications with God or angels except in scripture. There is no evidence that he had magical thoughts such as the ability to read minds. He declared instead that memory, the mother of the Muses, and meditation are the only sources of wisdom or knowledge.135 Second, Hobbes is notable for his cognitive organization and attention to detail, as demonstrated in the extensive elaboration of ideas required by his philosophy over years of sustained work. There is no evidence of functional impairment. We have seen these traits in the mental orderliness and self-reliance of his university years and the diligence and conscientiousness for which the Cavendishes valued his service. Third, he enjoyed the company of other people and had many powerful and intelligent friends. It is true that he never married. Aubrey reports that he was always “temperate” rather than abstemious in his relations with women,136 and though generally continent he still experienced desire, if we may judge from his own observations. For “continent men,” he wrote, “have the passion they contain, as much or more than they that satiate the appetite.”137 He may have been simply devoted to his work. Howard Gardner has called the creative individual’s compulsive unwillingness to risk his creative talent in order to sustain a personal relationship his “Faustian bargain.”138 Finally, Hobbes was not impulsively nonconformist, particularly as a younger man. He had made a career serving a great family tutoring and overseeing its youth, organizing the complicated arrangements of their grand tours, preparing them for public life, and helping them in it. Such a long career required commitment and long-term planning, like his philosophy. He knew how to be careful and discreet, how to maintain high moral standards, how to handle the family’s money, and how to win its trust. He could be impulsive, as his irritable reaction to philosophical and mathematical criticisms later in life illustrates, but the reason may have had nothing to do with schizotypy and could have been the result of other serious problems.139 He challenged

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philosophical, political, moral, and religious convention in his works, which is an important reason why they are works of genius, but it would be difficult to show that the nonconformity of his writings was impulsive rather than by design. Moreover, his doctrine opposed attempts to promote ideas at odds with those that are officially approved. Nor is there evidence that Hobbes experienced the kind of distress or dysfunction from schizotypic symptoms that would justify a diagnosis of schizoid personality. Proponents of the psychopathology thesis believe that factors such as high IQ, greater capacity of working memory, and cognitive flexibility (“the ability to disengage attention  from one stimulus or concept and deliberately refocus it on another”) allow creative individuals who suffer from mental illness to control or exploit unusual thoughts as well as to lead stable, productive lives.140 But we cannot know if this was Hobbes’s case because the protective factors could make it difficult to detect the underlying schizotypal features necessary to show that he had a schizotypal spectrum disorder. The evidence of a mood disorder is stronger than the evidence of schizotypy. Aubrey says that Hobbes’s temperament was “sanguineo-­ melancholicus,” the term for alternating active-social and analytical-quiet moods according to ancient Greek medicine, which still reigned in the seventeenth century. This sort of temperament, which could capture bipolar disorder, was associated by experts with the most ingenious people. The term “melancholy” in the modern depressive sense, which was well known at the time (witness Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy), was also applied to Hobbes. The famous French physician Guy Patin treated the “melancholy” English philosopher in August 1651, four months after the completion of Leviathan, for unbearable abdominal pain, which made him think of suicide.141 There is a clear implication in these ephemeral contemporary remarks that Hobbes may have had a mood disorder. Alternating positive and negative affect could explain why Charles II found him so odd. If Hobbes had a mood disorder it must have been mild. People who suffer from severe mental illness cannot pursue useful work over long periods of time as Hobbes did. His unsympathetic comments on the “exorbitant and causeless” fears of melancholy in The Elements of Law and Leviathan suggest that he did not suffer from them.142 One possibility is that he shared a family liability for mood disorder with his father. There is a higher incidence of alcoholism among people with mood disorders than in the general population, a problem which must have been greater in the

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seventeenth century when there were no anti-depressants.143 Hobbes’s father drank but according to Aubrey was not a drunk, and Hobbes himself said that he had been drunk a hundred times in his life and drank large amounts of alcohol occasionally to induce vomiting for health reasons.144 But he did not become an alcoholic. Another possibility is that Hobbes had cyclothymia, unpredictable, alternating hypomanic and depressive episodes that can last for weeks, interspersed with relatively long periods of normal moods. If so, it still would have been possible for him to lead a successful creative life with rewarding interpersonal relationships.145 A higher level of mania might have made it difficult for him to produce the extensive, closely argued logic of philosophy. A higher level of depression would have impeded originality and work output. A milder level of positive mood can lead to rapid thought processes and cognitive fluency (the ability to generate multiple responses in problem solving). It may also lead to increased intrinsic motivation, risk taking, and productivity as well as mild cognitive disinhibition or overinclusive thinking. Milder negative mood may increase attention to problem solving, and lead to better information processing and creative insight in solving complex problems. But it may also work against the transformative creativity that breaks through existing paradigms.146 Hypomanic periods, during which the individual may be “cheerful, optimistic, extraverted, self-confident and energetic, and sometimes irritable, rude, reckless, and irresponsible,” could help explain the popularity of Hobbes’s ready wit and repartee, which Aubrey reports, as well as his asperity with his opponents.147 A mood disorder may also help to explain his professed inability to manage his own finances properly; expenditure during periods of hypomania may result from feelings of expansiveness and entitlement without considering cost.148 However attractive the hypothesis of mood disorder may seem, we must conclude that it is inconclusive and abandon it.149 The study of psychopathology in geniuses suffers from a number of problems. Interpretation of historical evidence presents a danger of “selectivity” and the “bias” of hindsight, diagnostic criteria may be inadequate, and there are no controls.150 Evidence of a correlation between psychopathology and eminent creativity seems to show only that creativity and mental illness may be associated.151 But the causal relationship between them is unclear. Psychopathology may benefit creativity or the stress of creativity may cause psychopathology. It is certainly possible to be an eminent creator without suffering from mental illness.152 There is another important reason to be

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cautious. Evidence of a functional relationship between affective disorder and creativity seems to favor writers and artists, not philosophers and scientists.153 We must take a different tack toward explaining Hobbes’s personality and how it relates to his creativity.

2.9  Early Personality Development People who have achieved eminent lifetime creative contributions like Hobbes have special personalities, though each personality is unique.154 We have been considering the possibility that Hobbes suffered from psychopathology. We turn now to consider his personality development within the context of his changing environments. One of the principal theories of creativity is developmental.155 It rests on studies showing the importance of the interaction between the individual and her environment to the development of the creative potential and psychological resources that can lead to creative achievement. Relevant factors include childhood play, position within the family, the quality of home life, youth and young adulthood, the nurture of traits conducive to creativity, social marginalization, diversity of experiences, and an intellectual and affective support system. Adult creativity grows out of childhood and the family.156 According to Piaget’s stage theory of development, the period from ages two to seven (the pre-operational stage) is important to the child’s development of “symbolic representation” and “mental imagery,” capabilities which are necessary for academic achievement as well as creativity.157 We know little of Hobbes’s life during this period, but we know that he was “playsome” and that he continued to have a fertile childlike imagination as an adolescent university student visiting the bookbinders’ shops, which many psychologists consider a key contributor to adult creativity.158 As a second-born, Hobbes was in a family position thought to be favorable sometimes to the development of personality traits (rebelliousness, open mindedness) that can lead to creativity. According to Frank Sulloway, first-borns at first are the smartest and strongest children. As the first on the scene they occupy the pole position in the race to curry favor with parents, the source of family affection, attention, and other forms of power. They tend to identify with parents, to accept authority and defend convention to please parents, to be obedient and to cultivate and use convergent thinking, the ability to give the single “correct” or conventional solution to a problem.159 Hobbes does not seem to fit the rebel profile early in life. But middle children may

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rebel by ceasing to compete for parental affection, by shifting their orientation to their peer group, and by becoming independent of the family. Something like this may have occurred as Hobbes devoted himself to Latimer and school instead of his family.  The number of children (“sibsize”) in a family may also play a role in the development of personality traits favorable to creativity. Hobbes would have had to share family resources with his brother and sister and to consider their perspectives, which could have contributed to the development of cognitive flexibility and divergent thinking (cognition that leads in many different directions), both of which are elements of some forms of creative thought.160 Finally the apparent adversity of Hobbes’s home life, particularly his relationship with his father, may in itself have contributed to his future creative achievements. There is a disproportionate incidence of childhood trauma among highly creative people, including the loss of a parent (or in Hobbes’s case, his father’s disappearance during his adolescence).161 Nevertheless, many people with stressful or traumatic childhoods grow up to be normal, successful adults.162 Many also develop the ability of creative adaptation and persistence in the face of family challenges, frustrations, and disappointments, which help them through difficult periods later in life.163 Ego strength or strength of character, a particular characteristic of genius, helps creative people to be original over long periods and to choose for themselves when and when not to conform to social norms.164 Childhood and adolescent adversity may even enhance creative genius. “Unusual or unexpected shocks” may provide the experience necessary to break through cognitive boundaries and think in unexpected ways.165 Hobbes’s father, the most important figure in the household, seems to have imbued him with respect for authority (if his writings are any guide) and yet by his behavior to have provided a potent example of carelessness about socially approved inhibitions. Hobbes’s relationship with his father may also have given him a view of the world as an unpredictable and dangerous place. These factors—conventional acceptance of political authority with a willingness to be unconventional and a view of the world as potentially dangerous—would be reflected later in his mature political philosophy. Adolescence and young adulthood are especially important periods for human development. Piaget’s fourth stage, that of formal operations, lasts from about age 11 to about age 16 when the individual can think scientifically (or philosophically).166 This period covered part of Hobbes’s tuition by Latimer and his first years at Oxford. Like many other eminent creators

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Hobbes enjoyed and did well in school.167 He found in classical languages an all-consuming interest even though learning them can be tedious and involved much convergent thinking, perhaps in part because Latimer was such an effective teacher. Intrinsically oriented teachers make students see themselves as more competent and become more intrinsically motivated.168 Hobbes’s lessons came easily to him and he became comfortable working on them in solitude, something he would later have to do as a philosopher.169 His success as well as any praise he received from Latimer would have reinforced his interest, which, in a virtuous circle, would have reinforced his success and intrinsic motivation.170 Latimer seems to have given him the emotional support in learning that his father did not give him, though as a gifted student he may not have needed that support as much as others.171 His translation of Medea gives us some important additional information about him at age 14 or 15. First, he was a self-learner who did more than his formal training required, which is characteristic of scientific (and perhaps philosophic)  genius.172 Second, he had strong self-confidence, self-efficacy, and self-concept as well as the ability to delay gratification, all of which were evident by this age. A person with high self-efficacy, a conviction that one has the ability to complete a task, will devote great effort to achieving a goal and will persist in trying to achieve it if problems appear. It is essential to the completion of creative products.173 Self-­ concept includes metacognition, thinking about thinking, about controlling knowledge and how it is used, as well as “planning, monitoring and assessing” the process of cognition.174 “Highly creative self-concept is typical of eminent creators.”175 Third, he engaged in what learning theorists call “meaningful learning,” the individual’s creation of knowledge for himself by freely working to attain a distant goal by his own route. He developed his own understanding of the translation “problems” of Medea, their “solutions,” and the “strategy” that he needed to reach the solution.176 Fourth, he demonstrated the same sense of purpose and devotion to achieving his goal, based on his acquired knowledge, that he would later display as a philosopher.177 The translation’s demonstration of verbal reasoning marked him out as an important future contributor to verbal fields such as history and philosophy. At Oxford the individual and small group instruction of the tutorial system and student cooperation in practice exercises helped Hobbes to develop these and other personality traits essential for creative achievement. The environment was supportive of creative thought within accepted limits. Loose surveillance and distant evaluation (determination)

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were the hallmarks of the system. The guidance of the tutor and the unguided aspects of preparation for the disputations played to Hobbes’s strengths of self-learning, self-concept, and self-efficacy. He seems to have spent more time alone than his peers in developing his interests, was not a normal participant in group social activities, and must have felt his own relative social isolation and marginality—all factors that shielded him from distraction by the typical concerns of his peers as he concentrated on building his own knowledge through reading, meditation, and argumentation.178 The self-direction of university education, especially after the first year, required a high degree of autonomy and independence, which are conducive to creative achievement.179 The interaction with other students in preparation for the disputations was especially important. The popularity of the disputations ensured that there would be both intrinsic motivation and eventual extrinsic reward (determination and in Hobbes’s case, praise and enviable employment). Students were forced to think about and use the knowledge they had received.180 The learning experience was enhanced by the help of peers and their divergent perspectives. Subjects for debate had a generalized structure, arguments both pro and con had to be explored, and there was more than one route to consider in developing a strategy to prove a case. Students learned from each other that there were competing approaches from which to choose, they could revise and redefine their views and strategies in the process of practicing, and they sharpened their analytical skills in questioning the assumptions of others. Thus they learned the importance of dialog in the creation of knowledge. Dialog with other knowledgeable people was something the mature Hobbes enjoyed, valued, and sought out—even when he was faced with a serious rival—while he was in the process of developing his own philosophy.181 When at age 20 Hobbes became a servant of the Cavendish family, he was instantly catapulted from a life of social obscurity to the heights of English society. His reaction may have been twofold: to be fascinated by it and to do whatever he had to do to keep it. He had no thought of great creative achievement at this point and made no attempt to go down that path while William (II) Cavendish lived. His most important accomplishment, his translation of Thucydides, did not require the great creativity of his mature philosophy. Instead he spent his time becoming William’s friend and joining in his daily activities. He was part of the life of the wealthy nobility but not of it, at once living alongside it but as a valued servant. He was socially marginalized, an individual outside the group to

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which his new life belonged. Marginalization creates a tension between the perspectives of the cultures from which the individual has come (a social backwater in Wiltshire and the sheltered but competitive academic life of Oxford) and the culture to which she has acceded, a tension which can help to break the bonds of intellectual conventionality.182 Though Hobbes would become William’s close friend and confidant, adviser, and business agent, he would always be a social outsider even though he had nominal gentle status as a university graduate.

2.10  Developing Creative Cognition There were also other developmental consequences to his new employment. One was travel to London and the great intellectual centers of foreign countries. He was exposed to diverse cultural settings not only through his readings about the ancient civilizations of Greece and Rome but through his travels to Rome, Venice, Florence, Geneva, Paris, and other continental destinations. They enhanced his awareness of cultural variety and the value of looking at things from different points of view. In particular Hobbes was attracted to London and, especially in the mid-­1630s and the 1640s, to Paris. They were more stimulating and exciting than other places. They offered more interesting thinkers, thoughts, and discussions. They were what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls “centers of vital creativity,” where different beliefs, attitudes, ideas, and lifestyles blend in an environment conducive to forming novel ideas, offering tolerance or even encouragement for them and the lure of eventual appreciation and recognition.183 Another advantage of working for the Cavendishes was that their social positions, contacts, and activities gave Hobbes opportunities to seek out, meet, associate with, work for, and learn from people who would become his creative role models, mentors, and promoters, as well as the leaders of networks (Newcastle, Falkland, Mersenne) that would become his cognitive and affective support groups, welcoming his new ideas, validating his identity, recognizing and confirming his competence, supporting his autonomy, and encouraging his work, thereby contributing to his creativity.184 Hobbes especially needed psychic support in the 1630s and 1640s when there was so much creative work that he could only do alone. Some of these people, like Bacon and Mersenne, influenced him directly by modeling or coaching, while others, like Galileo, inspired him only indirectly and (mostly) at a distance. They offered a basis of comparison,

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useful criticism, and new information to facilitate and seed his creative advancement.185 Simonton states that creative people are more likely to achieve eminence if they are inspired by a number of models and mentors.186 That was certainly true of Hobbes. He never had an apprentice-­ relationship with a master who supervised his work, but his relationship with Mersenne came close, and perhaps the most eminent intellectual creators need no more.187 By the early 1630s Hobbes had mastered ancient thought and had a grasp of much modern thought through his formal education, post-­ university reading, pedagogical duties, and relationships with leading intellectuals such as Bacon. He also stepped up his scientific and mathematical study in cooperation with the Newcastle network and took the decisive step that led to his eminent achievements: he embraced the mechanical-materialist assumptions of the new science and began to integrate them with his accumulated knowledge. The next decade would prove to be pivotal in laying the foundations of his philosophical break with the past. None of that would have been possible without the long, time-consuming acquisition of the extensive knowledge required to begin a restructuring process. This is especially true of philosophy and the natural sciences.188 But the most difficult part of Hobbes’s philosophical journey was to break the set of conventional concepts and theories which he had internalized and to integrate information from different domains in novel ways. We cannot know whether our ideas are novel or not without understanding the ideas of the past.189 But as Hobbes understood well, too much knowledge can create formidable constraints that make it difficult to question the established boundaries of a domain. Knowledge should be broad but not too deep.190 His intermittent concentration on science and mathematics helped to prevent this from happening. Beginning in the 1630s, and especially during the 1640s and 1660s, Hobbes pursued a pattern of activity which Howard Gruber calls “a network of enterprise,” working on two or more different projects or compositions at once and shifting back and forth between them. Gruber explains that “division of work into separate enterprises permits the thinker to change his ideas in one domain without scrapping everything he believes. In this way he can go on working purposely on a broad range of subjects without the disruptive effects that would ensue if every new idea and even every doubt immediately required a reorganization of the whole system of thought.”191 Hobbes could work on one project among his broad array of interests until he grew tired, ran into conceptual problems, experienced a

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block, or found another project more promising. He could put the first project aside and work on another, coming back later refreshed to the first project. One or more of these factors may help to explain why he put aside De corpore to write Leviathan, even though De corpore appears to have been nearly finished and he claimed to have put it aside for political reasons.192 What helped to make Hobbes so creative was not the invention of a single idea or theory, but as Gruber suggests, it was the interplay of larger conceptual frameworks in which new ideas and theories emerged and which then advanced projects underway in related areas. Some of Hobbes’s most original ideas took place when he took a useful idea from one domain and introduced it into another domain or a different part of the same domain, thereby giving it a fresh impetus.193 During periods in which he was resting from a project he may have been incubating ideas and preparing for a new insight. Cognition occurs in two processes in parallel, primary and secondary. Secondary processes require awareness, reasoning, and concentration such as in deduction and induction. Primary processes are unconscious and uncontrolled. They operate on material provided by secondary processes. Unconscious processing is known as incubation and an appropriate idea produced by incubation is known as an insight. Unlike secondary processes, the primary process seems to be able to incubate many projects at once. As Sawyer explains, “incubation works because it gives people’s minds a rest; because it provides an opportunity to become less fixated on incorrect solutions; and because it provides time for spreading activation [of associational, semantic or neural networks] in the unconscious mind.”194 Activity unrelated to the task such as taking walks, as Bacon and Hobbes did, seems to facilitate incubation.195 Hobbes’s philosophical career conforms roughly to the so-called ten-­ year rule, even though the general application of that rule has been cast into doubt. According to the rule at least ten years of work in a domain are necessary in order to master it, and therefore major creative achievements cannot take place before a decade of continuous work in the domain. A second decade must pass before the second major achievement occurs.196 The beginning of Hobbes’s creative work can be dated roughly from around 1630 when he began his collaboration with the Newcastle network on science and mathematics. He completed his first breakthrough, The Elements of Law, the first, rudimentary statement of his political philosophy, in 1640. He was finishing De corpore, his principal work on logic, metaphysics, and physics, in 1649 when he abruptly turned his attention to writing his masterpiece of political philosophy, Leviathan. De corpore

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was published five years later. The ten-year rule seems to be especially true in philosophy, probably because philosophy takes longer to master or because ideation and elaboration in philosophy take longer than in other domains. Philosophical careers tend to peak creatively later in life, as Hobbes’s did.197 The most eminent creators are highly prolific, but their products are not all of high quality. Even the greatest geniuses have failures.198 Hobbes’s embarrassing “proofs” of the quadrature of the circle, his misguided attempts to solve other ancient geometrical puzzles, and his attack on scientific experimentation in later life were not only wasted efforts, but they undermined his philosophical credibility. Was he suffering from age-­ related mental decline such as reduced processing capacity or memory? There may have been some decline in his seventies, as there is in the general population,199 but those who knew him well testify to his continued mental acuity and there is reason to believe them. Studies show that both size and quality of output continue with age,200 and Hobbes wrote other, high quality but less creative works in the late 1650s and the 1660s. The cause of his serial mathematical fiascoes may have been psychological instead. Creative people love to do what makes them special, and their strong intrinsic motivation and enjoyment of the creative experience impels them to attempt ever greater achievements.201 But the mathematical and scientific innovations that Hobbes opposed may have threatened his self-image, caused him to fear loss of reputation, made him reluctant to admit his errors, and entrenched him in their defense. His seemingly perverse determination to persist in his mathematical mistakes in the face of criticism or rejection by experts may even have been motivated partially by that very rejection, by what Howard Gardner calls the “asynchrony” or misalignment between himself and his ideas and the field and its ideas.202 What better way to prove his own superiority and that of his ideas than by proving all his opponents wrong? His behavior also may have been in part a defense mechanism that “buffered” the “anxiety” caused by consciousness of information about himself which opposed his most important self-­ image, that of a great philosopher.203 In addition, the disputes may have undermined his self-regulation, his ability to act in his own best interest, as illustrated by his vituperative response to criticism. Rejection does not undermine one’s ability to self-regulate if self-regulation is in one’s interest. But simultaneous rejection of oneself by others and rejection of others by oneself may weaken or destroy one’s willingness to self-regulate.204

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2.11   Personality Traits and Characteristics We have been considering the possibility that Hobbes suffered from a personality or mood disorder and examining aspects of his psychological development that may relate to his creativity. We have also identified a number of personality traits, the relatively stable patterns of behavior that characterize an individual, that are conducive to creativity. They include resourcefulness, intrinsic motivation, persistence in the face of obstacles, purpose and devotion to work, ego-strength and self-confidence, self-­ concept and self-efficacy, autonomy or a willingness to think on one’s own, and the ability to delay gratification. No single personality trait is sufficient to explain a person’s creativity; it is the result of a combination of traits and other factors.205 But specific traits “may account for as much as one-quarter to one-third of the variance in explaining  the causes of creative work.”206 We can get a general impression of Hobbes’s personality profile through the five-factor model (FFM) of personality, which consists of five personality dispositions each of which encompasses and describes, at a broad level of abstraction, several specific personality traits which co-­ vary and are useful in making rough distinctions.207 The five factors, which each occupy a continuum with its opposite, are extroversion (vs. introversion), neuroticism (vs. emotional stability), openness to experience/intellect (vs. conventionality), agreeableness (vs. antagonism), and conscientiousness (vs. unconscientiousness). Robert R. McCrae and Paul T. Costa, Jr. consider the five factors to be useful in understanding a person’s life rather than in predicting specific behavior in their five-factor theory, which seeks to explain the FFM.208 We have seen that Hobbes was conscientious, which is defined by six traits: competence, order, dutifulness, achievement striving, self-discipline, and deliberation (little impulsivity).209 One of the facets of conscientiousness, achievement striving (competence, industriousness, and goal orientation) is positively correlated with creativity. Achievement striving is essential to the long-term production of a great number of highly creative works, such as Hobbes’s output. It distinguishes people who only have great insights from those who can work out their details, elaborate them, and present them in a form that leads to social recognition. Achievement striving is reflected in Hobbes’s products from his translation of Medea to his published works. A second facet, orderliness and dependability, is negatively correlated with creativity.210 But it would have aided Hobbes in the intricate process of elaborating and recording the incremental logical steps

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which philosophy requires. He was dutiful, dependable, and orderly in his dealings with the Cavendishes, though apparently not in dealing with his own finances. Nor was he impulsive. If asked about a serious matter, he often preferred not to answer immediately. “He always avoided, as much as he could, to conclude hastily.”211 Hobbes was usually emotionally stable particularly in his youth and middle age. He seems generally not to have suffered from anxiety, as the boldness of his political and religious views attests, and did not suffer lapses of self-regulation until old age. He also seems to have been more agreeable (warm, modest, generous, gentle) than antagonistic, especially to friends, promoters, and admirers, though he could also be antagonistic. Agreeableness was one of his laws of nature and a virtue he recommended. Friends like Aubrey, Digby, and Sorbière testify to his friendliness and pleasantness, and cooperativeness must have been essential to his employment by the Cavendishes. He could also be generous, as in his scheme to establish a school in his native Wiltshire.212 But he was arrogant, abrasive, and argumentative to those with whom he disagreed, such as Descartes and the Oxford mathematicians. In addition, he seems to have been mildly introverted. He worked long hours in solitude through much of his life, from school and university to writing his great philosophical works. Aubrey’s report that his temperament was “sanguineo-melancholicus” suggests, according to the ancient Greeks, that he was introverted (“melancholicus”).213 He does not seem to have sought out conventional excitement and was a loner at Oxford. Yet he was not unsociable and often was intellectually assertive, self-confident, and dominant, traits that may be associated with ego-strength and self-efficacy. However, introversion, emotional stability, agreeableness, and conscientiousness as such are not related directly to creativity.214 The last FFM factor, openness to experience/intellect, has the most consistent correlation with creativity and is the dimension on which Hobbes’s personality seems to score highest. Openness/intellect is “a dimension reflecting a general tendency toward complexity and flexibility in information processing … People high in openness/intellect have both the desire and the ability to explore the world cognitively through both perception and reasoning.”215 Open people are tolerant—often welcoming—of different ideas and are open to new ways of doing things.216 They are tolerant of ambiguity and keep looking for solutions after they have already found one suitable to the task. They also tend not to be religious fundamentalists.217 Open individuals with intellect are motivated by curiosity and often

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have ingenuity, “the ability to gather, combine/connect, and generate new ideas”.218 Hobbes’s cognitive processes were highly abstract and complex. He was tolerant of conceptual ambiguity and continually perfecting key elements of his philosophy. He had an affinity for different cultures, both ancient and modern, and had traveled and lived on the Continent for many years. He was multilingual. Studies show that cultural diversity and multilingualism are positively correlated with creative cognition. Acceptance of diverse ideas lays the ground for their integration, and multilingualism enhances executive functions, working memory capacity, and other functions which are important for creative cognition.219 Hobbes had extraordinary cultural breadth, broad intellectual interests, a transformational philosophy, and an adventurous theology. They reflect his curiosity and unconventional attitudes, and a need for original thought and complex cognition.220 We now have a rough outline of Hobbes’s general personality. He was relatively conscientious though disorderly at times and in specific ways. He was relatively introverted but assertive, and he was often agreeable though occasionally arrogant and abrasive. He was relatively stable emotionally but could be volatile later in life. Most importantly, from the perspective of creativity, he had the trait of openness to experience/intellect. Some of these traits (intellect, introversion, conscientiousness) worked together to support his quest for inspiration and originality, his need to work long hours alone, and his ambition to express and elaborate his ideas for the appreciation of others. His relative agreeableness and emotional stability would have been useful to him in his relations with coaches, role models, and intellectual peers such as Bacon, Mersenne, and Gassendi.

2.12   Motivation The most eminent philosophers tend to be those, like Hobbes, who live the longest and write the most works. Such long-term commitment to creative work requires extraordinary diligence, determination, and perseverance. The creative individual’s motivation must be strong. Often she is motivated by a perception that something is wrong in the conventional understanding of an idea or phenomenon, or by a need to express what she believes is right. Hobbes was partly motivated by love of the subjects of his work and by curiosity. Part of his motivation appears to have been a desire for fame, respect, and admiration.221 He must also have felt that he was writing for human benefit and the common good.222 In the turbulent British political atmosphere of the late 1630s and early 1640s, Hobbes

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was a royalist, a supporter of the Stuarts.223 He thought that monarchy was the best form of commonwealth, that peace was the highest goal of civil government, that every commonwealth must have an absolute sovereign, and that simple obedience to this sovereign was the only route to lasting peace. His commitment to the Stuarts, his diagnosis of the political problems of his turbulent age, and his solution to them reflected what he thought was wrong in contemporary political discourse and the values that he wished to defend. They were the driving force of his political philosophy. Hobbes had many advantages to prepare for greatness. He had extraordinary intelligence and broad interests. He received an education that, after he learned the basics, left much of the learning to him. He had long-­ term employment that provided him with the material, social and intellectual resources he needed and the time to use them, to acquire additional knowledge, and to develop his thought. He had mentors, teachers, models, peers, and promoters to provide cognitive and emotional support, and a great rival to challenge him. He worked in a tolerant and accepting environment and had personality traits which empowered him to harness his advantages for his creative achievements. Even his early family life, though intellectually and emotionally inadequate, may have helped to steel his character for his mature struggles with creative ideation and elaboration. In addition, he had the motivation to transform traditional political philosophy.

Notes 1. Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. Barber, 149. 2. The English translation of his verse autobiography refers to his “dear” mother, but the Latin original does not confirm it. Cp. Hobbes, Verse Life, in Thomas Hobbes, The Elements of Law Natural and Politic, Part I Human Nature, Part II De Corpore Politico with Three Lives, ed. J.  C. A.  Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 254–64; 254; Hobbes, Vita, lxxxvi. 3. Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. Barber, 148. 4. Ibid.; John Aubrey, Brief Lives with An Apparatus for the Lives of our English Mathematical Writers, ed. Kate Bennett, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 2:1233; Malcolm, “Hobbes, Thomas (1588-1679).” 5. Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. Barber, 150. 6. Ibid.

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7. Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes, 4. 8. Johann Sommerville, “Life and Times,” in The Bloomsbury Companion to Hobbes, ed. S. A. Lloyd (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 1–28; 7. 9. Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. Bennett, 2:1360. 10. Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 19–40. 11. Hobbes, Verse Life, 255; Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. Barber, 150. 12. Stephen Porter, “University and Society,” in The History of the University of Oxford, ed. Nicholas Tyacke, vol. 4 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 25–103; 46. 13. Ibid., 28, 35, 60. Nicholas Tyacke calls this period “a golden age” at Oxford. Nicholas Tyacke, “Introduction,” in Tyacke, History of the University of Oxford, 1–24; 2. 14. Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes, 3. 15. Mordecai Feingold, “The Humanities,” in Tyacke, History of the University of Oxford, 211–357; 214–21, 227–30, 269–70, 272, 293. For Hobbes’s teaching William (II) Cavendish Italian and French see Malcolm, Reason of State, 3–4. 16. Tyacke, “Introduction,” 9; Feingold, “Humanities,” 246, 276, 283–84, 293; Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. Barber, 150; Hobbes, Prose Life, in Hobbes, Elements of Law, ed. Gaskin, trans. Mary Lyon, 245–253; 245; Hobbes, Verse Life, 255. 17. Tyacke, “Introduction,” 17; Mordecai Feingold, “The Mathematical Sciences and New Philosophies,” in Tyacke, History of the University of Oxford, 359–448; 366–68, 379, 402–403; Feingold, “Humanities,” 306, 313, 317; Hobbes, Prose Life, 245; Hobbes, Verse Life, 255. 18. Feingold, “Humanities,” 301–302; Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. Barber, 150. 19. Feingold, “Humanities,” 303. 20. Ibid., 301; Mark H.  Curtis, Oxford and Cambridge in Transition: An Essay on Changing Relations between the English Universities and English Society (Oxford: Clarendon, 1959), 88–90, 182. For the questions used during the formal disputations in 1608, the year Hobbes was graduated, see A.  P. Martinich, Hobbes: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 12. 21. Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. Barber, 156; Martinich, Hobbes, 13. 22. Ibid., 11; Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. Barber, 150–51; Hobbes, Verse Life, 255. 23. Hobbes, Prose Life, 245; Malcolm, “Hobbes, Thomas (1588-1679)”; Tyacke, “Introduction,” 90. 24. Martinich, Hobbes, 9. 25. Feingold, “Humanities,” 258.

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26. Malcolm, “Hobbes, Thomas (1588-1679)”; Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes, 53–79; Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, 223–24; Karl Schuhmann, Hobbes: Une chronique (Paris: Librairie philosophique J. Vrin, 1998), 33. 27. Hobbes, Vita, xiii. 28. Timothy Raylor, Philosophy, Rhetoric, and Thomas Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 39–41. 29. Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes, 93. 30. Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, 231; Hobbes, Prose Life, 246; Hobbes, Verse Life, 256. 31. Martinich, Hobbes, 41–42. 32. The editors of Three Discourses: A Critical Modern Edition of Newly Identified Work of the Young Hobbes, ed. Noel B.  Reynolds and Arlene W. Saxonhouse (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), allege that Hobbes wrote three of the essays. For the counterargument see Malcolm, Reason of State, 6-7 and n. 29, and esp. Raylor, Philosophy, 52–64. 33. Raylor, Philosophy, 70, 105–106, 187. 34. Ibid., 107. 35. Malcolm, “Hobbes, Thomas (1588-1679)”; Malcolm, Reason of State, 11 and n. 44. Kinch Hoekstra believes that he conceived the translation as a way discreetly to oppose war with Spain around 1624. Kinch Hoekstra, “Hobbes’s Thucydides,” in The Oxford Handbook of Hobbes, ed. A.  P. Martinich and Kinch Hoekstra (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 547–74. 36. Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. Barber, 151, 158. 37. Malcolm, Reason of State, 1, 124–99. 38. Hobbes, Prose Life, 252–53. 39. Cf. Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes, 80–145; Timothy Raylor, “Hobbes, Payne, and A Short Tract on First Principles,” The Historical Journal, 44 (2001): 28–58; Richard Tuck, “Hobbes and Descartes,” in Perspectives on Thomas Hobbes, ed. G. A. J. Rogers and Alan Ryan (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), 11–41; 17; Karl Schuhmann, “Le Short Tract, première oeuvre philosophique de Hobbes,” Hobbes Studies, 8 (1995): 3–16; Jean Bernhardt, “Essai de commentaire,” in [Thomas Hobbes?], Court traité de premiers principes: Le “Short Tract on First Principles” de 1630-31: Le naissance de Thomas Hobbes à la pensée modern, ed. Jean Bernhardt (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1988), 61–201. 40. Warner to Payne, 17 October 1634, in James Orchard Halliwell, A Collection of Letters Illustrative of the Progress of Science in England, from the Reign of Queen Elizabeth to that of Charles the Second (London: Historical Society of Science, 1841), 65. 41. Malcolm, “Hobbes, Thomas (1588-1679)”; Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, 255; Hobbes, Verse Life, 257; Hobbes to Newcastle, 15/25

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August 1635, in Noel Malcolm, ed., The Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 1:28–29; Hobbes to Newcastle, 29 July/8 August 1636, in ibid., 1:33–34; Hobbes to Newcastle, 16[/26] October 1636, in ibid., 1:37–38; Digby to Hobbes, 17[/27] January 1637, in ibid., 1:42–43. 42. Thomas Hobbes, A Briefe of the Art of Rhetorique (London, 1637); Raylor, Philosophy, 281–91. 43. Digby to Hobbes, 11[/21] September 1637, in Malcolm, Correspondence, 1:50. 44. Hobbes, Verse Life, 257–58. 45. Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes, 13. 46. Hobbes to Scudamore, 2/12 April 1641, in Malcolm, Correspondence, 1:114. 47. Thomas Hobbes, De Cive: The Latin Version entitled in the first edition Elementorum philosophiae sectio tertia de cive: A Critical Edition, ed. Howard Warrender (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983), I.2 second note, 93. All references are to the Latin edition of De cive unless specified otherwise. 48. Malcolm, “Hobbes, Thomas (1588-1679)”; Richard Tuck, Philosophy and government 1572-1651 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 314. 49. Hobbes, Vita, xc. 50. Raylor, Philosophy, 94–95; Robin Bunce, “Thomas Hobbes’ relationship with Francis Bacon—an introduction,” Hobbes Studies, 16 (2003): 41–83; 42; Robin Bunce, “Hobbes’s forgotten Natural Histories,” Hobbes Studies, 19 (2006): 77–104; 77; R. E. R. Bunce, Thomas Hobbes (New York: Continuum Press, 2009), 6. 51. Hobbes translated an essay that was included in the Latin version of The Advancement of Learning (De dignitate et augmentis scientiarum) in 1623 and may have translated other parts as well. Raylor, Philosophy, 70, 187; Hoekstra, “Hobbes’s Thucydides,” 565–66 n. 80; Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed Barber, 151. 52. Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. Bennett, 1:206–207; Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. Barber, 151. 53. Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. Barber, 157. 54. Ibid., 152–54, 157–58; Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. Bennett, 1:li; Noel Malcolm, “General Introduction,” in Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Noel Malcolm, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 2012), 1:8. 55. Anthony Grafton, New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992), 3–5. This attitude is reflected in Abraham Cowley’s ode “To Mr. Hobbes.” 56. For crystallizing events see Runco, Creativity, 50.

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57. Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. Barber, 151–52; Hobbes, Vita, xiv; Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes, 9. 58. Peter Dear, Mersenne and the Learning of the Schools (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 39. 59. Tuck, Philosophy and government, 45–64; Richard Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Savonarola to Bayle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 17–127. 60. Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, in Francis Bacon, The Major Works, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 120–299; 221–222. 61. The Essais had been a much earlier purchase at Chatsworth, perhaps reflecting (or stimulating) William (II) Cavendish’s interest in the literary form. Raylor, Philosophy, 38. Also Schuhmann, Chronique, 55 n. 5; Malcolm, “Hobbes, Thomas (1588-1679)”; Noel Malcolm, “Biographical Register,” in Malcolm, Correspondence, 2:777–919; 795. 62. See Chap. 4 for an account. 63. Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes, 93. 64. Thomas Hobbes, “A minute or first draught of the Optiques,” Epist. Ded., in EW, 7:468. Also “Hobbes, Thomas (1588-1679)”; Hobbes to Mersenne, [20/]30 March 1641, in Malcolm, Correspondence, 1:102–13; 108; Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes, 80–145; Jean Jacquot, “Sir Charles Cavendish and his learned friends: A contribution to the history of scientific relations between England and the Continent in the earlier part of the 17th century,” Parts I and II, Annals of Science, 8 (1952): 13–27, 175–91. 65. J. C. Hayward, “New Directions in Studies of the Falkland Circle,” The Seventeenth Century, 2 (1987): 19–48; 20. For an older view see Hugh Trevor-Roper, Catholics, Anglicans and Puritans: Seventeenth Century Essays (London: Secker and Warburg, 1987), 166–230; and Robert R.  Orr, Reason and Authority: The Thought of William Chillingworth (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967), 36. 66. Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes, 11; Martinich, Hobbes, 103; Trevor-Roper, Catholics, Anglicans and Puritans, 168. 67. Hayward, “New Directions,” 33. 68. Orr, Reason and Authority, 34–38. 69. Sarah Mortimer, Reason and Religion in the English Revolution: The Challenge of Socinianism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 67, 71–72, 85; Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes, 10; Noel Malcolm, “Thomas Hobbes and Voluntarist Theology” (Ph.D. diss., University of Cambridge, 1982), 234; Trevor-Roper, Catholics, Anglicans and Puritans, 204; Orr, Reason and Authority, 109, 139; Hobbes to

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Cavendish, 23 July/2 August 1641, in Malcolm, Correspondence, 1:120–21. 70. Hayward, “New Directions,” 31. 71. Dear, Mersenne, 3; David Allen Duncan, “Mersenne and Modern Learning: The Debate over Music,” in The Rise of Modern Philosophy: The Tension between the New and Traditional Philosophies from Machiavelli to Leibniz, ed. Tom Sorell (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), 89–106; 91. See Hobbes’s own elegiac description of Mersenne in his Verse Life, 259. 72. Sawyer, Explaining Creativity, 215. 73. Dear, Mersenne, 202, 237. 74. Armand Beaulieu, “Les relations de Hobbes et de Mersenne,” in Thomas Hobbes: Philosophie première: Théorie de la science et politique, ed. Yves Charles Zarka and Jean Bernhardt (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1988), 81–90; 81–82. 75. Cp. ibid., 81; Hobbes, Verse Life, 257. 76. Hobbes, Prose Life, 247. 77. Malcolm, “Hobbes, Thomas (1588-1679)”; Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes, 156; Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, 252–53; Schuhmann, Chronique, 80–81. 78. Tuck, “Hobbes and Descartes,” 16. 79. Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes, 13–14. 80. Jacquot, “Sir Charles Cavendish,” 187. 81. Malcolm, “General Introduction,” 1:3. 82. Descartes to Mersenne, [11/]21 January 1641, in Malcolm, Correspondence, 1:54–60; Hobbes to Mersenne, [28 January/]7 February 1641, in ibid., 1:62–79; Descartes to Mersenne, [8/]18 February 1641, in ibid., 1:86–92; Descartes to Mersenne, [22 February/]4 March 1641, in ibid., 1:94–100; Hobbes to Mersenne, [20/]30 March 1641, in ibid., 1:102–113. 83. Hobbes to Cavendish, [29 January/]8 February 1641, in ibid., 1:85. 84. Martinich, Hobbes, 164. 85. [Thomas Hobbes], “Third Set of Objections with the Author’s Replies,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 2:121–37. 86. Daniel Garber, “Natural Philosophy in Seventeenth-Century Context,” in Martinich and Hoekstra, Oxford Companion to Hobbes, 106–33; 117. Also Jacquot, “Sir Charles Cavendish,” 185–86; Schuhmann, Chronique, 82, 86. 87. Hobbes, Decameron physiologicum, 135. 88. Teresa M. Amabile, Creativity in Context (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996), 115; Dean Keith Simonton, Origins of Genius: Darwinian

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Perspectives on Creativity (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 210. 89. Cavendish to Pell, 17/27 December 1644, in Halliwell, Collection of Letters, 87; Raylor, Philosophy, 193. 90. Hobbes, Verse Life, 259–60; Hobbes, Prose Life, 248. 91. Cavendish to Pell, 17/27 June 1645, in Halliwell, Collection of Letters, 88; Petty to Pell, 8 November 1645, in ibid., 90. 92. Thomas Hobbes, Of Liberty and Necessity, in EW, 4:278 n. 93. Skinner, Visions of Politics, 3:16. 94. Howard Warrender, “Publication of Hobbes’s Political Philosophy,” in Hobbes, De Cive, 8–13. 95. Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. Bennett, 2:810–11. 96. Malcolm, “Hobbes, Thomas (1588-1679)”; Hobbes, Vita, xlvii. 97. Sir William Davenant, Sir William Davenant’s Gondibert, ed. David F. Gladish (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), 3, 24. 98. Schuhmann, Chronique, 132. 99. Hobbes, Prose Life, 250. 100. Bramhall, A Defense of True Liberty (1655); Hobbes, The Questions concerning Liberty, Necessity, and Chance (1656); Bramhall, Castigations of Mr. Hobbes together with The Catching of Leviathan (1657); Hobbes, An Answer to a Book Published by Dr. Bramhall [hereafter Answer to Bramhall] (1682). 101. Feingold, “Mathematical Sciences,” 413–419. 102. Vindiciae academiarum (Vindication of the Universities) (1654). The principal target of their attack was not Hobbes but John Webster, another critic of the universities. Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes, 326; Jon Parkin, Taming the Leviathan: The Reception of the Political and Religious Ideas of Thomas Hobbes in England 1640-1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 149. 103. For a summary account of the dispute with Wallis see Douglas M. Jesseph, Squaring the Circle: The War between Hobbes and Wallis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 10–16. Hobbes’s side of the argument spanned more than seven works in 20 years. 104. Ibid., 47, 74–75, 96. 105. Stephen Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 110–54. 106. Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes, 323. 107. Sorbière to Hobbes, [21 June/]1 July 1664, in Malcolm, Correspondence, 2:617–20; 619; Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes, 321. 108. Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. Barber, 154, 156. 109. Ibid., 159.

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110. Quoted in Martinich, Hobbes, 312. Also ibid., 219. 111. Hayward, “New Dimensions,” 36; Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes, 103–104. 112. Hooke to Boyle, 20[/30] July 1663, in Schuhmann, Chronique, 182. 113. Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. Barber, 158. He did not have Parkinson’s disease, which has additional debilitating symptoms, some devastating over time. His translation of Leviathan into Latin at age 79–80 seems to show memory decline. Malcolm, “General Introduction,” 1:189. 114. Schuhmann, Chronique, 181. 115. Aubrey to Wood, 3[/13] February 1672/1673, in ibid., 213. See also the testimony of Abraham Cowley in Miriam M. Reik, The Golden Lands of Thomas Hobbes (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1977), 188. 116. Alan Cromartie, “General Introduction,” in Thomas Hobbes, A Dialogue between a Philosopher and a Student, of the Common Laws of England and Questions Relative to Hereditary Right [hereafter Dialogue of the Common Laws], ed. Alan Cromartie and Quentin Skinner (Oxford: Clarendon, 2005), xiv–lxv; xvii. 117. Paul Seaward, “General Introduction,” in Thomas Hobbes, Behemoth or The Long Parliament, ed. Paul Seaward (Oxford: Clarendon, 2010), 1–70; 6–10; Hobbes, Prose Life, 252; Thomas Hobbes, Dialogus physicus (Dialog on Physics), trans. Simon Schaffer, in Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, 345–91; 391. 118. Seaward, “General Introduction,” 8. 119. Schuhmann, Chronique, 195. 120. Patricia Springborg, “Hobbes’s Historia Ecclesiastica: Introduction: Hobbes, History, Heresy and the Universities,” in Thomas Hobbes, Historia Ecclesiastica, ed. and trans. Patricia Springborg, Patricia Stablein, and Paul Wilson (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2008), 19–267; 26–27. 121. De principiis et ratiocinatione geometrarum (On Geometric Principles and Reasoning) and Quadratura circuli (Squaring the Circle). 122. Hobbes to Wood, 20[/30] April 1674, in Malcolm, Correspondence, 2:744–48; 746–47. 123. Parkin, Taming the Leviathan, 200–211, 221–222. For additional material on contemporary English criticism of Hobbes see Samuel I. Mintz, The Hunting of Leviathan: Seventeenth-Century Reactions to the Materialism and the Moral Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962); John Bowle, Hobbes and His Critics: A Study in Seventeenth Century Constitutionalism (London: Frank Cass & Co., 1969). 124. Skinner, Visions of Politics, 3:308–23. 125. I am indebted to Noel Malcolm for these observations. Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes, 472, 514. He lists some specific areas of Hobbes’s influence in ibid., 535.

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126. Aaron Kozbelt, Scott Barry Kaufman, Deborah J. Walder, Luz H. Ospina, and Joseph U. Kim, “The evolutionary genetics of the creativity-­psychosis connection,” in Creativity and Mental Illness, ed. James C.  Kaufman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 102–132; 103. 127. Plato, Phaedrus, in The Dialogues of Plato, trans. Benjamin Jowett, 2 vols. (New York: Random House, 1937), 1:233–82; 249–50 (245); Aristotle, Problemata (Problems), in The Works of Aristotle, ed. W. D. Ross, trans. E. S. Forster, vol. 7 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1927), 953a10–12. 128. Eysenck, Genius, 203. Also ibid., 236; Dean Keith Simonton, “The mad (creative) genius: what do we know after a century of historiometric research?” in Kaufman, Creativity and Mental Illness, 25–41; Shelley Carson, “The shared vulnerability model of creativity and psychopathology,” in Kaufman, Creativity and Mental Illness, 253–80. For cognitive disinhibition see Shelley H. Carson, “Cognitive Disinhibition, Creativity, and Psychopathology,” in Simonton, Wiley Handbook of Genius, 198–221; 201. 129. Simonton, Origins of Genius, 96–97. 130. Louis Sass, “Schizophrenia, modernism, and the ‘creative imagination’: On creativity and psychopathology,” Creativity Research Journal, 13 (2001): 55–74; 68. Also Neus Barrantes-Vidal, “Creativity and the spectrum of affective and schizophrenic psychoses,” in Kaufman, Creativity and Mental Illness, 169–204; 193. 131. Parkin, Taming the Leviathan, 103. 132. Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 6, 26. 133. David J.  Weeks and Kate Ward, “Eccentricity,” in Runco and Pritzker, Encyclopedia of Creativity, 1st ed., 1:613–21; 613–15. Also Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. Barber, 156, 158. 134. Gregory J. Feist, “The Function of Personality in Creativity: The Nature and Nurture of the Creative Personality,” in Kaufman and Sternberg, Cambridge Handbook of Creativity, 112–130; 124. 135. Thomas Hobbes, “The Answer of Mr. Hobbes to Sir Will. D’Avenant’s Preface before Gondibert,” in Davenant, Davenant’s Gondibert, 45–55; 49. 136. Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. Barber, 157. 137. Thomas Hobbes, The Elements of Law Natural and Politic, ed. Ferdinand Tönnies, 2nd ed. M. M. Goldsmith (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1969), I.9.17, 45. References to this work are from this edition unless specified otherwise. 138. Gardner, Creating Minds, 42. 139. Such as hypomania, depression, or irritable affective disorder. 140. Carson, “The shared vulnerability model of creativity,” 271. Also ibid., 264–65.

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141. Patin to Falconet, 15 August 1651, in Schuhmann, Chronique, 124. 142. Hobbes, Elements of Law I.10.11, 53; Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 8, 36. 143. Ruth Richard, “Affective Disorders,” in Runco and Pritzker, Encyclopedia of Creativity, 1st ed., 1:31–43; 40. 144. Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. Barber, 157. Hobbes’s nephew was an alcoholic. 145. Carson, “Cognitive Disinhibition, Creativity, and Psychopathology,” 206. 146. Dennis K.  Kinney and Ruth Richards, “Creativity as ‘compensatory advantage’: bipolar and schizophrenic liability, the inverted-U hypothesis, and practical implications,” in Kaufman, Creativity and Mental Illness, 295–317; Geir Kaufman and Astrid Kaufman, “When good is bad and bad is good: mood, bipolarity, and creativity,” in Kaufman, Creativity and Mental Illness, 205–35. 147. Sawyer, Explaining Creativity, 173; Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. Barber, 156. Cf. David Schuldberg and Louis A. Sass, “Schizophrenia,” in Runco and Pritzker, Encyclopedia of Creativity, 1st ed., 2:501–14; 501. 148. Hobbes, Prose Life, 253. The size of his estate (about £1,000) may belie this claim, but the opportunities for unwise expenditure must have been reduced during the final years of his life. 149. Weisberg, Creativity, 372–82. An interesting alternative thesis, which we cannot evaluate for Hobbes’s creativity, is that the relevant psychopathology belongs to a close relative. 150. Schuldberg and Sass, “Schizophrenia,” 506. 151. Paul J. Silvia and James C. Kaufman, “Creativity and Mental Illness,” in Kaufman and Sternberg, Cambridge Handbook of Creativity, 381–91. 152. Dean Keith Simonton, “Historiometric Studies of Genius,” in Simonton, Wiley Handbook of Genius, 87–106; 95. 153. Dean Keith Simonton, “Creative Genius and Psychopathology: Creativity as Positive and Negative Personality,” in The Cambridge Handbook of Creativity and Personality Research, ed. Gregory J.  Feist, Roni Reiter-­ Palmon, and James C.  Kaufman, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 235–50; 238. 154. Sawyer, Explaining Creativity, 84; Weisberg, Creativity, 505. 155. Kozbelt, Beghetto, and Runco, “Theories of Creativity,” 26–29. 156. Gardner, Creating Minds, 29; Runco, Creativity, 39–67. 157. Sandra W.  Russ and Julia A.  Fiorelli, “Developmental Approaches to Creativity,” in Kaufman and Sternberg, Cambridge Handbook of Creativity, 233–49; 234. 158. Sandra W.  Russ and Olena Zyga, “Imaginative Play,” in Kaufman and Baer, Creativity and Reason in Cognitive Development, 52–71; 52–53. However, Amabile dismisses pretend play as a source of eminent creativity. Amabile, Creativity in Context, 225.

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159. Frank J. Sulloway, “Birth Order,” in Runco and Pritzker, Encyclopedia of Creativity, 1st ed., 1:189–202. 160. Ibid., 192. But see also Gregory J. Feist, “Autonomy and Independence,” in Runco and Pritzker, Encyclopedia of Creativity, 1st ed., 1:157–63; 158–59. Sawyer considers the evidence for the influence of birth order and sibsize inconclusive. Sawyer, Explaining Creativity, 68. 161. Other eminent philosophers who lost one or both parents in the second decade of their lives include Aristotle, Augustine, Bacon, Erasmus, Kant, and Thomas Aquinas. Simonton, Origins of Genius, 116. Hobbes is an exception to Simonton’s finding that eminent philosophers come from better home conditions. Simonton, “Creativity in Highly Eminent Individuals,” 178. 162. Thomas A.  Widiger and Gregory T.  Smith, “Personality and Psychopathology,” in Oliver P. John, Richard W. Robins, and Lawrence A.  Pervin, eds., Handbook of Personality: Theory and Research, 3rd. ed. (New York: Guilford Press, 2008), 743–69; 756. 163. Damian and Simonton, “Diversifying Experiences,” 376–77, 381. 164. Mark A. Runco, “A Hierarchical Framework for the Study of Creativity,” New Horizons in Education, 55 (2007): 1–9. 165. Rodica Ioana Damian, “Where Do Diversifying Experiences Fit in the Study of Personality, Creativity, and Career Success?” in Feist, Reiter-­ Palmon, and Kaufman, Cambridge Handbook of Creativity and Personality Research, 102–23; 102–103. 166. Robert J.  Sternberg, Wisdom, Intelligence and Creativity Synthesized (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 24. 167. Simonton, Origins of Genius, 118–19. 168. Amabile, Creativity in Context, 204–205. 169. Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. Barber, 150. 170. Gregory J.  Feist, “Psychometric Studies of Scientific Talent and Eminence,” in Simonton, Wiley Handbook of Genius, 62–86; 63. 171. Eva M. Pomerantz and Ross A. Thompson, “Parents’ Role in Children’s Personality Development: The Psychological Resource Principle,” in John, Robins, and Pervin, Handbook of Personality, 351–74; 366. 172. Damian and Simonton, “Diversifying Experiences,” 383. 173. Richard E. Mayer, “The Role of Domain Knowledge in Creative Problem Solving,” in Kaufman and Baer, Creativity and Reason in Cognitive Development, 147–63; 157–58. 174. Joyce Van Tassel-Baska, “Higher Level Thinking in Gifted Education,” in Kaufman and Baer, Creativity and Reason in Cognitive Development, 92–113; 105, 107; Runco, Creativity, 200. 175. Maciej Karwowski and Izabela Lebuda, “Creative Self-Concept: A Surface Characteristic of Creative Personality,” in Feist, Reiter-Palmon,

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and Kaufman, Cambridge Handbook of Creativity and Personality Research, 84–101; 89. 176. Ronald A. Beghetto and Jonathan A. Plucker, “Revisiting the Relationship among Schooling, Learning, and Creativity,” in Kaufman and Baer, Creativity and Reason in Cognitive Development, 72–91; 80. 177. Russ and Fiorelli, “Developmental Approaches to Creativity,” 236 (quoting R. Keegan). 178. Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity, 176–77. 179. Amabile, Creativity in Context, 253, 268. 180. Runco, Creativity, 186–87, 193. 181. Sawyer, Explaining Creativity, 396, 400; Cropley and Cropley, “Functional Creativity,” 314. 182. Runco, Creativity, 155. 183. Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity, 127–33; Beth A.  Hennessey, “The Creativity-Motivation Connection,” in Kaufman and Sternberg, Cambridge Handbook of Creativity, 342–65; 348. 184. David M.  Harrington, “Conditions and Settings/Environment,” in Runco and Pritzker, Encyclopedia of Creativity, 1st ed., 1:323–40. 185. Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity, 260. 186. Simonton, “Philosophical Eminence,” 630–40. 187. Van Tassel-Baska, “Higher Level Thinking,” 107–108; Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity, 332–33; Amabile, Creativity in Context, 189. 188. Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity, 83; Sternberg and Lubart, Defying the Crowd, 151–52. 189. Sternberg and Lubart, Defying the Crowd, 5–7. 190. Simonton, “Creative Genius, Knowledge, and Reason,” 232; Robert J. Sternberg and James C. Kaufman, “Constraints on Creativity: Obvious and Not So Obvious,” in Kaufman and Sternberg, Cambridge Handbook of Creativity, 467–82; 474. 191. Gruber, Darwin, 251. 192. Skinner, Visions of Politics, 3:19. 193. Such as his concepts of liberty and necessity, or his materialist metaphysics, his optics and his psychology. Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity, 88. 194. Sawyer, Explaining Creativity, 103. For useful discussions of cognitive insight see Colleen M. Seifert, David E. Meyer, Natalie Davidson, Andrea L.  Patalano, and Ilan Yaniv, “Demystification of Cognitive Insight: Opportunistic Assimilation and the Prepared-Mind Perspective,” in Sternberg and Davidson, Nature of Insight, 65–124; Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Keith Sawyer, “Creative Insight: The Social Dimension of a Solitary Moment,” in Sternberg and Davidson, Nature of Insight, 329–63. There are different theories about the nature of insight and the role of the unconscious in it. I follow the common view. For the

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unconscious see John H. Kihlstrom, “The Psychological Unconscious,” in John, Robins, and Pervin, Handbook of Personality, 583–602. 195. Csikszentmihalyi and Sawyer, “Creative Insight,” 359. 196. Runco, Creativity, 280. But see Simonton, “Creative Genius, Knowledge, and Reason,” 229–30. 197. Simonton, “Creative Genius, Knowledge, and Reason,” 237. 198. Simonton, “Creativity in Highly Eminent Individuals,” 181. 199. Benjamin F.  Jones, E.  J. Reedy, and Bruce A.  Weinberg, “Age and Scientific Genius,” in Simonton, Wiley Handbook of Genius, 422–50; 431–32. 200. Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity, 211. 201. Sternberg and Lubart, Defying the Crowd, 246–47. 202. Gardner, Creating Minds, 38–39, 352–55. 203. Brent W. Roberts, Dustin Wood, and Avshalom Caspi, “The Development of Personality Traits in Adulthood,” in John, Robins, and Pervin, Handbook of Personality, 375–98; 392. 204. Matthew T.  Gailliot, Nicole L.  Mead, and Roy F.  Baumeister, “Self-­ Regulation,” in John, Robins, and Pervin, Handbook of Personality, 472–91; 472, 485–86. 205. Runco, Creativity, 289. Weisberg argues that no specific personality traits are required to explain creativity. Weisberg, Creativity, xi. 206. Adrian Furnham, “Personality Traits, Personality Disorders, and Creativity,” in Feist, Reiter-Palmon, and Kaufman, Cambridge Handbook of Creativity and Personality Research, 251–71; 255. 207. Robert R. McCrae and David M. Greenberg, “Openness to Experience,” in Simonton, Wiley Handbook of Genius, 222–43; 222–23. For the five-­ factor theory see Robert R. McCrae and Paul T. Costa, Jr., “The FiveFactor Theory of Personality,” in John, Robins, and Pervin, Handbook of Personality, 159–81; 175. We cannot test the FFM for seventeenth-­ century England, but its traits “exist and are similarly related in all cultures so far studied.” Ibid., 169. An alternative model of personality structure is the HEXACO six-factor model. Michael C.  Ashton and Kibeom Lee, “Empirical, Theoretical, and Practical Advantages of the HEXACO Model of Personality Structure,” Personality and Social Psychology Review, 11 (2007): 150–66. 208. McCrae and Costa, “The Five-Factor Theory,” 175; Oliver P.  John, Laura P.  Naumann, and Christopher J.  Soto, “Paradigm Shift to the Integrative Big Five Trait Taxonomy,” in John, Robin, and Pervin, Handbook of Personality, 114–58; 146. 209. Ibid., 126.

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210. Christa L. Taylor, Alexander S. McKay, and James C. Kaufman, “Creativity and Personality,” in Feist, Reiter-Palmon, and Kaufman, Cambridge Handbook of Creativity and Personality Research, 167–86; 172. 211. Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. Barber, 154. 212. Ibid., 155. 213. Ibid., 156. 214. Zorana Ivcevic and Jessica Hoffman, “Emotions and Creativity: From States to Traits and Emotion Abilities,” in Feist, Reiter-Palmon, and Kaufman, Cambridge Handbook of Creativity and Personality Research, 187–213; 190–191. 215. Victoria C.  Oleynick, Colin G.  DeYoung, Elizabeth Hyde, Scott Barry Kaufman, Roger E. Beaty, and Paul J. Silvia, “Openness/Intellect: The Core of the Creative Personality,” in Feist, Reiter-Palmon, and Kaufman, Cambridge Handbook of Creativity and Personality Research, 9–27; 12. 216. McCrae and Greenberg, “Openness to Experience,” 223. 217. Robert A. Emmons, Justin L. Barrett, and Sarah A. Schnitker, “Personality and the Capacity for Religious and Spiritual Experience,” in John, Robin, and Pervin, Handbook of Personality, 634–53; 636. 218. Sang Eun Woo, Melissa G.  Keith, Rong Su, Rachel Saef, and Scott Parrigon, “The Curious Dynamic between Openness and Interests in Creativity,” in Feist, Reiter-Palmon, and Kaufman, Cambridge Handbook of Creativity and Personality Research, 44–63; 47. 219. Damian, “Where Do Diversifying Experiences Fit?” 109–11. But see also Jen-Ho Chang, Jenny C.  Su, and Hsueh-Chih Chen, “Rethinking the Multicultural Experiences-Creativity Link,” in Feist, Reiter-Palmon, and Kaufman, Cambridge Handbook of Creativity and Personality Research, 124–39. 220. Robert R.  McCrae, “Social consequences of experiential openness,” Psychological Bulletin, 120 (1996): 323–37. Cassandro and Simonton found an association between openness to experience and the diversity of topics of creative products among philosophers. Hobbes was part of their sample. Cassandro and Simonton, “Versatility, Openness to Experience, and Topical Diversity,” 20. 221. Hobbes, Verse Life, 257. 222. This is the theme of Kinch Hoekstra, “The End of Philosophy (The Case of Hobbes),” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 106 (2006): 25–60. 223. There has been much debate about Hobbes’s political sympathies in recent years. I have given my reasons for my view in James J. Hamilton, “Hobbes the Royalist, Hobbes the Republican,” History of Political Thought, 30 (2009): 411–54; and “The Social Context of Hobbes’s Political Thought,” Modern Intellectual History, 11( 2014): 1–29. See also Glenn Burgess, “Contexts for the Writing and Publication of

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Hobbes’s Leviathan,” History of Political Thought, 11 (1990): 675–702; Hans-Dieter Metzger, Thomas Hobbes und die Englische Revolution 1640-1660 (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Fromman Holzboog, 1991), 148–53; Johann P. Sommerville, “Lofty Science and Local Politics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes, ed. Tom Sorell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 246–73; Malcolm, “General Introduction,” 24–35. For other views see Jeffrey R.  Collins, The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 116–20; James Martel, Subverting the Leviathan: Reading Thomas Hobbes as a Radical Democrat (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 17–18; Richard Tuck, The Sleeping Sovereign: The Invention of Modern Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Richard Tuck, “Democratic sovereignty and democratic government: The sleeping sovereign,” in Popular Sovereignty in Historical Perspective, ed. Richard Bourke and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 115–41; Richard Tuck, “Hobbes and democracy,” in Rethinking the Foundations of Modern Political Thought, ed. Annabel Brett and James Tully with Holly Hamilton-Bleakley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 171–90; Peter Vanderschraaff, “Instituting the Hobbesian Commonwealth,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 82 (2001): 383–405; Arihiro Fukuda, Sovereignty and the Sword: Harrington, Hobbes, and Mixed Government in the English Civil Wars (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997); Kinch Hoekstra, “The de facto Turn in Hobbes’s Political Philosophy,” in Leviathan After 350 Years, ed. Tom Sorell and Luc Foisneau (Oxford: Clarendon, 2004), 33–73; Parkin, Taming the Leviathan, 85–90; Quentin Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 179–85; Quentin Skinner, From Humanism to Hobbes: Studies in Rhetoric and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 9–10.

CHAPTER 3

Cognition and the Passions

3.1   Overview Hobbes viewed people as just matter in motion and developed a thoroughly materialistic account of human psychology, effectively claiming for his philosophy the imprimatur of the new mechanical philosophy of Galileo and providing the grounds for a sustained attack on the traditional, scholastic account. In this chapter we address the creativity of two important parts of Hobbes’s psychology. In the first part we examine his theory of cognition, which seems to have drawn upon ancient, medieval, and Renaissance ideas as well as contemporary scientific discoveries. The nature of the principal cognitive faculties was one of the most debated metaphysical issues of the seventeenth century.1 Hobbes’s model seems to have been the result of cross fertilization of ideas from different domains and different parts of the same domain, and its creativity lies principally in its novel integration of ideas and theories. His most important achievement was to replace the traditional account of higher intelligence as a process of the rational soul, which he rejected, with a revolutionary concept of reason as a form of addition and subtraction, and of science as a form of addition and subtraction using language.2 In the second part of the chapter we turn to Hobbes’s account of the passions. The most original is that of felicity, which was the central human motivation in much of ancient moral philosophy. Hobbes’s concept seems to be a reimagining, by a dialectical process, of the ancient concept of eudaimonia or felicity © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. J. Hamilton, Hobbes’s Creativity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27733-7_3

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along worldly lines suggested by Francis Bacon. Hobbes’s models of cognition and the passions made a notable contribution to the innovative contemporary attempts to merge traditional psychology with the new mechanical science.

3.2  Replacing the Soul There is a sizable secondary literature on Hobbes’s account of cognition, which emphasizes that all psychological phenomena are material bodily interactions. A number of commentators have pointed out important respects in which he quietly draws on Aristotle and late Renaissance Aristotelianism while trumpeting his independence and opposition to them.3 Other commentators have pointed out other derivative aspects of his thought.4 Cees Leijenhorst has done both.5 None of them has addressed the creativity of Hobbes’s psychology. Our first task is to explain how his new model of cognition was original and yet inclusive, that is, how it retained existing ideas and structures.6 Hobbes was just one of a number of Renaissance and early modern novateurs who wanted to reduce psychology to physics, or mechanics, based on a plausible physicalist or materialist account.7 The most daring theoretical move he made, in the intensely religious climate of the time, was to abandon the traditional concept of the soul and in particular that part of it designated the rational soul. Aristotle held that the rational soul, which is the seat of reason and the understanding, is an independent, divine substance implanted in the soul, has its own immaterial existence after life, but is not distinct from the rest of the soul (the nutritive soul and, especially, the perceptual soul, which shares in reason).8 Hobbes’s contemporaries generally considered the rational soul the immortal soul of Christian theology. But in The Elements of Law he proclaimed that “the whole nature of man” is limited to “strength of body, experience, reason, and passion.”9 He had jettisoned from his account of cognition the whole complex structure of the Aristotelian-scholastic model of the soul. But his concepts of the constituents of cognition—“sense, imagination, discursion [or mental discourse], ratiocination, and knowledge”10—were still Aristotelian. He must have known that his position left him open to the charge of atheism. In The Elements of Law he took the precaution, like Pietro Pomponazzi and Bernardino Telesio before him, of relegating the immaterial soul to the realm of religious faith, with little or no function in natural philosophy or science.11 In his anonymous objections to Descartes’

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Meditations, however, he abandoned all pretense and called the soul just a name we give to the powers of sense and action, which have materialistic explanations.12 The soul as such had no objective existence. Much later in Leviathan, he rejected the immaterial or incorporeal soul as a scholastic absurdity. The Latin word for the rational soul, or for the broader functions of the soul, is animus; that for life is anima, which significantly can be used secondarily for animus.13 The Vulgate, the principal Latin translation of the Bible, for example, uses anima for soul rather than animus. Accordingly, Hobbes uses anima in the Latin version of Leviathan and interprets the soul in scripture as just a metaphor for life or the living body.14 The soul in its diverse historical conceptions no longer had even a religious function in his thought. His challenge was to replace the traditional concept of the soul with an explanation of its cognitive powers or faculties—sense, imagination, memory, cogitation, and reason—by material and kinetic means, and to do so more completely than some of his principal predecessors, the Italian natural philosophers.15

3.3   Sense and Imagination Hobbes claims to have had an early insight that without constant change there would be no perception of the external world.16 He maintained that the universe and everything in it are like a great physical machine and that the most plausible way to explain change is by corporeal motion. But he was not the first to adopt such ideas. The first sophisticated materialists in the Western tradition, the ancient atomists, held that everything is in constant flux. Democritus and Epicurus taught that the world is mechanical and that the human body and soul are just matter in motion in empty space.17 The ancient medical writers tended to treat the body as materialist and subject to the laws of physics. Hippocrates pictured the body and soul in constant flux.18 Tertullian, the north African church father, and after the Reformation a number of Protestant sects (including William Tyndale and his followers) supported various materialist views of the soul, as did a few libertine and anti-religious writers.19 Telesio, the Italian natural philosopher, thought of all or nearly all psychic operations as the motions of the spirits, a tenuous body, in the brain and nervous system.20 Galileo’s rudimentary theory of inertia and William Harvey’s discovery that the circulation of the blood is “ceaseless motion”21 added scientific weight to these ideas. Harvey had called the heart a machine and Descartes thought of the human body as one, except for the immortal soul.22 In The Elements of

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Law, the “motions of the mind” embrace the passions of the mind such as fear and anger (but not purely sensual delights and pains such as those of sex or wounds), as well as two powers of the mind, “cognitive or imaginative or conceptive; and motive.”23 Hobbes’s psychological model, like Descartes’,24 began from a foundation provided by the ancient medical writers. Galen assumed Plato’s three-­ fold division of the soul—the vegetative, the animal, and the rational.25 Galen added that the pneuma or air, the life breath of the world, is modified in the three principal organs associated with the tripartite soul. It becomes the natural spirits, which are responsible for the nutrition, growth, and generation of the body, as modified by the liver. The natural spirits become the vital spirits, which are responsible for involuntary bodily activity such as breathing, as refined by the heart. The vital spirits become animal spirits, which are responsible for the powers that all animals have, such as perception, cogitation, and action, as refined further by the brain. Hobbes accepted the ideas of the vital and animal spirits, which he thought of as highly rarified body. But he did not endorse Galen’s account of the function of the animal spirits, and he dropped the idea of the natural spirits because Harvey had substituted the heart for the liver’s role of nurturing the body.26 Hobbes also asserted that the vital spirits were purified into animal spirits by the heart, not the brain, reflecting the new scientific emphasis on the heart. His continued acceptance of the ideas of the vital and animal spirits was superimposed over Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood, which did not support them, but Harvey himself had been unable to shake off the traditional belief in vital spirits.27 He had assumed that they must be in the veins and arteries with the blood and that “concoction” of vital spirits from blood takes place in the heart.28 The thought of the Italian natural philosophers, especially Telesio, and Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Parva naturalia (Short Treatises on Nature) appear to have been especially important to Hobbes, though he rejected their theories of the nature of the world. He openly admired the Rhetoric and cited one of the treatises of the Parva naturalia in his Tractatus opticus II (Optical Treatise II). 29 The ideas of the Italians—Girolamo Fracastoro, Telesio, and Tommaso Campanella—were well known in English philosophical and scientific circles. Bacon, whose natural history and philosophy were of perennial interest to Hobbes,30 called Telesio “the best of the Novelists [new philosophers]”31 and wrote an (unfinished) refutation of his cosmology. Robert Burton, whom Hobbes must have known before the early 1630s,32 cites them a number of times in The Anatomy of

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Melancholy. They were also well known to the Northumberland circle and Walter Warner, whom Hobbes knew through his association with the earl of Newcastle. Hobbes referred positively but indirectly to the Italians as “learned” pan-sensists but rejected their pan-sensism, the notion that everything has the capacity to sense, in De corpore.33 The central idea of Hobbes’s cognitive psychology is that all cognition except linguistic reasoning is some form of sense, an idea that was central to the psychologies of Telesio and the young Campanella. Sense, Hobbes says, is the motion caused by an external body acting physically on the sense organs immediately (taste), mediately (sight, smell, hearing) or both (touch). Telesio dispenses with the Aristotelian concepts of sensible species or representational forms and the perceptual soul, by which objects are apprehended. He maintains instead that the spirits themselves are what senses.34 Sensation is the spirits’ experience of their own reactive motion to sensory stimulation as perceived in the brain and the spirits themselves. Bacon also considered the spirits central to sensation and “the Instrument of Sense” the head and brain,35 but his concept of imagination was different from those of Telesio and Hobbes.36 Hobbes thought of the sense organs in De corpore as everything in the body contributing to sensation— the nerves, the brain, the arteries, the heart, and the animal spirits, besides the eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and skin.37 In The Elements of Law he had vacillated on the importance of the spirits or the brain, perhaps reflecting the views of Telesio and Bacon. Sense, he wrote, is what “the object worketh in the brain or spirits, or some internal substance of the head.”38 Aristotle had given the heart pride of anatomical place in animals, teaching that it is the seat of life, sensation, and action in his treatise on the history of animals, which Hobbes admired.39 According to Aristotle and the ancient Greek medical tradition, the heart receives the information of sensation and then it is transferred to and stored in the brain.40 After The Elements of Law Hobbes adopted a version of this scheme. The motion caused by sensory stimuli proceeds through the nerves to the brain (or in De corpore, the pia mater, a membrane surrounding the brain and spinal cord which also played a key role in Descartes’ theory of perception), and from there to the heart, “the fountain of all sense.” Then the motion rebounds physically, creating an imagination or phantasm—a concept which seems to have originated with Aristotle and the Stoics but without their metaphysical baggage41—and a perception of the object as external. The concept of a rebound, a phenomenon that occurs in optics and sight (reflection), the context of the rebound’s first appearance in The Elements

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of Law,42 was highly original as part of a general explanation of sense. It had the great advantage of supplying Hobbes with a solution to a problem that had puzzled philosophers after Kepler’s discovery of the retinal image. How could a person know that what she saw was an external object if there was no image sent from the object to the mind and there was no indication of the object’s location outside the body? Kepler was surprised to find that the retinal image is reversed and upside down. Hobbes held that sensible qualities are subjective (a view previously held by Democritus, Aristippus, Galileo, Montaigne, and Gassendi) in contrast to the view of scholastic realism, that universals or abstract ideas really exist, are instantiated in matter, and can be apprehended by the soul.43 For Hobbes, one can sense only the motions of one’s own body and the imaginations or phantasms which the motions ultimately create. Unlike other explanations of Kepler’s discovery, Hobbes maintained that the retinal image is not a direct representation of the external object. The retinal image is a phantasm created by the action of the luminous object as refracted through the ocular humor. The reversed, inverted retinal image is just a secondary effect of vision.44 His account of perception provides him with a solution to the problem of how we know we are sensing an external object based on an optical analogy, yet capitalizes on the idea that secondary qualities are subjective.

3.4  Memory Hobbes agreed with Aristotle (as well as Telesio and Campanella) that imagination is weakened or fading sense.45 Aristotle had taught that the phantasm remains after the external object is withdrawn from the senses and then becomes memory. Memory is just the residual sensation of things that have happened in the past.46 Like the Italians, however, Hobbes rejected Aristotle’s view that imagination and memory are “internal senses” and that memory can be ascribed to the rational soul. According to Galileo, an object continues in motion or remains at rest until it is moved by another body. Memories fade over time or over great distances, Hobbes explains, because the motions constituting sense gradually decay presumably by the principle of inertia from their interaction with other bodily motions, such as the stronger motion of present sense. Experience, as Aristotle and the Stoics had held, is sense or imaginations retained in the mind, or as Hobbes puts it in Leviathan, “memory of many things.”47 The mind is, in pertinent part, a warehouse of gradually decaying

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imaginations or phantasms, conceptions or ideas, and memories or experience, all of which are just forms of sense and therefore motion. For Hobbes as for Aristotle, we become self-aware through remembering that we had an imagination in the past.48 And like Aristotle, he explains our ability to perceive the external world in the face of the profusion of memories by asserting that our present sensations obscure our memories and our attention focuses on present events. Aristotle devoted Chapter 7 of De sensu et sensibilibus (On Sense and Sensibles), also part of Parva naturalia, to the problem of explaining why we sense only one thing at a time. His solution was that the stronger of two simultaneous sensory stimuli always tends to exclude the weaker from consciousness and that we cannot perceive two distinct objects simultaneously with the same sense. Later the Stoics, Epicureans, and scholastics observed that we can combine multiple memory phantasms to create fictitious imaginations,49 and Hobbes adopted a materialist version of these ideas. He affirms that we perceive one thing at a time because we sense dominant sensations such as the sun and not weaker sensations such as the stars during the day. When we look at the sun, the motion created by the luminous object in our sense of vision becomes the dominant motion on the heart, creating a phantasm of it.50 Thus we can sense and focus on individual phenomena while our senses are bombarded by a variety of never-ending physical stimuli, some strong, some weak. Moreover, he says, our imaginations may be composed of one sensation or more than one. If an imagination is composed of multiple sensations received at different times, we do not experience the separate phantasms simultaneously. We experience them as a composite of diverse bodily motions and our imagination is fictitious, such as the classical examples of a centaur, a golden mountain, and a chimera.51 Thus the power of the imagination is much greater than our memory of past events alone suggests. The psychological dimension of Aristotle’s theory of cognition, and the psychological and physiological dimensions of the theory of cognition of the Italian natural philosophers, especially Telesio, seem to have been central to Hobbes’s development of his accounts of sense, imagination, and memory. There is a high degree of inclusiveness of their basic ideas and structures in Hobbes’s account though he modified and elaborated them in an original way. He replaced the central role of the spirits in their account of sensation with all of the bodily organs which he associated with sensation. The importance of this approach is magnified by the absence of any role for an immortal soul, which still shouldered much of the

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cognitive burden for Descartes. He also seems to have adapted and transformed the traditional Aristotelian-scholastic account of the faculties by giving them a physiological explanation, while he modified the traditional account of the spirits themselves by dropping the natural spirits to reflect the recent discoveries of William Harvey. He shared Aristotle’s views of imagination as fading sense and memory as retained sense but gave the process of fading sense a strictly mechanical explanation based on inertia. He also seems to have invented a novel materialist account of Aristotle’s explanation of our ability to focus on one sensation and one memory at a time. One of his most original contributions to the debate on perception was the idea of the rebound of the phantasm from the heart to explain the sensation of external things, an idea which plays an essential role in his theory of action52 and which he may have derived from his study of optics, that is, from a regional analogy with reflection. The originality of his account of the Aristotelian faculties of sense, imagination, and memory lies not so much in its individual elements as in the integration of its elements into a new, strictly mechanical alternative to the dominant Aristotelian-scholastic model without Telesio’s heavy reliance on the spirits.

3.5  Thought We turn next to consider Hobbes’s accounts of mental discourse, prudence, judgment, and reasoning (or ratiocination). He maintains that there are two modes of thought that consist of sensation and memory; the second, reasoning, also may involve the use of speech.53 The first is our train of thoughts or conceptions, which Hobbes calls mental discourse. His views about it follow a long tradition which uses Aristotle’s account of the sequence of thoughts in memory to organize our thought about the past and future. These sequences are the foundation of Hobbes’s concepts of instrumental thinking, recollection, and prudence. Aristotle observes that sensations occur in sequence over time. The parts of a sequence have contiguity which is retained in memory, say, the sight of a white ball followed by the use of a spoon and the oral sensation of cold vanilla ice cream. We can recollect something by finding part of a sequence in memory by the principles of association—similarity, opposition, and contiguity—which leads us to the sequence itself, and then, by following the sequence, to what we wish to remember.54 Cicero linked memory with prudence, and the medievals combined his insight with

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Aristotle’s idea of a memory sequence as the basis of recollection.55 The synthesis entered the scholastic tradition through the treatment of the cardinal virtue of prudence by Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas. In the Renaissance innovators like Fracastoro also adopted the synthesis56 and in the following century Hobbes did as well. Mental discourse, Hobbes avers, may be an aimless and wide-ranging association of ideas or it may have a purpose which organizes the train of thoughts for the attainment of a specific goal. The latter is basic instrumental thinking (although Hobbes does not call it that), which requires only sense and memory, but which, without words, cannot consider generalities. When we seek to achieve a goal, we search our experience until we find a conception which is part of a memory sequence that leads to the goal. We can also search out the cause of something by reversing the process, seeking in memory the beginning of a train of thoughts that leads to what we want to explain.57 Our train of thoughts always appears in an order in which it has appeared to us in the past. Hobbes explains recollection as searching our experience like a hunting dog searching for a scent, for something that leads in a sequence of thoughts or conceptions to what we wish to remember. Hunting and fishing metaphors were common in explanations of recollection from ancient times, beginning with Aristotle.58 If I want to remember where I left my cell phone I hunt through my memory for sequences involving the cell phone until I recognize one that, hopefully, will lead me to it. Many of the sequences of sensations we retain in memory are causal because our observations are often of chains of causes. Prudence, Hobbes says, is the foresight or expectation that a person derives from the sequences of causal events in memory. We extrapolate future events from a causal sequence experienced in the past. But the extrapolation is uncertain because causal chains can develop in different ways.59 Mental discourse, Hobbes says, may lead to judgment, which is just the last opinion among the alternating opinions of a mental discourse concerning whether past or future events are true or probable, based on the expectations we form from our assessment of possible causal sequences.60 He calls the alternating opinions before judgment doubt. The idea of judgment as the end of a discourse of alternating opinions may derive from the Stoics. Plutarch reports in the Moralia (in the abridged English translation of Philemon Holland published in 1603, which was in the Cavendish library) that the Stoics did not distinguish opinion from passion and that our deliberations are alternating reasons, even if they are the

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effects of passions: “some there be who hold and maintain that passion is nothing different from reason: … all the trouble [of mind] that we feel is no more but an alteration or change of one and the self-same thing, to wit, reason both ways.”61 Opinions cause emotions, and emotions are always about something of which we have an opinion. The Stoics viewed them as one and the same phenomenon. The Holland translation emphasizes alternating reasons or opinions at the expense of alternating passions. For Hobbes, when we are uncertain about something and debate within ourselves, our opinions alternate until we reach a conclusion. The last of these alternating opinions is judgment.62 Hobbes’s explanation of intentional mental discourse or train of thoughts draws on a conception of a physiological process of comparison of past and present perceptions which, for Telesio, forms the basis of all reasoning and understanding. The spirits, according to Telesio, discriminate between sensations by sensing similarity and diversity among stimuli.63 Leijenhorst suggests that Hobbes co-opted the idea of comparing by similarity and opposition, two of the Aristotelian principles of association, from scholastic philosophy and refined it for his own materialist purposes.64 But Telesio had already put the idea into an anti-Aristotelian form. Hobbes describes the process of comparison in the Anti-White as a mental discourse consisting of three consecutive events. The first is a perception relating to something, the second is a perception relating to another thing, and the third is a phantasm of the similarities and differences between them, which are immediately apparent.65 We use this process when we form expectations about the future. The more past events in a causal chain we can distinguish in memory, the more likely we will be able to foretell accurately the outcome of a similar causal chain in the future. A person’s application of language (correctly) to express her trains of thoughts obviates the need to go through the whole mental process the next time she has similar thoughts. For Hobbes, the ability to detect similarities that are not apparent to others is the basis of wit or fancy and the creation of pleasing metaphors. The ability to distinguish differences that others cannot is the basis of judgment in scientific or philosophic reasoning. The second thought process is reasoning, which may or may not involve the use of language. Descartes asserted in Discourse on the Method that there cannot be meaningful speech without the rational soul.66 Hobbes disagreed and may have taken Descartes’ opinion as a challenge.67 He says that there are two types of knowledge. The first, as Aristotle held, is empirical, knowledge of fact, the knowledge one obtains from sensation of the

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environment, such as the knowledge of history. The second is scientific, related to causation and requires only sensation, memory, and names, which are just arbitrary or conventional mnemonic cues which we or others assign to our imaginations or thoughts.68 Hobbes was a nominalist. Universals do not exist in nature. They are just names of things. The concept “black” can be used to describe the color of a cat or the night sky. When we learn that we can use the word “black” to describe many things, we learn that we can use it to describe all things of that color and the word assumes the function of a universal concept. In Leviathan, understanding, far from a separate faculty of the mind as the scholastics believed, is reduced to the conceptions or imaginations which names raise in the mind from memory, their context and correct sequences, as suggested by the common meaning of the term.69

3.6  Reasoning Reasoning or ratiocination, Hobbes claims in The Elements of Law, is the application of logic to names of concepts to make propositions and syllogisms, and in Leviathan and De corpore, a form of addition and subtraction.70 Hobbes was not original in using language to explain higher reasoning in The Elements of Law; Fracastoro, another nominalist, had done the same. But explanations such as that in The Elements of Law are misleading. Hobbes holds that reasoning is also possible without language, although such reasoning must address only individual things and not universal concepts. He illustrates ratiocination without words in De corpore with the example of an approaching man, which also occurred in William of Ockham, Ramus, and Campanella,71 and was part of a traditional debate about Aristotle’s claim that generalities are more comprehensible by nature and specifics are more comprehensible by sense.72 When we see something moving in the distance, we first judge it to be a body, then as it comes closer, animated. If the animated body comes nearer and we perceive the human quality of speech, we conclude that the animated body is a person. The example shows that this kind of knowledge (analytic) is just the addition of more and more properties about what we see. If we imagine the example in reverse, it shows how another kind of knowledge (synthetic) is just the subtraction of specific properties of the man’s nature as he withdraws from us.73 Hobbes’s explanation of reasoning as addition and subtraction seems to have been new. Leijenhorst and Jan Prins see a connection between

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Petrus Ramus’s use of the metaphor of computation for reason and Hobbes’s conception of ratiocination as computation in Leviathan.74 Adding appropriate names with settled meanings to the mental process and using them as universals greatly empowers human ratiocination through the construction of propositions and syllogisms, and if done logically and with the proper method, results in science, the knowledge of causation. Thus human reasoning is a process of manipulation of concepts, imaginations (both of which are forms of sense), words, or propositions. This human power or capability is the faculty of reason and it is the necessary prerequisite of all the achievements of human civilization. Right reason is the correct manipulation of words and propositions, reflecting Aristotle’s view that truth and falsehood are properties of concepts and not things.75 We find the same cross fertilization and inclusiveness in Hobbes’s explanations of mental discourse, judgment, and ratiocination as we found in those of sense, imagination, and memory. His concepts of instrumental reasoning, recollection, and prudence seem to be especially indebted to Aristotle and the traditional account of intentional trains of thought as the operation of sequences of thoughts in memory, according to the principles of association theory. His concept of judgment seems to derive from the Stoics. His explanation of the comparison and contrast of phantasms in the train of thoughts seems to be derived from that of Telesio, the scholastics or both. A metaphor from Ramus may have provided the ground for his mature explanation of ratiocination, as he mapped the properties of addition and subtraction from the metaphor of computation onto the concept of reasoning, as instantiated in the traditional example of the approaching figure. His account of science substituted the use of language in accordance with correct method for the operations of the rational soul. The most original of the conceptual elements of his model of thought was his unique theory of ratiocination as computation.76 I have left out details of Hobbes’s model of cognition77 and further research may uncover other possible antecedents of his ideas. But we already have enough information to draw some preliminary conclusions. If my analysis is correct, Hobbes accepted much of the substance of the Aristotelian psychological account of cognition and took his primary task to be the replacement of the complex operations of the Aristotelian-­ scholastic theory of the soul with a materialist alternative organized around the individual Aristotelian faculties of cognition. The achievement of this principal task required the successful completion of a number of sub-tasks,

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each requiring its own solution. The first (logically, but not necessarily chronologically) was to replace the operations of the Aristotelian sensible soul, which he achieved with a scheme emphasizing bodily motions in sensation and, like Telesio, reducing imagination and memory to mechanistic modes of sense. His second set of sub-tasks was to find a new way to explain the faculties of cogitation or mental discourse, judgment, and ratiocination. Aristotle, the Stoics, Ramus, and Telesio seem to have provided essential ideas for this set of sub-tasks. What made Hobbes’s cognitive model stand out among the accounts of cognition of his time was his restructuring of the concept of ratiocination as computation, and its integration with the idea of other forms of cognition as mechanistic physiological modes of sense. The result was an important milestone in the history of psychology, the first model of cognition since the ancients that had a thoroughly mechanistic explanation, that had a simple, well-defined concept of higher reason, and that was, after The Elements of Law,78 entirely secular. It would not have been possible without the cross fertilization of ideas from several domains: philosophy (ancient, medieval, and Renaissance), the new mechanical science, optics, anatomy, medicine, and Ramist logic. We turn now to Hobbes’s account of the passions, especially felicity, which seems to derive from a different, higher-order form of creativity.

3.7  The Passions It is a commonplace of the secondary literature on Hobbes that his account of the passions is greatly indebted to Aristotle’s Rhetoric.79 Quentin Skinner also has shown that Hobbes’s explanation of laughter is of ancient origin and ultimately derives from ideas in the Rhetoric and other works of Aristotle.80 Hobbes wrote a Latin summary of the Rhetoric from a contemporary perspective for the young William (III) Cavendish and published his own English translation of it in 1636. However one can place too much stress on his debt to Aristotle. As Susan James nicely puts it, he drew upon “a long and palimpsestic tradition” of classifications of the passions going back to the ancients.81 He departed from convention by making Aristotle’s passions more egoistical and devoid of morality.82 He also incorporated into his account many ideas of post-Aristotelian provenance. For example, his ideas of Schadenfreude, panic terror and hatred of those to whom we are indebted are of ancient Greek or Roman origin.83 It is unfair to dismiss his account of the passions as uninteresting because it

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draws heavily on Aristotle and other writers.84 It strips out the Aristotelian idea that excessive or insufficient passion is a vice85 and embellishes some of the passions in new ways,86 but it is generally not his most original work. To be sure, Hobbes’s reduction of all the passions to variations of just two of them, desire and aversion, is often praised for its originality. They are the basic building blocks of all his passions. Aristotle held, and Telesio and Hobbes agreed, that all sensations are accompanied by pleasure and pain, and it has been argued that Aristotle’s account of the passions in the Rhetoric treats them all as pleasure and pain in different situations.87 Hobbes’s friend Robert Burton, in discussing contemporary accounts of the passions in The Anatomy of Melancholy, reports that all Aristotle’s passions can be reduced to four (some said six) basic passions: (1) love and joy for a present good, (2) desire of a future good, (3) hate and sorrow for a present evil, and (4) fear of a future evil.88 Hobbes reduced this convention to desire and aversion, perhaps to accommodate his binary physiological account of them, which appears to reflect other writers’ binary physiological accounts of the appetitive passions and pleasure and pain. Thomas Aquinas had asserted that those types of passions, such as desire, which imply a movement of the appetite in pursuit of something, are beneficial to the vital movement of the body unless they are excessive; and those types of passions, such as aversion, which imply a movement of the passion away from something, are repugnant to the vital movement of the body and harmful.89 Telesio thought that when an external object alters the spirits and sets them in motion, the spirits sense pleasure if the motion is restorative and pain if it corrupts the spirits. Burton, discussing the scholastic concepts of the irascible and concupiscible, says that the good causes joy or desire which dilates the heart and benefits the body, while evil causes sorrow or fear which contracts the heart and harms the body.90 Hobbes takes a related approach in De corpore. The internal motion set off by a sensory stimulus proceeds to the heart where it alters vital motion, which he conceives as the circulation of the blood, and simultaneously creates pleasure or pain, depending on whether it helps or hinders vital motion. Desire follows pleasure and aversion pain.91 Hobbes’s reduction of all the passions to desire and aversion seems to simplify further the traditional reductions of Aristotle’s passions, and to provide a binary physiological account related to them. Viewed within the framework of contemporary discussion his account is clarifying and original. But it is less original than commonly claimed.

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Thus Hobbes’s accounts of the passions and their physiological explanation are closely related to the ideas of others and are not highly original. The exception is his concept of felicity.

3.8   Felicity, the Ancients, and Bacon Hobbes’s account of felicity is a reimagining of the Hellenistic concept of eudaimonia, an ancient Greek word usually translated as human flourishing, well-being, or happiness, which was based on the doctrine that people by nature are happy with little. Hobbes’s concept is based instead on the antithetical view that people by nature are never satisfied. Arash Abizadeh argues that Hobbes derives his concept directly from the hedonistic Epicurean concept of eudaimonia.92 But the Epicureans were not hedonists, and certainly not in the sense that Hobbes was one.93 I will suggest instead that Hobbes developed his concept reflecting ideas which he found in Aristotle, the Stoics, and Francis Bacon’s critique of ancient moral philosophy in The Advancement of Learning.94 My focus is on the relationship between Hobbes’s concept and eudaimonia, and their shared meaning of a continuous process of striving. There is no other secular concept of happiness in the history of philosophy before Hobbes that includes that idea. We have already adverted to Hobbes’s close relationship with Bacon in the early 1620s and his long-term interest in Bacon’s thought. Skinner has suggested that Hobbes had read Bacon’s Essays,95 which Hobbes told Aubrey he helped to translate into Latin. He also participated in the translation of The Advancement of Learning into Latin (De dignitate et augmentis scientiarum).96 He has a way of assimilating and processing themes, ideas, and metaphors from his reading and recycling them in later works, usually without citing their origins. Martinich, Gabriella Slomp, and Antoni Malet point out such parallel themes with Bacon.97 Brett and Ugo Pagallo consider the Latin translation of The Advancement of Learning to be the likely source of Hobbes’s phrases, “Man is a God to man” and “Man is a wolf to man.”98 Strauss observes that Hobbes’s enumeration of pleasant things diverges from that of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, and claims that the difference between what Aristotle and Hobbes consider pleasant reflects Bacon’s critique of philosophical tradition in The Advancement of Learning.99 But he does not explain the connection. He contrasts Aristotle’s view that pleasure accompanies the soul’s achievement of a settled state with Hobbes’s emphasis on progressing or striving, and points to the similarity of the figures of circular motion in De homine and The

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Advancement of Learning. Bacon asserts that human advancement is better for the individual than preservation “because every obtaining of a desire hath a shew of advancement, as motion though in a circle hath a shew of progression.”100 Similarly, Hobbes comments in a discussion of felicity in De homine that the greatest good is always progressing toward goals with minimal hindrance. “For life is perpetual motion that, when it cannot progress in a straight line, is converted into circular motion.”101 I will discuss briefly the Aristotelian and Hellenistic concepts of eudaimonia and Bacon’s response to them. Then I will examine the development of Hobbes’s concept of felicity and explain its relationship to eudaimonia. I will conclude that Hobbes seems to have been answering both Aristotle and the Hellenistic philosophers. The result appears to be an example of dialectical thinking.

3.9   Eudaimonia The ancient Greek concept of eudaimonia was very different from our modern concept of happiness, with its connotation of an episodic and easily attainable pleasure. Eudaimonia is not transitory. It refers to a life-long activity. A life can be considered happy in this sense only when it is over and it can be judged in its entirety. Before death one cannot be sure that some unpredictable catastrophic event will not befall one. In the fifth century BCE (Herodotus) eudaimonia was an objective characterization of a life of ceaseless striving for good health, prosperity, family and friends, noble deeds and public admiration and respect. Only a few favored individuals could be considered to have attained it.102 The endless striving later came to entail “self-realization,” the “full flourishing” of “our most important human capabilities without impediment.”103 Though it would become associated with feelings of pleasure or the absence of pain and emotional disturbance as used by Aristotle and the Hellenistic schools, it would always retain this underlying meaning of an objective assessment of long-term activity and of limitation to a few lucky individuals. Aristotle says in the Nichomachean Ethics that contemplation, the life according to reason, is the best, the most pleasant and the happiest, and that second best is the life according to practical reason.104 But what exactly does he mean? In his teleological universe people can be happy only if they act in accordance with their essence, their rational nature, which is the telos, purpose, or end of human life. Accordingly some experts

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believe that for Aristotle felicity consists in the single activity of contemplation. Others believe that he meant that felicity consists in the possession of a variety of goods (inclusionism), such as physical pleasure, honor, health or friends, and needs nothing else. Others believe that there are two types of felicity in Aristotle, that of the philosopher, who can attain perfect felicity, and that of the statesman, who is morally virtuous but does not have a complete understanding of the nature of the universe. There is a conceptual hierarchy of goods, with the philosophical life at the top, then (in descending order) ethical activity, other goods that are desirable in themselves such as honor, and other goods that are conditionally desirable such as wealth. All the lower order goods are desirable for the sake of theoretical or practical virtuous activity.105 Every citizen is capable of theoretical or practical virtue, and the purpose of political activity is to govern so that everything promotes felicity and maximizes practical virtue.106 Still others believe that the best contemplative and political lives are not distinct but overlap. The best human life has a part requiring leisure such as contemplation, a part such as political activity which cannot be done at leisure, and non-contemplative activities such as relaxation.107 Aristotle realistically held that a moderate degree of material prosperity was required to face life’s uncertainties and provide self-sufficiency.108 A virtuous life could be led only if its necessities were not a matter of constant daily struggle. He divided human goods into the goods of body and soul such as strength, beauty, health, and wisdom; and the goods of fortune such as power, wealth, social status—the goods that are objects of competition109—and good luck. He also observed that most men seek power and wealth for the sake of honor because “everything that has a superiority in something good is held in highest honour.”110 But, he argued, those who possess wealth, power, or status cannot be worthy of honor unless they are virtuous. It is impossible to know which, if any, of these interpretations Hobbes may have shared. The eudaimonia of the Stoics, the Epicureans, and the Pyrrhonist Skeptics continued the ancient tradition but was more ascetic than that of Aristotle. The three Hellenistic schools agreed that happiness was an objective state measured over a lifetime.111 The tranquil soul was the best way to achieve happiness, and inner tranquility, ataraxia, the foundation of true happiness, meant withdrawal from the worldly competition for wealth, power, and reputation which people usually considered necessary for happiness. For the Roman Stoics happiness was conformity with the nature of humanity and the universe, the life of reason and virtue.112 It

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meant the rational control or suppression of the passions that are irrational and excessive, and a life of complete self-sufficiency and worldly detachment. The Stoic wise man views things that are contingent and therefore indifferent like wealth, power, and reputation only in a virtuous way. He is happy without them because he is virtuous and virtue is the only good. He is not emotionally dependent on anything and, being self-sufficient, is independent of the uncertainties of fortune. “The sage is neither elated by prosperity nor depressed by adversity. His endeavour is always to rely mainly on himself and to seek his whole satisfaction from within himself.”113 For the Pyrrhonists, by contrast, happiness was the tranquility of the soul that comes from suspension of belief in all philosophical doctrines and avoidance of the emotional disturbances arising from desires for apparent goods and aversions from apparent evils.114 For the Epicureans happiness was not sensual pleasure but the absence of pain and fear, and independence from external things.115 They agreed that happiness consists in ataraxia as a means to avoid unpleasantness, and therefore their view is not hedonistic. “We have need of pleasure when we are in pain … but when we are not feeling such pain … we have no need of pleasure.”116 The Hellenistic views of human nature, whether aiming at a rational telos (the Peripatetics and Stoics) or at the absence of disturbance or fear and pain (the Pyrrhonists and Epicureans), were value laden. Reason or the absence of disturbance or pain was the most important or valued part of our nature. Whatever hindered or deformed it corrupted our nature and our ability to flourish.117 Two views of human nature follow from the Hellenistic concepts of eudaimonia, particularly the Stoic one. In the first, viewed as the proper sort of human nature, people need little to achieve ataraxia and be truly happy. In the other, corrupt sort of human nature, people seek ever more wealth, power, and glory which disrupt and destroy ataraxia. The Stoics and Epicureans pointed to the never-ending, ever-increasing desires of the second type of nature, a nature that could never be satisfied, as proof that happiness was impossible without ataraxia.118 Horace, one of only three ancient poets whom Hobbes specifically names as part of his early humanist study in his verse Vita,119 expressed in Satire I.1 his Stoic distaste for the second, deformed sort of nature using the metaphor of a man running a race (actually a chariot race and therefore much faster than a footrace)—a metaphor for life of ancient origin which we also find in Renaissance and early-modern writers like Hobbes.120

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… However fast he runs there is always somebody richer just in front; … So it is that we can rarely find a man who says he has lived a happy life and who, when his time is up, contentedly leaves the world like a guest who has had his fill.121

The futility of pursuing the objects of our greed and ambition and the unhappiness it causes were common Stoic and Epicurean themes. By the Renaissance the culture which produced these ancient ascetic values had long vanished. Despite the popularity of the ancient Hellenistic schools to the generations who rediscovered and reinvigorated them, humanists generally considered the lifestyle that they recommended too rigorous and demanding to be realistic. Neo-Stoics like the Belgian Justus Lipsius, for example, did not recommend committing suicide if necessary to maintain one’s personal autonomy and avoid violating the principles of morality.122 Virtue generally continued to be considered a necessary component of happiness when Hobbes was writing in seventeenth-century England.123 But it was becoming possible to think of happiness in a different way. Thomas Wright wrote in The Passions of the Minde in Generall that “felicity is nothing else but a compleat contentation [contentment], quietnesse, and rest of the minde and body.”124 In 1609 a writer praised the civilization of the English, who had reached “the highest degree of wealth, happiness and honour,” by contrast with the savage Native Americans in Virginia.125 Neither writer ties happiness to the idea of striving for virtue in the classical way. A contemporary preacher observed that most men were “continually complaining, never satisfied, but always desirous to change their condition.”126 No one was interested in trying to achieve the Hellenistic ideal of felicity. According to Paul Slack, “happiness was acquiring new prominence and fresh connotations in the middle of the century which conspired to accelerate a long evolution from a rare experience, the fruit of extreme virtue scarcely attainable in this world, to a commonplace mixture of physical well-being and psychological content.”127 Another scholar dates the beginning of the modern concept of happiness as earthly contentment from this period.128

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3.10   Bacon on the Active Good Francis Bacon reconsiders felicity in the context of his critique of ancient moral philosophy in Book 2 of The Advancement of Learning. There he is deeply critical of the ancient concept of eudaimonia and reflects the views of those of his contemporaries who approved of ambition, prosperity, and upward mobility. A successful lawyer, politician, and courtier as well as a philosopher, he was the sort of person least likely to find a life of self-denial satisfactory or justifiable. Ancient philosophers, he complained, “feigned an higher elevation of man’s nature than was.”129 He scorned the life devoted to tranquility: “in this theater of man’s life it is reserved only for God and Angels to be lookers on.”130 The healthiest mind was not the most tranquil, but the mind that had learned to cope with the world’s challenges through confronting them.131 He divided human good into public and private, that of the individual as an individual; the latter he sub-­ divided into active and passive or preservative, and expressed his preference for the active good. Considerations of our mortality and exposure to the vicissitudes of fortune “maketh us to desire to have somewhat secured and exempted from time, which are [sic] only our deeds and works.”132 Internal tranquility could not fulfill this need. He supported his point by citing the debate between Socrates and Callicles in Plato’s Gorgias on whether tranquility or “much desiring and enjoying” makes people happy. Socrates accused Callicles, who supported the latter idea of happiness, of arguing that happiness is equivalent to continually itching and scratching. Bacon agreed with Callicles in so far as “the good of advancement” is better than the “simple preservation” of the tranquil life “because every obtaining a desire hath a shew of advancement.”133 But he concludes, against Callicles, Socrates and the eudaimonists, that tranquility and the pleasures of the active or worldly life—the lifestyle which the eudaimonists deplored—are not mutually exclusive. What did Bacon mean by the active good? He seems to have meant principally self-realization through practical activity. People enjoy variety and activity. This was true, he says in the Latin version, even of men at the apogee of power such as ancient Roman emperors like Nero and Commodus. Though they foolishly chose to excel at the harp and gladiatorial combat, their examples show that the active life is better than mere sensual enjoyment.134 And though Bacon considers virtue important to the active good, “it is with a respect private to a man’s own power, glory, amplification, continuance.”135 He justifies just the kind of self-regarding,

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ambitious, and aggrandizing behavior that the Hellenistic eudaimonists taught their followers to eschew and which his own career exemplified. Here is a vision of felicity that replaces the ancient eudaimonist ideal with worldly striving and accomplishment, a vision which Hobbes shared.

3.11  Hobbes on Felicity Hobbes developed his concept of felicity over a number of works. What changes most from work to work is his account of the kind of pleasure that constitutes felicity. Each of his discussions is presented in contra-­distinction to eudaimonia. He repeatedly denies that felicity is striving after a telos or ultimate end, the telos of Aristotelianism and Stoicism.136 The one characteristic which all his accounts but one share is the idea of constant striving associated with eudaimonia. The exception is the account in De homine, which says first that felicity, conceived as the final end as the ancients had done, cannot be achieved in the present life. Then he explains the greatest of goods in the same way as he had explained felicity in earlier works.137 All his formulations also share a characteristic which is alien to eudaimonia, the idea of the need for the continual fulfillment of ever-increasing human desires, especially material desires. Despite the variations in his formulations, he is describing a single concept which he approaches in different ways. He does not have two separate concepts of felicity as F. S. McNeilly claims.138 What Hobbes gives us is a worldly mirror image of the Hellenistic concept of eudaimonia, which he seems to invert. Inversion is an important source of creativity.139 Like Hobbes’s concept of felicity, Bacon’s advocated egoistic worldly advancement in place of the ancients’ emphasis on tranquility and striving for virtue. But it was founded on Bacon’s practical approach to the world, not on a sophisticated theory of psychology like Hobbes’s. Bacon did not expressly discriminate joy of the mind—the sort of pleasure which constituted eudaimonia140—from sensual pleasure as Hobbes did, and his focus on the variety of life experiences with its ups and downs could not sustain the continual delight that Hobbes’s idea required. Hobbes also seems to have found key ideas that he needed in Aristotle’s Rhetoric, in which Aristotle took a more worldly approach than in the Nichomachean Ethics. According to Hobbes’s summary of Aristotle’s account in the Rhetoric, felicity is “Prosperity with Vertue, or a continuall content of the life with surety.” Prosperity, he adds, is “to have all, or the most, or the greatest of those goods which we attribute to Fortune.”141 But prosperity is limited to

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the very few, for “all Prosperity appertaines” to a portion of “the Nobility, the Rich, and those who are in Power.”142 Hobbes’s first philosophically mature account of felicity, that of The Elements of Law, has four components: prospering, continual delight, increasing desire, and surpassing everyone else in the competition for the goods of fortune. After citing the examples of Nero and Commodus which we found in Bacon,143 he says: “FELICITY, therefore (by which we mean continual delight), consisteth not in having prospered, but in prospering.” His account of “prospering” combines Aristotle’s idea of prosperity with Bacon’s idea of advancement and stresses striving for “more riches, honours, or other power.”144 People may achieve felicity at least in part through contemplation, study, and teaching, but Hobbes does not identify felicity with the philosophical and scientific life. Separately Hobbes explains felicity in the ancient metaphor of a race, his metaphor of the passions, as running ahead of all one’s competitors.145 Prospering is therefore a process of constant striving like eudaimonia and a worldly activity like pursuit of Bacon’s active good. It reflects Aristotle’s requirement of prosperity, though Aristotle sees a need only for a moderate and achievable amount of the goods of fortune to support a life of contemplation or the practical political activity of the city. For Hobbes felicity is a process driven by the requirement of continual delight, but this is the delight that the Hellenistic schools detested, the delight of people who are never satisfied. Hobbes reinforces his concept of felicity with two others, power and glory, which evoke the second or bad Hellenistic type of human nature. A good can be either a goal or end, or it can be a means to an end. But the means to achieve an end is power.146 Following Aristotle’s scheme of the goods of the body and soul and the goods of fortune, Hobbes divides power into power of the body (beauty, strength), power of the mind (knowledge), and power which can be acquired by the power of the body and mind, such as “riches, place of authority, friendship or favour, and”— one that cannot be acquired by the power of the body and mind—“good fortune,”147 which are all among the Aristotelian goods of fortune.148 Glory is a joy of the mind, the feeling of triumph one gets from imagining or realizing the superiority of one’s power over that of one’s competitors.149 Hobbes places great emphasis on glory and the pleasure that one gets from others’ acknowledgment of one’s power as central to human psychology in his early works.150 Glory propels us ahead in the competition of life because we cannot continually celebrate our superiority without first achieving prosperity, then maintaining and advancing it.151

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In the Anti-White, which contains Hobbes’s most thorough discussion of felicity, he draws upon the account of The Elements of Law and introduces the Aristotelian idea of security and protecting one’s possessions. Unlike the eudaimonists, he holds that felicity lies not in attaining the goal or end of our activity, but in the process itself.152 He explains that the foundation of felicity consists in seeking ever increasing power (potentia), power that at each stage is easy to achieve with the power which we already possess, power that we have attained and made secure. Each succeeding stage in the attainment of more power must be easy because if it were difficult it would not be pleasurable. We must secure the power which we have attained at each stage because security prevents the fear of losing what we have attained and is the basis of the hope and expectation that we will be able to attain more power that is the object of our desire. Lack of security will shake our faith in our means to achieve a new power and cause disappointment or despair. Felicity is thus the new idea of the joy of which we are aware in the prolonged and trouble-free process of seeking, attaining, and protecting power after power. This is the real peace of mind touted by the eudaimonists, Hobbes claims, not inactivity or the absence of desire.153 The attainment of one sort of power provides an additional basis for us to achieve more of the same or another sort of power ad seriatim in an endless process of striving and delight or appetite.154 Sensual pleasure is not felicity because, though it is initially pleasurable, we become sated, repulsed, and sickened by prolonged sensual pleasure, Hobbes explains, using the Horatian example of vomiting after overeating or overdrinking.155 Nor do we take much pleasure in what we already possess because, as the Stoics lamented, we despise what we have in comparison with what we do not have. Some commentators have accused Hobbes of adopting the Calliclean model of itching and scratching, the endless seriatim satisfaction of immediate desires.156 But Hobbes explicitly rejects this metaphor, which we also saw in Bacon, because if something is acquired and then immediately lost there can be no prolonged happiness.157 The pleasure of felicity is not just continuous desire, not just the advance of the appetite from one good to another without irritation, fear, or disappointment, and not just the hope of attaining more power. It is also glory, the joy of the mind that results from imagining the superiority of one’s power to that of others. Hobbes makes the unsustainable claim, and one that he abandons later, that all joy of mind and thus all mental pleasure derived from the perception of our continual prospering is glory, and all

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grief of mind is the distress that follows from the awareness of our relative weakness. After all, it is possible to delight in one’s success without always imagining one’s success in contrast to the failure or lesser success of others. But he insists that all felicity is a continuous feeling of glory.158 Glory is no longer a possible adjunct of felicity, as it was in The Elements of Law. It has become the most important constituent passion of felicity.159 Hobbes consolidated his thoughts on felicity in Leviathan, shifting the balance from psychology back to process and returning to the simpler sort of psychological explanation which he had used in The Elements of Law. His best-known pronouncements about felicity are found in Leviathan but there is nothing new in them. They stress long-term activity and the fulfillment of our endless desire to attain and retain the power necessary to assure a contented life.160 He develops his account of power into an entire chapter, which once again takes as its point of departure Aristotle’s goods of body, soul, and fortune and stresses worldly goods.161 Science or philosophy, which implicates Aristotelian philosophical contemplation as well as natural science, is but “small Power”162 because it is not recognized by many people and hardly worth contending for. But Hobbes drops the requirement from the Anti-White that the prospering process should be trouble-free, that each increase in one’s power should be easily achievable. By the time he wrote Leviathan he had accepted that no life is free from fear and pain.163 But this requirement returns in a slightly modified form in De homine. There the continuous achievement of our goals must progress, as the eudaimonists had maintained, “with the least hindrance.”164 Struggling to attain riches, power, and reputation is not felicity.

3.12  Hobbes vs. the Ancients There are convergences and divergences between Hobbes’s concept of felicity and the ancient concept of eudaimonia in all of Hobbes’s discussions of felicity. Each of his discussions is framed in relation to recognizable classical elements of eudaimonia: the shared notion of long-term continuous striving; his attack on the concept of a supreme good or ultimate end and the internal tranquility taught by the “ancient moral philosophers”; and his conspicuous omission of moral virtue as the focus of striving and its replacement by the endless competition for ever more worldly power reflecting the Aristotelian goods of fortune, which the Hellenistic philosophers and the Stoics in particular considered a corruption of human nature. Like the eudaimonists he believed that everyone

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wants felicity but few people can attain it. The number of those in a position to compete for power, riches, and honor in seventeenth-century English society was small and those who achieved their quest for power over a long period of time were even fewer. But the attainment of felicity, conceived as a process and not a goal, was possible for those who achieved worldly success at the apex of English political and social life, particularly among the favored few at court.165 His concept of felicity stands in a different relationship to Aristotle’s concept of eudaimonia and to those of the Hellenistic schools, and we need to differentiate them. He rejects Aristotle’s notion that pleasure accompanies an internal settled state; instead pleasure is the internal motion of desiring, which ceases only upon death. Unlike Hobbes, Aristotle held that only a moderate amount of worldly goods is necessary to support a life of eudaimonia. Aristotle considered unlimited competition for wealth and power evil and destabilizing. Hobbes saw competition as part of the human condition and something which the state was established to control. But they agreed that we must be able to secure what we have attained and to protect what we possess. Most importantly, Hobbes rejects Aristotle’s emphasis on moral virtue as part of eudaimonia, that is, what makes human life genuinely good and praiseworthy. Hobbes’s concept of felicity was as much a challenge to the Hellenistic concept of eudaimonia, particularly the Stoic concept, as it was to Aristotle’s. But he had less in common with the Hellenists than with Aristotle because of their asceticism. Hobbes agreed with them that felicity is a long-term process of striving, but in every other important respect Hobbes diverged radically from them. Nature does not lead us to a life of internal tranquility, withdrawal from worldly competition, or the single-­ minded pursuit of moral virtue. Bacon’s attack on these aspects of ancient moral philosophy had been correct. Human nature is not as perfect as the eudaimonists thought it was. The best life for the individual is pursuit of worldly “advancement,” the “active” life of “deeds and works.” Tranquility, as Bacon observed, is compatible with activity. The tranquility of this life, Hobbes thought, is the tranquility of knowing that you are competing successfully for ever more power and the security that superior power provides. If the Hellenistic view of ataraxia was unachievable and the supreme good was a metaphysical fiction, then the value-laden Hellenistic view of human nature must also be wrong. Hobbes’s concept of felicity depends on accepting at face value the corrupt behavior against which the Hellenistic schools warned, the life of unrelenting, ever-increasing desire,

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the life dominated by the single-minded pursuit of worldly goods—wealth, power, and reputation. Hobbes makes the self-seeking vice of glory the central human passion in his early works and even equates felicity with continuous glory in the Anti-White. Felicity is not a struggle against worldly goods; it lies in the race for them itself. In this sense he stood the Hellenistic view of human nature on its head.

3.13  Dialectical Thinking and Inversion Hobbes’s account of felicity, his only highly original concept of a passion, seems to be the result of dialectical thinking, the synthesis of contrary or antithetical concepts into a new concept. The contemporary concept of happiness was in flux. Bacon had opposed the eudaimonists and supported an idea of the active good conceived as worldly advancement and accomplishment. The evidence suggests that Hobbes agreed with Bacon that the active life is happiest, and with Aristotle’s idea of happiness as the secure reward of prosperity in the Rhetoric. The Hellenistic concept of eudaimonia, with its emphasis on virtue, tranquility, and withdrawal from the world, was wrong. But contentment in worldly behavior and competition for power, honor, and riches, which the eudaimonists had attacked, Hobbes thought was right. He seems to have inverted and replaced the eudaimonists’ ultimate good with striving for wealth, power, and reputation as the goal to which we all aspire, based on a new calculus of the nature of the joy of the mind which emphasizes the continual satisfaction of increasing desires. He thus seems to have synthesized the ancient account of eudaimonia as successful and continuous striving (thesis) and the Baconian account of the good of the active life and worldly advancement (antithesis) in a new concept of felicity as continual, successful striving for power after power (synthesis). He elaborated this new concept with ideas drawn from Aristotle (prosperity, security, goods of body, soul and fortune, power as means to future goods), the Stoics (ever increasing desire, glory, competition), Bacon (tranquility in the active life), and his own philosophy and psychology (life as continuous change, happiness as continuous joy of the mind). If my analysis is correct, his use of dialectical thinking confirms the maturity and advanced nature of his creative processes. And it explains why he inverted the Stoic doctrine of ataraxia. Inversion was a way of combining the idea of continuous striving with Bacon’s “shew of advancement.”

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Hobbes’s concepts of ratiocination and felicity rejected the prevailing models, while his accounts of cognition and the passions generally accepted and drew on other ancient, medieval, and modern ideas and integrated them with the new physiological-mechanical paradigm. He rejected the Aristotelian-scholastic idea that the traditional rational soul is responsible for ratiocination, a notion that his mechanical philosophy effectively rendered impossible, and created one of the first psychological models of reasoning that was entirely secular and entirely physical. His concept of felicity was equally momentous. He apparently sought to reconstruct the ancient concept of eudaimonia and to redirect contemporary philosophers’ understanding of the concept in a new, worldly way. He failed. No version of eudaimonia, even a worldly one, was going to endure. But his accounts of both cognition and the passions made a valuable contribution—and one of the first—to the new science’s understanding of psychology and thus to its future.

Notes 1. Gary Hatfield, “The Cognitive Faculties,” in Garber and Ayers, Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, 2:953–1002; 953. 2. Philip Pettit, Made with Words: Hobbes on Language, Mind, and Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 2. 3. Hatfield, “Cognitive Faculties,” 953–1002; Tom Sorell, “Hobbes and Aristotle,” in Philosophy in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: Conversations with Aristotle, ed. Constance Blackwell and Sachiko Kusukawa (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), 364–80; 371; Pettit, Made with Words, esp. 9–11; Juhana Lemetti, “From Metaphysics to Ethics and Beyond,” 147–62. 4. Karl Schuhmann, “Hobbes and Telesio,” Hobbes Studies, 1 (1988): 109–33; Karl Schuhmann, “Hobbes and Renaissance Philosophy,” in Hobbes oggi, ed. Andrea Napoli and Guido Canziani (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1990), 331–49; Gianni Paganini, “Hobbes, Gassendi e la psicologia del meccanicismo,” in Napoli and Canziani, Hobbes oggi, 351–445; Tom Sorell, “Seventeenth-­century materialism: Gassendi and Hobbes,” in The Renaissance and 17th Century Rationalism, ed. G. H. R. Parkinson (London: Routledge, 2007), 235–72; Gordon Hull, Hobbes and the Making of Modern Political Thought (London: Continuum, 2009), 70–86. 5. Cees Leijenhorst, “Sense and Nonsense about Sense: Hobbes and the Aristotelians on Sense Perception and Imagination,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s “Leviathan,” ed. Patricia Springborg (Cambridge:

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Cambridge University Press, 2007), 82–108; Cees Leijenhorst, The Mechanisation of Aristotelianism: The Late Aristotelian Setting of Thomas Hobbes’ Natural Philosophy (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 56–100; Cees Leijenhorst, “Hobbes and Fracastoro,” Hobbes Studies, 9 (1996): 98–128; Cees Leijenhorst, “Motion, Monks and Golden Mountains: Campanella and Hobbes on Perception and Cognition,” Bruniana and Campanelliana, 3 (1997): 93–121. 6. Finke, Ward, and Smith, Creative Cognition, 39–40. 7. Richard S.  Peters, ed., Brett’s History of Psychology (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T.  Press, 1967), 328; Leijenhorst, “Sense and Nonsense,” 86; Bernard Gert, “Hobbes’s Psychology,” in Sorell, Cambridge Companion to Hobbes, 157–74; 159. 8. Aristotle, De anima (On the Soul), in The Works of Aristotle, trans. J.  A. Smith, ed. W.  D. Ross, vol. 3 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1931), 408b17–19, 429a19–25, 430a22–25. 9. Hobbes, Elements of Law I.14.1, 70. 10. Ibid., I.6.9, 27. 11. Ibid., I.11.4–5, 55. Also Hobbes, De Cive VI.19, 148; XVII.13, 262. 12. [Hobbes], “Third Set of Objections,” 129; Charles McCracken, “Knowledge of the Soul,” in Garber and Ayres, Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, 1:796–832; 819. 13. Charleton T.  Lewis and Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon, 1879), s. v. “animus” and “anima.” 14. Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 44, 339–40; ch. 46, 373. 15. Hobbes’s most complete materialistic account of these faculties is in Thomas Hobbes, Critique du “De Mundo” de Thomas White [hereafter Anti-White] (Paris: Librairie philosophique J. Vrin, co-edition with the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1973), ch. XXX. 16. Hobbes, Vita, xx–xxi; Hobbes, Concerning Body, IV.25.5, in EW, 1:394. 17. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, trans. R.  D. Hicks, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), bk. IX, sect. 44, 2:452–455; bk. X, sects. 39–43, 2: 568–73, and sects. 62–67, 2:592–599. This work was available to Hobbes in the Cavendish library. Richard Talaska, The Hardwick Library and Hobbes’s Early Intellectual Development (Charlottesville, VA: Philosophy Documentation Center, 2013), 79. 18. Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 56. 19. Daniel Garber, “Soul and Mind: Life and Thought in the Seventeenth Century,” in Garber and Ayers, Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, 1:759–95; 773. 20. Roberto Bondi, Introduzione a Telesio (Rome: Editori Laterza, 1997), 11, 76.

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21. William Harvey, On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals, trans. Robert Willis (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 1993), 74–81. 22. Ibid., 35–36; René Descartes, Discourse on the Method, in Cottingham, Stoothoff, and Murdoch, Philosophical Writings of Descartes, 1:111–51; 139. 23. Hobbes, Elements of Law I.1.7, 2. 24. Susan James, “The Passions in Metaphysics and the Theory of Action,” in Garber and Ayres, Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, 1:913–49; 924. 25. Galen, “The Soul’s Dependence on the Body,” in Galen, Selected Works, trans. P. N. Singer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), arts. 2–3, sects. 770–73, pp. 151–52. Works by Galen and Hippocrates were in the Cavendish library. Talaska, Hardwick Library, 85, 89. 26. Hobbes, Concerning Body IV.25.10, 403; Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 34, 207. 27. Peters, Brett’s History, 316. 28. Harvey, Motion of the Heart, 14, 73–74. 29. De somno et vigilia (On Sleep and Sleeplessness). Thomas Hobbes, “Excerpta de Tractatu Optico [II],” in Hobbes, Elements of Law, 211–26; ch. 4, art. 13, 220; Leijenhorst, Mechanisation of Aristotelianism, 81. 30. Rayler, Philosophy, 104–110, 278; Bunce, “Thomas Hobbes’ Relationship,” 42. 31. Francis Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum (A Grove of Trees) or, A Natural History, in Ten Centuries, ed. William Rawley (London, 1670), cent. I, sect. 69, 19. Hobbes may have observed or taken part in the natural philosophy experiments which supported Bacon’s views in Sylva sylvarum, which was in the Cavendish library. Raylor, Philosophy, 105–106; Talaska, Hardwick Library, 71. Also Daniel Garber, “Telesio among the Novatores: Telesio’s Reception in the Seventeenth Century,” in Early Modern Philosophers and the Renaissance Legacy, ed. Cecilia Muratori and Gianni Paganini (Switzerland: Springer, 2016), 119–33. 32. Rayler, Philosophy, 98; Noel Malcolm, Review of Talaska, The Hardwick Library and Hobbes’s Early Intellectual Development, Hobbes Studies, 26 (2013): 200–203; 202. 33. Hobbes, Concerning Body IV.25.5, 393. 34. Bernardino Telesio, De rerum natura juxta propria principia (On the Nature of Things according to Their Own Principles), ed. Vincenzo Spampanato, 3 vols. (Modena, Genoa and Rome: A.  F. Formiggini, 1910–23), bk. VII, ch. 2, 3:2–4. 35. Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum, cent. IX, sect. 876, 189. 36. Ibid., cent. X, sect. 945, 203. 37. Hobbes, Concerning Body IV.25.2–4, 390–92.

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38. Hobbes, Elements of Law I.2.4, 4. 39. Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. Barber, 159; Aristotle, Historia animalium (History of Animals), trans. D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1910), 514a6–22. 40. Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 59. Carruthers reads Aristotle’s account of the physiology of memory in De memoria et reminiscentia (On Memory and Recollection) as qualifying what he says elsewhere about sensation in animals. 41. Hobbes, Concerning Body IV.25.2, 391; Hobbes, Anti-White XXX.3, 349–50; Yves Charles Zarka, “Le vocabulaire de l’apparaître: Le champ sémantique de la notion de phantasma,” in Hobbes et son vocabulaire, ed. Yves Charles Zarka (Paris: Librairie philosophique J. Vrin, 1992), 13–29; 24–25; Peters, Brett’s History, 152. 42. Hobbes, Elements of Law I.2.8, 5–6. 43. Robert Pasnau, Metaphysical Themes 1274–1671 (Oxford: Clarendon, 2013), 507–12; Leijenhorst, Mechanisation of Aristotelianism, 73. 44. I owe this point to an anonymous reviewer. See also Antoni Malet, “The Power of Images: Mathematics and Metaphysics in Hobbes’s Optics,” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science Part A, 32 (2001): 303–33; 305–307; Thomas Hobbes, De homine (London: Andrew Crooke, 1658), II.1–7, 5–12. 45. Aristotle, Rhetorica (Rhetoric), in The Works of Aristotle, trans. W. Rhys Roberts, ed. W. D. Ross, vol. 11 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1952), 1370a28–31; Hobbes, Concerning Body IV.25.7, 396; Leijenhorst, Mechanisation of Aristotelianism, 81; Zarka, “Vocabulaire,” 24–25. 46. Aristotle, Parva naturalia: De somno et vigilia (Short Treatise: On Dreams and Sleeplessness), in The Works of Aristotle, trans. J. I. Beare, ed. W. D. Ross, vol. 3 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1908), 460a1–2; Leijenhorst, Mechanisation of Aristotelianism, 95. 47. Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 2, 5. Also Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. W. D. Ross (Oxford: Clarendon, 1928), 980b27–28; Peters, Brett’s History, 152. 48. Hobbes, Elements of Law I.3.6, 11; Aristotle, De memoria et reminisentia, 452b27–28; Samantha Frost, Lessons from a Materialist Thinker: Hobbesian Reflections on Ethics and Politics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 33–34. 49. See esp. Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe, trans. R.  E. Latham (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 153, which has a very different materialist explanation from that of Hobbes. 50. Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 2, 5; Hobbes, Anti-White, XXX.4, 350. 51. Hobbes, Elements of Law I.3.4, 10; Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 2, 5.

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52. His theory of action is beyond the scope of my subject. For a stimulating discussion which explains the role of the rebound see Samantha Frost, “Hobbes, Life, and the Politics of Self-Preservation: The Role of Materialism in Hobbes’s Political Philosophy,” in Interpreting Hobbes’s Political Philosophy, ed. S. A. Lloyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 70–92. However, I have been unable to understand how an impulse to persist in living can be separated for an impulse to avoid death. 53. Pettit, Made with Works, 39. 54. Aristotle, De memoria et reminiscentia, 451b10–25; Peters, Brett’s History, 119. 55. Cicero, De inventione (On Invention), in De inventione; De optimo genere oratorum; Topica, trans. H.  M. Hubbell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949), 2–346; bk. II, sect. 53, para. 160, 326–27; Frances A.  Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 53–57. Hubbell translated “prudentia” as “wisdom” rather than “prudence.” 56. Girolamo Fracastoro, Turrius sive de intellectione (The Tower, or On Intellection), in Girolamo Fracastoro, Opera omnia (Venice, 1555), fol. 165r – fol. 206v; fol. 175r. 57. Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 3, 8–10; Jeffrey Barnouw, “Respice Finem! The Importance of Purpose in Hobbes’s Psychology,” in Thomas Hobbes: De la métaphysique a la politique: Colloque Franco-américain de Nantes, ed. Martin Bertman and Michel Malherbe (Paris: Librairie philosophique J. Vrin, 1989), 47–61; 53–54. 58. Carruthers, Book of Memory, 323–24. 59. Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 3, 9–10. 60. Ibid., ch. 7, 30; Michael Ayers, “Theories of Knowledge and Belief,” in Garber and Ayers, Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, 2:1003–61; 1042. 61. Plutarch, “Of Moral Virtue,” in Plutarch’s Moralia: Twenty Essays, trans. Philemon Holland (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1927), 1–27; 14–15. The Cavendish library also contained Plutarch’s works in Greek and Latin. Talaska, Hardwick Library, 103. 62. For the role of emotions in Hobbes’s theory of human action and its revolutionary attack on the scholastic concept of the soul, see Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty, 26–27. 63. Telesio, De rerum natura, bk. VIII, ch. 1, 3:87. 64. Leijenhorst, Mechanisation of Aristotelianism, 82–83. 65. Hobbes, Anti-White XXX.14, 355; Hobbes, Concerning Body, IV.25.5, 393. 66. Descartes, Discourse on the Method, 139–41. 67. Pettit, Made with Words, 2, 28, 144.

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68. Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 5, 21–22; Hobbes, Elements of Law I.5.1–2, 18. 69. Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 2, 8; ch. 5, 17. 70. Hobbes, Elements of Law I.5.11, 22; Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 5, 18; Hobbes, Concerning Body I.1.2, 3. What exactly Hobbes means by reason is a subject of dispute. Cf. for example Pettit, Made with Words, 37–47; Bernard Gert, Hobbes: Prince of Peace (Cambridge: Polity, 2010), 48–53; John Deigh, “Method, Science, and Philosophy: Reason and Reasoning,” in Lloyd, Bloomsbury Companion, 71–75. Michael LeBuffe argues that Hobbes reverted to a more traditional concept of reason in De cive but that he was not serious. Michael LeBuffe, “Motivation, Reason, and the Good in On the Citizen,” in Hobbes’s “On the Citizen”: A Critical Guide, ed. Robin Douglass and Johan Olsthoorn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 89–107. 71. Leijenhorst, “Motion, Monks,” 113–15; Petrus Ramus, That There is But One Method of Establishing a Science, in Renaissance Philosophy: New Translations, ed. Leonard A. Kennedy, trans. E. J. Barber and Leonard Kennedy (The Hague: Mouton, 1973), 118. 72. Hobbes, Concerning Body I.6.2, 66–68; Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, in The Works of Aristotle, trans. G.  R. G.  Mure, ed. W.  D. Ross, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1908), 71b19–72a6; Aristotle, Physics, in The Works of Aristotle, trans. R. P. Hardie and R. K. Gaye, ed. W. D. Ross, vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1927), 184a1–21. 73. Hobbes, Concerning Body I.1.3, 3–5; Arash Abizadeh, Hobbes and the Two Faces of Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 77–78; Pettit, Made with Words, 158–59 n. 9. 74. Martine Pécharman denies that there is a connection, but she opposes the stronger linkage claimed by Gabriel Nuchelmans, not the linkage of a suggestive metaphor. Martine Pécharman, “Hobbes on Logic, or How to Deal with Aristotle’s Legacy,” in Martinich and Hoekstra, Oxford Handbook of Hobbes, 21–59; 42; Leijenhorst, Mechanisation of Aristotelianism, 40; Jan Prins, “Hobbes and the School of Padua: Two Incompatible Approaches to Science,” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, 22 (1990): 26–46; 42–46; Gabriel Nuchelmans, Late Scholastic and Humanist Theories of the Proposition (Amsterdam: Royal Dutch Academy of Science, 1980), 169. 75. Hobbes, Elements of Law I.5.12, 22; Hobbes, De Cive II.1, 99; Raylor, Philosophy, 190. 76. Pettit, Made with Words, 25; Abizadeh, Hobbes, 65. 77. Two, more complete accounts of Hobbes’s theory of cognition may be found in Frost, Materialist Thinker, esp. 15–68; and Pettit, Made with Words, esp. 9–54. But for correctives of Pettit’s book see Kathryn Tabb, “The Fate of Nebuchadnezzar: Curiosity and Human Nature in Hobbes,”

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Hobbes Studies, 27 (2014): 13–34; Marcus P. Adams, “The Wax and the Mechanical Mind: Reexamining Hobbes’s Objections to Descartes’ Meditations,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 22 (2014): 403–24. 78. Even there he quarantines the concept in a chapter on religion. Hobbes, Elements of Law I.11.5, 55. 79. Leo Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and Its Genesis, trans. Elsa M.  Sinclair (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 35–41. The rest of this chapter is a revised and repurposed version of James J.  Hamilton, “Hobbes on Felicity: Aristotle, Bacon and Eudaimonia,” Hobbes Studies, 29 (2016): 129–47. 80. Skinner, Visions of Politics, 3:142–76; Skinner, From Humanism to Hobbes, 168–72. 81. Susan James, Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 4. 82. Christopher Tilmouth, Passion’s Triumph over Reason: A History of the Moral Imagination from Spencer to Rochester (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 213–34. 83. Tacitus, The Annals of Imperial Rome, trans. Michael Grant (Baltimore: Penguin, 1966), 162; Lucretius, Nature of the Universe, 60; Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, bk. VII, sect. 112, 2:219; Hobbes, Elements of Law I.9.19 and 21, 46–47; Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 6, 26. 84. And some find it unconvincing. Richard Peters, Hobbes (Baltimore: Penguin, 1956), 144–49. 85. Noah Dauber, State and Commonwealth: The Theory of the State in Early Modern England 1549-1640 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 212–13. 86. Gianni Paganini, “Hobbes’s Philosophical Method and the Passion of Curiosity,” in Lloyd, Interpreting Hobbes’s Political Philosophy, 50–69. 87. Jamie Dow, Passions and Persuasion in Aristotle’s “Rhetoric” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 145–81. 88. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Thomas C.  Faulkner, Nicolas K.  Kiesling, and Rhonda L.  Blair, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989–2000), Part. I, sect. 2, memb. 3, subsect. 3, 1:255. 89. Thomas Aquinas, The Summa Theologica, trans. English Dominicans, vol. 3 (London: Catholic Way Publishing, 2014), I–II, q. 37, a. 4, co., p. 139. This work was in the Cavendish library. Talaska, Hardwick Library, 42. 90. Telesio, De rerum natura, 3:8; Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, Part. I, sect. 1, memb. 2, subsect. 8, 1:160–61; Leijenhorst, “Motion, Monks,” 105; Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 6, 25. 91. Hobbes, Concerning Body IV.25.12, 407. In Leviathan Hobbes had conceived of vital motion more broadly as the circulation of the blood, “con-

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coction” of animal spirits, and other internal bodily functions. Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 6, 23. 92. Abizadeh, Hobbes, 139. 93. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, bk. X, sects. 132–33, 2:657. 94. Relevant works by Aristotle, Stoic writers and Bacon were in the Cavendish library. Talaska, Hardwick Library, 70–71. 95. Skinner, Visions of Politics, 3:44, 52. 96. Hoekstra, “Hobbes’s Thucydides,” in Martinich and Hoekstra, Oxford Handbook of Hobbes, 547–74; 565–66 n. 80; Raylor, Philosophy, 70, 187. Evidence of Hobbes’s participation in the translation of the Historie of the Raigne of King Henry VII into Latin is a passage from The Elements of Law, which may be based on his recollection of it. Hobbes, Elements of Law II.8.2, 169. 97. Martinich, Hobbes, 67–69; Gabriella Slomp, Thomas Hobbes and the Political Philosophy of Glory (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 50; Malet, “Power of Images,” 316 and n. 25. 98. Annabel Brett, “‘The Matter, Forme, and Power of a Common-wealth’: Thomas Hobbes and Late Renaissance Commentary on Aristotle’s Politics,” Hobbes Studies, 23 (2010): 72–102; 81 n. 43; Ugo Pagallo, “Bacon, Hobbes and the homo homini deus formula,” Hobbes Studies, 11 (1998): 61–69; 63. 99. Strauss, Political Philosophy of Hobbes, 134–36. 100. Bacon, Advancement of Learning, 251. 101. Thomas Hobbes, On Man, in Man and Citizen, ed. Bernard Gert, trans. Charles T. Wood, T. S. K. Scott-Craig, and Bernard Gert (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1972), XI.15, 54. 102. Darrin McMahon, The Pursuit of Happiness: A History from the Greeks to the Present (London: Penguin, 2007), 6–7. 103. Martha C.  Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 31. 104. Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, trans. W. D, Ross (Oxford: Clarendon, 1908), 1178a6–10. 105. Richard Kraut, Aristotle on the Human Good (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 4–9. 106. Ibid., 160; C. D. C. Reeve, Action, Contemplation, and Happiness: An Essay on Aristotle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 101–102. 107. Reeve, Action, Contemplation, and Happiness, 270. 108. Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, 1178b33–1179a9. 109. Ibid., 1098b24–29, 1099a31–1099b8; McMahon, Pursuit of Happiness, 47. 110. Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, 1124a23–24.

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111. McMahon, Pursuit of Happiness, 64–65. 112. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, trans. J.  E. King (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1945), bk. V, sect. 15, 468–72. 113. Seneca, “Consolation to Helvia,” in The Stoic Philosophy of Seneca, trans. Moses Hadas (New York: Norton, 1958), 107–36; 111. 114. Sextus Empiricus, Against the Ethicists, in Sextus Empiricus, Against Physicists; Against Ethicists, trans. R. G. Bury (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 384–509; ch. III, sects. 88–89, 429; ch. IV, sects. 112–18, 439, 441, 443. 115. Epicurus, “Letter to Menoeceus,” in The Stoic and Epicurean Philosophers, ed. Whitney J. Oates (New York: Modern Library, 1940), 30–33. 116. Fragment 85, in Oates, Stoic and Epicurean Philosophers, 50. 117. Nussbaum, Therapy of Desire, 30–31. 118. The Greek Stoa may not have held this view. Cicero reports that Chrysippus, using the metaphor of a race, held that it was acceptable for one to pursue one’s interests and strive to win, if one did so fairly. Cicero, De officiis (On Duties), trans. Walter Miller (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), bk. III, sect. 10, para. 42, 311. 119. Skinner, Visions of Politics, 3:42. 120. Tilmouth, Passion’s Triumph, 228; Hobbes, Elements of Law I.9.21, 47–48. 121. Niall Rudd, trans., Horace: Satires and Epistles; Persius: Satires (London: Penguin, 2005), 43. 122. For example, Justus Lipsius, On Constancy, trans. Sir John Stradling, ed. John Sellars (Exeter: Bristol Phoenix Press, 2006), ch. 19, 112–14. 123. Keith Thomas, The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfillment in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 15. 124. Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Minde in Generall (London, 1630), 289. 125. Quoted in Paul Slack, “Material Progress and the Challenge of Affluence in Seventeenth-Century England,” Economic History Review, 62 (2009): 576–603: 579. 126. Quoted in Thomas, Ends of Life, 29. 127. Slack, “Material Progress,” 590. 128. McMahon, Pursuit of Happiness, 195. 129. Bacon, Advancement of Learning, 245. 130. Ibid., 247. 131. Ibid., 248. 132. Ibid., 249. Also Tuck, Philosophy and government, 112–13. 133. Bacon, Advancement of Learning, 250–52. 134. Ibid, 652–53 n. 249. 135. Ibid., 249.

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136. Hobbes, Elements of Law I.7.7, 30; Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 11, 47; Hobbes, De homine XI.15, 66. 137. Hobbes, De homine XI.15, 66. 138. F.  S. McNeilly, The Anatomy of Leviathan (London: Macmillan, 1968), 129–36. 139. Runco, Creativity, 83. For other examples (or possible examples) of Hobbes’s use of inversion see Nicholas Gooding and Kinch Hoekstra, “Hobbes and Aristotle on the Foundation of Political Science,” in Douglass and Olsthoorn, Hobbes’s “On the Citizen,” 31–55; 48–49; Kinch Hoekstra, “A lion in the house: Hobbes and democracy,” in Brett and Tully, Rethinking the Foundations, 191–218; 194–95; Kinch Hoekstra, “Tyrannus Rex vs. Leviathan,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 82 (2001): 420–46; 439 n. 10. 140. V. J. McGill, The Idea of Happiness (New York: Praeger, 1967), 266. 141. Hobbes, Art of Rhetorique, I.5, 43, 45. Cf. Aristotle, Rhetorica, 1360b14–19. 142. Hobbes, Art of Rhetorique, II.19, 90. 143. There is a long discussion of the avocations of the emperors in the Essays, where Bacon laments that kings have many things to fear but little to desire. There is also a shorter discussion in De augmentis, where Bacon argues that even the mighty are not satisfied with the pursuit of merely sensual pleasures. The latter text is closer to the context of Hobbes’s use of the same examples. Bacon, Advancement of Learning, 653 n. 249; Francis Bacon, Essays, in Bacon, Major Works, 341–456; 376. 144. Hobbes, Elements of Law I.7.7, 30. 145. Ibid. I.9.21, 48. 146. This is not an Aristotelian formulation, which differs greatly from Hobbes’s materialistic one. 147. Hobbes, Elements of Law I.8.4, 34. 148. Aristotle, Rhetorica, 1360b19–28. 149. Hobbes, Elements of Law I.9.1, 36–37. 150. Ibid. I.8.8, 36; Hobbes, De Cive I.2, 91–92; Hobbes, Anti-White XXXVIII.8, 418–19. 151. For the origin of Hobbes’s concept of glory see Chap. 5. 152. Hobbes, Anti-White XXXVIII.9, 419. 153. Ibid. XXXVIII.6, 415–16. 154. Ibid. XXXVIII.7, 416–17. 155. Ibid. XXXVIII.5, 415. 156. Yves Charles Zarka, La décision métaphysique de Hobbes: Conditions de la politique, 2nd ed. (Paris: Librairie philosophique J.  Vrin, 1999), 11; Nicholas P.  White, A Brief History of Happiness (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 45; Tilmouth, Passion’s Triumph, 224.

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157. Hobbes, Anti-White XXXVIII.6, 416. 158. Ibid. XXXVIII.7, 417. 159. Gianni Paganini considers Hobbes’s definition less competitive in the Anti-White than in The Elements of Law, but the prominence of glory guarantees that there will be competition. Gianni Paganini, “Early Modern Epicureanism: Gassendi and Hobbes in Dialogue on Psychology, Ethics, and Politics,” in The Oxford Handbook of Epicurus and Epicureanism, ed. Phillip Mitsis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 671–710; 688. 160. Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 6, 29; ch. 11, 47. 161. Ibid., ch. 10, 41. 162. Ibid., ch. 10, 42. 163. Ibid., ch. 6, 29. 164. Hobbes, On Man XI.15, 54. 165. Hamilton, “Social Context,” 14–16.

CHAPTER 4

Moral Relativity and the Sovereign

4.1   Overview Ancient Pyrrhonism had an enormous impact on intellectuals in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.1 The Pyrrhonists opposed all other philosophical schools on the grounds that their doctrines are all equally plausible and we can never know which is true. The destructive consequences of a skeptical doctrine that questioned the value of all knowledge undermined traditional philosophy and raised doubts about the validity of the new science. I will show that Hobbes co-opted it by integrating Pyrrhonist and traditional ideas and arguments in his philosophy, though he was not a skeptic in the Pyrrhonist sense. The result was the emergence of new principles and constructs and the radical transformation of traditional moral and political philosophy. The result is one of his greatest philosophical contributions, moral subjectivity (the individual determines what is moral), and relativity (each person has his own good and bad) within the context of a theory of natural law. My argument will make a number of specific points. First, he adopted Pyrrhonist arguments to support a vision of the moral relativity of the individual outside the commonwealth, that is, in the state of nature. Second, his long-term solution to this problem, an absolute sovereign, and the moral supremacy of the individual in the state of nature seem to draw on a Reformation theological debate conducted on the basis of Pyrrhonist argumentation. Third, Pyrrhonist arguments help to explain © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. J. Hamilton, Hobbes’s Creativity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27733-7_4

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some of the most unconventional aspects of his thought. I will refer to the Ten Modes of Aenesidemus and the five Additional Modes formulated by later skeptics as enumerated by Sextus Empiricus, which form the theoretical foundation of Pyrrhonism.2 In concluding I will suggest that Hobbes’s integration of Pyrrhonist relativity and traditional moral philosophy by an apparent process of sepconic articulation, his radical expansion of the concept of sovereign power, his mitigation of the moral force of the law of nature in the state of nature, and his integration of Pyrrhonist ideas with other parts of his philosophy, were a monumental creative achievement.

4.2   Moral Relativity in The Elements of Law Hobbes may have learned much about ancient and early modern Pyrrhonism in the 1620s from one of its devotees, his French friend Charles du Bosc. The works of the ancient skeptic Sextus Empiricus were more popular on the Continent than in England and were widely available in France. His ideas were of great interest to the Parisian intellectual circles to which Hobbes was introduced, especially during his third trip to the Continent when he became closely associated with Mersenne, who had written a critical assessment of the Modes of Aenesidemus. But Hobbes did not hesitate to make dogmatic statements and was unsympathetic to the Pyrrhonists’ programmatic suspension of belief in all philosophical dogmas for the sake of internal tranquility. The Elements of Law reached a number of traditional conclusions familiar to contemporaries. There is an unalterable law of nature discoverable by reason which is the moral law, which is the basis of virtue and vice, and which is the law of God. But these views are not as straightforward as they seem. Hobbes ultimately undermines the traditional doctrine that “the civil law cannot make that to be done jure, which is against the law divine, or of nature.”3 Much of his moral philosophy was highly unconventional. He rejected the metaphysical foundations of all previous systems of universal morality. There are no Platonic or neo-Platonic ideas, no Aristotelian telos or purpose, and no Stoic or Thomist right reason in nature: “seeing right reason is not existent [in rerum natura, in the nature of things], the reason of some man, or men, must supply the place thereof.”4 Ioannis Evrigenis cites this passage to support his view that Lucretius and Epicureanism account for Hobbes’s rejection of a universal standard of truth and the need for a judge.5 But as I will show, Hobbes seems rather

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to have been following Reformation controversialists who argued that the answer to the problem of distinguishing truth from falsehood in theological disputes was a person. His antidote to the problem of moral relativity was an absolute sovereign as well as universal natural law, but the sovereign would prove to be more important. Hobbes embraced moral relativity for people living in the state of nature, before the institution of commonwealths, based on the supremacy of the subjective judgment of each individual. Individuals are disposed psychologically and physiologically to seek their own self-interest in reaction to external stimuli. Whatever they desire is called good and whatever they seek to avoid is called evil. They are driven instinctively to avoid death, which he sometimes calls the greatest evil. The laws of nature are rational rules to achieve the imperative of avoiding death, the peace that can satisfy that imperative, and a life of convenience.6 They have the certainty of universal conclusions of reason (or of the commands of God),7 but they are seldom effective in the state of mere nature where each person has an equal right to pursue her own good or avoid her own evil as she sees fit in accordance with her conscience. She alone is judge of their proper meaning and application as well as her compliance, which is a prescription for partiality. The environment is hostile and it is her natural right to avoid death: “nothing is unlawful to any man that tendeth to his own safety or commodity.”8 A major theme of Sextus Empiricus’s Against the Ethicists is that there is no absolute good or evil by nature, and that consequently the only avenue to human happiness is to suspend judgment (the practice of epoché) about all philosophical doctrines and not to pursue our desires or seek to avoid our aversions with any enthusiasm, which disturbs our tranquility. He begins from the premise that good is what attracts us and is useful, and evil is the opposite. Then he proceeds by a series of reductiones ad absurdum to attack the views of opposing schools on the nature of absolute good and evil, which he says are entirely subjective: “since the intelligence of each man disagrees with that of his neighbour in respect of its judgment, each must necessarily regard as good that which appears so to himself. But what appears good to each man is not good by nature.”9 Hobbes had his own psychology but he agreed on the subjectively determined nature of good and evil for each individual and asserted the consequence of moral relativity in the state of nature. For him, the idea of subjective good and evil was a scientific conclusion,10 and unlike Sextus’s, his theory of moral relativity was associated with a theory of immutable natural law.

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For Sextus, the theory functioned only as a working premise drawn from commonly accepted opinion as a means to undercut traditional moral philosophy. For Sextus moral relativity was also an argument for the Pyrrhonist lifestyle of wise serenity or ataraxia.11 He drew the political conclusion that if a tyrant commands a skeptic to do something prohibited “he will perchance choose the one course and avoid the other owing to the preconception due to his ancestral laws and customs.”12 Michel de Montaigne and his followers accepted the Pyrrhonist prescription of suspension of judgment on all doctrines and of calmness as the way to happiness. They also emphasized moral and religious conformity and political obedience based on established customs, laws, and beliefs. If Hobbes found the Pyrrhonist prescription for emotional quietude unrealistic, he found common ground with the French skeptics on acquiescence in the political and religious realm and the subject’s duty of obedience (with certain exceptions). But for Hobbes obedience to the sovereign replaced acquiescence in the established laws, customs, and opinions.13 Hobbes’s discussion of morality in the state of nature in The Elements of Law utilizes the Modes of Aenesidemus in a number of ways. First, in arguing that good and evil, right and wrong have relative meanings, he resorts to the second of the Ten Modes, differences among persons (persons are pleased and displeased by different things because people are composed differently).14 Disagreement about value is embedded in individual physical differences, as we saw in Chapter 3. Second, he enlists in an argument for his concept of science a number of factors that produce relativity about the virtues and vices as well as about good and evil, including the classical skeptical problem of sense deception (interpreted in a new way),15 differences in human passions, and the classical rhetorical technique of paradiastole (in which one word is redescribed in terms of a related one), “scarce two men agreeing what is to be called good, and what evil; what liberality, what prodigality; what valour, what temerity.”16 People use different evaluative terms for the same thing because they have different feelings about it. The consequences in the state of nature are moral chaos, conflict, and war because of relativity of meaning (the eighth Mode). Third, Pyrrhonists cite, as evidence that there is no right or wrong by nature, a number of sexual practices which are accepted in some places and not in others, including homosexuality, incest, holding women in common, polygamy, and adultery.17 Hobbes’s deployment of these examples reflects the tenth Mode, different laws, and customs.

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There is such a great variety of them that no single one can be right. He declares that it is the duty of the sovereign to prohibit such practices because the sovereign has the duty under natural law to “improve” or increase the population. But he concludes that it is not clear whether people living outside a commonwealth would break the law of nature by engaging in such practices.18 In effect, Hobbes accepted the arguments of undecidable dissension and relativity on these questions for individuals in the state of nature. To provide a long-term solution to this dilemma he appears to have borrowed from one of the most important early modern applications of Pyrrhonism, the Reformation debate between Catholics and Protestants on the proper judge in determining the canonicity and interpretation of scripture.19 To resolve the problem of doubt Pyrrhonists considered whether an epistemological criterion, or agreed test, could establish truth. The criterion could be a person, the senses, reason, or a combination of sense and reason.20 But Pyrrhonists argued that none of them met exacting logical requirements and that doubt was inescapable. The Catholic and Protestant “judges” functioned like the Pyrrhonist concept of a criterion on the canonicity and interpretation of scripture by providing answers to controversial questions on which salvation could be attained. Hobbes, who rejected the concept of an epistemological criterion twice in discussing the classical skeptical problem of how we distinguish being awake from dreaming, found the senses and reason wanting because, although they could produce science, both commonly fail us. People reason badly because of the deceptions of sense (believing that secondary qualities are real), the widespread use of varying names for the same thing, and the proclivity to reason fallaciously.21 He was confident that truth could be established by correcting sense and by thinking in a philosophically sound way. By doing so, he claimed, he had established a set of laws of nature scientifically. But two fundamental problems remained. First, there is a paucity of Hobbesian philosophers and people who act rationally. The “vulgar” (Vulgo) or common people, the poor masses, especially have “no known measure of good and evil, and regard justice / and injustice as mere words.”22 Second, some problems of great importance and contentiousness, particularly theological, moral, and property issues, cannot be resolved by reason alone. Hence the necessity of a mechanism to define norms and resolve disagreements in everyday life. Neither Catholics nor Protestants were skeptics about their own beliefs, but they found the Pyrrhonist Modes useful in attacking each other and

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undermining their opponents’ chosen judge. Protestants argued that the judge was the individual’s own conscience guided by scripture and, in the Anglican version, the testimony of the earliest witnesses of Christ’s message and universal tradition. Catholics believed that the judge was the infallible pope guided by the Church fathers, Church traditions, and general councils. They argued that scripture cannot determine its own canonicity and interpretation, and that therefore the faith of Protestants was laid on uncertain ground. They charged that the individual conscience could lead to as many judges as there are individuals, which was no judge at all (the first additional Mode, undecidable dissension). If there is no agreement, the meaning of scripture is undecidable and our salvation is at risk. Protestants countered that the Catholic doctrine of papal infallibility is only a pretext for clerical manipulation of believers for personal and institutional aggrandizement and that an infallible judge needs its own infallible ground, which needs a further infallible ground and so on (the second additional Mode, infinite regress). They also argued that Catholics believe the doctrine of papal infallibility because they are told to do so, and they do so because of the doctrine of infallibility, resulting in circularity (the fifth additional Mode). An English version of the Reformation debate can be found in The Religion of Protestants a Safe Way to Salvation by William Chillingworth, in which Chillingworth debated the Jesuit controversialist Matthew Wilson (also known as Edward Knott).23 According to Aubrey, Chillingworth, Hobbes’s friend from Great Tew, “much delighted in Sextus Empeiricus.”24 The debate between Chillingworth and Wilson may have supplied or reinforced Hobbes’s choice of his own judges. He seems to have adopted the Catholic judge (with a Protestant twist), a single deciding person, the sovereign considered as a natural or corporate person (an assembly), for theological and moral questions involving people living in commonwealths. The sovereign in this sense is thus analogous to the pope. Hobbes also seems to have adopted the Protestant judge, the individual’s conscience, for theological and moral decisions of people living in the state of nature (including sovereigns in international affairs). The individual in the state of nature was analogous to a Protestant: he must make his own theological and moral decisions and take responsibility for them. For Hobbes, the sovereign, empowered by the consent of subjects in the covenant of subjection, served as a political criterion, not an epistemological one.25 A sovereign was necessary because no one could agree on the truth of matters that caused conflict. For the Pyrrhonists there are two

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types of criterion, a criterion to establish reality and a criterion of action. Montaigne’s criterion (mire de la verité et de la raison) was actually a criterion of action, the accepted opinions and customs of each country.26 Hobbes’s sovereign judge also functions only as a criterion of action. It does not necessarily establish the truth. Hobbes agreed with the Catholics that scripture does not interpret itself and that Christians must submit to the interpretation of a human judge.27 But he was opposed to papal or any other form of infallibility on the canonicity or interpretation of scripture.28 Chillingworth had taught that Christian subjects have a problem of obedience only if the ruler ceases to hold the fundamental article of faith, that Jesus is the Christ (Messiah). Then the ruler becomes an infidel. Hobbes, who adopted this view, believed that it might be necessary in these circumstances for Christians to die for their beliefs rather than to obey. But there was nothing that could justify disobeying a Christian sovereign on religious grounds, because there was nothing that a Christian sovereign could command that would endanger our salvation and we are free secretly to believe whatever we want on non-essentials, as long as we conform outwardly.29 Transferring the concept of a judge from the domain of theology to that of political and moral philosophy, Hobbes holds that the sovereign, whether an individual or an assembly, has an effective monopoly of all civil power including the power to define by law all moral terms and other terms that could cause controversy, such as conflicts over property claims.30 Sovereigns can violate the law of nature but are bound in conscience to comply with it and govern for the good of the people “to the utmost of their endeavour, by God Almighty, under the pain of eternal death.”31 Chillingworth had taught that God expects Christians to use their “best” or “utmost endeavours” to believe and live according to scripture since God does not expect us to do the impossible. Perhaps it is therefore not surprising that we first encounter the notion of “best” or “utmost endeavour” in an early draft of a passage in which Hobbes reconciles his laws of nature to scripture. He justifies the idea that they oblige only in foro interno (in the internal court, the court of conscience), which supports the relativity of moral judgments in the state of nature, with the claim found in Chillingworth that “Christ required no more than our best endeavour.”32 But Hobbes neglected to go back and conform the previous chapter containing the doctrine of obligation in foro interno to this requirement. He was concerned only to ensure that it applied to the law of nature requiring keeping covenants, the essential means by which individuals

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secured their escape from the state of nature by submitting to a sovereign ruler.33 He would later apply it to all the laws of nature in De cive.34 For Hobbes there are in principle no prohibitions that are always binding in foro externo (in the external court) in the state of nature (with the specific exceptions of the prohibitions on drunkenness and cruelty in De cive). The appearance in Chillingworth of the individual conscience as judge supported by Pyrrhonist argumentation and the requirement of “best” or “utmost endeavour,” alongside what may have been a source of the basic theology of The Elements of Law, suggests the pivotal influence of Chillingworth on these aspects of Hobbes’s thinking.

4.3   Moral Relativity in De Cive In De cive Hobbes continued the task of reconciling his theory of the immutable law of nature to the themes of the moral subjectivity and relativity of the individual in the state of nature and of the sovereign as a criterion of action, and in doing so, employed substantially more Pyrrhonist analysis. In Chapter 2 he launched a Pyrrhonist attack on the views of other philosophers on the law of nature, questioning their judge or criterion of action and wielding the first additional Mode of undecidable dissension.35 The argument against knowledge of truth from the disagreement of philosophers is a fundamental Pyrrhonist ploy. Hobbes often emphasizes disagreement about the law of nature, but he also insists that though people disagree on short-term good and evil, they can agree on the long-term evil of violent death and the rationality of avoiding it by following the law of nature dictated by reason to achieve and maintain peace.36 Thus there is an objective dimension to the laws of nature despite the subjectivity and relativity of their interpretation and application among people in everyday life. The law of nature is immutable and eternal but only in a special sense captured in Pyrrhonist accents. The vices, Hobbes says, “will never be lawfull; nor the contrary vertues to these ever unlawfull, as we take them for dispositions of the mind, that is, as they are considered in the Court of Conscience, where onely they oblige, and are Lawes. Yet actions may be so diversified by circumstances, and the Civill Law, that what’s done with equity at one time, is guilty of iniquity at another; and what suits with reason at one time, is contrary to it another.”37 Application of the law of nature is normally subjective and variable, and the reasons which Hobbes gives are a Hobbesian turn on the tenth Mode, different laws and

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customs, and the eighth Mode, relativity. Moreover, Hobbes employs paradiastole again to point out the epistemological problems with the concepts of virtue and vice.38 There is agreement only on what the virtues and vices are, not on what they mean,39 due to relativity (the eighth Mode) and undecidable dissension (the first additional Mode). The laws of nature become actual laws by God’s command in scripture.40 But Hobbes asserts that five of the Ten Commandments—almost all of the second table, the secular commandments—are what the civil laws determine them to be. He mentions the remainder of the second table (not to covet your neighbor’s house or wife) but dismisses it. It cannot be a civil law because it concerns only a mental state.41 The five other commandments, which for Hobbes are all natural as well as divine laws in accordance with Calvinist tradition, have no settled meaning in the state of nature. The commandments that address property questions are inconsistent with and trumped by the natural right of everyone to everything, a situation which ends when the civil law defines the rights of individuals and abolishes the right to all things. Moreover, Hobbes repeats his permissive attitude toward the sexual practices used by Pyrrhonists to question universal norms. The net effect is to undermine divine and natural law.42 Three of the five commandments become applicable only in so far as the sovereign defines them (theft, marriage) or creates institutions that give a commandment effect (establishing courts of law to take testimony). Until then, taking does not count as stealing, fornication does not count as adultery,43 and lying cannot be false testimony. Everyone agrees that theft and adultery are bad because these words have bad connotations. But there is no agreement on what theft and adultery are (the first additional Mode, undecidable dissension). Only the sovereign can eliminate the disagreement through civil law. The two remaining commandments sometimes are applicable in the state of nature. First, people have the right to kill other people only if they believe in conscience that killing would conduce to peace, that their lives are at risk, or that killing would be profitable and therefore would provide more security of future life. But no one yet has the right not to have her life taken and therefore the crime of murder is not yet possible. Second, children are never completely in the state of nature while their parents are alive. Adults owe their parents internal but not uniform external honor outside commonwealths by agreement between them and by the natural law of gratitude. Only sovereigns decide in commonwealths what common external forms honor consists of, such

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as the contemporary English practice of children listening to their parents on their knees. There are problems, however. Though justice and injustice, which occur only in interpersonal relationships, are not possible in the state of mere nature where people live solitary lives and there are no civil laws, they must be possible in the attenuated state of nature, where people have relationships of some kind with each other, especially family relationships. Obligations corresponding to rights are created by contract and covenant. Some forms of adulterous relationship and private possession must be possible, though they may be of limited extent, because contracts of co-­ habitation and exchange are valid. Breaking such agreements may be unjust.44 What Hobbes seems to mean is that without a strong independent power or guarantor—the sovereign, who maintains and regulates contractual relations and creates the institution of marriage—all contractual rights to goods and all conjugal agreements in the state of nature are tenuous, either because of the actions of those who are not party to a contract or because people will break their contracts for personal advantage.45 The enduring relationships of marriage and other contracts can exist only in a commonwealth. Hobbes reinforces his radical mitigation of the five commandments in the state of nature with two examples from the Pyrrhonist arsenal (the tenth Mode, different laws and customs). Each relates to one of the commandments and has a special status in the early modern treatment of natural law. The first example is theft and comes from a well-known anecdote from Plutarch’s Life of Lycurgus.46 Lycurgus had established a law designed to enhance the warlike qualities of Lacedaemonian youth by permitting them to steal things if they did not get caught. Hobbes uses the example to show that the civil sovereign, not natural or divine law, defines property and theft.47 The Catholics Suárez and William Barclay,48 as well as the Protestants Grotius and Chillingworth,49 considered the Lacedaemonian law immoral and an affront to the traditional immutability of natural law prohibitions. James I himself cited the Lacedaemonian law as a legislative model to be avoided in a 1610 speech to parliament.50 However, Sextus Empiricus and Montaigne used the Lacedaemonian law to cast doubt on the view that we can have knowledge of absolute good and evil.51 Hobbes’s second example is marriage, which evokes the Pyrrhonist example of adultery. The Catholic Church and the Church of England had theological objections to the dissolution of marriage and renewed sexual relations with another person, which violate the divine command against

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adultery. Hobbes counters that among pagans sexual relationships counted legally as marriages (he was probably thinking of ancient Greece and Rome). Marriage could change with changing sexual relationships, which therefore were not necessarily adulterous. Commonwealths decide what marriage is and whether it is indissoluble, not the clerics.52 Montaigne and Hobbes’s friend, the libertin érudit François La Mothe La Vayer, similarly had contrasted modern Christian to ancient practices on marriage to illustrate the diversity of laws in different places and at different times.53 Selden, the legal scholar and jurist, distinguished the marriage practices of the ancient Greeks and Romans, which were based on consent, from those of the pre-Mosaic Jews, which were based on consent of the man and then intercourse, drawing the Hobbesian conclusion that every government has the right to legislate on marriage and divorce as it wishes.54 Many early Protestant theologians, English religious radicals, and John Milton (following Selden) supported divorce, and civil marriage was introduced briefly under the English republic.55 But Grotius and Chillingworth defended traditional religious norms against adultery.56 Bishop Bramhall, one of Hobbes’s most relentless critics, objected to his acceptance of ancient marriage and attacked his treatment of theft, adultery, and murder.57 Hobbes thus shared his liberal views on marriage and adultery with a medley of other unconventional thinkers with different intellectual perspectives. But what he shared with the Pyrrhonists (and Selden) was the radical idea that valid marriage and adultery are whatever a government decides it is, even a relationship which lasts only as long as conjugal relations. There can be little doubt that he was motivated primarily by Pyrrhonist examples to show, contrary to traditional Christian doctrine, that there is nothing immutable about the meaning of marriage. For him, the diversity of cultural practices proves that only sovereign governments can determine what constitutes marriage (the tenth Mode, different laws and customs). Moreover, Hobbes continues to make sovereigns serve the function of sole criterion of action, or judge, on all spiritual as well as temporal matters. He predictably supports his case with Pyrrhonist arguments. Individuals can make mistakes in interpreting scripture. The result is commentaries upon commentaries and glosses upon glosses (the second additional Mode, infinite regress). Nor can a church understood as a multitude be the judge because, as Wilson had argued, there will be as many opinions as individuals (the first additional Mode, undecidable dissension).58 A single judge and interpreter are therefore necessary.

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There are a number of important doctrinal changes from The Elements of Law. Hobbes declares now that civil law cannot contravene the law of nature unless it blasphemes God, because subjects have accepted anything the sovereign commands in the covenant of subjection.59 He supports this claim by reference to his interpretation of the relevant commandments. The consequences of his position are highly unorthodox: “every action in its own nature is indifferent; that it becomes just, or unjust, proceeds from the right of the Magistrate: Legitimate Kings therefore make the things they command, just, by commanding them, and those which they forbid, unjust, by forbidding them.”60 This passage makes it appear that the sovereign creates the law of nature, that Hobbes is a legal positivist. Though the sovereign’s role is only to interpret the law of nature within a commonwealth, his interpretations are the only legitimate statements of its content for his subjects. This view separates Hobbes from traditional natural law theorists, who hold that the legitimacy of civil laws must be measured against the law of nature.61 For Hobbes, the Christian sovereign is unassailable in its function of imposing moral order on the state. No moral reason can justify disobedience.62 It may be objected to this account that Hobbes’s theory of value cannot be subjective and relative because he has a theory of natural law which prescribes universal and immutable rules which establish a rational good and evil (peace and war) applicable to everyone. Opinions among commentators on this score vary. Jean Hampton accepts his subjectivism and considers it “critical” to his theory, but believes that “moral propositions are capable of being objectively assessed for their truth.”63 Gregory Kavka and Arash Abizadeh deny that Hobbes’s moral theory is subjectivist,64 while Martin Harvey denies that it is relativist.65 I agree with Hampton. Hobbes often explicitly treats value as relative; it follows directly from his materialistic psychology. Good and evil require a relationship between a person and something or some situation that affects him in a desirable (and thus good) or undesirable (and this bad) way. Hobbes sees all good and evil in the state of mere nature as subjectively determined in specific circumstances because the individual is a criterion of action for himself. The objective is always in danger of being subverted by the psychologically subjective, and in normal human behavior the subjective is dominant. For Hobbes, no amount of education will change this fact of life. It may further be objected that this account is at odds with Hobbes’s statements about the accessibility of the laws of nature, which is a prominent feature of traditional natural law theory, and that therefore it greatly

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overemphasizes the role of moral relativity in his thought.66 The laws of nature, Hobbes thinks, are as certain as a geometry theorem. S. A. Lloyd observes that all normal adults may be assumed to know that they should do as they would be done by.67 To be sure, there is a gap between Hobbes’s theory of objective natural law and his theory of moral relativity, which he often seems to minimize. But the problem of subjectivity and relativity is always present at some level because human nature is constant in its variety. “The unwritten Law of Nature, though it be easy to such, as without partiality, and passion, make use of their naturall reason, and therefore leaves the violators thereof without excuse,” he reassures us, “yet considering there be very few, perhaps none, that in some cases are not blinded by self love, or some other passion, it is now become of all Laws the most obscure; and has consequently the greatest need of able Interpreters,”68 like himself. The gap between the two aspects of Hobbes’s theory of morality places the sovereign in a uniquely powerful position to determine and judge right and wrong for large groups of people. Why was there such a marked increase in Pyrrhonist argumentation from The Elements of Law to De cive? Perhaps the composition of The Elements of Law was too hurried, too sketchy, or too tied to English politics in 1640 for a more extensive rendering.69 Pyrrhonism was not fashionable in England but writing in Latin for an intellectually sophisticated continental audience may have encouraged Hobbes to emphasize Pyrrhonist argumentation. Perhaps he felt simply that he needed to make a stronger case for moral relativity and to work out its theoretical implications further.

4.4   Moral Relativity in Leviathan In Leviathan Hobbes marginalized the Pyrrhonist Modes and eliminated some of the most controversial ideas of De cive, but the moral relativity of the individual in the state of nature and the role of the sovereign in resolving it remain central. The book’s agenda was philosophically and theologically broader than that of De cive, which may have diverted his interest from Pyrrhonist argumentation. He wanted Leviathan to have broad popular appeal to an English audience and he may have judged extensive use of Pyrrhonist arguments to have been too controversial for popular acceptance. Perhaps he felt that drawing attention to Pyrrhonism could increase opposition to his unorthodox theological views.70 Gone is almost all reference to the morally controversial Pyrrhonist examples of theft, adultery,

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and other sexual practices. Only one exception remains: he posits a possible liberty of bigamy in a commonwealth left over from the state of nature, which suggests that he had not changed his view of the permissibility of any of the sexual practices.71 Moreover, his unorthodox discussion of the inapplicability of three of the Ten Commandments and the limited applicability of two others in the state of nature disappears. Yet Pyrrhonist argumentation can still be found. It holds a secondary place in his various attacks on the views of other philosophers on the law of nature.72 There are still no mine and thine, no right and wrong, and no justice and injustice before there are commonwealths. We find him mixing the second Mode (differences among persons) with the eighth Mode (relativity) and the first additional Mode (undecidable dissension) to make the familiar point that good and evil are inconstant names that have no absolute objective meaning, “[f]rom whence arise Disputes, Controversies, and at last War.”73 The classic virtues and vices are so epistemologically slippery that they can have no philosophical utility without a careful grounding and analysis of the sort that only Hobbes provides: “in reasoning, a man must take heed of words; which besides the signification of what we imagine of their nature, have a signification also of the nature, disposition, and interest of the speaker; such as are the names of Vertues, and Vices.”74 Here Hobbes combines the second Mode (differences among persons) and the eighth Mode (relativity) to show that the virtues and vices are susceptible to moral subjectivity and relativity in normal discourse. The criterion of action, or judge, remains the individual in the state of nature and the sovereign in the commonwealth. But Hobbes now adds a third possibility, an arbitrator, which was a common judicial expedient which was cheaper and speedier than litigation.75 Remarkably, Hobbes introduces a new, even more radical formulation to describe the relationship between civil and natural law which, like his earlier position in De cive, is impossible to understand in a traditional system of natural law where the law of nature is morally superior to and may invalidate civil law. Civil and natural law, he says, contain each other and are co-extensive.76 The law of nature contains civil law because the law of nature requires us to keep our covenant of subjection and obey whatever the sovereign commands, unless a command threatens our lives or in certain other personal circumstances. Civil law contains the law of nature as the law of equity. There is no law of nature that cannot be an unwritten civil law and all civil law is enjoined by the law of nature. This formulation brings all the laws of nature under the sovereign’s control in a new way,

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optimizing the authority of Hobbes’s criterion of action, and suggests that the distinction between natural and civil law is effectively a distinction without a difference within a commonwealth. No one has a right to substitute his own private judgment of the laws of nature for the sovereign’s public judgment, because he has authorized all the sovereign’s judgments, and his personal judgment is subjective and may differ from that of everyone else. At times Hobbes seems to suggest once again that the moral content of the civil laws is completely conventional. They are no more than the rules of a game of cards. There is no absolute justice or injustice, only arbitrary rules which create right and wrong.77 This assertion would appear to be one of Hobbes’s clearest and strongest statements of legal positivism. But the statement cannot be taken at face value because the sovereign should try sincerely to legislate in conformity with the law of nature, on pain of eternal damnation. Although Hobbes does not discuss the status of the five commandments in the state of nature, he seems to have altered his view of only one of them, honoring parents. Now he asserts that honor is due to parents in commonwealths as a vestige of their rights in the state of nature. The other four commandments are treated as before; they are made binding upon everyone in commonwealths as the commands of sovereigns. But in the state of nature there is no crime and therefore by implication no theft or murder. There are no laws of marriage and therefore by implication no adultery. There are no accusations and therefore by implication there is no false testimony.78 And for the first time he gives an account of the commandment (or commandments) on coveting your neighbor’s house or wife. He does not subscribe to the doctrine of original sin in an orthodox way. No passion or action—lust for example—is just or unjust in itself. A sin, he declares, is any transgression of a law or contempt of a legislator, which implies a breach of all the laws simultaneously. But sinning, like good and evil, is a subjective matter. No one sins in the state of nature whose intention is to preserve himself, whether his action actually serves to preserve himself or not. An action is a sin only if there is an intention to break the natural or civil law.79 Coveting therefore is justified whenever the intention is self-preservation, a view which is consistent with the right of everyone to everything in the state of nature. The sovereign remains the judge not only of moral but of theological truth, the sole judge of the canonicity of scripture, its sole interpreter, and the sole declarer of the religious doctrine of the commonwealth. Vindication of this role against the claims of various forms of Christianity

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is the organizing principle in a much larger treatment of ecclesiology in chapter 42 than in his previous works. Historically, Hobbes implies, the individual was the judge of theological truth only before the conversion of the Emperor Constantine when there were no laws defining what Christian doctrines we should profess publicly. The most remarkable change from the teaching of De cive is that now Hobbes completes the analogy between the sovereign and the pope, bestowing on the sovereign the role of chief pastor with the right to perform clerical functions.80 Finally, Hobbes nearly abolishes the sphere of disobedience required by the Christian faith. No ordinary Christian subject of any sovereign, Christian or infidel, need disobey it on anything as long as the subject is sincerely faithful to God in his heart. But pastors called to evangelize the infidels may have to give their lives as testimony to their faith. He concedes to them, like the primitive Christians, the legitimate status of private judges on religious questions, independent of the infidel sovereign in this respect but required passively to accept their fate at its hands.81

4.5   Sepconic Articulation and Emergence The integration of two or more thought matrixes which are normally considered unrelated can produce emergent features, features which do not occur in or are not important to the original thought matrixes or which are not obviously part of their assumptions. Emergence, especially resulting from anomalous integrations, is an important source of creativity.82 Sepconic articulation is a process of concomitant separation and connection of anomalous frames or thought matrixes in which some component features are kept separate while others are integrated but keep their original characteristics. The motivation behind sepconic articulation is a felt need to resolve the tension between the anomalous frames or matrixes. The process results in the emergence of new meaning not present in the original matrixes.83 Hobbes connects the Pyrrhonist idea of moral relativity with the theory of natural law but keeps their respective original features of relativity and immutability separate. They are linked by the individual’s differing objective and subjective (biased or self-interested) approaches to moral judgments. The moral relativity of Pyrrhonism is an anomalous and unlikely candidate for integration with elements of traditional moral philosophy. Pyrrhonist skepticism cannot find certainty or immutability in any philosophical dogma, even in itself. But traditional natural law theory, with its associated moral, political, and theological

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elements, was ultimately anchored in the moral supremacy, the eternity of the will, or the rational nature of God. We cannot know whether Hobbes felt a tension between Pyrrhonist relativity and the law of nature; we have only his writings to go by. But the finished product exhibits all the other features of sepconic articulation. Hobbes seems to have mapped the structure of the concept of relativity onto the traditional concept of the immutable law of nature as it applies to the individual; and in parallel, he seems to have combined the concept of a criterion of action with the concept of the individual conscience. The combination of the concept of an absolute sovereign in a commonwealth and that of the individual in the state of mere nature with the concept of a criterion of action produces new emergent features, and yet all three ideas retain their original meanings. The principal emergent feature resulting from these combinations is the potential subjugation of the law of nature to the subjective preferences of the individual in the immediate context of its application. The result is the supremacy of the individual conscience in the state of mere nature and the political, moral, and theological supremacy of the sovereign on matters of potential conflict in the commonwealth. The effect of moral relativity and the individual’s role as a criterion of action is to promote moral disagreement and conflict in the state of mere nature. The effect of the expansion of the concept of the absolute sovereign is to give him the power to impose a uniform standard on matters subject to dispute to help prevent conflict. Hobbes thus strengthens his case for the unpredictability and insecurity of the state of mere nature and for the necessity of a radical form of absolute sovereign power to establish and maintain peace. Thomas B. Ward, Steven M. Smith, and Jyotsna Vaid predict that “the more massive the prior knowledge structure, the more cognitive force required to change it.”84 If they are right, Hobbes must have expended great cognitive force to produce the integration of moral relativity and traditional natural law with other parts of his political philosophy. The moral relativity of the individual is essential to some of the most original and controversial aspects of his philosophy. 1. Morality in the state of nature. Hobbes imposed moral relativity on the state of nature by merging the Protestant criterion of action or judge of religious questions with the individual conscience. Without an absolute sovereign to enforce common rules, the law of nature is a weak reed, limited in application by subjectivity, the passions of

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individuals, failures in reasoning, and in key respects the impossibility of a common definition (murder, theft, adultery). The laws of nature are binding only in the partial, self-interested internal court of conscience. 2. The sovereign as criterion of action. Hobbes seems to have merged the Catholic criterion of action, the papacy, by regional analogy with the contemporary concept of the absolute secular sovereign, although the sovereign is fallible like anyone else and can commit iniquity. His function is to settle or prevent disputes in commonwealths. The subject’s conscience remains the criterion of action in areas where the sovereign has not legislated or where there are no disputes or potential disputes; where a subject is at risk of death, harm, or chains, or chooses not to obey for other important personal reasons; or where a Christian evangelist must refuse obedience to in infidel sovereign for his eternal salvation. . Radical absolutism. As a Pyrrhonist criterion of action, the sovereign 3 has the exclusive power to determine the canonicity of scripture and interpret it, to establish official religious doctrine and the mode of public worship, to decide all theological, moral, and intellectual disputes, and to declare the meaning of value and property terms as well as the laws of nature. There are no independent criteria by which Christian subjects can legitimately question the sovereign’s moral, political, or theological commands openly unless he is an infidel. The independence of Hobbes’s caesaro-papism from contemporary Erastian thought reinforces this view.85 . “De jure” sovereignty dependent on “de facto” power. No one can have 4 sovereign right without the power to rule. The sovereign must be able to establish and maintain the precedence of her will and conscience over those of everyone else to satisfy the subject’s need for peace. If she loses the power to do so, the obligation of her subjects to obey dissipates in a conflict of individual wills and consciences prioritizing their own individual survival and interests, as they struggle to protect their lives and property. The subject’s obligation to obey is trumped and effectively terminated by a return to the war of all against all. The idea that the duration of sovereignty is dependent on and co-extensive with effective absolute power is an emergent feature of the combination of the concept of a criterion of action with the concept of the absolute sovereign; and the integration of this combination with the idea that the sovereign’s function is to

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protect its subjects and the public good, and with the individual’s right of self-preservation. 5. The consistency of civil law with natural law. Hobbes’s claims that the civil laws cannot contravene the law of nature, and that the natural and civil law are co-extensive, must be understood in the context of the sovereign’s role as a criterion of action and the limitations of the force of the law of nature. Since there is no agreement on the meaning of good and evil without the sovereign’s determinations; since there is an immutable law of nature but there is no agreement about its meaning in practice and it has no predictable application in the state of nature; since the divine laws prohibiting theft, adultery, and false witness have no application in the state of nature; and since no one has the right not to be killed or not to have his possessions taken from him in the state of nature, the sovereign’s commands must provide definitive rules to judge actions and settle disputes and he must be able to enforce them. Hobbes argues that there will be no difference between civil and natural law because the sovereign determines the nature of each in his legislative and judicial roles. This gives the sovereign broad power to determine what the law of nature means. The law of nature and the civil law must be identical and co-extensive if they have only one authoritative definition, the command of the sovereign. Different sovereigns may command contradictory things licitly because of their differing judgments about what conduces to the preservation of themselves and their commonwealths and what the law of nature means. The consistency of natural and civil law is an emergent feature of the integration of the notion of the sovereign as a criterion of action with a radically mitigated law of nature, which gives Hobbes’s legal theory its positivist flavor.86 . Natural right as the right to all things. The right of nature is a key 6 conceptual underpinning of the state of nature and a component of sovereign right. The individual living in the state of mere nature has the right to all things because he always has the unlimited liberty to do everything which in his own judgment will contribute to preserving his life, as broadly interpreted. There is no legal regime to form a common, enforceable, rational standard to restrain the individual’s liberty and give him claim rights against others, and there is no independent criterion other than the individual’s own conscience sufficient to validate or invalidate his decision that an action is or is not

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necessary for his self-preservation. Hobbes’s doctrine of the right of nature seems to be an emergent feature of the integration of the idea of the individual’s conscience as a criterion of action, the concept of natural right as liberty, and the absence of effective constraint imposed by the law of nature when a person’s life is at issue. It is reinforced by Hobbes’s appeal to the two Pyrrhonist examples of theft and adultery, which led him to a novel restructuring of the traditional Biblical prohibitions of the Decalogue, which sapped their force in the state of nature. The integration of traditional natural law theory with Pyrrhonist ideas and argumentation led to its complete transformation, the production of a new, highly sophisticated version of the traditional natural law paradigm, not just its improvement.87 The result was the restructuring of traditional political and moral philosophy on a grand scale to produce a new account with far-reaching theoretical consequences for his philosophy. It must count as one of his greatest creative achievements.

Notes 1. This chapter is a revised and repurposed version of James J.  Hamilton, “Pyrrhonism in the Political Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 20 (2012): 217–47. 2. Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism [hereafter PH], ed. Julia Annas and Jonathan Barnes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), bk. I, ch. 14, paras. 36–39, pp. 12–13; bk. I, ch. 15, paras. 164–69, pp. 40–41. 3. Hobbes, Elements of Law II.10.5, 186. 4. Ibid. II.10.8, 188. 5. Ioannis D.  Evrigenis, Images of Anarchy: The Rhetoric and Science in Hobbes’s State of Nature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 188. 6. There is no agreement among scholars on the nature of Hobbes’s theory of obligation. I adopt by default the standard interpretation of the ground of the law of nature as avoidance of death, and the laws of nature as the means to peace. A sophisticated recent restatement of this view can be found in Azibadeh, Hobbes and the Two Faces of Ethics. For a different but important interpretation see S.  A. Lloyd, Morality in the Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes: Cases in the Law of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 7. Hobbes, Elements of Law I.17.12, 93.

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8. Ibid. I.19.1, 100. Also ibid. I.14.6, 71. 9. Sextus Empiricus, Against the Ethicists, ch. III, sects. 88–89, p. 429. Also ibid., ch. III, sect. 44, p. 407. Montaigne makes no reference to the classical concepts of good and evil as what attracts and repels us and may not have been familiar with Against the Ethicists. Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, ed. and trans. M. A. Screech (London: Penguin, 2003), bk. I, ch. 50, 338. 10. There is disagreement about what Hobbes meant by science. Cf. Marcus P.  Adams, “Hobbes’s Laws of Nature in Leviathan as a Synthetic Demonstration: Thought Experiments and Knowing the Causes,” Philosophers’ Imprint, 19 (2019): 1–23; Lloyd, Morality in the Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, 151–210; A. P. Martinich, Thomas Hobbes (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 86–103; John Deigh, “Reason and Ethics in Hobbes’s Leviathan,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, 34 (1996): 97–109. 11. Sextus Empiricus, Against the Ethicists, ch. IV, sect. 118, p. 443. 12. Ibid., ch. V, sect. 166, p. 465. Also Sextus Empiricus, PH, bk. I, ch. 11, paras. 23–24, p. 9; Montaigne, Essays, bk. II, ch. 12, 560–65. 13. On one occasion, however, he offers us Sextus’s and Montaigne’s formulation on the objects of our obedience. Hobbes, Anti-White XXXVIII.4, 414. 14. Hobbes, Elements of Law I.7.3, 29. Also Sextus Empiricus, PH, bk. I, ch. 14, paras. 79–90, pp. 22–25. 15. Hobbes, Elements of Law I.2.10, 7; Hobbes, Anti-White III.1, 116–17. 16. Hobbes, Elements of Law I.5.14, 23. Montaigne also used paradiastolic redescription for Pyrrhonist purposes. Skinner, Visions of Politics, 3:111–13. 17. Sextus Empiricus, PH, bk. III, ch. 23, paras. 197–201, 205–206, 209, and 213, pp. 196–99; Montaigne, Essays, bk. II, ch. 12, 653–55, 657–60. 18. Hobbes, Elements of Law II.9.3, 180. 19. Popkin, History of Scepticism, 3–16. 20. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, bk. IX, sect. 95, 2:507. 21. Hobbes, Elements of Law I.5.14, 23; I.2.10, 7. For Hobbes’s rejection of the criterion of reality see ibid. I.3.10, 12; [Hobbes], “Third Set of Objections,” First Objection, 2:121. See also Gianni Paganini, Skepsis: Le débat des modernes sur le scepticisme (Paris: Librairie philosophique J. Vrin, 2008), 203. 22. Hobbes, Historia Ecclesiastica, lines 2155–56, pp. 568–69. Also Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 5, 20–21; ch. 30, 179. 23. William Chillingworth, The Religion of Protestants a Safe Way to Salvation (London: Bell and Daldy, 1870), 72–173. Hobbes’s amanuensis, James Wheldon, recorded a copy of the book in a catalog of the Cavendish library around 1659. It was placed there sometime between its publication and

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the Restoration and may have been available to Hobbes in the late 1630s. Hamilton, “Hobbes’s Study,” 451. 24. Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. Bennett, 1:409. 25. The expression is that of Richard H. Popkin, “Hobbes and Skepticism,” in History of Philosophy in the Making, ed. Linus J.  Thro (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1982), 133–48; 141. 26. Michel de Montaige, Essais, 3 vols. (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1969), bk. I, ch. 31, 1:254. Also Sextus Empiricus, PH, bk. I, ch. 11, paras. 21–24, p. 9. 27. Hobbes, Elements of Law II.6.13, 158. 28. Ibid. I.11.8, 58; Hobbes, De Cive XVIII.14, 292–93; Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 26, 149; ch. 43, 323–24. 29. I explain my interpretation on this point further in Chap. 6. 30. Hobbes, Elements of Law II.10.8, 188–89. 31. Ibid. II.9.1, 179. 32. Ibid. I.18.10, 98. Cp. Chillingworth, Religion of Protestants, 45–46 (“best endeavours”) and 130 (“utmost endeavours”). Martinich argues for the importance of Chillingworth and Great Tew to Hobbes’s theology. But he errs in his claim that Hobbes held a doctrine of monarchical infallibility. Martinich, Hobbes, 108–13. 33. Hobbes, Elements of Law I.16.18, 81. He amended the initial MS version with the necessary language. Ibid. II.1.7, 111. 34. Hobbes, De Cive III.30, 119 (“toto conatu”). 35. Ibid. II.1, 98–99. Also Hobbes, Elements of Law I.15.1, 74–75; Sextus Empiricus, Against the Logicians, ed. and trans. Richard Bett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), bk. I, pt. B, ch. 3, sect. b, sub-sect. v, para. 369, p. 73. 36. Hobbes, De Cive III.32, 120–21. 37. Thomas Hobbes, De Cive: The English Version Entitled in the First Edition Philosophicall Rudiments Concerning Government and Society [hereafter Philosophicall Rudiments], ed. Howard Warrender (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983), III.29, 73–74. All references to De Cive bear the page numbers from the Latin version unless Philosophicall Rudiments is specified. 38. Hobbes, De Cive III.32, 120–21. Also Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 4, 17; Skinner, Visions of Politics, 3:136–38. 39. Jesuit moral theologians had held the same view. Horro Höpfl, Jesuit Political Thought: The Society of Jesus and the State, c. 1540–1630 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 373. 40. Hobbes, De Cive XVI.10, 239–40. 41. Ibid. XIV.14, 212. 42. Ibid. XIV.9, 209–10. Also ibid. IV.4, 123; VI.10, 140; XVII.10, 259–60. Suárez, Grotius and Selden also had held that the Biblical prohibition

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against theft is not applicable where there has been no division of goods and there are no property rights. But unlike Hobbes, they hold that an effective division could take place before the establishment of government. 43. Hobbes seems to think of adultery as a form of theft by men, as did “many theologians popular with Puritans,” because the woman was thought of as more susceptible to adultery and as the property of the man. Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 30, 179; Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution (London: Penguin Books, 1991), 309. 44. Hobbes, De Cive II.10–11, 102–103; VI.1, 136; VI.15, 144–45; IX.4–7, 165–66. For conjugal contracts in the state of nature see ibid. IX.6, 166. In The Elements of Law Hobbes had adopted an alternative to the institution of marriage in the state of nature, a covenant of “cohabitation … for society of all things” between a “husband” and “wife.” Hobbes, Elements of Law II.4.6, 133; Nancy J.  Hirschman, “Hobbes on the Family,” in Martinich and Hoekstra, Oxford Handbook of Hobbes, 242–63; 253, 258. There is no conjugal contract in Leviathan. Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 20, 103; Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Malcolm, ch. 20, 2:309. 45. Perhaps what Hobbes means by property (mine and thine) is just a stable right to something by which a person can prevent its use by everyone else, a view reminiscent of that of Cicero, who asserts in Pro Caecina (For Caecina) that without law there is no means by which people can determine what belongs to them because there is no universal and unchanging common standard. For Cicero as for Hobbes, everything is common by nature; private possessions can exist before the establishment of the republic only as moral claims. A stable system of private possessions is a creation by legal grant of the republic. Cicero, Pro Caecina, in Pro lege Manilia; Pro Caecina; Pro Cluentio; Pro Rabirio Perduellionis, trans. H. Grose Hodge (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 97–205; 167. Hobbes quotes Pro Caecina in Leviathan, ch. 24, 127–28. 46. Plutarch, The Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, ed. Arthur Hugh Clough from the translation of John Dryden, 2 vols. (New York: Modern Library, 2001), 1:68–69. 47. Hobbes, De Cive XIV.10, 210. 48. Francisco Suárez, De legibus, ac Deo legislatore (On Laws and God the Law Maker), in Selections from Three Works of Francisco Suárez, S.  J., trans. Gwladys L. Williams, Ammi Brown, and John Waldron, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1944), bk. II, ch. 8, sects. 5–6, 1:134; William Barclay, The Kingdom and the Regal Power, trans. George A.  Moore (Chevy Chase, MD: Country Dollar Press, 1954), bk. III, ch. 3, p. 156. 49. Grotius, Right of War, bk. III, ch. 4, sect. 2, 3:1272–73; Chillingworth, Religion of Protestants, 8.

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50. James VI and I, Political Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), Speech to Lords and Commons, 21 March 1609, 202. 51. Sextus Empiricus, PH, bk. III, ch. 23, para. 215, p.  200; Montaigne, Essays, bk. II, ch. 12, 653–55. 52. Hobbes, De Cive VI.16, 145–46; XIV.10, 210. 53. Montaigne, Essays, bk. II, ch. 12, 658; François La Mothe Le Vayer, Dialogues fait a l’imitation des anciens (n.p.: Fayard, 1988), “Dialogue sur le marriage,” 452–508. 54. Jason P.  Rosenblatt, Renaissance England’s Chief Rabbi: John Selden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 264; G. J. Toomer, John Selden: A Life in Scholarship, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 2:535–36, 684, 691. 55. Hill, World Turned Upside Down, 310–14; Christopher Hill, Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution (London: Panther, 1972), 275; Rosenblatt, Chief Rabbi, 144. 56. Grotius also recounted the ancient pagans’ practice of divorce. Grotius, Right of War, bk. II, ch. 5, sect. 9, paras. 1–4, 2:514–23; Chillingworth, Religion of Protestants, 8. 57. Hobbes, Answer to Bramhall, 378–79. 58. Hobbes, De Cive XVII.18–20, 265–67. 59. Ibid. XIV.10, 210. 60. Hobbes, Philosophicall Rudiments XII.1, 146. 61. David Gauthier, “Thomas Hobbes and the Contractarian Theory of the Law,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Supplementary Volume 16, (1990): 5–34; 22–23. 62. Luciano Venezia, Hobbes on Legal Authority and Political Obligation (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 91–92. 63. Jean Hampton, “Hobbes and Ethical Naturalism,” in Philosophical Perspectives, 6: Ethics, 1992, ed. James E.  Tomberlin (Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Publishing, 1992), 333–53; 338–39. 64. Gregory S.  Kavka, Hobbesian Moral and Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 340–41; Abizadeh, Hobbes, 19, 39–43, 95–138. 65. Martin Harvey, “Hobbes’s Conception of Natural Law,” Southern Journal of Philosophy, 37 (1999): 441–60; 446. 66. Hobbes, De Cive XIV.14, 212. Also Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 26, 140. 67. S. A. Lloyd, “All the Mind’s Pleasure: Glory, Self-Admiration, and Moral Motivation in On the Citizen and Leviathan,” in Douglass and Olsthoorn, Hobbes’s “On the Citizen,” 51–70; 64. 68. Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 26, 143.

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69. Deborah Baumgold, “The Composition of Hobbes’s Elements of Law,” History of Political Thought, 25 (2004): 16–43. 70. Two of his early critics, Roger Coke and Thomas Tenison, were shocked at the extent and consequences of his use of Pyrrhonism, in particular the relativist and subjectivist aspects of his ethics. Mark Goldie, “The reception of Hobbes,” in The Cambridge History of Political Thought 1450–1700, ed. J. H. Burns and Mark Goldie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 589–615; 606. 71. Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 21, 113. 72. Ibid., ch. 26, 143; “Review, and Conclusion,” 395. 73. Ibid., ch. 15, 80. Also ibid., ch. 13, 63; ch. 15, 71–72. 74. Ibid., ch. 4, 17. 75. Ibid., ch. 6, 24. 76. Ibid., ch. 26, 138; ch. 43, 330. Also Hobbes, Anti-White XXXVIII.4, 414. For the conceptual difficulties of this paradox see Ross Harrison, “The equal extent of natural and civil law,” in Hobbes and the Law, ed. David Dyzenhaus and Thomas Poole (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 22–38. 77. Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 42, 306. Also ibid., ch. 12, 56; ch. 26, 138. 78. Ibid., ch. 14, 70; ch. 20, 103; ch. 27, 151–52; ch. 30, 179; ch. 43, 322. 79. Ibid., ch. 27, 151–52; ch. 29, 169. Also ibid., ch. 13, 62; ch. 30, 179. Cp. Hobbes, De Cive I.10, 95–96; XIV.19, 214–15; Hobbes, Answer to Bramhall, 284–85. 80. Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 39, 248. Suárez calls the pope “the supreme pastor of the church.” Suárez, De legibus, bk. II, ch. 14, sect. 24, 2:284. 81. Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 26, 149; ch. 40, 249–50; ch. 42, 271–73. 82. Zachary Estes and Thomas B. Ward, “The Emergence of Novel Attributes in Concept Modification,” Creativity Research Journal, 14 (2002): 149–56. 83. Rothenberg, “Janusian, Homospatial, and Sepconic Articulation Processes,” 5–6. 84. Ward, Smith and Vaid, “Conceptual Structures,” 23. 85. Johann P. Sommerville, “Hobbes, Selden, Erastianism, and the History of the Jews,” in Hobbes and History, ed. G.  A. J.  Rogers and Tom Sorell (London: Routledge, 2000), 160–88. 86. For four different arguments about why Hobbes was not a legal positivist, see Mark C. Murphy, “Was Hobbes a Legal Positivist?” Ethics, 105 (1995): 846–73; S.  A. Lloyd, “Hobbes’s Self-Effacing Natural Law Theory,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 82 (2001): 285–308; Larry May, Limiting Leviathan: Hobbes on Law and International Affairs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 67–84; David Dyzenhaus, “Hobbes on the Authority of Law,” in Dyzenhaus and Poole, Hobbes and the Law, 186–209. 87. Runco, Creativity, 14.

CHAPTER 5

The State of Nature

5.1   Overview The state of nature is one of Hobbes’s most powerful and enduring theoretical legacies.1 It has been recognized as a forerunner of rational choice theory and has been revived by moral philosophers in an ahistorical form. Perhaps it has had its greatest impact on international relations, which seem especially suited to its view of human behavior as guided overwhelmingly by self-interest unleavened by altruistic motives. It was also central to his political philosophy. Hobbes characterized it as “a warre of every man against every man,”2 an idea which seems to have originated with Plato. At the beginning of Laws Cleinias declares, “all men are always at war with one another.”3 Hobbes seems to have set out intentionally to create the state of nature, the condition in which people live before the establishment of the civil state, as the civil state’s polar opposite. He developed the concept of the state of nature into an imaginative argument for the need for an all-­ powerful, absolute sovereign and preservation of the political status quo. In its purest form the state of nature represents savagery, constant danger of violent death, and moral uncertainty, while the civil state represents a life of security, civilization, comfort and relative plenty. Hobbes’s task was to justify his new concept in a compelling, multidimensional way, drawing a portrait by the cross fertilization of ideas from different domains.4 His solution is apparently a reflection of divergent thinking, seeking multiple solutions to a problem. Hobbes’s development of the state of nature as the antithesis of the civil state seems to belong to a process of sepconic articulation by which he used the two antitheses to imagine and conceptualize a third state, the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. J. Hamilton, Hobbes’s Creativity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27733-7_5

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attenuated state of nature.5 The attenuated state of nature seems to have emerged from the integration of some features of each of the antithetical states while keeping others separate, creating a condition of interpersonal relationships within the state of nature, including family life and transactional relationships, in a setting of mutual suspicion and danger. We will examine six components of his theory in turn: the concept of the state of nature, the theory of history as progress, the idea of anarchy, the concepts of moral relativity and subjective right, the effective equality of people in the state of nature, and a group of passions that promote competition and war. Then we will consider the creativity of the attenuated state of nature.

5.2   The Theory of Historical Progress Hobbes did not invent the concept of the state of nature but his usage was unusual in its single-minded secularity. Medieval theology used it to characterize the pre-lapsarian condition (before the Fall) conceived as the first state, the state of nature as originally established, a state of innocence, and sometimes as the condition of people before the Flood.6 After the Fall, people lived in a state of fallen or corrupt nature. However, the term “state” itself was not theological. Soto, following Thomas Aquinas, defines it as “a condition of liberty or servitude.”7 The concept of a state of nature or the natural condition gained in secular associations in the writings of such diverse writers as Montaigne, Suárez, and Grotius.8 Bartolomé de Las Casas used the term specifically for the condition of Native Americans.9 None of them thought of it as a state of war. Hobbes uses the expression state of nature without any religious connotation to mean, fundamentally, a state of natural liberty, the life of individuals trying to survive a primitive existence without government. His contemporaries confused his concept with the post-lapsarian state because accounts of the post-lapsarian state made use of some of the same ideas as Hobbes’s sources.10 But the origin of his account of primitive history was pagan. In Hobbes’s day imagining what life was like before the establishment of property or the creation of the civil state was common. It was not just an academic or professional inquiry of jurists and political theorists. The discovery of America had become an urgent focus of such reflection as Europeans tried to grasp the reality of native cultures. It has been shown that Hobbes belonged to a tradition of describing this strange, exotic people negatively by contrast with familiar European culture.11 His state of

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nature also has been ascribed to the influence of Thucydides,12 Cicero,13 a “philosophical convention” found in Thucydides, Lucretius and Horace,14 classical writers against the Golden Age and ancient proponents of the benefits of poetry, rhetoric, and philosophy.15 There is some truth to all these suggestions.16 Their common denominator is the ancient idea that history proceeded from brutish origins to civilization.17 There were three ancient myths of human history: that of decline, that of progress, and that of cyclicality.18 They were revived during the Renaissance and exerted lasting influence on European culture. Each appeared with differences of detail and at times was combined with aspects of one or more of the others, and different ideas were used by the same writer in different contexts. The myth of decline first appeared in ancient Greece as the myth of the four Ages of Man (Gold, Silver, Bronze, and Iron), later simplified to the two Ages of Saturn and Jupiter (the primitive age and today). Important ancient exponents of the myth of decline were Hesiod, Ovid, Tacitus, and Seneca.19 The myth of progress first rose to prominence with the Sophists in the fifth century BCE. The best-known ancient proponents of historical cycles were Plato and Polybius. Both applied them to explain the rotation of government. The two theories of historical decline and progress began from the premise that people originally lived isolated and scattered, often after they had issued as adults spontaneously from the earth and mud, “sprung out of the earth, and suddainly (like Mushromes).”20 This view contrasts with the Aristotelian claim that humans are political by nature. People lived in caves or wandered the earth in natural abundance or scarcity and hardship. At first there were no language, no moral code, and no laws or arts. They had no money, no property, and no clothing. They gradually learned to communicate and finally gathered together for protection under the leadership of the most eminent man for wisdom, eloquence, or valor. Here the two myths diverged. The theory of decline idealized a primitive past when simple people were peaceful, modest, guileless, and naturally virtuous, uncorrupted by the greed and ambition that accompany the arts of commerce and navigation. They gradually changed, took up hunting, agriculture, trade, and sailing, and gathered together for protection in walled towns. Morality degenerated with the growth of civilization and luxury. Crime, lust, war, and impiety replaced primitive innocence. The theory of progress saw history in reverse. People originally were wild and savage with no sense of morality. They died from starvation, cold, and attacks by wild animals. As they came into contact with one another they quarreled,

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stole from one another, and killed each other. Government was established and laws were instituted as remedies. The introduction of agriculture and commerce gradually improved people’s lives and they became educated and civilized. Proponents of the theory of progress, from Protagoras and Cicero to Bacon and Hobbes, believed in the transformative power of knowledge and the arts. Hobbes employs all three ancient theories. De cive eulogizes the dutiful obedience of the world’s first subjects as the Golden Age, while Behemoth uses the cyclical theory to describe the shifts in English sovereignty between the Long Parliament and the Restoration.21 But it was the theory of progress, with the benefits of the advancement of civilization, that provided the imaginary historical framework of the state of nature. Hobbes turned to the classic method of negative description, now greatly elaborated, in his well-known description of the state of nature in Leviathan. He imagines life stripped of all the advantages that we enjoy today. Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of Warre, where every man is Enemy to every man; the same is consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security, than what their own strength, and their own invention shall furnish them withall. In such condition, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.22

This is the state of mere or pure (mera) nature, a condition in which no one lives in families or has made any agreements with anyone else.23 Hobbes claimed that only one science, his own civil philosophy, could prevent the calamity of the state of nature.24 Hobbes would have encountered the narrative of scattered individuals in four writers he knew well: Diodorus Siculus, Cicero, Horace, and Lucretius. Diodorus Siculus, whom Hobbes praises for his account of the origins of the human race25 and calls “the greatest antiquary perhaps that euer was,”26 says that the “first men” led “an undisciplined and brutish life, each going off to feed by himself.” They were “miserable” because nothing “useful” had been “discovered.”27 They had no language, no

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clothing, no dwellings, and no cultivation, and often died from cold, starvation, and wild predators. According to Cicero, men lived “scattered and dispersed” and “had no other possessions” but what “they had been able either to seize by strength and violence, or keep at the cost of slaughter and wounds.”28 There was no marriage or family, no religion and no moral duty.29 Horace adds the ideas that people sprang from the earth and that justice arose from fear.30 Lucretius, whom Hobbes discusses in De corpore and elsewhere, mixes aspects of the theory of decline with the theory of progress and, significantly, emphasizes development of the arts and sciences. “[N]ot only such arts as sea-faring and agriculture, city walls and laws, weapons, roads and clothing, but also without exception the amenities and refinements of life … all were taught gradually by usage and the active mind’s experience as men groped their way forward step by step … Men saw one notion after another take shape within their minds until by their arts they scaled the topmost peak.”31 Together these writers provide all the elements of Hobbes’s view of primitive history, but he probably encountered them in others as well. Hobbes’s principal example of primitive people was the “savage people in many places of America” who lived under the government of small families linked in Leviathan by sexual desire and led brutish lives—but not the Inca empire, which did not fit this small-family model.32 A small family will disintegrate in fear if it cannot withstand its neighbors, he argued.33 He reinforced the violent imagery with the examples of ancient piracy and brigandage found inter alia in Thucydides’ account of piracy in earliest Greece and the conflict among the ancient Germanic tribes which Philip Clüver portrayed as primitives and Tacitus had idealized as a Golden Age.34 Hobbes praised only the ancient Germans’ valor and magnanimity in victory (“the Lawes of Honour”) and said that they had no other virtues.35 His example of Native Americans fell into a long tradition of viewing primitive contemporaries as analogues of the earliest European people in conformity with the theories of historical progress or decline. The ancients idealized the legendary Isles of the Blessed, the Hyperboreans and the Arcadians, or vilified the Scythians as wild men. Following the voyages of Columbus, Europeans struggling to understand the new world applied traditional stereotypes and the stereotypes often won out in the face of conflicting information. Early English travel literature characterized the North and South American natives as brutes, sometimes benign and sometimes hostile toward Europeans, often determined by whether Europeans traded with or abused, plundered, and enslaved them.36 While

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Francesco Guicciardini, Las Casas, and Montaigne idealized Native Americans as simple and virtuous—at least more virtuous than Europeans— Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, Jean Bodin, and Giovanni Botero saw them as savages. The natives’ massacre of the Jamestown colonists in 1622 while Hobbes was a member of the Virginia Company, which had established the settlement, may have exerted a lasting impression on him. In Leviathan he admitted that the state of nature “was never generally so, over all the world,” but insisted that it existed in America, appealing more to simplistic popular English views than to the nuances of reality.37

5.3  Anarchy and Civil War The flip side of the theory of progress was the idea that a breakdown of government and law would result in wholesale rapine and slaughter, a worry of social conservatives from ancient times to the present. The Spanish Jesuit Luis de Molina stated the traditional case: “since the passions of people after the advent of sin are inclined to evil, and in their childhood demonstrate that almost everyone wants to dominate by his depraved instincts, it is evident that if they lived outside a political community, without a superior public power that can coerce and suppress them, there would be many murders, sedition, rapine, theft, fraud and suffering, oppression of the vulnerable by the powerful, and the condition and misery of mankind would be much worse.”38 An ancient example of the idea can be found in Plutarch, who attributes it to the Epicurean Colotes of Lampsacus. “The men who appointed laws and usages and established the government of cities by kings and magistrates brought human life into a state of great security and peace and delivered it from turmoil. But if anyone takes all this away, we shall live a life of brutes, and anyone who chances upon another will all but devour him.”39 Plutarch objected that people educated in philosophy can be virtuous even without laws, but Hobbes agreed with Colotes. When the commonwealth is dissolved “every man returneth into the condition, and calamity of a warre with every other man.”40 The idea fits easily with the myth of progress. A classic example can be found in Cicero. In the progress of history, some eminent men gathered a group of scattered people together “and brought them from that state of savagery (ex feritate illa) to one of justice and humanity.” Cities and defenses were introduced. “Now, between life thus refined and humanized, and that life of savagery, nothing marks the difference so clearly as law and the administration of justice, or if there is none,

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force must rule.”41 Hobbes had a ready example of civil war anarchy in Thucydides’ account of the stasis or civil war in Corcyra. Moral values were subverted, agreements reconciling groups lasted only as long as they could not take revenge, all social bonds were loosened, and “it was far the best course [for people] to stand diffidently against each other with their thoughts in battle array.”42 “All forms of death were seen,” Thucydides reports, even filicide.43 Hobbes cited rebellion and civil war as examples of the return to anarchy caused by the dissolution of government, and in Behemoth he considered the English civil wars of the 1640s a validation of his theory. English governments since the early Tudors, with the experience of the Wars of the Roses, had used the terror of civil war to instill obedience. Sir Walter Raleigh (1552–1618) similarly had termed civil war “the meer state of Nature of Men out of Community” and “a state of War.”44 In De cive Hobbes asserts that the bitterest wars are religious or political civil wars.45 He was probably thinking of the sixteenth-century French wars of religion, the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Dutch rebellion against Spain, and the seventeenth-century Thirty Years’ War, which devastated central Europe and produced eight million casualties. However, Hobbes did not believe that such wars were as violent and deadly as the state of mere nature because to preserve their reputations the participants avoided great cruelty.46

5.4   Moral Relativity and Subjective Rights A theory of moral relativity and subjective rights is central to Hobbes’s state of nature. As we saw in the last chapter, each person is obliged to follow his own conscience in judging the content of the laws of nature, its interpretation and its application, for “he that is subject to no Civill Law, sinneth in all he does against his Conscience, because he has no other rule to follow but his own reason.”47 He cannot do wrong if his intentions are right, even if he breaks the law of nature, “every man being his own Judge, and accused onely by his own Conscience, and cleared by the Uprightnesse of his own Intention.”48 But different consciences are certain to conflict.49 Non-Pyrrhonist writers may have contributed to or reinforced Hobbes’s views. Richard Hooker had argued that without government everyone would be judge in his own case, there would be no impartiality, force would have to resolve disputes, and conflict would be perpetual.50 But unlike Hobbes, he did not think that each person is justified in his

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partiality. Raleigh had said that in the state of nature “all men have an equal right to all things,”51 but he did not justify killing. Hobbes goes much further. “To this warre of every man against every man, this also is consequent; that nothing can be Unjust. The notions of Right and Wrong, Justice and Injustice have there no place.”52 There are no civil laws to violate, and there are no agreements to violate in the state of mere nature. Thucydides’ account of the Corcyraean stasis, which employs paradiastolic redescription, may also have contributed to Hobbes’s understanding of moral relativity. There people used the virtues and vices indiscriminately to praise or blame actions as it suited their interests.53 Moreover, Selden affirmed that laws could be just in one state but not another. God’s laws do not change but interpretations or our understanding of them can differ with local circumstances.54 Subjective right reinforces the moral independence of the individual in the state of nature. The concept of a right which attaches to the individual had medieval origins and was in common use by the mid-sixteenth century.55 But Hobbes’s formulation is a historical aberration.56 He defines right in Leviathan as “liberty to do, or to forbeare,” and natural right as “the Liberty each man hath, to use his own power, as he will himselfe, for the preservation … of his own Life; and consequently, of doing any thing, which in his own Judgement, and Reason, hee shall conceive to be the aptest means thereto.”57 Natural right is a liberty which depends only on the will of the individual and absence of obligation. But there are no enforceable laws to limit liberty in the state of nature, and the doctrine of obligation in foro interno which attaches to the law of nature provides an escape clause whenever a person sincerely believes that her life or safety is in danger. Brett attributes Hobbes’s concept of right to Grotius and what Grotius calls the liberty of the jurists, particularly the influential sixteenth-century Spanish humanist jurist Fernando Vázquez de Menchaca. Vázquez conceived of dominium (lordship or ownership) in Controversiarum illustrium (Illustrious Controversies) simply as the remnants of a natural, primitive liberty. Grotius expanded this liberty by adding power over ourselves as well as financial or commercial credit, and characterized these disparate elements as a right to or over these things.58 Vázquez calls dominium “the natural faculty of [doing] that, which it pleases anyone to do, unless it is prohibited in any way by force or by right.”59 This is Florentius’ definition of liberty in the Institutes,60 and for Vázquez, liberty becomes a right with the introduction of different forms of moral and legal

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regulation. A person who has absolute freedom to act in respect of his dominium within related legal and other constraints has a right. Grotius further derives his concept of subjective natural right from the idea that “the Right” is “that which may be done without injustice.”61 Hobbes’s concept of subjective right combines the idea of a liberty with the idea that the exercise of this liberty must not be unjust. He also accepts the consequence that liberty and right are reduced as legal constraints increase. He conceived of all morally unconstrained liberty as a right in his early works. The conceptual connection between Vázquez (as mediated by Grotius and later perhaps Selden) and Hobbes becomes clearer in Hobbes’s definition of right in De cive. There he says that a right is a “natural liberty … not constituted, but allowed by the Lawes.”62 Like Grotius’s right, Hobbes’s applies broadly anywhere, even outside commonwealths. Apparently reflecting Grotius’s view, he states that “that which is not contrary to right reason, that all men account to be done justly, and with right.”63 He thus created from a set of disparate ideas a new, much simpler, more coherent and universal concept of a liberty right, which reached its final form in Leviathan. Hobbes’s concept of the inalienable natural right of self-preservation also had a long history. Aristotle had declared death to be the most terrible of all things,64 and the Stoic idea that all species of living creatures have an impulse for self-preservation was extremely influential during the Renaissance. The theme of a fundamental right of self-preservation derived from this impulse had been common during the Middle Ages, and during the fourteenth century William of Ockham had made it inalienable.65 As Soto reasoned in the sixteenth century, “the right of self-preservation is so innate in man that all must give way before it.”66 A related concept is the right of self-defense, which was commonly justified both on the basis of the Roman law precept that it is licit to resist force with force and the necessity of self-preservation.67 “[T]he right of self-defense is natural and necessary,” Suárez asserted, and it was licit not only to protect one’s life and limbs but one’s property and honor—and perhaps also those of another victim of unjust force.68 Molina allowed individuals to resist enslavement, life imprisonment, or torture. In the law of war proponents usually held that, at the command of a superior, a private person may kill an aggressor if he uses moderation and even an innocent person who resists (such as a common soldier). However, it was not licit to kill unnecessarily; force had to be present. Grotius—who like Hobbes attributed the right of self-defense to disaggregated individuals—recognized a right to

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resist force and its common usage before the institution of commonwealths, but preferred to disable rather than to kill, if possible.69 Never before Hobbes had a philosopher so expressly conceived the rights of self-­ preservation and self-defense so broadly and permissively, which increases insecurity by permitting virtually any kind of behavior if the individual acts sincerely out of what she believes to be necessary and avoids cruelty. These rights contribute greatly to the violence and uncertainty of the state of nature. Hobbes’s most consequential application of moral relativity and subjective right was to international affairs. He challenged the supra-national norms, the law of nations, characteristic of the developing law of war and especially the thought of Grotius. Sovereigns have a natural right to defend their states and to decide for themselves the best means, the same natural right that individuals have in the state of nature. Nothing is unjust because there are no civil laws between states to violate, alliances are valid only as long as they last, and anything is legitimate if the sovereign sincerely considers it necessary.70 The basic premise of the sixteenth and early seventeenth century law of war was that there is an analogy or even a legal connection between states and individuals, and therefore between the morality of states and the legal rights and duties of individuals.71 Roman private law contains precepts valid for rulers in their relations with each other. States have the right to protect themselves but must not act unjustly. Hobbes seems to adopt, invert, and turn the analogy of state and individual against Grotius and his scholastic predecessors. The moral condition of sovereigns is not that of individual citizens protected by civil law, but that of individuals in the state of nature where the right of nature holds sway. Hobbes is forced to admit that sovereigns are not in the state of nature or a condition of anarchy since they enjoy the protection of their people. Yet he insists on the moral symmetry because there is no one on earth to enforce norms among sovereigns.72 Hobbes’s doctrine is in some respects similar to reason of state, the early modern theory that rulers may do whatever is necessary to protect themselves and their realms.73 He also was perhaps harking back to the ancients. Cleinias says in Plato’s Laws, “every city is in a natural state of war with every other.”74 The Sophists Thrasymachus and Glaucon in Plato’s Republic argued that justice and right are just the interest of the stronger.75 Similarly, the Athenian generals in Thucydides’ Melian dialogue rejected the idea of justice between stronger and weaker.76 And Epicurus’s sixth Principal Belief was that it is a natural good to procure

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security from others by any means.77 Roman precedents may have been particularly important to Hobbes. Bodin asserts that the ancient law of warfare was just the right of the stronger,78 and according to the Spanish scholastics, the Romans believed that war was equally as just for their enemies as for themselves. Molina knew of nobody who disagreed with the latter point.79 Hobbes’s theory was more sophisticated than the view attributed to the ancients, because the law of nature, the law of reason— which he identified with the traditional law of nations,80 which therefore no longer represented a distinct temporal human juridical development— was always an issue, particularly for a Christian sovereign. It may not wage war indiscriminately or cruelly and must seek peace when it can safely do so.81 Yet the sovereign alone is judge of its own natural rights, the laws of nature and their application. Its conscience is determinative, and no sovereign has a duty to accede to the right of another or to accept another’s interpretation of the law of nature.

5.5  Natural Equality To this mix of arguments in support of the state of nature Hobbes adds an unconventional alternative to the traditional doctrine that people are equal by nature. The ideas of natural equality and natural liberty, as moral or legal matters, had deep roots in Stoicism and Christian moral thought (Catholic and Protestant) as well as Roman law, though there were many nuances and exceptions. Scholastics and jurists held that there is no reason why one person should serve or rule another before the establishment of government because no one has more legitimate power than anyone else.82 Hobbes teaches that individuals have equal liberty or right by nature, and that they must treat others equally in accordance with the law of nature when they create government and establish peace.83 But there is another kind of natural equality which has no moral quality, the idea that people are somehow equal in capacity. As Aristotle had asserted, people “tend to be equal by nature and to differ in nothing.”84 Hobbes gives this sort of natural equality a new, minimalist twist, that of equal ability to kill or equal vulnerability to being killed, and argues that it is a cause of war in the state of nature. The political benefits of social hierarchy were a widespread belief in Hobbes’s time. Equality was the harbinger of conflict, and according to Roman law an equal has no command over an equal.85 Hierarchy was traditionally seen as the divine and natural order of the universe, a source of

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harmony, and its absence as a cause of social disorder.86 James I put the idea pithily in his famous warning, “No bishop, no king,” by which he meant that in pressing for the abolition of episcopacy puritans really had a more revolutionary agenda. The disappearance of episcopal discipline would lead to the downfall of the monarchy itself and the end of social order. Johannes Althusius, the German Calvinist jurist and philosopher, quoting the French absolutist Pierre Gregoire approvingly, argued typically that government and subjection are natural and necessary because “‘if all were truly equal, and each wished to rule others according to his own will, and the others refused to be ruled, discord would easily arise, and by discord the dissolution of society.’”87 Similarly, Bodin argued that inequality is necessary for peace, because “there is neuer greater hatred, nor more capitall quarrels, than betwixt equals: and the iealousie betwixt equals, is the spring and fountaine of troubles, seditions, and civill warres.”88 This sort of traditional reasoning is the seed of Hobbes’s novel position on natural equality as equal vulnerability, which traded on the popular belief that equality causes social disorder.89 His view would have resonated strongly with his readers as a cause of anarchy. He recognized that there are inequalities in the mental or bodily powers of different individuals. Some are stronger or more attractive than others, while others have more wit or eloquence.90 He also rejected the traditional idea of a natural hierarchy. Each person is just matter in motion and social rank is just a product of the civil law and social forces. “There is no question of Rank among men in the Natural Condition,” he wrote in the Latin version of Leviathan.91 The idea of natural hierarchy ran counter to the efforts of the Tudor and Stuart monarchs to shift popular attitudes about ennoblement to the free gift of the monarch, and especially in Charles I’s reign to recognition of public service. Natural hierarchy threatened the power of the Crown just as it threatened the absolute power of Hobbes’s sovereign by creating competing loci of authority. Hobbes admits that some individuals in the state of nature, where human relations are dominated by the threat of violence, are smarter or stronger than others. But everyone, he argues, whether clever or eloquent, strong or weak, is equal in one respect—the vulnerability of each to a violent death at the hands of someone else. Anyone, acting alone or in coalition with others, can kill anyone else. The differences between adults in mental and bodily power are too small to assure anyone that he or she can live a secure life where there is no government. Even someone who is

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weaker or less intelligent, or both, may destroy a stronger or smarter person since it is easy to kill. He is evidently speaking of the state of mere nature, where people spring up like mushrooms as adults and, while groups of unattached individuals may form, there are no conquerors, families, children, or servants yet. This relative but effective equality provides a powerful incentive for people to band together and create temporary, informal coalitions or, optimally, a permanent government for security. The distribution of capabilities among individuals is sufficiently equal that no one can “hope by his own strength, or wit, to defende himselfe from destruction, without the help of Confederates.”92 In Leviathan Hobbes claims that people are more equal in prudence than in strength because adults have acquired much experience, from which prudence is derived. Most people, especially the proud or vain, think that they are smarter than almost everyone else, but this delusion proves only how relatively equal they really are. “For there is not ordinarily a greater signe of the equall distribution of any thing, than that every man is contented with his share.”93 Descartes makes the same point at the opening of Discourse on the Method and Hobbes must have been familiar with it.94 Since individuals are equal in vulnerability and roughly equal in capacity, they have equal prospects of success in combat, ambush, or surreptitious attempts at murder against one another. When two people want the same thing, they become enemies and try to destroy or subjugate one another. Hobbes reinforced this idea by rejecting the Aristotelian idea that, though most people tend to be equal by nature, barbarians are natural slaves.95 For Hobbes, slavery was just a step in the creation of families and the acquisition of sovereignty by conquest. According to Roman law, everyone was free by nature and slavery was an institution of human creation under the law of nations.96 Many natural law writers justified slavery on the Roman law grounds of consent, conquest, or just punishment, although Christians in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (and Selden claims, Muslims as well) maintained that they could no longer enslave co-religionist prisoners of war.97 Thucydides’ account of the Corcyraean stasis and its effect on all Greece may have been central to Hobbes’s assessment of the equal vulnerability of individuals in situations of extreme violence when they are, or perceive themselves to be, unequal in capability. For Thucydides shows that even individuals of inferior mental ability can gain victory over the wisest people. It was mostly those with “the least wit” who took the initiative because they did not wish to become the victims of the persuasive arguments of the

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wise. The less intelligent proved equal to the wise in ability to kill because they refused to give the wise the opportunity to use their wisdom against them, and the wise did not take any precautions to prevent their own slaughter.98 “And when there was any contention between the finer and the coarser wits, (as there hath been often in times of sedition and civil war),” Hobbes says in The Elements of Law, “for the most part these latter carried away the victory.”99 Thucydides’ narrative provided an evidential basis for Hobbes’s belief that those who are less capable can emerge victorious. The effective equality of the state of mere nature and its corollary, the necessity of hierarchy to social stability in commonwealths, have important implications for the feminist interpretation of his account of the family. Families must exist in the state of nature because the survival of humanity depends on generation, child rearing, and the security necessary for them. Feminist interpreters generally agree that Hobbes’s family, both in commonwealths and in the state of nature, is patriarchal, that the father is normally head of the family.100 His model is the patriarchal family of Roman law, in which the father is the “master.” The key question is, how did fathers become the heads of families? One possibility is male conquest. But effective gender equality in the state of mere nature means that the power of wit and bodily strength is gender neutral. Women would be as likely to conquer men as men to conquer women, resulting in a mix of families led by men and women. Another possibility is consent, the voluntary submission of women to men. But what would induce a woman to subjugate herself to a man? The standard patriarchalist response, for protection, fails if the genders are effectively equal in power. Another possibility is that Hobbes saw the patriarchal family as a normal part of the social hierarchy, which is essential to social stability. The patriarchal family was apparently universal, from the Americas to Europe, from Turkey to China, from ancient Greece and Rome to ancient Israel. The only example of matriarchy he cites, the Amazons, was mythological. He was consistent in his view that mothers were the first heads of families in the state of nature because children can be assumed to have promised to obey them in response to their care. This gave him a strong counterargument to ideological patriarchalism, the idea that all legitimate government is patriarchal. He was also consistent in his view that the patriarchal family, which was not a natural phenomenon but the result of the customary patriarchal institution of marriage and the matrimonial laws of sovereigns, was an important feature of the social hierarchy of the

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commonwealth and thus an important contributor to social stability. The stabilizing advantages of hierarchy presumably extended to the patriarchal family in the state of nature. This creates problems for commentators who view his individualism in the state of nature as a forerunner of modern liberalism.101 He agreed with Bodin in several works that men created the first commonwealths. How could individual freedom be the norm if the patriarchal family was the dominant social factor before the creation of commonwealths and an important social factor afterward? From Hobbes’s perspective, if hierarchy was always beneficial, it was rational that hierarchy should exist and that families should be patriarchal in the state of nature because they were patriarchal everywhere. Perhaps the reason that women submit to men in the state of mere nature is that they recognize the advantages of hierarchy and the customary social preference for patriarchy. They submit because of utility and custom. But if this is what Hobbes thought, it does not explain how patriarchy began. Why would a woman subordinate herself to a man, and other women do so as well, before patriarchy became customary? I have been arguing that Hobbes marshalled a number of different ideas to support his contention that the state of nature is a condition of complete anarchy, a war of all against all. As we have seen, one of those ideas derives from the popular belief that equality is socially destabilizing. To capitalize on this belief, Hobbes, who devotes much attention in chapter 10 of Leviathan to the different forms of power and the different levels of power among individuals, developed the idea of an equal vulnerability to suffering violent death, an idea that could be flexible enough to allow for individual differences in personal power. Kinch Hoekstra argues in his typically thorough way that Hobbes appeals to the concept of natural equality in several contexts despite many denials and exceptions; and that his claim that equal vulnerability to violent death is a cause of ceaseless war in the state of nature is deeply problematic. He concludes that the principal purpose of natural equality in Hobbes’s writings was that we ought to acknowledge each other as equals as a means to establish peace in the only way possible, through creation of a commonwealth. But this cannot have been its principal purpose if it was also a fundamental cause of the state of nature, which, in its broad sense of a state of war, provides the incentive intended to drive everyone into a civil state. In The Elements of Law, for example, Hobbes argues that it is irrational to remain in the state of nature because of natural human equality.102 Hoekstra does not take into consideration the popular belief that hierarchy is necessary to stability, and

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without it he misreads the importance of equality to Hobbes in the war of all against all despite the difficulties which he identifies.103

5.6   Passions The final cause of war in the state of nature is the role played by human passion. Hobbes identifies three passions that ignite and fuel the war of all against all. “First, Competition; Secondly, Diffidence; Thirdly, Glory. The first, maketh men invade for Gain; the second, for Safety; the third, for Reputation.”104 Commentators agree that the three passions seem to derive from the reasons the Athenian ambassadors gave the Lacedaemonians for expanding Athens’ dominion after the defeat of the Persians, as reported by Thucydides: “chiefly for fear, next for honour, and lastly for profit.”105 If so, they were originally conceived as motives to explain and justify domination. Equality—the rough or effective equality in ability to kill or the equal vulnerability to being killed which we have just considered—is a necessary condition for competition among two individuals. When there is equality, Hobbes says, each competitor calculates that he has a chance to overcome the other. They quarrel over something which they both cannot have simultaneously. Aristotle had used a similar analysis to explain competition as a cause of war in the Rhetoric: “our rivals for a thing cause us fear when we cannot both have it at once; for we are always at war with such men.”106 The parallel passage in Hobbes’s summary of the Rhetoric says similarly that among “men that are to be feared” are “our Competitors in such things as cannot satisfie both.”107 The assumption of the relative equality of the rivals is implied but not specified in both these formulations, and most commentators believe that the scarcity of what they quarrel over is implied as well. However, Hobbes’s formulation suggests that the competitors will quarrel if there is not enough at hand to satisfy both, even if what they fight over is not scarce.108 The distrust and fear caused by competition (as well as by the third passion, glory) lead people to act to protect themselves, their families and belongings by anticipating attack and attacking first.109 Thucydides also may have been the principal source of this idea. Anticipation as justification for the use of force is a doctrine that he frequently used. The real cause of the Peloponnesian war, he claimed, was fear, “the growth of the Athenian power, which putting the Lacedaemonians into fear necessitated the war.”110 Alcibiades supported the catastrophic invasion of Sicily by

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warning that if Athens did not expand her empire her enemies might attack her out of fear of her greatness. “For when one is grown mightier than the rest, men use not only to defend themselves against him when he shall invade, but to anticipate him, that he invade not at all.”111 Self-­ defense by anticipation is a key cause of Hobbes’s war of all against all, because it contributes materially to the potentially unlimited exercise of natural right, and impels even individuals with moderate desires to seek to dominate others because anyone may threaten their lives or well-being. Abizadeh has made a convincing case that the first two passions, competition and diffidence, are reliant on the third, glory, and that glory thus is the key passion driving conflict in the state of nature.112 In The Elements of Law and De cive, Hobbes asserts that some people are glory seekers who have an unusual desire to appear greater than they are by comparison with others.113 Those who desire glory often desire domination. As Abizadeh observes, Hobbes seems to be drawing on Aristotle’s account of anger and revengefulness.114 People take offense and seek revenge not only when they are the objects of hatred, but also of contempt and undervaluing. They feel grief at a slight, which is a sign that they are of no importance, but feel pleasure at the hope of revenge and the expectation that they will be successful. Following this tradition, Francesco Guicciardini observes in the Ricordi (Recollections), “everyone esteems himself, and thinks himself more than he is worth. And nevertheless he becomes indignant if, when he sees you, you do not take that account of him that he believes you should.”115 In Leviathan Hobbes modifies his approach but the consequences are the same. There glory, or pride, is universal, usually introspective, and no longer comparative with someone else. “For every man looketh that his companion should value him, at the same rate he sets upon himselfe: And upon all signes of contempt, or undervaluing, naturally endeavours, as far as he dares (which amongst them that have no common power to keep them in quiet, is far enough to make them destroy each other,) to extort a greater value from his contemners, by dommage; and from others, by the example.”116 If he succeeds in compelling someone to rate him more highly, the example will enhance his reputation among others as well. Together the three passions that cause conflict are a toxic mix intended to sweep up everyone into a vortex of hostilities when he comes into contact with other people. They constitute a powerful indictment of Aristotle’s concept of people as political animals who naturally congregate to seek their fulfillment as rational beings in society.117

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5.7  Divergent Thinking and Sepconic Articulation Cross fertilization was an important part of Hobbes’s creative process in developing his theory of the state of nature. He drew upon a range of domains to support it—history, poetry, rhetoric, Roman law, Christian theology, and philosophy. He seems to have found ideas in many disparate sources, including the thought of Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, Diodorus Siculus, Cicero, Horace, the Sophists, the Pyrrhonists, the Stoics, the Epicureans, the scholastics, and even his great rival Descartes. He integrated several conceptual elements for the first time which together portray the inevitability of conflict where there is no government to enforce public security: the concept of the state of nature as a state of war of everyone against everyone; the idea of history as progress; the idea of anarchy without government; a theory of moral relativity encompassing the subjectivity of good and evil, the supremacy of the individual conscience, and a concept of subjective natural right as liberty unrestrained by natural law; the inalienable right of self-preservation interpreted broadly by individuals fearful of the threat from others and seeking to enhance their means of survival; effective human equality; and the passions of competition, fear, and glory. They seem to reflect a process of divergent thinking, a search for multiple solutions to his task of portraying the state of nature as a state of war. Hobbes appears to have deliberately set up a polarity between absolute sovereignty and the complete absence of government. Evrigenis has stressed Hobbes’s “strategy of oppositions” and Brett has pointed to a polarity.118 The polarity is implicit in four of the arguments which he used to support his theory. First, the ancient narrative of history as progress was conceived as a dichotomy between (1) the benefits of government and society and (2) the disadvantages of the lack of government and society in primitive history, characterized by the negative description of life without any of the advantages of civilization. Second, he employed the traditional conservative account of the fearful specter of the dissolution of commonwealths expressed as two opposites, (1) a life of anarchy, violence, and rapine, and (2) the rule of law, justice, prosperity, and civilization found under government. Third, Hobbes’s concept of equality, the equality of vulnerability to violent death, seems to have been drawn from the conventional dichotomy between (1) inequality, hierarchy, and subjection as necessary conditions for social order, and (2) social equality as a cause of conflict and anarchy. Fourth, his theory of the moral relativity of human

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behavior, an important source of conflict in the state of nature, contrasts with the rule of law and a life of justice and security in a commonwealth. Hobbes also seems to have created the state of nature by a deliberate process of sepconic articulation, a process of concomitant separation and connection of two or more thought matrixes with synergistic affects. In the first stage he established the antitheses of sovereign rule and lack of government. In the second stage, he connected features of the antitheses while continuing to maintain other features of the antitheses separate from each other. The result, the attenuated state of nature, was a completely new vision of life before the establishment of the commonwealth which included original features of both the commonwealth and the state of nature. Individuals come together and no longer live solitary lives. They make contracts or covenants for mutual advantage and form families. Children and servants covenant with the head of the family to transfer all their power to him and he becomes an absolute sovereign writ small. This act bestows on the family other rudimentary features of the civil state, rules and regulations enforced by the head of the family, individual possessions among family members, and a stronger basis of self-defense than that of a single person living alone. But there is still a state of war. Families live in a condition that shares some features of the state of nature: the danger of violent death, suspicion, fear, competition, and the quest for superiority between family groups and between families and autonomous individuals, and the impossibility of lasting peace, security, justice, and prosperity, which can be found only in a commonwealth. Danger and suspicion exist outside families and coalitions. All groups may be overwhelmed and killed or enslaved by larger, stronger groups because they are not yet large enough to provide lasting security. Absolute power, family rules and possessions, enforcement, and group self-defense—features brought together from the theory of the commonwealth—may be fleeting. The theory of the attenuated state of nature is a half-way house between the state of mere nature and the commonwealth precisely because it shares aspects of both of them. Thus this outcome seems to reflect a two-stage cognitive process of sepconic articulation. First, Hobbes developed his theories (or the broad outlines of his theories) of the state of mere nature and the civil state. Then he joined together features of the antitheses of the state of mere nature and the civil state in the attenuated state of nature. The synergy which this construct generates seems to produce a condition of basic security permitting family life. Sepconic articulation can explain the great

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difference between Hobbes’s attenuated state of nature and all other traditional visions of life before the civil state, and it can explain why his new construct was transformative.

Notes 1. This chapter is a revised and repurposed version of James J. Hamilton, “The Origins of Hobbes’s State of Nature,” Hobbes Studies, 26 (2013): 152–70. 2. Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 13, 63. 3. Plato, Laws, in Plato, Dialogues of Plato, 2:407–703; bk. I, sect. 626, 408. Also Martin A.  Bertman, Hobbes: The Natural and the Artifacted Good (Bern: Herbert Lang, 1981), 149; Richard Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace: Political Thought and the International Order from Grotius to Kant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 53. The works of Plato were in the Cavendish library. Talaska, Hardwick Library, 101. Hobbes cites Plato’s Meno in the introduction to his translation of Thucydides, Symposium in The Elements of Law, and Theaetetus in Tractatus Opticus II. Hobbes, “Of the Life,” 575; Hobbes, Elements of Law I.9.17, 44–45; Hobbes, “Excerpta de Tractatu Optico [II],” ch. IV, sect. 13, 220. 4. Alison McQueen argues that Hobbes may have had a “convergence” strategy in employing his multi-element account of the causes of the state of nature (specifically, vainglory vs. equality and competition). He may have overdetermined the causes of war to appeal to the specific predilections of different readers. If the first cause did not convince, the second might. I see Hobbes’s thinking as divergent. Divergent thinking is consistent with her view. She is not speaking of convergent thinking, but of a rhetorical convergence. Alison McQueen, “Hobbes’s Convergence Strategy,” Hobbes Studies, 33 (2020): 135–52. 5. Rothenberg, “Janusian, Homospatial and Sepconic Processes,” 1–9. 6. Leo Strauss, “On the Spirit of Hobbes’ Political Philosophy,” Revue internationale de philosophie, 4 (1950): 405–31; 419; Evrigenis, Images of Anarchy, 1. For the meaning of the term and related terms as used by the late scholastics see Höpfl, Jesuit Political Thought, 257–61. Note, however, that Höpfl’s account of what Hobbes means by “state of mere nature,” which I will explain, is incorrect. 7. Domingo de Soto, De iustitia et iure Libri decem, 5 vols. (Madrid: Instituto de Estudios Politicos, 1968), bk. 7, q. 5, a. 1, 4:683 col. 1. 8. Montaigne, Essays, bk. II, ch. 12, 607; Suárez, De legibus, bk. II, ch. 18, sect. 3, 1:185 col. 1; Grotius, Right of War, bk. II, ch. 7, sect. 27, para. 1, 2:623.

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9. Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 139. 10. Helen Thornton, State of Nature or Eden? Thomas Hobbes and His Contemporaries on the Natural Condition of Human Beings (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2005), 30–31. Evrigenis is wrong to see a strong connection between the state of nature and the post-lapsarian state. In support of his view, he cites the reference to Cain and Abel in the Latin version of Leviathan, which came long after the original formulation of the state of nature. Tuck attributes the Biblical example to a 1650s letter to Hobbes from a French disciple. Evrigenis, Images of Anarchy, 159–63; Theodore Christov, Beyond Anarchy: Hobbes and His Critics in Modern International Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 45; Tuck, Rights of War, 136–37. 11. Margaret T. Hodgen, Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971), 194–201; Kinch Hoekstra, “Hobbes on the Natural Condition of Mankind,” in Springborg, Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s “Leviathan,” 109–27; 113. 12. George Klosko and Darryl Rice, “Thucydides and Hobbes’s State of Nature,” History of Political Thought, 6 (1985): 405–409; Evrigenis, Images of Anarchy, 199–200. 13. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, in Hume’s Moral and Political Philosophy, ed. Henry D. Aiken (New York: Hafner, 1972), 190. 14. Charles Cantalupo, A Literary “Leviathan”: Thomas Hobbes’s Masterpiece of Language (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1991), 17. 15. Hoekstra, “Hobbes on the Natural Condition of Mankind,” 113–14. 16. There are also similarities with late-Renaissance commentary on Aristotle. Annabel Brett, Changes of State: Nature and the Limits of the City in Early Modern Natural Law (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 117–20. 17. There are short, useful discussions of the origins of the state of nature in Perez Zagorin, Hobbes and the Law of Nature (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009), 36–42; Ioannis D.  Evrigenis, “The State of Nature,” in Martinich and Hoekstra, Oxford Handbook of Hobbes, 221–41; Sommerville, Thomas Hobbes, 28–56. 18. G. B. Kerford, The Sophistic Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 125–26. For a typology of views of history in antiquity reflecting these myths and their variations see Arthur O.  Lovejoy and George Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1935), 1–7.

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19. For a discussion of the nuances of the example of Hesiod and a comparison with Ovid see Evrigenis, Images of Anarchy, 197–98. Hobbes cites Hesiod’s Theogony in Leviathan, ch. 45, 353. 20. Hobbes, Philosophicall Rudiments VIII.1, 117. For the myth of Prometheus, ancient hero of the theory of progress, as creator of the original humans from the earth, see Hobbes, De Cive X.3, 172–73. 21. Hobbes, De Cive, Praefatio, 79; Hobbes, Behemoth, 389–90. 22. Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 13, 62. Also Hobbes, De Cive X.1, 171. For sixteenth- and seventeenth-century examples of negative description see Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Malcolm, ch. 13, 2:195 n. g. 23. For a definition see Hobbes, De Cive I.10, 95. 24. Hobbes, Concerning Body I.7, 7–10. For a rich and meticulous account of Hobbes’s development and improvement of his theory of the state of nature, see Arash Azibadeh, “Glory and the Evolution of Hobbes’s Disagreement Theory of War: From Elements to Leviathan,” History of Political Thought, 41 (2020): 265–98; 280–93. For a useful discussion of different interpretations of the state of nature see Peter Vanderschraaf, “The Character and Significance of the State of Nature,” in Lloyd, Interpreting Hobbes’s Political Philosophy, 191–205. 25. Hobbes, De homine I.1, 1. 26. Hobbes, Behemoth, 226. 27. Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheca historica (Historical Library), bk. I, ch. 8, quoted in Lovejoy and Boas, Primitivism, 221. This work, in Greek and Latin, was in the Cavendish library. Talaska, Hardwick Library, 75. 28. Cicero, Pro Sestio (For Sestius), in Cicero, Pro Sestio and In Vatinium, trans. R.  Gardner (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 36–239; para. 42.91, 159. Cicero’s extant works were in the Cavendish library. Talaska, Hardwick Library, 75. 29. Cicero, De inventione, bk. I, ch. 2, 5–7. 30. Rudd, Horace, Satire I.3, 52–53. A volume of Horace’s complete poetry was in the Cavendish library. Talaska, Hardwick Library, 75. 31. Lucretius, Nature of the Universe, bk. V, 216; Hobbes, Concerning Body IV.26.3, 416. For other parallels between Lucretius and Hobbes, see Evrigenis, Images of Anarchy, 182–90. 32. Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 13, 63. Also Hobbes, Elements of Law I.14.12, 73; Hobbes, De Cive XV.2, 220; Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 12, 57; Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Malcolm, ch. 13, 2:195; Grafton, New Worlds, 251. 33. Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 20, 105. 34. Thucydides, Peloponnesian War, bk. I, sects. 5–6, 3–4; Tacitus, Germania, in Tacitus on Britain and Germany: A Translation of the “Agricola” and the “Germania,” trans. H.  Mattingly (Baltimore: Penguin, 1948), 101–40; esp. paras. 14–19, pp.  112–17; Evrigenis, Images of Anarchy,

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211, 214–16. Cf. Bodin’s account of primitive history, which is based on families rather than individuals. Jean Bodin, The Six Bookes of a Commonweal, ed. Kenneth D.  McRae, trans. Richard Knowles (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), bk. III, ch. 7, 361–62. For Hobbes’s view on primitive piracy in relation to those of Aristotle, Grotius, and Alberico Gentili, see Brett, Changes of State, 193–94 and n. 90. 35. Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 17, 85. Also ibid., ch. 10, 45; Hobbes, Elements of Law I.4.12, 73; Hobbes, De Cive I.13, 96. 36. Richard Hakluyt, Voyages and Discourses, ed. Jack Beeching (London: Penguin, 1972), 51–52, 107, 139–55, 190–92, 302, 390–405. See also the contemporary characterizations of Native Americans as brutish and primitive quoted in Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Malcolm, ch. 13, 2:195 n. g. 37. Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 13, 63. 38. Luis de Molina, De la Justicia y el Derecho, trans. Manuel Fraga Iribarne, 4 vols. (Madrid: José Luis Cosano, 1941–1944), bk. I, tract. II, disp. 22, sect. 8, 1:379–80. 39. Plutarch, “Reply to Colotes in Defence of the Other Philosophers,” in Plutarch, Moralia, trans. Benedict Einarson and Phillip H. Lacey, vol. 14 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 190–315; sect. 30, 295 (1124D). 40. Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 30, 175. 41. Cicero, Pro Sestio, para. 42.92, 161. 42. Thucydides, Peloponnesian War, bk. III, para. 83, 206. Also Clifford W.  Brown, Jr., “Thucydides, Hobbes, and the Derivation of Anarchy,” History of Political Thought, 8 (1987): 33–62; 58–60; Evrigenis, Images of Anarchy, 192–95. 43. Thucydides, Peloponnesian War, bk. III, para. 81, 204. 44. Sir Walter Raleigh, Three Discourses (London, 1702), 97 (essay first published 1650). 45. Hobbes, De Cive I.5, 94. 46. Ibid. V.2, 131. 47. Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 29, 169. 48. Ibid., ch. 27, 152. 49. Ibid., ch. 15, 79–80. Abizadeh has made a compelling case that disagreements are, for Hobbes, the universal cause of conflict. Arash Abizadeh, “Hobbes on the Causes of War: A Disagreements Theory,” American Political Science Review, 105 (2011): 298–315. 50. Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, 2 vols. (London: J. M. Dent, 1907), bk. I, sect. 10, para. 4, 1:190. Also Bodin, Six Bookes, bk. II, ch. 2, 204. Both works were in the Cavendish library. Talaska, Hardwick Library, 53, 71, 118.

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51. Raleigh, Three Discourses, 97–98. The same idea can be found in Selden’s De jure naturali et gentium, juxta disciplinam Ebraorum (On the law of nature and nations, according to the teaching of the Jews). Malcolm, “Voluntarist Theology,” 156. There was a copy of De jure naturali in the Cavendish library at the Restoration and could have been there since its publication in 1639. Hamilton, “Hardwick Library,” 452. 52. Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 13, 63. Also Hobbes, De Cive I.10, 95. 53. Thucydides, Peloponnesian War, bk. III, para. 82, 204–205; Brown, “Derivation of Anarchy,” 58–60. 54. Malcolm, “Voluntarist Theology,” 153–56; Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 215–17. 55. Brett, Changes of State, 91. 56. Brian Tierney, The Idea of Natural Rights: Studies on Natural Right, Natural Law and Church Law 1150–1625 (Grand Rapids, MI: William R. Eerdmans, 1997), 51; Gauthier, “Contractarian Theory of Law,” 18. For a brief review of the different critical approaches to Hobbes’s concept of right, see Eleanor Curran, “Hobbes in the History of Rights Theory,” in Lloyd, Bloomsbury Companion, 308–13. 57. Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 14, 64. Also Hobbes, Elements of Law I.14.6–8, 71–72; Hobbes, De Cive I.7–9, 94–95. For a discussion of problems associated with his theory of natural right and the views of commentators, see Susanne Sreedhar, “Interpreting Hobbes on Civil Liberties and Rights of Resistance,” in Lloyd, Interpreting Hobbes’s Political Philosophy, 141–55. 58. Annabel S. Brett, Liberty, Right and Nature: Individual Rights in Later Scholastic Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 205–10, 234–35; Brett, Changes of State, 99, 105, 114. 59. Quoted in Brett, Liberty, Right and Nature, 180. 60. The Institutes of Justinian, trans. J.  B. Moyle (Oxford: Clarendon, 1913), I.3.1. 61. He is speaking of the right of war. Grotius, Right of War, bk. I, ch. 1, sect. 3, para.1, 1:136; Brett, Changes of State, 103–108. 62. Hobbes, Philosophicall Rudiments XIV.3, 170. 63. Ibid. I.7, 47. 64. Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, 1115a26–27. 65. Tierney, Natural Rights, 194. For an account of William of Ockham’s concept of subjective right see Brett, Liberty, Right and Nature, 50–68. 66. Soto, De iustitia, bk. V, q. 1, a. 1, 3:395 col. 1. Also Brett, Liberty, Right and Nature, 153. 67. The Digest of Justinian, ed. Alan Watson, 4 vols. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 43.16.27, 4:98. 68. Francisco Suárez, De triplici virtute theologica (The Threefold Theological Virtue), in Suárez, Selections, disp. XIII, sect. 1, art. 4, 1:798 col. 2. Also

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Tierney, Natural Rights, 232, 267. For the views of other Jesuit scholastics and their refinements of what this right permitted see Höpfl, Jesuit Political Thought, 292–96. 69. Grotius, Right of War, bk. II, ch. 1, sects. 3–4, 2:397–98; Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 198–99. 70. Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 13, 63; ch. 17, 85; ch. 22, 122; ch. 30, 185. 71. Daniel Lee, Popular Sovereignty in Early Modern Constitutional Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 262–63; Brett, Changes of State, 82–83. The analogy even existed in ancient Athens. Kinch Hoekstra, “Athenian democracy and popular tyranny,” in Bourke and Skinner, Popular Sovereignty in Historical Perspective, 15–51; 25. 72. Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 30, 185–86; Christov, Beyond Anarchy, 34. 73. Malcolm, Reason of State, 92–123. 74. Plato, Laws, bk. I, sect. 626, 408. 75. Plato, The Republic of Plato, trans. Francis MacDonald Cornford (London: Oxford University Press, 1945), bk. I, sect. 338, p. 18; bk. II, sects. 358–59, pp. 43–44. 76. Thucydides, Peloponnesian War, bk. V, paras. 85–114, 364–71; Hobbes, “Of the Life,” 583–84. 77. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, bk. X, sect. 141, 2:665. 78. Bodin, Six Bookes, bk. V, ch. 5, pp. 600, A148 n. 600G9. 79. Molina, De la Justicia, bk. I, tract. 2, disp. 118, sects. 9–10, 2:264. Also Suárez, De triplici virtute, disp. XIII, sect. 7, art., 9, 1:815 col. 2. 80. He was not the first to do so. Brett, Changes of State, 82, 88–89. 81. May, Limiting Leviathan, 195–239. 82. Kinch Hoekstra, “Hobbesian Equality,” in Hobbes Today: Insights for the 21st Century, ed. S. A. Lloyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 76–112; 93–97. 83. Hobbes, Elements of Law I.17.1–2, 87–89; Hobbes, De Cive III.13–14, 113–14; Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 15, 76–77. 84. Aristotle, Politics: A New Translation, ed. C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2017), 1259b5–6. 85. Digest, 4.8.4, 1:150. 86. Hodgen, Early Anthropology, 397–404. 87. Johannes Althusius, Politica, ed. and trans. F.  S. Carney (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1995), bk. I, para. 37, 26 (I have supplied a clause dropped by the translator). 88. Bodin, Six Bookes, bk. V, ch. 2, 570. 89. Hobbes, Elements of Law I.14.2, 70; Hobbes, De Cive I.3, 93; Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 13, 60–61. 90. Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 13, 61; Hoekstra, “Hobbesian Equality,” 77–82.

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91. Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Malcolm, ch. 15, 2:235. Also Hobbes, Elements of Law I.17.1, 88; Hobbes, De Cive III.13, 113; Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 15, 76–77. 92. Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 15, 73. Also Hobbes, Elements of Law I.14.14, 74; Hobbes, De Cive I.13, 96–97. 93. Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 13, 61. 94. “Good sense is the best distributed thing in the world: for everyone thinks himself so well endowed with it that even those who are the hardest to please in everything else do not usually desire more of it than they possess.” Descartes, Discourse of the Method, Pt. I, 111. Also Malcolm, “Biographical Register,” 825. For problems with this facile argument see Hoekstra, “Hobbesian Equality,” 83–84. 95. Aristotle, Politics, 1254b16–22. 96. Institutes I.5. 97. Toomer, John Selden, 2:550. This practice did not extend to Africans who were forcibly converted to Christianity before being sent into slavery in the Americas. 98. Thucydides, Peloponnesian War, bk. III, para. 83, 206. Also Brown, “Derivation of Anarchy,” 51–52. 99. Hobbes, Elements of Law I.17.1, 88. Also Hobbes, De Cive III.13, 114; Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 11, 49; ch. 15, 77; Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Malcolm, ch. 15, 2:235. 100. Hirschman is an exception. Hirschman, “Hobbes on the Family,” 257–58. I rely heavily on her analysis. 101. I am indebted to Cheryl Welch for these points. 102. Hobbes, Elements of Law I.14.12, 73. 103. Hoekstra, “Hobbesian Equality,” 99–100, 109–112. Hoekstra provides the best analysis of Hobbes’s concept of equality and its roles in his thought, despite this oversight. 104. Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 13, 61–62. Also Hobbes, Elements of Law I.14.5, 71; Hobbes, De Cive I.2, 91; I.4–6, 93–94. More generally, for the social vices or passions leading to incivility as threats to peace and the apparent sources of Hobbes’s views, see Skinner, From Humanism to Hobbes, 162–89. 105. Thucydides, Peloponnesian War, bk. I, para. 75, 44. Also Richard Schlatter, “Thomas Hobbes and Thucydides,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 6 (1945): 350–62; 358–60; Klosko and Rice, “Thucydides,” 405; Brown, “Derivation of Anarchy,” 52–53; Slomp, Thomas Hobbes, 71; Jonathan Scott, “The peace of silence: Thucydides and the English Civil War,” in Rogers and Sorell, Hobbes and History, 112–36; 122; Zagorin, Hobbes, 39; Abizadeh, “Glory and the Evolution,” 281; and many more. 106. Aristotle, Rhetorica, 1382b12–14.

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107. Hobbes, Art of Rhetorique, bk. II, ch. 6, 75. 108. I am indebted to an anonymous reviewer for this point. 109. Hobbes, Elements of Law I.19.1, 100; Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 13, 61. 110. Thucydides, Peloponnesian War, bk I, para. 23, 15. 111. Ibid., bk. VI, para. 18, 388. Also Brown, “Derivation of Anarchy,” 56. 112. Abizadeh, “Glory and the Evolution,” 293–98. 113. Hobbes, Elements of Law I.14.4, 71; Hobbes, De Cive I.4, 93; Gabriella Slomp, “Hobbes on Glory and Civil Strife,” in Springborg, Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s “Leviathan,” 181–98; 185–86. 114. Aristotle, Rhetorica, 1378a31–1379b38; Abizadeh, “Glory and the Evolution,” 277–80. Hobbes rejected Aristotle’s claim that a slight that makes a person angry must be undeserved. 115. Francesco Sansovino, ed., Propositione, overo Considerationi in materia di cose di stado … Di M.  Francesco Guicciardini et  al. (Propositions or Considerations on Matters of the Affairs of State) (Venice, 1583), LVIII.5. This volume, a compendium of the texts of three authors, including the 1525 or 1528 version of Guicciardini’s Ricordi, was in the Cavendish library. Hobbes’s catalog entry lists it only under Guicciardini’s name, which suggests that Guicciardini was his principal or only interest. Talaska, Hardwick Library, 123. The Ricordi might have been useful to Hobbes and William (II) Cavendish for their study of Italian. For their knowledge of Italian see Noel Malcolm, De Dominis (1560–1624): Venetian, Anglican, Ecumenist and Relapsed Heretic (London: Strickland and Scott Academic Publications, 1984), 47–54, esp. 49–50. 116. Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 13, 61. Also Hobbes, Elements of Law I.14.4, 71; Hobbes, De Cive I.2, 91–92; I.4, 93. 117. For an extended argument that for Hobbes the concept of a natural political animal is absurd, see Gooding and Hoekstra, “Hobbes and Aristotle,” 31–50. 118. Evrigenis, Images of Anarchy, 255; Brett, Changes of State, 5–6, 114. For a different, unconventional view see Christov, Beyond Anarchy, 33–66. Christov’s naturalistic interpretation of the state of nature emphasizes the role of the family, which does not exist in the state of mere nature. The state of mere nature precedes this attenuated state of nature and is situated at the opposite extreme from the commonwealth.

CHAPTER 6

The Civil State and Popular Sovereignty

6.1   Overview In the preceding three chapters, we seem to have detected cross fertilization and integration, analogy and metaphor in Hobbes’s theory of cognition; dialectical thinking and inversion in his concept of felicity; relativity, sepconic articulation, analogy, conceptual combination and concept expansion in his theory of moral relativity; and cross fertilization and integration, sepconic articulation, divergent thinking, inversion, and conceptual combination in his theory of the state of nature. The subject of this chapter is the commonwealth, which Hobbes calls the state in Leviathan and sometimes in The Elements of Law as well.1 I wish to focus not on the whole gamut of his creative insights in his theory of the civil state, but on the creative aspects of an important feature of his philosophical argumentation which I call adversarial thinking. By this I mean that he employs philosophical ideas and theories that attack opposing views and counter, replace, rule out, or otherwise undermine them. Making the strongest argument that he can make in favor of his own view almost of necessity requires him to challenge opposing views, such is the thoroughness of his philosophic ethic and the strength of his engagement with the scholastic tradition. He also had political reasons to attack opposing views, and these would naturally have reinforced his motivation to deal a blow to them. But he seldom calls out and criticizes specific writers, institutions, and movements by name, although Aristotle, scholasticism, the Catholic © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. J. Hamilton, Hobbes’s Creativity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27733-7_6

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Church, and Cardinal Roberto Bellarmino, the champion of the indirect power of the pope in temporal matters, are notable exceptions. Taken together, several aspects of his adversarial thinking constitute a formidable creative force reinforcing the goals of his philosophical project. Hobbes’s adversarial thinking is either general or generic, or it is pointed and specific, politically, philosophically, or theologically. The general form of Hobbes’s adversarial thinking often appears as a broad philosophical position supported by layers of arguments requiring different individual sub-tasks for which he marshals traditional views and invents new arguments to solve the problem at hand. Several commentators have observed Hobbes’s tendency to use varied, overdetermined theory to support a single conclusion.2 It may be philosophically problematic to heap up arguments with little regard to their mutual coherence,3 but doing so no doubt in his judgment enhanced the prospects of convincing his seventeenth-­ century audience. It also may represent strong divergent thinking, which can produce many different useful ideas, demonstrating his fluency, flexibility, and originality, which can lead to creativity.4 Hobbes’s creative adversarial argumentation takes three general forms: (1) redefining or redescribing concepts and modifying or replacing theories to present compelling alternatives to those he found objectionable; (2) enhancing, strengthening, or reinforcing existing concepts and theories; and (3) diminishing, weakening, qualifying, or trivializing opposing ideas, especially when it would be impossible, impracticable, or even dangerous to attempt to discredit them. They are not mutually exclusive. For example, as Hobbes undermines traditional natural law theory he also expands the traditional power of the sovereign and the duty of subjects where necessary to provide an obligatory public standard of behavior. Several specific modes of thinking seem to assist his adversarial thinking: (1) ruling out, or blocking5 opposing views on the grounds of logic, epistemology, metaphysics, or theology so that they cannot be legitimate candidates for consideration; (2) subversive integration,6 co-opting or adopting an opposing idea in a form that supports his own case; (3) conceptual combination; (4) concept expansion; (5) relativity; (6) inversion; and (7) divergent thinking. We are constrained to consider creative only Hobbes’s arguments that were unknown to the field of philosophers in his day, even if he innocently and unknowingly reinvented an idea with a long history. This is the only practical approach since it would be difficult to prove that he was not aware of an existing idea. For example, in De cive and Leviathan he attacks

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those who promoted the classical theory of liberty as the absence of domination and held that there is more liberty in democracy than in monarchy. Liberty, he says, is the same in all forms of commonwealth. But Francisco de Vitoria had already taken the same position, arguing against Aristotle and the supporters of popular government.7 There is no evidence beyond this parallel that Hobbes actually read Vitoria but we cannot rule it out. He may have reinvented this view, but we cannot consider it creative because there is room for doubt that it was and because the field would not consider it original. We will begin where Hobbes began, by identifying the problem which he thought that he needed to solve. Then we will consider the opposing ideas that he himself highlights and seeks to challenge, and some representative voices of the tradition to which he seems to refer. After a brief account of his theory of the institution and nature of the commonwealth, the rest of this chapter will be devoted to an examination of the ideas and approaches which he used to counter the opposing ideas, focusing on what seem to be their creative aspects. Then we will be in a position to assess the scope of his adversarial thinking and its creativity.

6.2   The Problem and the Goal The first thing that Hobbes had to do in launching his political philosophy was to identify a problem requiring a solution. A problem will entail a goal and one or more obstacles to achieving the goal.8 In Hobbes’s case, the problem he found set off a long series of obstacles, for the goal which he set himself was so audacious and iconoclastic that it would have seemed to the field of his day absurd and impossible to try to achieve before he did so. In the end he constructed a complex cognitive model to represent his solution based in part on existing thought matrixes and in part on his own inventions. But there were so many emergent obstacles that neither they nor their solutions could have been entirely evident to him at the outset. Our first task, then, is to recover the problem and the goal he had identified. There are clear statements of them in the English and Latin versions of Leviathan. The dedication to the English original states that he wished to “advance the Civill Power,” and in the conclusion he declares specifically that the book “was occasioned” by the English civil wars and written “without other designe, than to set before mens eyes the mutuall Relation between Protection and Obedience.”9 The problem with which he was concerned appears to have been sedition and rebellion against the

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government that protects people and the folly of causing civil war. There is a lot more at play in his political and moral thought than the idea that one ought to obey the power which protects one, an idea that had become central to the polemical arguments of the advocates of the new English Commonwealth: royalists should accept and obey the new republican government because it offered them protection. He appears to be trying to curry favor with the new government rather than being entirely honest about his goal. The Latin edition returns to the first point. There he states that he wrote the book to “exalt” the civil power “as much as I can,”10 and to demonstrate that there can be no ideological pretext for violation of the law.11 These latter claims also may have been politically motivated, to defend Hobbes against his English critics or to please the court of Charles II.12 But the Latin version was intended primarily for a continental audience, and from this viewpoint its stated goal would appear to have more credibility. He had less reason to posture politically before foreign readers. Moreover, his early works support the conclusion that he wanted to maximize the civil power and respond to opposing ideological viewpoints, especially those that led in his view to civil war. The dedications to The Elements of Law and De cive show that Hobbes was preoccupied with the problem of war and peace from the start. France had endured a devastating civil war in the late sixteenth century, and the Thirty Years’ War had several more years to run in Germany, as did the rebellion of the Low Countries against Catholic Spain. The Scots had rebelled against Charles I, the Irish also revolted while Hobbes was writing De cive, and civil war in England may have begun to appear inevitable to him,13 though the first civil war would not break out until the following year. He claims that without his science society had been nothing but “mutual fear,” that “neither the Sword nor the Pen” had been “allowed any Cessation,” that writers on justice and politics had done nothing but contradict one another, and that if his science were adopted there would be no more ideological pretext for civil war.14 In the body of the texts, the sovereign has absolute power, subject only to divine and natural law. Subjects are obliged to obey the sovereign in nearly everything if it is Christian.15 Resistance and the opinions that provide a pretext for sedition and rebellion are central concerns.16 There are certain things that a person cannot be understood to have relinquished in establishing a commonwealth, such as the right of self-preservation, which many commentators believe justifies rebellion. But he denied the right of self-defense the capacity to justify resistance for ideological reasons.17 His political focus in these

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early works was on war and peace, absolute power, simple obedience, non-­ resistance, and the ideologies which provided an excuse for rebellion. The same themes appeared later in Leviathan, which he greatly expanded to support further the rights of sovereigns and the duties of subjects based on theology and scripture.18 Thus the overall goal of his political philosophy was, much as he would state later in the Latin version of Leviathan, to maximize the legitimate power of the sovereign and the obedience that subjects owe it, and to demonstrate that there can be no valid philosophical or theological reason for resistance. So far, this is a blueprint that would have been familiar to any early modern absolutist, but Hobbes was much more audacious than other absolutists. In pursuit of his goal, he would undermine or demolish the traditional limits on governmental power imposed by divine, natural, and civil law, attack many opposing views, and reinterpret scripture in a way that was deeply offensive to most of his contemporaries. What exactly were the dangerous ideological views justifying resistance to which he objected? In 1646, between the English civil wars, he wrote a new preface to De cive in which he concisely answered this question, specifically in defense of monarchy and in opposition to a set of ideas associated with popular sovereignty. The political and military situation had changed dramatically since the initial printing of De cive, and the new preface constitutes a commentary on the plight of Charles I as well as an attack on the theory of popular sovereignty. How many Kings (and those good men too) hath this one errour, That a Tyrant King might lawfully be put to death, been the slaughter of? How many throats hath this false position cut, That a Prince for some causes may by some certain men be deposed? And what blood-shed hath not this erroneous doctrine caused, That Kings are not superiours to, but administrators for the multitude? Lastly, how many rebellions hath this opinion been the cause of, which teacheth that the knowledge whether the commands of Kings be just or unjust, belongs to private men, and that before they yeeld obedience, they not only may, but ought to dispute them? Besides, in the morall Philosophy now commonly received, there are many things no lesse dangerous then those, which it matters not now to recite.19

The unnamed philosophical dangers to which Hobbes refers last must include another four “dangerous” errors which are the subject of criticism in the body of De cive: (1) that the sovereign is subject to the laws; (2) that supreme power may be divided; (3) that subjects have absolute property in their possessions; and (4) that the people is the same as a multitude and

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therefore can exist before the institution of government (or in The Elements of Law, that the people is distinct from the sovereign).20 Each of these doctrines could ground a challenge to the absolute power of Hobbes’s sovereign. Many commentators have justifiably focused on the relation of Hobbes’s thought to contemporary English politics during the 1640s and early 1650s. They argue that Hobbes engaged in a political debate with his English contemporaries during this period. Important work has also been done on the European context of Hobbes’s thought, especially in respect of Leviathan. The principal spokesperson of this point of view is Quentin Skinner. He asserts that his contextual approach is governed by the assumption that abstract thought such as Hobbes’s is “never above the battle” but “always part of the battle itself.”21 Noel Malcolm agrees that Hobbes deployed his philosophy polemically in Leviathan  against the Commonwealth government, and against a host of traditional religious orthodoxies which, Hobbes believed, undermined the obedience of subjects.22 But Malcolm also avers that contextual and biographical analysis of the sort championed by Skinner and his followers “is very far from exhausting the meaning of [Hobbes’s] work, or from explaining why Hobbes believed that what he wrote was true.”23 I would add that his abstract adversarial thinking is an integral part of his philosophy and contributes to its distinctive character. It is not just philosophical polemic. Many of the English views which Hobbes targets are derived from older continental ideas, which had long circulated widely in England and which re-emerged in the English debates of the 1640s. The universal form in which he presents his theoretical concerns and expresses his replies suggests that he often thought of them not just in a parochial English context, but in a broad theoretical manner which also captured continental writers. He seems to have tailored many of his arguments for a European audience in De cive, which he originally published in Latin in France. We will focus our attention on what appear to be creative aspects of his adversarial thinking relating to the moral and political issues which he cites and rebuts in De cive, before his political interests gravitated back to England and the civil wars. There has been relatively less interest in this aspect of his thought. We have identified the goals of Hobbes’s political philosophy and a number of beliefs which he found dangerous and which his goals required him to rebut. We turn now to identify some of the most important

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European proponents of these views, writers in the long tradition of theoretical popular sovereignty.

6.3   The Theory of Popular Sovereignty The earliest threads of the theory of popular sovereignty, which Hobbes knew well,24 go back at least to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and descend to the seventeenth century through the civilians or Roman law jurists, canon lawyers and the conciliar movement, scholastics, humanists, the sixteenth-century monarchomachs or “king killers,” Althusius and Grotius. The theory assumes a more recognizable constitutionalist form by the sixteenth century. We will find that all of the views which Hobbes considers to be dangerous appear in many of these writers, though not all. What unites them in a tradition is the ideas of the community as responsible for creation and empowerment of the ruler, the ruler’s responsibility to act justly, and the community’s residual power to control, remove, or even assassinate the ruler under certain circumstances. Under Roman law every people or independent community has the power to make law for itself. 25 The influential medieval civilian Azo of Bologna (c. 1150–1230) glossed the origin of the authority of the Holy Roman emperor (princeps) as a concession or delegation of the people (populus), who appointed him to be its agent and reserved to itself the power to rescind his legislative power at will. Azo understood populus both as a multitude of individuals and as a unified body or whole community (universitas).26 The emperor, he declared, was greater than each individual but not greater than the universitas.27 According to Accursius (c. 1182–1263), Azo’s pupil, the emperor is bound by the law because it is the source of his authority. 28 In the fourteenth century, the civilians Bartolus of Saxsaferrato (1313–1357) and Baldus de Ubaldis (1327–1400) went further. Bartolus maintained that the whole community as a universitas, though an abstraction, can act and transact as an individual or corporation. He held that the universitas model should apply to all independent communities, proposed that specific constraints be imposed on rulers, and argued that the populus or universitas can act without the traditional requirements of a head or the prior authorization of a superior. It had all the authority it needed to act on its own. Baldus added that the community or corpus mysticum (mystical body), a concept of theological origin, is not just an abstraction but a body of individuals capable of acting for the corpus mysticum.29

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In parallel with the civilian developments, some canonists argued that the papacy is inferior to a general council if the Church is under threat, and that a council could depose a pope for a history of crimes. The theologian William of Ockham (c. 1287–1347) said that the pope was merely a minister or administrator, that he must exercise his authority for the good of the faithful, and that he could be deposed if he did not do so. The principal achievements of the conciliar movement came in the first half of the fifteenth century, in connection with the Councils of Constance (1414–1418) and Basel (1431–1449).30 The participants at Basel represented a variety of opinions. Some moderates maintained that the best constitution of the Church was mixed, with the papal authority restrained by aristocratic and democratic elements.31 But radical voices argued that a general council is a microcosm or a symbolic representation of the whole Church and the Church’s sovereign juridical authority, with power to remove the pope by force and administer the Church itself.32 Jean Gerson (1363–1429) and Juan of Segovia (c. 1395–1458), like Bartolus, applied the theory of the universitas to all temporal governments. In the early sixteenth century John Mair (or Major) (1465–1550), with his influential pupil, Jacques Almain (d. 1515), reinvigorated conciliarist theory in Paris and in parallel advanced a theory of civil popular sovereignty.33 Mair counted among his important pupils the Spanish neo-scholastics Vitoria (c. 1483–1546) and Soto (1494–1560), the Scottish humanist George Buchanan (1506–1582), and the Protestant reformer John Calvin (1509–1564). Calvin’s French followers, the Huguenot monarchomachs, explicitly acknowledged their debt to conciliarism. Mair and Almain maintained that under natural law political power rests in the community, that the community delegates its power to a ruler-­ administrator, and that he has greater power than any individual and, as a rule, greater power than the community. But sometimes the community has greater power than the ruler, such as when it deposes a tyrant.34 According to Mair, in monarchies originally established by free people the imposition of taxes and adoption of binding laws require the consent of the estates, and tyrants cannot be deposed without the estates. Almain argues that a community cannot transfer its coercive power to a ruler irrevocably because a community, by analogy with the individual, has an inalienable right of self-preservation and self-defense. The community’s coercive power, which is the basis of the ruler’s power, belongs to him or her only by delegation.35

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The ideas of Mair and Almain were reflected in the thought of the principal Spanish neo-scholastics, Vitoria, Soto, Molina (1535–1600), and Suárez (1548–1617), although there were many differences between them. What began with a theory of partial popular sovereignty issued ultimately in constitutionalism.36 They all agreed that individuals are free by nature, that power is vested in the commonwealth, that the commonwealth transmits its authority or power to a ruler or rulers (unless they receive it by conquest), that monarchy is the best form of government, and that a ruler is superior to every individual and to the commonwealth as a whole.37 Although Vitoria maintained that royal power comes immediately from God (the traditional view of canonists) and not from the commonwealth, the other three agreed with Mair that the power of the commonwealth itself comes directly from God.38 Molina and Suárez allowed the commonwealth to determine how much authority to transfer to its ruler.39 Soto and Suárez held that the commonwealth alienates the authority it gives to the ruler and gives away the right to withdraw that authority and depose him, as long as he is just.40 But they also agreed with Almain that if a legitimate king becomes a tyrant, power to depose and remove him remains with the commonwealth because the commonwealth can licitly repel force with force.41 Molina, on the other hand, agreed with Mair and Almain that the commonwealth only delegates power to the ruler and permitted resistance to the ruler if he oversteps the bounds of his delegated power.42 Soto and Suárez endorsed tyrannicide for a legitimate ruler who has become a tyrant. Suárez maintained that it is permissible for anyone to slay a ruler who is trying to destroy the commonwealth and is slaughtering its citizens. He also held that if a competent judge (such as the pope or the estates) deposes the tyrant, anyone may kill him if he attacks the commonwealth because he is no longer the ruler but an enemy.43 In accordance with Vatican tradition, all four writers considered the spiritual power separate (or largely separate) from the secular power and superior to it, and argued that the pope may interfere in secular affairs for the good of religion and the salvation of souls, such as to depose and expel a king.44 Vitoria and Soto maintained that a ruler is bound to follow the law but cannot be forced to do so.45 Molina and Suárez, like Mair, declared that laws issued by the ruler are only binding on the commonwealth with the consent of the estates.46 The Huguenot monarchomachs had a more advanced constitutionalist theory of popular sovereignty than the neo-scholastics. They gave greater effective power to the commonwealth by expanding the limitations on

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kings, the power of the estates and inferior magistrates, and the meaning of tyranny. The most important of these French writers were François Hotman (1524–1590), Theodore Beza (1519–1605), and the author or authors of the Vindiciae, contra tyrannos (Recourse against Tyrants), who used the pseudonym Stephanus Junius Brutus.47 Beza and Brutus were contract theorists, and Brutus relied heavily on legal arguments to reinforce the whole people’s authority over the prince. Hotman wrote of the constitution of ancient France as a prescriptive model for sixteenth-century France. Supreme authority was vested in the people.48 The constitution was mixed, with a weak king and a strong public assembly which had the power to elect and depose kings, enact laws, tax, appoint officers of the kingdom, and control all important public affairs.49 The king was restrained by fundamental laws which required him to preserve the authority of the public assembly and not to alienate the royal domain (which provided public financial support) without the assembly’s approval.50 Beza advocated the power of lesser magistrates (originally a Lutheran idea) to control kings and resist those who become tyrants, identifying these magistrates with the ancient Spartan ephors, a model endorsed by Calvin to protect the people’s liberty.51 It is inconceivable that a nation would submit to a king without placing conditions on his rule, Beza argued, and the king must accept these conditions and swear that the lesser magistrates, who are magistrates of the kingdom and not of the king, will share in the government of the kingdom.52 If the king violates his oath, the lesser magistrates are released from their oaths to obey him and, if his tyranny is flagrant, are obliged to resist him until the estates can meet. The lesser magistrates collectively should apply pressure on the tyrant to convoke the estates if he prevents them from meeting.53 Though the estates have the power to depose a tyrant, Beza maintained, they must exhaust every other avenue first.54 The king is subject to divine, natural, and civil law, and subjects should disobey commands which they consider to be inequitable or contrary to the law of God.55 But as private individuals they have no right to act against a tyrant unless they have a special mandate from God.56 Many of these ideas featured in the Vindiciae in a more juristic manner. The king, who is chosen by God and constituted by the people, that is, by all individuals considered together as members of a whole (universi), is just an administrator whose power is revocable.57 There is a covenant between the king and the whole people (a persona ficta) involving, first, the king’s promise to rule justly for the good of the people, which binds

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him and opens him to correction if he does not. The universi, second, promise to obey the king, conditional on his honoring his promise. The people retain their liberty and ownership of their property. The king must obey the laws and cannot make laws, tax, or make war or peace without the order of the people.58 A second covenant, based on Old Testament covenants and involving God, the king and people, binds the king and the universitas to God and to each other to be the people of God.59 If the king violates his oath to God, he forfeits his kingdom. If he violates his promises to the people, the people, acting through the nobles and inferior magistrates as officers of the kingdom, are bound to admonish, judge, and restrain him by force if he resists.60 A private individual may not use force to oppose a king unless God has given him an extraordinary mandate to kill a tyrant.61 Thus, Brutus concluded, a true king is superior to the people as individuals but inferior to the universitas, to the public assemblies as epitomes of the people, and to the nobles and magistrates who act on their behalf.62 The king, by analogy with Roman private law, is just a curator or caretaker, not an owner of power and public resources, and holds them as a precarium, granted on sufferance of the universitas.63 Again, the king is like a tutor or guardian who acts on behalf of his ward (the universitas), which is independent but unable to act for itself. The magistrates and nobles are co-tutors, bound to ensure that the principal tutor acts for the benefit of the ward, with recourse against him if he does not.64 The magistrates, as partners and ephors of the king, have received their authority directly from the people.65 Such constitutionalist ideas would have a long lifespan. A later, Catholic version emphasized popular sovereignty, deposition of kings by the pope, and tyrannicide.66 Althusius (1557–1638) shared many of the constitutionalist ideas of the Huguenots though his corporativist thought differed in significant respects. All commonwealths are mixed of monarchical, aristocratic, and democratic elements.67 The seat of sovereignty is the people as a universitas, which constitutes the supreme magistrate just as an administrator.68 There are two covenants, one secular and the other sacred, as in the Vindiciae. The first, between the supreme magistrate and the ephors (princes, estates, officials, counselors) acting on behalf of the universitas,69 sets out the laws and conditions of the supreme magistrate’s rule, and transfers to him only as much power as the people deem necessary. He promises to act in accordance with divine, natural, and human law, and his decrees are not valid without the approval of the ephors, the defenders of the liberties and powers of the people.70 Collectively the ephors have the

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right to correct, punish, and remove in extremis a supreme magistrate who breaks his promises, begins to destroy the fundamental laws, or to act contrary to piety and justice.71 Two writers, Buchanan and the Spanish Jesuit Juan de Mariana (1536–1624), notoriously argued that private individuals have the right to slay a tyrant. In each case the assassin must first judge whether the king is good or bad. Buchanan maintained that there is a mutual secular covenant between the king and the people. The king promises to rule justly.72 If he breaks his promise, he forfeits his authority and anyone may kill him.73 Mariana declared that a tyrant should not be tolerated if he sows confusion, appropriates public and private property, and is wicked and impious. In these extreme circumstances it is the responsibility of the estates to resist him. But if the estates are prevented from meeting, any private individual may slay the tyrant in accordance with the public will as expressed by illustrious and prudent people.74 He assigns the pope no role in this context. Our final writer is Grotius (1583–1645), who was Hobbes’s contemporary and who commentators generally agree was important to Hobbes.75 He maintained that a people may establish whatever form of government it wishes, including a mixed form, and may transfer to a ruler or rulers as much power as it wished, even absolute power irrevocably.76 Sovereign power may be shared or held by separate persons, and is usually in the ruler as head, or agent, while it remains in the body of the people as a whole.77 A contract between a people and its ruler may have conditions attached, and a people may reserve some power exclusively to itself, although this arrangement is not common.78 As long as the ruler respects any qualifications and limitations on his power he is supreme, and he is not subject to his own laws unless his power is limited by law.79 The origin of his right to punish subjects for wrongdoing lies in a right to resist and punish anyone attempting to injure oneself or another, which each person possessed before the establishment of government. The ruler retains this right but his subjects have transferred their right to him.80 Most kings, Grotius observes, hold supreme power only as a usufruct, though some hold it despotically as their personal property, such as by right of conquest in a just war.81 A usufruct is the right to use the benefits of someone else’s possession without the right to harm or destroy it. Subjects, for their part, should not obey but must patiently accept punishment from a ruler who commands anything manifestly contrary to natural law or the commands of God. As private citizens they have no right to compel him to desist,82

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but they may resist if they have violated no law and are in extreme danger.83 Citing Brutus and others, Grotius attacked the idea that inferior magistrates may resist a legitimate ruler because they have no authority other than that provided to them by the ruler himself.84 But he maintained that a whole people may licitly resist a legitimate ruler in seven specific cases involving the institution of the ruler and the nature of his power, his relationship to the people and others with whom he shares power, his abandonment of his office, or alienation of the realm.85 These views on resistance were cited widely later in England.86 The theory of popular sovereignty is a house with many rooms and its construction had a long history. We have surveyed some of the most important contributors to that tradition, which finally led to full constitutionalism. Hobbes would naturally have wanted to address such a prominent theory in opposition to his own in seeking continental recognition among the learned through the printing of De cive. It features all of the political and moral doctrines that Hobbes specifies as objectionable: that tyrants may be slain; that kings may be deposed “for some causes” and “by some certain men”; that kings are just administrators; that private individuals may question and dispute their king’s commands; that he is subject to the law; that supreme power may be divided; that subjects have absolute property in their possessions which therefore cannot be taken from them without their own consent; and that the people is the same as the group of individuals of which it is comprised and therefore can exist before the institution of government and the state. All these “seditious doctrines” can be found together in the tradition of popular sovereignty and nowhere else.87 There developed in opposition to this long tradition and in dialogue with it a long tradition of absolutism, the very antithesis of popular sovereignty. Hobbes subscribed to this theory and benefited from it, but also developed it in new and original ways. The next section summarizes Hobbes’s account of the process of establishing the commonwealth and its nature. The following section will focus specifically on the originality and creativity of Hobbes’s responses to the doctrines which he opposed.

6.4  Establishing the Civil State Hobbes opens De cive by attacking Aristotle’s idea that humans are political and social animals by nature,88 which was a widely held contemporary belief either alone or in conjunction with the competing idea that humans

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are motivated by self-interest. It appeared particularly among the neo-­ scholastics but also in Grotius. As Brett has shown, writers who held both views used sociability and utility seeking to ground human society.89 But this was anathema to Hobbes. If sociability were sufficient to base society on, even in conjunction with utility seeking, an absolute sovereign might not be necessary. Most people would willingly cooperate without being forced to do so by Hobbes’s absolute sovereign. Aristotle acknowledged that some people are wicked, motivated by profit or glory.90 Hobbes maintains instead that most people are wicked91 and are motivated by profit or glory, and insists that they are driven to form society by mutual fear.92 People in the state of nature seek society for its own sake only secondarily. Aristotle also held that a polis or city is unified and made into a community by education.93 Again, Hobbes disagrees. People cannot be born fit for society because they are born children and children do not understand the binding force of covenants. Other people do not understand society’s benefits. They have to be educated to make them fit for society.94 The necessary role of education, for Hobbes, comes before the formation of society, not afterward. He can be understood to be weaving a number of Aristotle’s views into his explanation of the origins of society and inverting them for his own purposes in an original way. Wicked people are predominant, not just social anomalies. Natural sociability is insufficient to bring people together for long, but it is still a reason why people seek community. Education is useful in preparing people to enter society, but not in establishing concord and civil unity after the formation of society. Only a sovereign with absolute power, established artificially by covenant, can achieve that goal. Hobbes undercuts the neo-scholastics and many others95 again by arguing that common consent, an accord or agreement among many individuals to work toward some common goal which falls short of a binding covenant, is insufficient to lift them permanently out of the state of nature and to establish lasting peace. People left to their own devices are just too wicked, competitive, and fearful of one another in the state of nature to keep their informal agreements longer than it serves their interests.96 This act of will cannot establish an authoritative government.97 Everyone has the liberty to do whatever she wants and a right to all things, but to no avail. Everyone suffers at the will of everyone else. To bring lasting peace only a binding covenant will do, enforced by a sovereign with absolute power. Hobbes is making an original but necessary point in support of his own theory of the establishment of absolute sovereignty, while implicitly

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rebutting a view which often grounded theories of popular power. His theory of the state of nature as a state of war underpins his argument. Mere concord results in a state of dangerous flux. Hobbes’s concepts of natural right and rights transfer are central to his account of the establishment of commonwealths. The conventional view of subjective natural right was that it was an effect of natural law and had a moral dimension warranting its exercise. Thus the right of self-­ preservation, it was maintained, was given to individuals by God through the law of nature. The transfer of this type of right was analogous to the transfer of a parcel of property. One’s entitlement was simply conveyed to another person. But this scheme was not available to Hobbes because he did not conceive of natural right in this way. His concept of natural right has no moral dimension. In the state of nature natural right is simply the liberty to do or not to do something which is not inconsistent with reason or the law of nature. Since it is impossible actually to transfer a liberty, he devised his own scheme of rights transfer. One obliges oneself by promise or contract not to interfere in someone else’s exercise of his liberty, either generally or in respect of something specific.98 An advantage of his concept of right as liberty is to deprive the subject of any moral worth or warrant which could help to justify opposition to his sovereign, with the exception of the inalienable right of self-preservation, which he cannot be obliged to part with. An advantage of his concept of rights transfer is that Hobbes is able to interpret the obligation not to interfere as an obligation not to resist, which he could use against the theorists of popular sovereignty who relied on rights transfer to create their ruler or rulers. Another advantage of his concepts of natural right and rights transfer in his early works is to provide the conceptual basis of the absolute power of the sovereign. The subject covenants or promises not to resist him, leaving him to exercise freely the right to all things which he had in the state of nature.99 Hobbes seems to have developed his initial theory of the establishment of absolute sovereign power in response to Grotius. Grotius maintained that the origin of a ruler’s right to punish his subjects for wrongdoing, and thus the origin of his coercive power over them, was the right which everyone had to resist and punish anyone attempting to injure himself or others before the establishment of government. Subjects have transferred their right to punish wrongdoing to their ruler, while he retains his original right to punish as the basis of his power. A similar process occurs in Hobbes’s early works. Since the sword of justice must be transferred to an individual or an assembly for the sake of peace, he says, that individual or

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assembly must be understood to have sovereign right.100 This transfer is effected by individuals covenanting among themselves not to resist the sovereign in the exercise of its natural right to all things.101 In both Grotius and Hobbes, then, the ruler’s or assembly’s right is what it retains after its subjects transfer their rights to it, except that for Hobbes, they transfer their right only to assist and defend others, since they cannot surrender their right to defend themselves.102 Grotius’s subjects surrender their right to punish others. Hobbes appears to co-opt this approach from Grotius to support a theory of greater sovereign right. He simultaneously justifies his own absolutism and counters Grotius. The establishment of a person or assembly with absolute sovereign power has three important consequences. First, Hobbes says, the subject’s covenant entails that he is bound not to resist the will of the sovereign, nor to refuse to give the sovereign the use of his strength and wealth against anyone other than himself (which presumably means that he cannot licitly refuse to fight for his sovereign or to provide funds to support a militia).103 Second, the sovereign’s power is absolute and indivisible because divided sovereignty would be ineffectual or descend into civil war. He borrows the theory of absolute, indivisible sovereignty in its essentials from Jean Bodin, whom he cites in The Elements of Law.104 Sovereign power cannot be divided or shared, Bodin argued inter alia, or it would “come to arms” until sovereignty belonged to a single person, or to part or all of the people.105 Third, since the subjects have submitted their wills to that of the sovereign, from the unity of the sovereign’s will in matters concerning the common peace there proceeds the unity of the commonwealth.106 In addition to the judicial power, the sovereign possesses exclusively the powers of legislation, defense, and the appointment of magistrates, administrators, and counselors. Since the subject is bound by the covenant of subjection to simple obedience, he must obey whatever laws the sovereign commands, subject to his right of self-preservation. Daniel Lee aptly characterizes the process of establishing the commonwealth as one of “mass enslavement.”107 The creation of the sovereign unifies a multitude of individuals in a body politic or civil person, the fictitious person or universitas of the jurists, which has its own rights and resources separate from the rights and property of individual subjects.108 This body politic is called the commonwealth or state.109 By the covenant of subjection subjects have agreed to take the will of the civil person as their own, but it has no will of its own because it is fictitious.110 Therefore Hobbes, apparently working implicitly

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with a concept of virtual representation for both a sovereign assembly and a sovereign monarch,111 declares that the single will of one person or the majority of an assembly is to be taken for the will of each individual and of all of them together as a body.112 The sovereign acts on behalf of the body politic, because her will is taken for its will.113 In her will “is included and involved the will of everyone in particular.”114 Hobbes therefore feels entitled to conclude that the commonwealth is included even in the person of a monarch.115 His use of the juridical concept of the body politic and the requirement of an agent to act on its behalf is familiar from the universitas of the theory of popular sovereignty. But he cannot agree that the sovereign is a mere tutor or guardian of the commonwealth, nor that the multitude constitutes a people before the establishment of the commonwealth. Hobbes also followed Bodin in asserting that there are only three forms of commonwealth, monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, or rule by one person, by a part of the populace, or by all of the populace. The ancients had held that tyranny, oligarchy, and anarchy are corruptions of the first three. But Bodin reasoned that they cannot be three more forms of commonwealth because whether the holders of sovereignty are good or bad is immaterial to the essence of the commonwealth.116 Chronologically, the first of these forms, according to Hobbes, is democracy, the form from which aristocracy and monarchy develop. It may appear odd that a monarchist such as Hobbes would devise a theory that hinges on the idea of original democracy, when Bodin and other absolutists maintained that the first commonwealths were monarchies. But there is a precedent from ancient Rome. The lex regia (royal law), by which the Roman people purportedly transferred all its power to the emperor, also began with a form of popular power, the Roman Republic. For Hobbes, this arrangement established an alternative to the rule of popular power in the theory of popular sovereignty. Hobbes reinforced his theory of sovereignty by arguing that the sovereign must have the power to interpret scripture because, like any text, it must be interpreted for it to be understood. But interpreters make mistakes or have hidden agendas. Therefore the only possible solution to the endless scriptural disagreements is that the sovereign, a criterion of action, be the authoritative interpreter of scripture to prevent disputes from threatening the peace.117 This doctrine is painfully at odds with another passage, however, which seems to say that the sovereign is obliged by divine law to follow the interpretation of clerics. If this is what Hobbes

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means, his sovereign has a chink in his absolutist armor. He could be challenged by his own clerics on the grounds that scripture forces them to do so. It is worth quoting the passage at some length before we consider it. [F]or the deciding of questions of Faith, that is to say, concerning God, which transcend humane capacity, we stand in need of a divine blessing (that we may not be deceiv’d at least in necessary points) to be deriv’d from CHRIST himselfe by the imposition of hands … This infallibility our Saviour Christ promis’d (in those things which are necessary to Salvation) to his Apostles untill the day of judgement; that is to say, to the Apostles, and Pastors succeeding the Apostles who were to be consecrated by the imposition of hands. He therefore who hath the Soveraigne power in the City, is oblig’d as a Christian, where there is any question concerning the Mysteries of Faith, to interpret the Holy Scriptures by Clergy-men lawfully ordain’d.118

Hobbes asserts that the sovereign should be guided on questions of faith by the interpretation of duly ordained clergy because those who have received the imposition of hands in succession from the Apostles are infallible in matters necessary to salvation. But he claimed elsewhere in De cive that the sovereign’s interpretation of scripture is the word of God and attacked the idea of clerical infallibility as a cloak for clerics to seek power and wealth.119 Many years later Bishop Bramhall called him out for asserting clerical infallibility, which is not an orthodox Protestant or Catholic doctrine (with the exception, for Catholics, of the pope or a general council). In reply Hobbes changed the question from clerical infallibility to obedience to the sovereign and ignored what he had said about successive imposition of hands.120 Some commentators take this passage at face value.121 Others consider it to be anomalous.122 Lodi Nauda has shown that the clergy does not play an independent role in religious matters in The Elements of Law, and Jeffrey Collins has argued that it is incompatible with the rest of De cive.123 This passage is nonsensical and perhaps deliberately deceptive to mislead the French Catholic censors, the English Laudian clergy, or the passage’s Catholic readers (as it has misled modern commentators). If we unravel the meaning of the text in light of Hobbes’s theology, we will find that it is far from an endorsement of the efficacy of the successive imposition of hands, and it does not support the implication that the apostolic succession gives sovereigns the assurance of infallible advice if they consult duly ordained clergy. He does not say that ordination bestows infallibility in difficult matters of faith, only that it bestows infallibility on the one point

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necessary for salvation, that Jesus is the Christ.124 But all Christians by definition accept this point. By Hobbes’s tautologous standard of infallibility even the pope is infallible, but only on a point that he shares with all other Christian clergy and indeed with all faithful Christians.125

All Christian sovereigns will settle doctrinal disputes on questions necessary to salvation with perfect infallibility as long as they confess that Jesus is the Christ. If they do not, they cease to be Christian. The ancient kings of Israel, a model for early modern Christians, had the right to interpret God’s word, Hobbes claims, but delegated this authority to the priests, who were better qualified. The public validity of the priests’ interpretation depended on the king’s authority but he was not obliged to consult them.126 And Moses had governed Israel in both spiritual and temporal matters even though he was not a priest.127 Similarly, the Christian sovereign may wish to consult the clergy on doctrinal matters, though official determination of doctrinal matters will depend on the sovereign’s authority. Whatever he decides will not endanger anyone’s salvation, unless perhaps he rejects Christianity altogether. This troublesome passage creates no coherent obstacle to the Christian sovereign’s absolute power over the church and matters of faith and salvation.

6.5  Attack on Popular Sovereignty Hobbes’s Adversarial Thinking Hobbes thus succeeded in his goal of maximizing sovereign power and the obedience which subjects owe the commonwealth, and he did so by arguing that the sovereign needs the greatest possible power to perform its essential function of maintaining peace, the fundamental condition for justice, prosperity, and civilization,128 by requiring subjects to surrender all their rights except the right of self-­ preservation, and by effectively minimizing the moral and theological constraints on the sovereign. We turn now to the main purpose of this chapter, which is to identify and assess the creativity of Hobbes’s responses to the theory of popular sovereignty and the doctrines which he singles out in his early works as pretexts for rebellion and civil war. Those responses constitute his adversarial thinking. We will begin with one of Hobbes’s most consequential teachings, that there is no people or body politic before the establishment of a commonwealth, and two related ideas, that sovereign kings are not mere administrators and that they are not subject to the laws. None of these ideas is essentially new, though he developed and used them in an original way.129

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No People without Commonwealth The proponents of original popular power usually began from the premise that the community or commonwealth is vested with power which it can transfer or delegate to a ruler. Many of them also considered the supreme magistrate to be an administrator, guardian, or curator and maintained that the ruler was bound to follow the law. But Hobbes’s doctrine that there is no body politic to empower a sovereign before a sovereign is actually created by mutually covenanting individuals blocked the possibility that a community of uncovenanted individuals could transfer power to a ruler, and that in doing so it could impose laws, conditions, or other restrictions on him. Writers such as the conciliarists, the neo-scholastics, Hotman and Grotius, as well as popular opinion, considered the community of individuals a people but, Hobbes insists, a people can only be a body politic or civil body, a fictional person with a sovereign monarch or assembly whose single will is capable of acting and transacting on behalf of the civil body. To be sure, Brutus and Althusius too had considered the people a civil body or universitas, which, acting through the universi (in the case of Brutus) or the ephors (in the case of Althusius), had created a monarch and imposed laws and conditions on him to protect their liberty. But by what right did the universi or ephors act for the people? Mere agreement or consent, Hobbes claims, is insufficient to create a lasting community.130 The multitude of individuals is not a people without subjection to a sovereign; they are still in a state of nature. A series of paradoxes follows. “The People rules in all Governments, for even in Monarchies the People Commands; for the People wills by the will of one man; but the Multitude are Citizens, that is to say, Subjects. In a Democraty, and Aristocraty, the Citizens are the Multitude, but the Court [assembly] is the People. And in a Monarchy, the Subjects are the Multitude, and … the King is the People.”131 Rebellion against a king is just a war of the multitude against the people. Hobbes’s concept of the commonwealth as the fictitious person of the body politic, which he identifies with the sovereign because the sovereign provides the state with a will, erects a barrier between the multitude and the sovereign in sovereign monarchies and aristocracies, which makes it impossible for the multitude licitly to control or resist the sovereign, reinforcing his absolute power.132 The state is the people and the people cannot resist the sovereign, as the monarchomachs had argued, because the will of the sovereign “includes” the will of each of the subjects and is the will of the people as a whole, that is, the body politic. Hobbes thus seems to strengthen sovereign monarchs and aristocracies by

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inversion, by audaciously redescribing sovereign monarchs and assemblies as the people, combining the concept of the people with the concepts of the state and the sovereign, and blocking the foundation of the theory of popular sovereignty.133 Conversely, if the sovereign ceases to exist the body politic or state ceases to exist as a persona ficta with a will of its own. Hobbes’s responses to two more doctrines from the theory of popular sovereignty, that kings are just administrators and that they are subject to the civil laws, are parasitic on these ideas. Kings not Administrators nor Subject to the Law According to Brutus and Althusius, kings are just administrators because the people have imposed binding laws, conditions, and other restrictions on them by covenant, and kings can be removed at any time. Grotius maintains that a people may create a temporary or usufructuary king by covenant. Hobbes’s sovereign monarch cannot be bound by covenant to the people. In his telling, the first people must have been the body politic of a democracy, the first type of commonwealth (unless the commonwealth originated by conquest). The people or body politic can create a sovereign monarch (or aristocracy) by transferring its sovereignty to him. But a sovereign monarch cannot obligate himself to the people by accepting sovereignty because the body politic of the democracy thereby ceases to be a person, and any obligation he may have made to it no longer exists.134 He cannot be a mere administrator or be bound to obey any laws which have been imposed on him. But this response does not directly address the superior power of the people in the theory of popular sovereignty. Hobbes accordingly takes a second approach in De cive, and translates the accounts of writers such as Brutus, Althusius, and Grotius135 into the theory of absolute sovereignty by considering a case in which a democracy keeps sovereign power and appoints an elective or temporary king. He considers four possible scenarios of such kingship, one of which is administrative, and introduces a factor that opponents of absolute sovereignty such as Hotman had used to render the assembly of a monarchy superior to the king.136 The assembly that appoints an elective or temporary monarch must establish an appropriate schedule of future meetings or the assembly will cease to exist. The four scenarios are: (1) The assembly elects a monarch for life but adjourns without setting a date to meet again. In this situation the king is obliged by natural law either to convene the assembly or to name a successor himself for the good of his subjects before his death. His power has become absolute because he has the power to convene the assembly. (2) The

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assembly elects a monarch for life and before adjourning establishes a time and place of meeting after the monarch’s death. Sovereignty is still vested in the people and the king holds power as a usufruct. He exercises absolute power during his lifetime but does not possess it.137 (3) The assembly appoints a monarch for a specific period of time and adjourns after establishing a permanent schedule of future meetings during the monarch’s term of kingship. The monarch is just an administrator and the assembly can dismiss him at any time. (4) If the assembly elects a temporary monarch and transfers the right of convening itself to the monarch, the people is dissolved and the monarch is sovereign.138 There are important implications of this analysis for the theory of popular sovereignty. First, not just any elected or temporary monarch is usufructuary or administrative. Whether he is or not depends on the actions of the original democratic assembly. The monarch in (1) is not elective and the monarch in (4) is not administrative. Only the monarch in (3), such as the dictator in the Roman Republic, is administrative and may be obliged to obey the laws. Barclay had said that a monarch who could summon and dissolve the estates was superior to it.139 Like Barclay, Hobbes blocked the possibility that most European monarchies were administrative, because almost all monarchs possessed the exclusive power to convene and dissolve the estates. He also blocked Grotius’s view that most monarchies were usufructuary, because the estates in nearly all monarchies did not have the right to assemble after the deaths of their monarchs.140 The right to summon and dissolve the estates carries a lot of theoretical water for Hobbes, though he was not the first to use it as a sign of sovereign power. His response to Grotius, however, appears to be original. By combining that right with the idea of a monarch elected for life, Hobbes effectively minimized the purchase of Grotius’s view. The establishment of a true administrative kingship in a sovereign democracy is not the only possible way that a monarch can be obliged to obey the civil laws. Hobbes considers and rejects two others: (1) that the commonwealth (and therefore the sovereign) has an obligation to itself to obey the law; and (2) that the sovereign has an obligation to a subject to obey the law. There is little originality in Hobbes’s rebuttal of the first. Bodin had considered the same possibility and had rejected it on the grounds that one cannot have an obligation to oneself, which is a principle of Roman law. The sovereign cannot be bound by laws which he himself has made. Hobbes agreed.141 But Bodin had also argued that a sovereign who has promised his subjects to uphold a law cannot revoke it unless it

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has become unjust, because he is bound by his promise. Beza had said that there is a mutual obligation between the king and the officers of the kingdom on the feudal model of the mutual covenant between lord and vassal, and that the officers can oblige the king to obey the laws. Althusius argued that the supreme magistrate has promised the ephors to obey the laws. But Hobbes considered these officers or ephors as individuals subordinate to the sovereign; they have no political rights independent of his authority. The sovereign is not bound by his promises because the will of his subjects is contained in his will, and if he wills to revoke the law the subjects have concurred.142 Hobbes thus strengthened the sovereign’s power of legislation by integrating it with his new principle of the subjects’ consent to all the sovereign’s acts. No Divided Sovereignty, Nor Absolute Property Right Next, we will assess the originality of Hobbes’s responses to two more, related ideas which can be found in the theory of popular sovereignty. The first idea is that sovereign power may be divided or limited, and the second is that subjects have an exclusive right to their possessions, even against the sovereign.143 He treats separately the division of sovereignty temporally and its division along temporal and spiritual lines. We will consider the temporal and spiritual division last. Hobbes needed little originality to rebut the idea of divided or limited sovereignty and the idea of absolute property. Bodin had tried to show that sovereign power is indivisible analytically. Barclay had held that a sovereign monarch has absolute sovereign right over his subjects’ property, and that sovereign monarchs do not need the consent of the estates to raise money, though they may choose to seek it.144 Still, Hobbes placed much more weight than Bodin on Bodin’s observation that if sovereignty were divided the separate powers would, as equals opposing each other, “come to arms,” a strategy which dovetailed nicely with Hobbes’s own view that the alternative to an absolute sovereign is a state of war. He also attacks the concept of limited supreme power, which was derived from the classical theory of the mixed constitution, as an example of divided sovereignty.145 The theory of the mixed constitution, which Hotman and Althusius had promoted, Grotius had allowed and Bodin had attacked,146 joined elements of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, with each element providing limits or restrictions on the other two. The ancients had praised it as providing a harmonious balance among competing interests. Where they saw harmony Hobbes sees only inevitable conflict; harmony comes only from absolute sovereignty. He also argues that a power that

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controls the sources of public money would either be the sovereign itself or could deny the sovereign the money necessary for peace and security, leading to the dissolution of the commonwealth.147 The estates must have no such power in a sovereign monarchy. He therefore disagrees with Mair, Hotman, Brutus, Suárez, and Grotius. The state of nature rules out the possibility that a general system of private property could exist before the establishment of an absolute sovereign, or that natural law could provide the foundation of a general right of private property. Therefore all property rights have to depend on the sovereign to whom subjects have transferred all their rights, as Barclay had said.148 They do not retain a right to consent to taxation. The idea that the brutality of the state of nature awaits commonwealths with divided or limited sovereignty and the control of public finances by the estates was original, but most of what Hobbes says on these two points was not new. His response to the second kind of division of sovereign power is much more original. Division of spiritual and temporal power was practiced by states of different Christian confessions in early modern Europe, including Catholicism, the religion of the Spanish neo-scholastics, and Calvinism, the religion of the Huguenot monarchomachs and Althusius. Hobbes saw both Catholics and Calvinists as threats to the commonwealth because they claimed that spiritual power was superior to temporal power, and because he feared that when the sovereign and the clerics make divergent demands on subjects, subjects would obey their clerics, whom they view as the source of their eternal salvation, rather than their secular authorities.149 His goal is to show by philosophical and theological argumentation—by expanding the concepts of sovereignty and the commonwealth and by blocking the institutional authority of the church universal—that ecclesiastical power is subordinate to temporal power and that legitimate clerical authority is essentially pastoral and sacramental. Hobbes begins by reflecting on the nature of the sovereign’s spiritual power according to natural religion, that is, by reason without the aid of revelation. He concludes that the sovereign has the right to interpret sacred natural law, to control public expression about God, and to determine the form of public worship. God rules through the commonwealth, and the subject’s disobedience is a form of atheism.150 Then from this rationalist baseline, Hobbes argues that a Christian sovereign has the right to interpret scripture and to judge all religious doctrines because his subjects have no right to oppose him.151 He acts as a Pyrrhonist criterion of action, not as an expert on scripture or doctrine. But his word is the word

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of God because his word is authoritative.152 Everyone else’s claim to speak authoritatively is false. Those subjects who believe that their eternal salvation depends on the authority of a foreigner, such as the pope, and therefore that they are bound to obey him, are really subjects of that foreigner and unfaithful to their Christian sovereign in violation of the law of nature requiring them to keep their covenants.153 He reinforces his view of the Christian sovereign’s spiritual power institutionally by expanding the concept of the commonwealth by combining it with the concept of the church. According to a Tudor idea used to justify the royal supremacy, the church and the commonwealth are comprised of the same people. Hobbes goes further and argues that the church in the salient sense and the commonwealth are not separate entities. In this sense, he claims, the church must have a personality attributed to it; it must be a civil person with the capacity to act because it must be able to assemble the baptized. But the only civil person with this power is the commonwealth itself and the sovereign provides its will.154 Moreover, he claims that the choice of all ecclesiastics belongs to the church, that is, the sovereign, while the clergy merely ratifies his choices by ordaining or consecrating them.155 The Catholics and Calvinists believed that there is a universal church administered, respectively, by the pope over all Christians or by synods of presbyters in each Christian commonwealth. Hobbes replies to both confessions that all their co-religionists, including the clergy, are subject to the civil authority. In addition, he replies to the Catholics, who appealed to the medieval idea that the universal church is a mystical body whose head is Christ. But the church universal is not a civil person, as the term “mystical body” often implied, and does not have universal earthly jurisdiction with its own sovereign. He seems to be reflecting the Augustinian idea that the kingdom of God does not exist on earth, that the earthly church is just a fellowship of believers, and that the kingdom of God will consist only of the elect, who are pilgrims on earth in this life aiming at the heavenly city.156 He reinforces these views further, in accordance with the practice of the time, by presenting an unorthodox interpretation of the Old Testament history of Israel and the New Testament history of the Gospels. He integrates his own theory of the origin and nature of sovereign power with the history of the Jews, and thus implies that his views on the supremacy of the civil sovereign have divine support. From Abraham and Moses to the time of Christ, sovereign civil and spiritual authority resided together in the same person—Abraham, Moses, the High Priest, the kings, and after the

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Babylonian captivity, the High Priest again. The Jewish sovereign always had the right to interpret God’s word and determine the form of religious worship. When sovereign authority did not reside in the High Priest, the priests were subordinate to the civil power and their function was merely ministerial.157 Christ, on the other hand, never claimed earthly power, exercised only a pastoral function,158 and taught His followers that the new covenant with God requires obedience to the civil power, an idea which Hobbes derives in a novel way from the requirements of repentance and charity.159 Christ ordained only two new laws, the Protestant sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, ordained nothing new about civil government, taught his followers to obey the law of nature (which requires that subjects keep their covenants of subjection), and proclaimed that His kingdom was not of this world, which, Hobbes says, meant that it would not begin until judgment day.160 Therefore the Catholic and Calvinist claim that there is an earthly universal church was in conflict with scripture. The Christian civil sovereign in seventeenth-century commonwealths had the same rights, by analogy, as the sovereigns of ancient Israel, while duly ordained ecclesiastics legitimately could only preach approved doctrine, perform the sacraments, ordain clerics of the sovereign’s choice, and otherwise act in accordance with the sovereign’s wishes.161 A mediator such as Abraham or Moses was an essential part of covenant theology, and Hobbes identifies the Christian sovereign as that person. All covenants with God require his mediation unless the subject has some special revelation, because we cannot know if God accepts our covenant. In addition, since scripture always assigns the role of mediator to a person, by implication mediation does not involve the king, the estates, and the people together. Therefore Hobbes blocks the monarchomach claim of a scriptural basis for joint or multiple covenants with God. The Spanish neo-scholastics defended the pope’s claim to intervene in temporal affairs for spiritual purposes, his use of excommunication to enforce his will, and the right to go to war, if necessary, usually through the agency of surrogate Catholic rulers. Hobbes accepts that clerics have the right to excommunicate sinners because Christ gave the apostles the right to retain the sins of the faithful. But he inverts and redefines sin as a violation of the civil law rather than divine and natural law. Clerics can only excommunicate to implement a prior judgment of the civil sovereign based on the sovereign’s interpretation of the law.162 Nor can a foreigner like the pope excommunicate a commonwealth, the members of a commonwealth, or a sovereign monarch. All excommunication, Hobbes

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insists, derives from the sovereign’s authority. A commonwealth is an independent church and there is no competent universal church which can interfere in it. The Church of Rome, even considered as a local civil body, cannot excommunicate a commonwealth because in doing so it would just excommunicate itself. Finally, papal excommunication of a monarch is in effect a declaration of war, which presumably would justify military action against the pope and his surrogates.163 Hobbes’s account of excommunication is reminiscent of that of Marsilius of Padua and the Tudor Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer.164 Hobbes’s criticism of the division of spiritual and temporal power offers a good example of his novel layered, mutifaceted argumentation, which appears to be the result of divergent thinking, the exploration of many possible solutions. He supports his claims about the spiritual powers of the sovereign from natural religion and then from philosophy, scripture, theology, and sacred history. He reduces the power of the clergy to pastoral and sacramental functions. In the process, he seems to make a number of startlingly original claims in support of these views: (1) that the Christian civil sovereign has the sole right to interpret scripture because no one can licitly oppose him; (2) that the Christian civil sovereign’s word is the word of God; (3) that the church and the commonwealth form one, indivisible civil body under the Christian civil sovereign; (4) that the Christian civil sovereign alone mediates between God and his subjects in making covenants with God, unless a subject has some special revelation; and (5) that the Christian civil sovereign controls the process of excommunication because sin is a violation of civil law and he is the interpreter of the law. Hobbes has stripped the clergy of most of its functions and given them to the Christian civil sovereign, going well beyond the Erastian idea of the ascendancy of the civil authority165 and contemporary practice. His analysis of scriptural history as proof of the union of all temporal and spiritual power in the civil sovereign surpassed even English Reformation belief, which glorified the power of the king in spiritual matters. Moreover, Catholics took the view that the High Priest had ruled Israel as a historical precedent for the pope.166 Hobbes seems to adopt, subvert, and invert the idea to justify his caesaro-papism from scripture. The High Priest was a precedent for absolute monarchs, not for the pope. No Private Judge of Good and Evil So far, we have established the extent to which Hobbes’s responses to a number of doctrines associated with the theory of popular sovereignty are original: the idea that a people may exist before the establishment of a ruler; the claims that monarchs are

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just administrators and that they are subject to the civil laws; the doctrine that sovereign power may be divided between monarchic, aristocratic, and democratic powers or between spiritual and temporal powers; and the claim that a subject has absolute right to his property and may not have it taken from him without his own consent. Next are Hobbes’s objections to a pair of issues which are characteristic of the natural law and Christian traditions, and which are essential to the theory of popular sovereignty: (1) that individuals must not act against their consciences, which Hobbes calls disapprovingly (by reference to the sin of Adam and Eve) the knowledge of good and evil; and (2) that obedience to an immoral law or command is a sin. They assume the traditional doctrine that the law of nature, the divine and moral law, is superior to and may invalidate the civil law. Without these doctrines, the popular safeguards of the conciliarists, the Spanish neo-scholastics, the Huguenot monarchomachs, Buchanan and Mariana, Althusius and Grotius become moot. Hobbes responds with a doctrine of active obedience in all cases of conscience. We have already encountered in Chapter 4 Hobbes’s principal argument against (1), which is highly original. Private judgment of right and wrong is too variable and undependable to produce agreement and uniformity in moral judgments without an absolute sovereign to impose them. Moreover, he claims, civil laws cannot contravene the laws of nature unless they blaspheme God.167 The sovereign decides what natural law requires, not the individual. If not, the disagreements that inevitably arise about these matters will lead to conflict and the dissolution of the commonwealth. For the same reason, no private individual has the right to interpret scripture for herself, nor claim its authority against the sovereign’s interpretation of it, which is the word of God.168 Barclay also had criticized the idea that natural law provides a standard against which positive law can be judged,169 but no one in the natural law tradition had violated convention as much as Hobbes. He transformed the question and strengthened sovereign power by attempting to eliminate any differences of content between natural and civil law, and by inventing a theory of subjective moral relativity which ruled out the public validity of private moral opinions. Hobbes does not deny that it is a sin to act against one’s conscience, but he also argues against (2) that, although the sovereign sins in issuing an iniquitous command or an iniquitous law, the subject does not sin in obeying it.170 She sins by disobeying and, if a Christian, endangers her eternal salvation.171 Since the sovereign’s laws define what sin is in matters subject to controversy, disobedience to a law is always a sin unless it

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requires blaspheming God. And it is better for a subject just to obey a command without first attempting to judge whether it is good or evil. If she fails to obey a command that she considers immoral she violates her covenant of subjection and undermines the commonwealth in violation of the law of nature. If she obeys against her conscience, she neglects her eternal salvation. Therefore both obedience and disobedience following reflection about good and evil may endanger the subject’s eternal salvation.172 Simple obedience is the best course. Hobbes reinforces his arguments with his expansive adiaphorism. Since all that salvation requires is obedience and faith that Jesus is the Christ, the Christian sovereign cannot command the subject to do anything which will endanger his salvation. All disputes among different Christian sects are irrelevant. Thus, in yet another startlingly original claim, Hobbes declares that there can be no conflict between the subject’s obligations to the commonwealth and his obligation to God as long as the sovereign is Christian.173 He has expanded the concept of what is necessary to salvation to include virtually complete civil obedience and he has integrated with it his minimalist account of what it means to be Christian. No Deposition or Tyrannicide The ultimate sanctions of the theory of popular sovereignty are the deposition and the assassination of legitimate kings who become tyrants. All the writers whom we have surveyed from Mair to Grotius embrace deposition under certain circumstances, and Beza, Brutus, Buchanan, Soto, Suárez, Mariana, and the Catholic monarchomachs teach, or at least countenance, tyrannicide under certain circumstances. The doctrines of deposition and tyrannicide had long been targets of criticism by absolutist writers and other supporters of conventional monarchy, and Hobbes found new ways to reinforce sovereign power against the threat which they posed. No subordinate assembly and no subordinate magistrate or ephor possesses the authority of the people to depose a sovereign monarch, because, he could now argue, the sovereign is the people and only she possesses the authority of the body politic. Subjects have surrendered the right to resist their sovereign by their covenant of subjection. They may not arrogate to themselves the knowledge of good and evil, which would be necessary to judge her actions. Nor can she injure or wrong her subjects or the body politic because injury and injustice mean breaking faith, that is, violating an obligation which one has undertaken by promise, contract, or covenant.174 It is a maxim of Roman law and English common law that an act is not an injury to someone who has

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consented to it.175 But subjects have consented to all their sovereign’s acts, and she has not entered into any agreement from which she cannot release herself.176 In addition, the sovereign has impunity because she is not subject to the laws and because her subjects retain neither the power nor the right to punish her.177 To be sure, she may commit iniquity by violating the law of nature. But only God can punish iniquity, because a sovereign (like anyone else) commits iniquity only if she intends to do so and only God can judge intentions. Nor does the pope have any authority over sovereigns which could justify deposition or tyrannicide. Hobbes was not the first to assert that injury and wrong are breaking faith, or that a king could not do injustice to his subjects. Grotius said the first178 and Bishop Maynwaring said the second.179 It was customary for European monarchs to enjoy legal impunity. But Hobbes was the first to say that the sovereign cannot act unjustly to individual subjects or the body politic as a whole because no democratic assembly has entered into any covenants during its establishment, a sovereign monarch or aristocratic assembly cannot have any obligation to the democratic assembly which created it, the sovereign may release itself from any covenants with its subjects, and only the sovereign may judge good and evil acts. Thus in what appears to be another case of divergent thinking, Hobbes blocked subjects from claiming that their sovereign had wronged or injured them, or had acted illegally or iniquitously, as a reason for punishing or resisting her. Hobbes identifies the doctrine of tyrannicide with the ancients and, among moderns, unnamed theologians, presumably Catholic theologians such as Soto, Suárez, and most notoriously Mariana, who was widely blamed for the assassination of Henry IV of France. Hobbes’s principal response is to delegitimize the term “tyrant” by arguing that its meaning is relative to the speaker and hence unactionable. Bodin had feared that Aristotle’s view of a tyrant as someone who gives commands which the people do not like would encourage subjects to kill any legitimate king whom they did not like.180 Hobbes, following this line of reasoning, argues that the terms “king” and “tyrant” are words of inconstant signification whose meanings, like the meanings of good and evil, are relative to the subjective inclinations of the individuals who use them. What one person calls an aristocracy, another person calls an oligarchy, and what one person calls a king, another calls a tyrant, in accordance with “the diverse opinions of the Subjects concerning him who hath the Supreme Power.”181 Subjects tend to judge whether their kingdom is governed well or badly based on their perception of whether their king is ruling according to their wishes.

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A monarch has the same absolute sovereignty whatever subjects call her and whether they like her or not.182 The originality of Hobbes’s response to the doctrine of tyrannicide lies principally in his use of relativity, and in his denial of the subject’s right to make a judgment of good and evil about a legitimate monarch. We are now in a position to assess what appear to be the creative aspects of Hobbes’s adversarial thinking.

6.6  Hobbes’s Adversarial Thinking We established at the outset that Hobbes’s political thought is above all concerned with the problems of sedition and civil war, and that he set as his goal to exalt the civil power and deny any ideological pretext for violation of the civil law. In pursuit of this goal in his early works, he mounts a highly creative attack on the theory of popular sovereignty by marshaling a number of ideas and theories to replace, counter or undermine its chief constituent elements, which do so in a philosophically appropriate and effective way, and which apparently involve various creative cognitive mechanisms. He adopts a definition of a people as a body politic, a fictitious person, which cannot exist before the establishment of a commonwealth. The idea was not new, but his use of it was. This definition blocks the foundation of the theory of popular sovereignty because there is no people to empower and restrain a monarch before the creation of a commonwealth. He simultaneously expands the concept of the sovereign and inverts the relationship between the sovereign and the concept of the people in everyday usage. The king paradoxically is the people because his subjects have agreed to everything he does. By integrating this idea with the idea that the people is not a multitude of disunited individuals, Hobbes concludes that rebellion against the king is a war of the multitude against the people. Proponents of the theory of popular sovereignty often maintained that the king is just an administrator because the people have imposed laws and conditions on him and can remove him if he violates these conditions and becomes a tyrant. Hobbes ties the idea that democracies create sovereign kings to the idea that monarchs supersede the democracies that create them. Any obligation which the sovereign may have had to the democracy to obey the laws ceases to exist. He also considers in a novel way the case of a democracy which elects a usufructuary monarch. He combines this idea with the idea that the democratic assembly must have the right to

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meet after the king’s death to select a new monarch. This requirement ruled out the possibility that all but a few European monarchies were usufructuary, pace Grotius, because monarchs almost always controlled the meetings of their estates. Hobbes’s response to the doctrine of the division of secular and spiritual power, and the superiority of the latter to the former, was highly original. He expands the concepts of the sovereign and the commonwealth, inverts the power relationship between the sovereign and the clergy in all religious matters except those which are exclusively pastoral or sacramental, and inverts the relationship between natural and civil law. He argues that the Christian sovereign has the right to interpret scripture, judge all religious doctrines, decide the manner of public worship, and select and appoint all clergy. He makes the civil law the measure of natural law and redefines sin as violation of the civil law. He gives the church a secular meaning by redefining it as the commonwealth. Then he supports these views with an audacious interpretation of ancient Jewish history which appears to co-opt and invert the Catholic doctrine of the supremacy of the High Priest, whom Hobbes takes to have been a civil sovereign before the advent of the kings. Two other traditional doctrines, that individuals must not act against their consciences, and that they sin if they obey an immoral law or command, are essential to the theory of popular sovereignty, which depends on the ability of subjects to oversee their king and correct him if he becomes a tyrant. These two doctrines assume the traditional doctrine that the law of nature is superior to and may invalidate the civil law. But Hobbes inverts the traditional relationship between natural and civil law and makes the sovereign’s determinations on moral and religious matters paramount because of the dangerous relativity of the individual’s judgments about them. He also recommends simple, unquestioning civil obedience for the subject’s salvation. Finally, Hobbes integrates a number of his original ideas to make the case that there can be no valid reason for the deposition or assassination of a legitimate king whom subjects consider a tyrant. The people have no right to depose their sovereign because the sovereign is the people. Subjects have surrendered their right to resist him and may not arrogate to themselves the judgment of whether his acts are good or evil. He cannot wrong his subjects or the body politic because he cannot be bound by any agreements against his will and his subjects have consented to all his acts. No one can judge him because only God knows his intentions. And

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his argument that the word “tyrant” is infected with partiality and cannot justify the assassination of a legitimate ruler delegitimizes the term because its meaning is unsettled and relative to the opinions of its user. These views are highly original and appear to be highly creative. They are appropriate to fulfilling Hobbes’s philosophical goals, important to the task at hand, make a significant contribution to his political philosophy, and yet simultaneously serve the important secondary purpose of addressing and countering some of the most important tenets of the theory of popular sovereignty.

Notes 1. Robin Douglass, “Authorisation and Representation before Leviathan,” Hobbes Studies, 31 (2018): 30–47; 38 n. 36. The concept of the state in the modern sense was of fairly recent origin. James Collins, “Dynastic Instability, the Emergence of the French Monarchical Commonwealth and the Coming of the Rhetoric of ‘L’état,’ 1360s to 1650s,” in Monarchy Transformed: Princes and their Elites in Early Modern Western Europe, ed. Robert von Friedeburg and John Merrill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 87–126; 92, 101; Skinner, From Humanism to Hobbes, 341–83; Skinner, Visions of Politics, 2:368–413; 3:13–14; Martin van Gelderen, “Aristotelians, Monarchomachs and Republicans: Sovereignty and respublica mixta in Dutch and German Political Thought, 1580-1650,” in Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, ed. Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 1:195–217; 210; Michael Mendle, Henry Parker and the English Civil War: The political thought of the public’s “privado” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 45. 2. For example, McQueen, “Hobbes’s Strategy of Convergence,” 135–52. 3. Hoekstra, “Tyrannus Rex,” 420–46. 4. Runco, Creativity, 8–9. Fluency refers to “the number of ideas” and flexibility refers to “the number of unique and unusual ideas.” Ibid., 8. 5. The notion of epistemological blocking in Hobbes’s thought was first suggested by Malcolm, and Parkin later used it in a more generalized manner. Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes, 428; Jon Parkin, “Hobbes and the Future of Religion,” in Hobbes on Politics and Religion, ed. Laurens van Apeldoorn and Robin Douglass (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 184–201; 196. 6. Frank Lessay coined the term in “Hobbes’s Covenant Theology and Its Political Implications,” in Springborg, Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s “Leviathan,” 243–70; 258. Also Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty,

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209; Sommerville, “Hobbes, Selden,” 160–61; Alison McQueen, “Mosaic Leviathan: Religion and Rhetoric in Hobbes’s Political Thought,” in Van Apeldoorn and Douglass, Hobbes on Politics and Religion, 116–34; 128–29. This approach can also be characterized as judo-like or using an opponent’s idea against her. Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes, 411; Parkin, “Future of Religion,” 194–95. 7. Francisco de Vitoria, “On Civil Power,” in Francisco de Vitoria, Political Writings, ed. Anthony Pagden and Jeremy Lawrance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 3–44; q. 1, a. 8, pp. 19–21; Hobbes, De Cive X.8, 175–76; Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 21, 110–11. Bodin and Barclay thought that subjects can have more liberty under monarchy than in a democracy. Bodin, Six Bookes, bk. VI, ch. 4, 708; Barclay, Kingdom, bk. III, sect. 4, 166. 8. Runco, Creativity, 15–17; Daniel J.  Harris, Roni Reiter-Palmon, and Gina Scott Ligon, “Construction or Demolition: Does Problem Construction Influence the Ethicality of Creativity?” in The Ethics of Creativity, ed. Seana Moran, David Cropley, and James C.  Kaufman (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 170–86; Mark A. Runco and Gayle Dow, “Problem Finding,” in Runco and Pritzker, Encyclopedia of Creativity, 1st ed., 2:433–35; 433. 9. Hobbes, Leviathan, Epist. Ded., Sig. A2v; “A Review, and Conclusion,” 395–96. 10. Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Malcolm, Epist. Ded., 2:n.p. Also Malcolm, “General Introduction,” 20. 11. Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Malcolm, ch. 47, 3:1125. This is the last chapter of the Latin translation. 12. For a discussion of Hobbes’s self-serving claims about his motives for writing Leviathan after its publication, and the role which his need to rebut his critics played in shaping it, see Malcolm, “General Introduction,” 82–87. 13. Conrad Russell, The Fall of the British Monarchies 1637-1642 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), 299, 330. 14. Hobbes, Philosophicall Rudiments, Epist. Ded., 25–26; Hobbes, Elements of Law, Epist. Ded., xvi. 15. Hobbes, Elements of Law II.6.1, 144; II.6.4, 146–47; II.6.11, 157; II.10.3, 185–86; Hobbes, De Cive VI.13, 141–43; XI.5, 182–83; XIV.20, 216–17; XVII.10–12, 259–62; XVIII.13, 291–92. 16. Hobbes, Elements of Law I.15.3, 75–76; I.19.10, 104; II.1.7, 111; II.1.18, 116; II.3.2, 127–28; Hobbes, De Cive I.5, 94; II.4, 100; II.18, 105; V.7, 133; V.11, 134; VI.11, 140–41; XVII.27, 277. 17. Sreedhar, “Interpreting Hobbes,” 154; Sreedhar, Hobbes on Resistance: Defying the Leviathan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 171; Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 21, 112–13.

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18. Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 18, 91; ch. 21, 112–13; ch. 24, 128; ch. 26, 149; ch. 43, 321, 331; ch. 46, 378. 19. Hobbes, Philosophicall Rudiments, Preface to the Reader, 30–31 (italics removed). Also Hobbes, Elements of Law, II.9.8, 183. 20. Hobbes, De Cive XII.4–7, 187–90; Hobbes, Elements of Law II.8.4, 170–71. Cf. Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 29, 169–72. I will put aside the Catholic and Calvinist doctrine that faith and sanctity are infused or inspired supernaturally, which was of concern to Hobbes because it could provide a source of independent, authoritative scriptural interpretation to use against the sovereign. Hobbes’s response formed part of his challenge to covenant theology. Luc Foisneau, Hobbes et la toute-puissance de Dieu (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2000), 339–58. 21. Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty, xvi. Also Sommerville, Thomas Hobbes, 17; Sommerville, “Lofty science,” 247; Baumgold, Hobbes’s Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 3–4 and passim. 22. Malcolm, “General Introduction,” 23–24, 41. 23. Ibid., 82. 24. Hobbes implicitly characterizes the theory of popular sovereignty in Hobbes, Elements of Law II.1.13, 113; and Hobbes, De Cive VI.17, 147. 25. Digest 1.1.9, 1:2 (Gaius). 26. The distinction can be found in Aristotle, Politics, 1278b23–24. 27. For details see Lee, Popular Sovereignty, 31–39. 28. Codex 1.14.4. 29. Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 1:62–65; Lee, Popular Sovereignty, 71–77; Ernst H.  Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 210. 30. Skinner, Foundations, 2:36–40. The Council of Basel technically became the Council of Ferrara in 1438 and the Council of Florence in 1439. 31. Francis Oakley, “Almain and Major: Conciliar Theory on the Eve of the Reformation,” The American Historical Review, 70 (1965): 673–90; 687. 32. Antony Black, Council and Commune: The conciliar movement and the fifteenth-century heritage (London: Burns and Oates, 1979), 8. 33. For their ecclesiastical views see Skinner, Foundations, 2:43–47. The oath of allegiance controversy following the Gunpowder Plot drew attention once again to Mair and Almain. The Cavendish library contained Almain’s pivotal Expositio de suprema potestate ecclesiastica et laica (Explanation of Supreme Ecclesiastical and Lay Power) and works by Jean Gerson and William of Ockham in the first two volumes of Melchior Goldast’s De monarchia sacri Romani imperii (On the Monarchy of the Holy Roman

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Empire). Talaska, Hardwick Library, 52; Oakley, “Almain and Major,” 684–85. 34. Skinner, Visions of Politics, 2:257–62; Skinner, Foundations, 2:118–23. 35. Black, Council and Commune, 194–95; J. H. Burns, “Scholasticism: survival and revival,” in Burns and Goldie, Cambridge History of Political Thought, 132–55; 151; Howell A. Lloyd, “Constitutionalism,” in Burns and Goldie, Cambridge History of Political Thought, 254–297; 261–62; Skinner, Visions of Politics, 2:257–62; Skinner, Foundations, 2:117–23. 36. Nathaniel Mull, “Divine Right and Secular Constitutionalism: The JesuitAbsolutist Debates, 1580-1620,” History of Political Thought, 39 (2018): 606–33. 37. Vitoria, “On Civil Power,” q. 1, aa. 4–5, sects. 7–8, pp. 11–17; q. 2, a., sect. 14, pp. 30–31; Soto, De iustitia, bk. I, q. 6, a. 4, 1:52 col. 1; bk. III, q. 6, a. 4, 2:269 col. 2; bk. IV, q. 4, a. 1, 2:302 cols. 1–2; Molina, De la Justicia, bk. I, tract. 2, disp. 22, sect. 9, 1:380–82 (citing Vitoria and Soto); disp. 23, sect. 8, 1:387 (citing Vitoria and Soto); disp. 26, sect. 4, 1:402; Suárez, De legibus, bk. I, ch. 7, sect. 5, 1:39 col. 2–40 col. 1; bk. III, ch. 3, sect. 6, 1:205 col. 1; ch. 4, sect. 5, 1:207 col. 2; Brett, Liberty, 136; Brett, Changes of State, 123–28. 38. Vitoria argued that the commonwealth transferred only its authority to the king. Vitoria, “On Civil Power,” q. 1, a. 3, sect. 6, p. 10; Soto, De iustitia, bk. I, q. 1, a. 4, 1:13 col. 1; Molina, De la Justicia, bk. I, tract. 2, disp. 22, sect. 9, 1:380–82; Suárez, De legibus, bk. III, ch. 3, sect. 6, 1:205 col. 1. 39. Molina, De la Justicia, bk. I, tract. 2, disp. 20, sect. 8, 1:355; disp. 26, sects. 4–5, 1:402; Suárez, De legibus, bk. III, ch. 3, sect. 8, 1:205 col.2; ch. 4, sect. 5, 1:207 col. 2-208 col. 1. 40. Soto, De iustitia, bk. III, q. 6, a. 4, 2:269 col. 2; Suárez, De legibus, bk. III, ch. 4, sect. 6, 1:208 col. 1. 41. Soto, De iustitia, bk. III, q. 5, a. 1, 2:240 col. 1; q. 6, a. 4, 2:269 col. 2; Suárez, De legibus, bk. III, ch. 3, sect. 6, 1:205 col. 1; ch. 4, sect. 5, 1:207 col. 2–208 col. 1; Suárez, Defensio fidei Catholica (Defense of the Catholic Faith), in Suárez, Selections from Three Works, 237–724; bk. IV, ch. 4, sect. 6, 1:717 col. 2; sect. 15, 1:721 col. 1; Burns, “Scholasticism,” 1:154–55; Brett, Changes of State, 124–25. 42. Molina, De la Justicia, bk. I, tract. 2, disp. 23, sect. 10, 1:387; disp. 26, sect. 6, 1:402–403. 43. Soto, De iustitia, bk. V, q. 1, a. 3, 3:389 cols. 1–2; Suárez, Defensio fidei, bk. VI, ch. 4, sect. 6, 1:717 col. 1–718 col.2; sects. 14–15, 1:720 col. 1–721 col. 2; Höpfl, Jesuit Political Thought, 332–37. 44. Vitoria, “On the Power of the Church,” in Vitoria, Political Writings, 47–151; q. 5, aa. 6–8, sects. 10–13, pp. 90–94; Soto, De iustitia, bk. I,

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q. 2, a. 1, 1:18 col. 2; bk. IV, q. 4, a. 1, 2:301 cols. 1–2; Molina, De la Justicia, bk. I, tract. 2, disp. 21, sects. 2-5, 1:362–65; disp. 29, sect. 23, 1:440; Suárez, Defensio fidei, bk. III, ch. 23, sect. 10, 1:336 col. 1; sects. 21–22, 1:340 cols. 1–2; bk. VI, ch. 4, sect. 16, 1:721 col. 2. 45. Vitoria, “On Civil Power,” q. 3, a. 4, sect. 21, p. 40; Soto, De iustitia, bk. I, q. 6, a. 7, 1:69 cols. 1–2. 46. Molina, De la Justicia, bk. I, tract. 2, disp. 23, sect. 6, 1:386–87; Suárez, De legibus, bk. VII, ch. 12, sect. 1, 1:820 col. 2. 47. Beza’s Right of Magistrates and the Vindiciae were in the Cavendish library. Talaska, Hardwick Library, 115, 121. 48. François Hotman, Francogallia (Frankish Gaul), ed. Ralph E. Giesey and J.  H. M.  Salmon, trans. J.  H. M.  Salmon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), ch. 19, 405. 49. Ibid., ch. 9, 255, 257; Ralph E. Giesey and J. H. M. Salmon, “Editors’ Introduction,” in Hotman, Francogallia, 3–134; 69. 50. Hotman, Francogallia, ch. 7, 235; ch. 25, 459, 473. 51. Jean Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T.  McNeil, trans. Ford Lewis Battles, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), bk. VI, ch. 20, sect. 31, 2:1519; Skinner, Foundations, 2:315–16. 52. Theodore Beza, Right of Magistrates, in Constitutionalism and Resistance in the Sixteenth Century: Three Treatises by Hotman, Beza, and Mornay, trans. and ed. Julian H.  Franklin (New York: Pegasus, 1969), 101–35; bk. VI, 111–12, 115, 124. 53. Ibid., bk. VII, 129; bk. VIII, 131–32. 54. Ibid., bk. VI, 112, 114; bk. VII, 130. 55. Ibid., bks. I–II, 101–102; bk. VI, 127. 56. Ibid., bk. VI, 108. 57. Stephanus Junius Brutus, Vindiciae, contra tyrannos, ed. George Garnett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), Q. 3, 68, 71, 74–75. 58. Ibid., Q. 3, 96, 111, 172; Postscript, 186; Lee, Popular Sovereignty, 142–49. 59. Brutus, Vindiciae, Q. 1, 21–2. For the complex details see George Garnett, “Introduction,” in Brutus, Vindiciae, xix–lxxvi; xxii–xxxi. There also some covenants of lesser importance. 60. Brutus, Vindiciae, Q. 3, 77, 86, 172. 61. Ibid., Q. 2, 62; Q. 3, 171–72. 62. Ibid., Q. 2, 47; Q. 3, 78. 63. Ibid., Q. 3, 75, 119, 125. 64. Ibid., Q. 2, 49–50; Q. 3, 158–59, 172; Lee, Popular Sovereignty, 149–55. 65. Brutus, Vindiciae, Q. 2, 46–48. 66. J. H. M. Salmon, “Catholic resistance theory, Ultramontanism, and the royalist response, 1580-1620,” in Burns and Goldie, Cambridge History of Political Thought, 219–53; 219–31.

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67. Althusius, Politica, ch. XXXIX, sects. 15–16, 203–204. 68. Ibid., Preface to the First Edition, 6–7; ch. I, sect. 13, 20. 69. Ibid., ch. XIX, sects. 18, 23–25, 27, 29, pp. 123–24. 70. Ibid., ch. XVIII, sects. 61–66, 68, pp. 103–104. 71. Ibid., ch. XX, sect. 20, 134; ch. XXXVIII, sects. 3–10, 191–92. 72. George Buchanan, A Dialogue on the Law of Kingship among the Scots, ed. Roger A.  Mason and Martin S.  Smith (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 150–153. 73. Ibid., 152–55. 74. Juan de Mariana, Del rey y de la Institucion Real (Barcelona: La Selecta, 1880), bk. I, ch. 6, 142–46; Salmon, “Catholic Resistance Theory,” 240–41. Mariana’s book was in the Cavendish library. Talaska, Hardwick Library, 95. 75. Tuck, Hobbes, 62; Brett, Liberty, 205; Brett, Changes of State, 103–14; Deborah Baumgold, Contract Theory in Historical Context: Essays on Grotius, Hobbes, and Locke (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 76–77; Martin Harvey, “Grotius and Hobbes,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 14 (2006): 27–50. Perez Zagorin, however, has challenged the claim that Hobbes was indebted to Grotius’s concepts of natural law and natural right. Perez Zagorin, “Hobbes without Grotius,” History of Political Thought, 21 (2000): 16–40; Zagorin, Hobbes, 20, 24–26, 31–32, 53. 76. Grotius, Right of War, bk. I, ch. 3, sect. 8, para. 1, 1:260–62; bk. II, ch. 5, sect. 31, 2:563; bk. III, ch. 19, sect. 10, 3:1543. This work was in the Cavendish library. Talaska, Hardwick Library, 87. 77. Grotius, Right of War, bk. I, ch. 3, sect. 17, 1:305–306; bk. II, ch. 9, sect. 8, para. 1, 2:671–72. For an explanation see Brett, Changes of State, 134–35. 78. Grotius, Right of War, bk. I, ch. 3, sect. 16, 1:300–302, 305; sect. 17, 1:306. 79. Ibid., bk. II, ch. 14, sect. 2, para. 1, 2:804. 80. Ibid., bk. II, ch. 20, sect. 40, para. 1, 2:1021; ch. 21, sect. 3, para. 1, 2:1061. 81. Ibid., bk. I, ch. 3, sect. 11, 1:280–81; Lee, Popular Sovereignty, 268–71. 82. Grotius, Right of War, bk. I, ch. 4, sect. 1, 1:337–38. 83. Ibid., bk. I, ch. 4, sect. 7, 1:357–58. 84. Ibid., bk. I, ch. 4, sect. 6, 1:354. 85. Ibid., bk. I, ch. 4, sects. 8–14, 1:372–77. 86. Martin van Gelderen, “‘So merely humane’: theories of resistance in early modern Europe,” in Brett and Tully, Rethinking the Foundations, 149–70; 162. 87. Skinner argues in several works that one of Hobbes’s aims was to “demolish” a “neo-Roman” republican political theory which was popular in

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Renaissance Italy and emphasized self-government and civic virtue. But the theory of popular sovereignty accepted monarchy as a valid (and sometimes preferable) form of government, while republicanism in this form considered life under monarchy to be slavery. Thus “neo-Roman” republicanism was not the target of the collective criticisms which we have identified from De cive, although Grotius does express this republican, anti-monarchical view. Skinner, Visions of Politics, 3:13–15. Skinner’s thesis has been subject to criticism. See for example Robin Douglass, “Thomas Hobbes’s Changing Account of Liberty and Challenge to Republicanism,” History of Political Thought, 36 (2015): 281–309; Philip Pettit, “Freedom in Hobbes’s Ontology and Semantics: A Comment on Quentin Skinner,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 73 (2012): 111–26; Zagorin, Hobbes, 76–80; Blair Worden, “Republicanism, Regicide and Republic: The English Experience,” in Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, ed. Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 1:307–27; 327 n. 16. See also, more generally, Blair Worden, “English republicanism,” in Burns and Goldie, Cambridge History of Political Thought, 443–75. For Skinner’s reply see Quentin Skinner, “On the Liberty of the Ancients and Moderns: A Reply to My Critics,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 73 (2012): 127–46. 88. Hobbes, De Cive I.2, 90–92; Aristotle, Politics, 1253a2–3, 1278b19–24. 89. Brett, Changes of State, 121–22. 90. Aristotle, Politics, 1271b16–18. 91. Hobbes, De Cive II.11, 102. 92. Ibid. I.2, 91–92. Paganini makes an interesting case that Hobbes is responding in the two notes to objections posed by Gassendi. He also observes that the motives of glory and fear in the formation of a commonwealth are typically Epicurean. Paganini, “Early Modern Epicureanism,” 699–704; Gianni Paganini, “Hobbes, Gassendi et le De cive,” in Materia actuosa: Antiquité, Âge classigue, Lumières: Mélanges en l’honneur d’Olivier Bloch, ed. Miguel Benitez et  al. (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2000), 183–206; 203–205 and n. 58. 93. Aristotle, Politics, 1264a35–37. 94. Hobbes, De Cive I.2 first note, 92. 95. Tuck, “Hobbes and Democracy,” 176. 96. Hobbes, De Cive V.4, 131–32; Hobbes, Elements of Law I.12.7–8, 63. 97. Hobbes, De Cive V.6, 133; Hobbes, Elements of Law II.1.2, 108–109. 98. Hobbes, De Cive II.4, 100; Hobbes, Elements of Law I.19.6–7, 103–104. 99. The non-resistance feature of his concept of rights transfer has been criticized for failing to create an obligation to obey the sovereign, and thus for failing to create absolute authority and the means of escape from the

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state of nature. Zarka, Décision métaphysique, 334–37. Hobbes improved his theory in Leviathan by introducing a theory based on authorization and sovereign representation, which has been much discussed. Philippe Crignon, De l’incarnation à la représentation: L’ontologie politique de Thomas Hobbes (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2012); Mónica Brito Vieira, The Elements of Representation in Hobbes: Aesthetics, Theater, Law, and Theology in the Construction of Hobbes’s Theory of the State (Leiden: Brill, 2009); Mónica Brito Vieira and David Runciman, Representation (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008), 24–28 and passim; Quentin Skinner, “Hobbes on Persons, Authors and Representatives,” in Springborg, Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s “Leviathan,” 157–80; David Runciman, “The concept of the state: the sovereignty of a fiction,” in States and Citizens: History, Theory, Prospects, ed. Quentin Skinner and Bo Stråth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 28–38; David Runciman, “What Kind of Person is Hobbes’s State? A Reply to Skinner,” Journal of Political Philosophy, 8 (2000): 268–78; Skinner, Visions of Politics, 3:177–208; Runciman, Pluralism and the personality of the state, 6–33. 100. Hobbes, De Cive VI.6, 138; Hobbes, Elements of Law II.19.7, 111. 101. He also held that a commonwealth could be established by conquest, but this alternative is not directly relevant to the discussion. 102. Hobbes, De Cive VI.5, 138. Hobbes’s creative account of the establishment of sovereign right appears to be an emergent feature of his philosophy because it was possible only after he developed his theory of the state of nature and his concept of natural right. 103. Ibid. V.6–8, 133–34. 104. Hobbes, Elements of Law II.8.7, 172–73. He quotes from the English translation of Richard Knowles without acknowledgment. 105. Jean Bodin, On Sovereignty, ed. and trans. Julian H. Franklin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), bk. II, ch. 1, 104. Bodin even claimed that only an absolute monarch is a sovereign in the proper sense because his will cannot be divided. Hobbes did not endorse this view, though he considered the singularity of a monarch’s will one of the advantages of monarchy. Bodin, Six Bookes, bk. VI, ch. 4, 715. 106. Hobbes, De Cive V.7, 133; Hobbes, Elements of Law I.4.7, 103–104. Hobbes does not actually say that subjects must covenant that the will of the sovereign is to be taken for the will of all until the second printing of De cive. But he implies it in the original text (De Cive V.9 and X.5). See Hobbes, De Cive VI.1 note, 136; Douglass, “Authorization and Representation,” 40.

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107. Daniel Lee, “Sovereignty and Dominion: The Foundations of Hobbesian Statehood,” in Douglass and Olsthoorn, Hobbes’s “On the Citizen,” 126–44; 137. 108. Hobbes calls the body politic one person, a fictitious body and a civil person. Hobbes, Elements of Law I.19.8, 104; II.2.4, 120; Hobbes, De Cive V.9, 134. I disagree with Olsthoorn’s claim that Hobbes’s state is not a fictitious person in any of Hobbes’s works. Johan Olsthoorn, “Leviathan Inc.: Hobbes on the nature and person of the state,” History of European Ideas, 47 (2021):17–32. 109. Cf. Hobbes, De Cive V.9, 134; Hobbes, Elements of Law II.1.1, 108. 110. Hobbes, De Cive VI.19, 148. 111. The representative is in some sense identical with the represented. Crignon, De l’incarnation, 338–39; Brito Vieira, Elements of Representation, 161–62. 112. Hobbes, De Cive V.6, 133. 113. Hobbes, Elements of Law I.12.8, 63. 114. Ibid. II.2.11, 124; II.5.2, 139; Hobbes, De Cive V.9, 134. 115. Hobbes, De Cive VI.13 note, 143. This idea was not entirely new, but Hobbes gives it substance. Soto, discussing the lex regia, had asserted that “a king is to be reputed the commonwealth itself.” (“Rex … ipsa eadem respublica repudendus est.”) Soto, De iustitia, bk. III, q. 6, a. 4, 2:269 col. 2. 116. Bodin, On Sovereignty, bk. II, ch. 1, 89–90; Hobbes, De Cive VII.1–3, 150–51. 117. Hobbes, De Cive XVII.17–18, 264–65. 118. Hobbes, Philosophicall Rudiments XVIII.28, 249 (italics removed). 119. Hobbes, De Cive XVII.17–18, 264–65; XVIII.14, 292–94. 120. Thomas Hobbes, The Questions concerning Liberty, Necessity and Chance, in EW, 5:259, 269. 121. Johan Olsthoorn, “The Theocratic Leviathan: Hobbes’s Arguments for the Identity of Church and State,” in Van Apeldoorn and Douglass, Hobbes on Politics and Religion, 10–28; 18–19; Richard Tuck, “Hobbes, Conscience, and Christianity,” in Martinich and Hoekstra, Oxford Handbook of Hobbes, 481–500; 494–95; Richard Tuck, “The Civil Religion of Thomas Hobbes,” in Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain, ed. Nicholas Phillipson and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 120–38; 124; Tuck, Philosophy and government, 319; Richard Tuck, “The “Christian Atheism’ of Thomas Hobbes,” in Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment, ed. Michael Hunter and David Wooton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 111–30; Tuck, Hobbes, 96–97; Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty, 168.

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122. Malcolm, “General Introduction,” 40–41; Alison McQueen, “‘A Rhapsody of Heresies’: The Scriptural Politics of On the Citizen,” in Douglass and Olsthoorn, Hobbes’s “On the Citizen,” 180–98; 185 n. 6; Johann Sommerville, “Hobbes and Christian Belief,” in Lloyd, Interpreting Hobbes’s Political Philosophy, 156–72; 167–68; and esp. Sommerville, “On the Citizen and Church-State Relations,” in Douglass and Olsthoorn, Hobbes’s “On the Citizen,” 199–216; 208–13. 123. Lodi Nauda, “Hobbes’s Views on Religion and the Church between The Elements of Law and Leviathan: A Dramatic Change of Direction?” Journal of the History of Ideas, 63 (2002): 577–98; 588; Collins, Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes, 66–69. 124. Hobbes knew that this idea would be controversial and he amended it in a note to the second printing. He continued to insist that the doctrine that Jesus is the Christ, that is, the Messiah foretold in the Old Testament, was the only doctrine necessary to be believed internally for salvation. He added that the Apostles’ Creed (not the Nicene Creed which he found metaphysically objectionable) contained additional points explicating the idea that Jesus is the Christ. However, apparently following the thought of Chillingworth, he claimed that the fact that Christ and the Apostles admitted people to the Kingdom of God without understanding the implications of the teaching that Jesus is the Christ proved that it was the only point necessary for salvation. Chillingworth, unlike Hobbes, had been keen to point out that those who were admitted without an understanding of the implications were those who could not understand or be taught for lack of time. He considered those exempted exceptions; Hobbes did not. Hobbes, De Cive XVIII.6, 285–87; Hobbes, Elements of Law II.6.8, 152–53. 125. Hamilton, “Hobbes the Royalist,” 447; Hobbes, De Cive XVIII.13, 291–92. 126. Ibid. XVI.16, 248. 127. Ibid. XVII.6, 254. For the importance of Abraham, Moses, the kings of Israel, and the Sanhedrin as a political blueprint for early modern theorists see Eric Nelson, The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2010), 3, 122–23; McQueen, “Mosaic Leviathan,” 117–18; McQueen, “‘A Rhapsody of Heresies’,” 191–97; Lea Campos Boraclevi, “Classical Foundational Myths of European Republicanism: The Jewish Commonwealth,” in Van Gelderen and Skinner, Republicanism, 1:247–61. 128. Later Hobbes gave judges considerable leeway in interpreting and applying natural and civil law to individual cases. But they could not change the law formally, could be overridden and punished by the sovereign, and did not make law for others. Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 26, 143–46.

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Dyzenhaus exaggerates the implications of this development for Hobbes’s theory of sovereign power. Dyzenhaus, “Hobbes on the authority of law,” 186–209. 129. For the idea that a community, or a body taken as a whole, comes into existence only with the union of a multitude created “largely” by establishment of a ruler, see Suárez, De legibus, bk. 1, ch. 6, sect. 19, 1:36 col. 2–37 col. 1; bk. III, ch. 2, sect. 4, 1:202 col. 2–203 col. 1; Brett, Changes of State, 125–26. Also Cicero, De re publica (On the Republic), in Cicero, De re publica, De legibus, trans. Clinton Walker Keys (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1928), 12–285; bk. I, ch. 25, sect. 39, pp. 64–65; bk. III, ch. 33, sect. 45, pp. 222–23. Barclay had held versions of the other two views. Barclay, Kingdom, bk. VI, ch. 5, 510; bk. III. ch. 16, 268. 130. Brutus is vague about the origins of the community. Althusius employs the concept of representation but bases his theory of community formation on mere consent. Althusius, Politica, ch. IV, sect. 1, 33. 131. Hobbes, Philosophicall Rudiments XII.8, 151 (italics removed). Also Hobbes, De Cive VI.1, 136; Hobbes, Elements of Law II.2.11, 124–25; II.8.9, 174. 132. Thus the impetus for Hobbes’s startling identification of a sovereign monarch or aristocratic assembly with the people may have had little to do with “reflections on democracy.” Tuck, Sleeping Sovereign, 100. 133. Hoekstra, “Lion in the house,” 205–206. 134. Hobbes, De Cive VII.11–12, 154–55. 135. Grotius, Right of War, bk. I, ch. 3, sect. 11, 1:279–85; Tuck, Sleeping Sovereign, 90–91. 136. Hotman, Francogallia, ch. 12, 296–97. 137. Hobbes adopts Bodin’s distinction between forms of state and forms of government, as well as Bodin’s view that that form of sovereign democracy or sovereign aristocracy is best in which the sovereign assembly only elects a small number of people actually to govern. Such a government by a few people is better, Hobbes says, because it resembles a monarchy. It also resembles usufructuary monarchy because the sovereign body does not interfere in the government of affairs. Hobbes, Elements of Law II.1.17, 115–16; Hobbes, De Cive X.15 and 19, 179–80; Bodin, Six Bookes, bk. IV, ch. 6, 517–18; bk. VI, ch. 4, 708–13. 138. Hobbes, De Cive VII.16, 156–58; Hobbes, Elements of Law II.2.9–10, 121–24. 139. Barclay, Kingdom, bk. VI, ch. 14, 544; ch. 17, 555–56. The right to summon and dissolve the estates was one of the factors which Bodin had used to show that the kings of Aragon, one of the prototypes for the monarchomachs’ view of kingship, was superior to the estates. Bodin, On

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Sovereignty, bk. I, ch. 8, 10; Xavier Gil, “Republican Politics in Early Modern Spain: The Castilian and Catalano-Aragonese Traditions,” in Van Gelderen and Skinner, Republicanism, 1:263–88; Julian H. Franklin, “Introduction,” in Franklin, Constitutionalism and Resistance, 11–45; 14–15. 140. Grotius, Right of War, bk. I, ch. 3, sect. 11, 1:280. 141. Bodin, On Sovereignty, bk. I, ch. 8, 12–13; Digest, 45.1.109, 4:181; Hobbes, De Cive XII.4, 187–88. 142. Bodin, On Sovereignty, bk. I, ch. 8, 14; Hobbes, De Cive VI.14, 144; XII.4, 187–88. 143. Hobbes, De Cive XII.5 and 7, 188–90. 144. Barclay, Kingdom, bk. III, ch. 5, 523. 145. Hobbes, De Cive VI.18, 147–48. 146. Bodin, On Sovereignty, bk. II, ch. 1, 91. 147. Hobbes, De Cive XII.5, 189. 148. Ibid. VI.15, 144–45; Barclay, Kingdom, bk. II, 131; bk. IV, ch. 14, 465; Laurens van Apeldoorn, “Property and Despotic Sovereignty,” in Douglass and Olsthoorn, Hobbes’s “On the Citizen,” 108–25; 109, 121–25; Hobbes, Elements of Law II.8.8, 174. 149. Hobbes, De Cive XII.5, 188–89. The idea that subjects will obey those who control their consciences had appeared in Paolo Sarpi’s Tractatus de interdicto (Treatise on the Interdict), contained in Controversiae memorabilis (Memorable Controversies), which was in the Cavendish library. Gregorio Baldin, “Hobbes, Sarpi and the Interdict of Venice,” Storia del pensiero politico, 2 (2016): 261–80; 278; Talaska, Hardwick Library, 126. 150. Hobbes, De Cive XV.16–17, 229–31; XV.19, 233. 151. Ibid. XVII.27–28, 276–79; Hobbes, Elements of Law II.7.11, 167. 152. Hobbes, De Cive XVII.17–18, 264–66; Hobbes, Elements of Law II.7.11, 167. His definition of the word of God is expansive. Hobbes, De Cive XVII.15, 263–64. 153. Hobbes, De Cive XVII.27, 277. 154. Ibid. XVII.20–21, 266–67. 155. Ibid. XVII.24, 269–70. 156. Ibid. XVII.22, 267–68. Also Herbert A. Deane, The Political and Social Ideas of St. Augustine (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), 11, 172–74. St. Augustine’s De civitate dei (The City of God) was in the Cavendish library. Hamilton, Hobbes’s Study, 448. Responses to Catholic claims of the universality of the pope’s authority during the Interdict and Oath of Allegiance controversies argued, inter alia, that the Catholic church was not a separate entity from commonwealths. But they do not seem to have been based on a strict distinction between the church universal as a corpus mysticum and a body politic, as was Hobbes’s in De cive.

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Stefania Tutino, Empire of Souls: Robert Bellarmine and the Christian Commonwealth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 172–83; Sommerville, Thomas Hobbes, 116. 157. Hobbes, De Cive XVI.6, 237; XVI.13–17, 242–48. 158. These ideas emerged from the international dispute over the papal interdict of Venice in 1606–1607. They were embraced by Marco Antonio de Dominis, archbishop of Spalato, whose important work on the church, De republica ecclesiastica (On the Ecclesiastical Commonwealth), was in the Cavendish library. Noel Malcolm, De Dominis (1560-1624): Venetian, Anglican, Ecumenist, and Relapsed Heretic (London: Strickland and Scott, 1984), 82. 159. Hobbes, De Cive XVII.6–7, 254–56; XVII.11, 260–61; Hobbes, Elements of Law II.7.9, 164–65. 160. Hobbes, De Cive XVII.5–13, 253–62. 161. Sarpi had written that Christ had given the clergy only the power to teach. Baldin, “Hobbes, Sarpi,” 271. 162. Hobbes, De Cive XVII.25, 271–73; XIV.17, 213–14. 163. Ibid. XVII.26, 274–76. 164. Marsilius of Padua, The Defender of the Peace, ed. and trans. Annabel Brett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 208–12; Sommerville, Thomas Hobbes, 131–32. 165. Sommerville, “Hobbes, Selden,” 160–88. 166. Sommerville, Thomas Hobbes, 118; Sommerville, “Hobbes, Selden,” 175, 178. 167. Hobbes, De Cive XIV.10, 210. Also Russell, Fall of the British Monarchies, 29, 41. 168. Hobbes, De Cive XVII.27, 276. 169. Burns, “George Buchanan and the anti-monarchomachs,” 18. 170. Hobbes, De Cive XII.2, 186–87; XV.18, 231–32. He supports his position again by his unorthodox interpretation of Old Testament history. Ibid. XVI.18, 248–49. Similarly, Soto wrote that when a subject acts by the commander’s command, it is properly an act of the commander. Soto, De iustitia, bk. V, q. 1, a. 3, 3:390 col. 1. 171. Hobbes, De Cive XVII.11, 260–61; Hobbes, Elements of Law II.6.11, 157; II.8.5, 171. 172. Hobbes, De Cive XII.2, 187; XV.19, 233. 173. Ibid. XVIII.1, 280–81; XVIII.6, 285–87; Hobbes, Elements of Law II.6.11, 157. Hobbes’s theory does not leave any room for a formal doctrine of passive obedience on matters of conscience in a Christian commonwealth, the conventional doctrine that one must disobey an unjust command and accept one’s punishment passively. He attacks the doctrine together with the concept of the purely penal law in De Cive because it

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entails a form of passive obedience. Hobbes, De Cive XIV.23, 217–18. For the theory of the purely penal law see William Daniel, The Purely Penal Law Theory in the Spanish Theologians from Vitoria to Suárez (Rome: Gregorian University Press, 1968). 174. Hobbes, De Cive III.3, 109; Hobbes, Elements of Law I.16.2, 82. 175. Hobbes, De Cive III.7, 111; Hobbes, Elements of Law II.2.3, 120; Digest 47.10.1.5, 4:285 (Ulpian). 176. Hobbes, De Cive VII.14, 155–56; Hobbes, Elements of Law II.2.3, 119–20; II.2.7, 121. 177. Hobbes, De Cive VI.12, 141; Hobbes, Elements of Law II.1.12, 113; II.8.10, 174–75. 178. Grotius, Right of War, Prolegomena to the First Edition, 3:1749. See also Cicero’s influential statement that the basis of justice is faithfulness to promises and agreements in De officiis, bk. I, sect. 7, para. 23, p.  25. Paganini sees possible Epicurean influence. Paganini, “Hobbes, Gassendi, and De cive,” 200–201. 179. Sommerville, Thomas Hobbes, 88. 180. Bodin, On Sovereignty, bk. II, ch. 5, 120; Hoekstra, “Tyrannus Rex,” 422. 181. Hobbes, Philosophicall Rudiments VII.2, 107. Also Hobbes, Elements of Law II.1.3, 109–10. 182. Hobbes, De Cive VII.3, 151. Cf. Hobbes, Elements of Law II.5.1, 137–38.

CHAPTER 7

Hobbes’s Creative Virtuosity

7.1   Overview We set out at the beginning of this study to explain Hobbes’s creativity in accordance with the classic framework of the four Ps: person, process, product, and press. We have elaborated this approach with an account of the development of Hobbes’s knowledge, his relationships, his personality, and his motivation. Our focus has been on Hobbes (person) in the context of his culture and environment (press), and on his creative cognition (process) as inferred from his writings (products). In this final chapter we put the components of our analysis together and present a summary account of Hobbes’s creativity and the personal resources which he drew upon to achieve it. I will suggest that Hobbes was creative in so many different ways that it is fitting to think of him as a creative virtuoso, that an understanding of his creative processes adds an important new dimension to our understanding of his thought, and that his creativity and originality are the principal reasons that we prize his philosophy so highly today. In the first section we review the development of salient aspects of his extraordinary personal, interpersonal, and material resources. In the following four sections we will review our findings on his creativity in four aspects of his philosophy, his theory of cognition and the passions, his theory of moral relativity and the role of the sovereign, his theory of the state of nature, and his theory of the civil state and his reply to the theory of popular sovereignty. Finally, I will address what appear to be © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. J. Hamilton, Hobbes’s Creativity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27733-7_7

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transformational aspects of his creativity, the contributions of this study to the work of philosophers and psychologists, and topics for further research.

7.2   Hobbes Hobbes had many intellectual, psychological, social, educational, and material advantages which empowered him to achieve philosophical eminence. He seems to have had a difficult early home life, but that may have given him the inner strength to face and overcome personal and intellectual challenges later in life. As an adolescent, he had the support of an intrinsically oriented teacher who provided an inspirational role model, intellectual and moral support, and an excellent preparation for university. At Oxford, where he found an environment conducive to creative insights within permissible limits, he seems to have been a hard worker with an active imagination and a loner who was not distracted by the pleasures of academic social life. Instruction emphasized guided individual study with loose oversight and remote evaluation, a framework which required strong self-direction and self-discipline and played to his personal strengths. Preparation for the final disputations involved the creation of knowledge by dialogue among students exploring different points of view and different paths to the goals of their practice disputations. It is hard to imagine an education better suited to the development of the bright, creative mind. After Hobbes received his degree, he was employed by a powerful and well-connected family which provided him with a livelihood, status, security, leisure time to pursue his varied interests, a library to continue his studies, and a network of important friends and acquaintances. He visited “centers of vital creativity” such as London and Paris where he encountered vibrant intellectual activity which was conducive to the formation of novel ideas. He learned how to be a philosopher and the satisfactions of creativity from another eminent philosopher, Francis Bacon, and he received intellectual and psychological support, encouragement, and stimulation in the development of his ideas from three circles of intellectuals. The most important was that of Marin Mersenne, a gatekeeper who embraced him, championed him, and introduced him to his European network of scientists, mathematicians, and philosophers, including Descartes, whose rivalry provided an important stimulus to the development of Hobbes’s own original ideas. From the 1630s to the 1660s he engaged in a “network of enterprise” which enhanced his originality and productivity. As he worked on different projects simultaneously, new ideas

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emerged in one project which enhanced other projects. His mathematical and scientific misadventures in later life were not a reflection of declining mental power, but perhaps a risky and misguided attempt to maintain a high level of creativity. His unwillingness to self-regulate in response to criticism may be explained by his critics’ attacks on his views and his equally strong disagreement with their views. There is no evidentiary basis to support a conclusion that Hobbes was mentally ill, despite its common attribution to some types of eminent creators. His personality traits contributed to his success. In early adolescence he already displayed unusual ego-strength, self-confidence, self-efficacy, and self-concept, and the ability to delay gratification, learn meaningfully, and work autonomously and in solitude. During his mature philosophic years, he benefited from intrinsic motivation, persistence, purpose, and devotion to long-term goals as well as the task at hand. Rated according to the rough guide of the five dimensions of McCrea and Costa’s five-factor model of personality, the mature Hobbes seems to have possessed the traits of moderate introversion, emotional stability, openness to experience/intellect, conscientiousness, and moderate agreeableness (though he could be arrogant, intellectually assertive and, in later life, antagonistic under criticism). His conscientiousness included the traits of competence, self-discipline, deliberation, achievement focus, orderliness, and dependability. Achievement focus was essential to his long career of ideation and production of creative products, while the difficult, complex, and detailed process of drafting and elaborating them for public acceptance required self-discipline and orderliness. His moderate introversion helped him to work long hours alone, and his relative agreeableness and emotional stability helped him to establish and maintain productive relationships with role models, coaches, and intellectual peers. But the most important personality trait to his creativity was his openness and intellect, which are associated with a number of traits characteristic of Hobbes: to be motivated by curiosity, to appreciate different ideas and cultures, to engage in cognitive complexity and flexibility, and to tolerate ambiguity, which manifests itself in the presence of ambiguity throughout his thought and in the willingness to replace old solutions with new and better ones. His traits of intellect, introversion, and conscientiousness together supported his quest for inspiration and originality and his need to express his mature philosophy in a compelling way. These personality traits, together with the tolerant and supportive environment in which he worked during the 1630s and

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1640s, empowered him to harness his advantages to achieve a great creative contribution to philosophy. From the 1630s Hobbes devoted the rest of his life to scientific, mathematical, philosophical, theological, and historical pursuits. Such long-­ term efforts required strong, sustained commitment, which in turn required strong, sustained motivation. At first he was driven by implicit motivation and curiosity about the subjects which he studied and about which he wrote, by a desire for fame, and later, in his political philosophy, by a commitment to the public good and the betterment of the state and society. The common good, to him, was royalism in the fraught English context of the late 1630s and early 1640s. He believed that monarchy was the best form of government and that, if there were to be peace and stability, the sovereign must have as much power as possible and that subjects should obey whatever their sovereign commands, unless a command posed a threat to their lives or violated other important personal imperatives. This was his solution to the problem which he saw in conventional political ideologies. All of them had weaknesses which, in his telling, could lead to civil war. His radical absolutism, the idea that the sovereign must be all powerful, followed from these sympathies and concerns. In the following four sections we review our account of the creativity of his accounts of cognition and the passions, his theory of moral relativity and the role of the sovereign, his theory of the state of nature, and his theory of the civil state and his response to the theory of popular sovereignty.

7.3   Cognition and the Passions Hobbes, among the novateurs of his day, was the first to develop a thoroughly secular account of cognition with a thoroughly mechanistic physiological explanation and a simple, well-defined concept of reasoning. Cross fertilization and integration of ideas from different domains and different parts of the same domain are evident throughout his account. His theory of cognition seems to be indebted to ancient, medieval, and Renaissance ideas as well as contemporary scientific discoveries. He accepted much of Aristotle’s account of cognition though he rejected his metaphysics and his theory of the soul. The central principle of Hobbes’s cognitive psychology is that all cognition except linguistic reasoning is some form of sense, which is a physical phenomenon, an idea which he shared with the Italian natural

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philosophers Telesio and Campanella. According to Hobbes’s novel explanation, sense is just the motion caused by sensory stimuli proceeding through the nerves to the brain or the pia mater, and from there to the heart, where it rebounds to the brain and creates an imagination or idea and a perception of the object as external. He appears to have reached this conclusion by means of a regional analogy with optics. Memory, as Aristotle, Telesio, and the young Campanella had said, is just retained sense which, Hobbes explains, gradually decays from the Galilean principle of inertia because of its interaction with other bodily motions. Imaginations and ideas are also just forms of sense and motion. Hobbes’s theory of mental discourse, our conscious thought process, incorporates Aristotle’s account of the sequence of thoughts in memory to explain instrumental thought, recollection, prudence, foresight, and expectation. We extrapolate future events and explain past ones from a causal sequence of imaginations experienced in the past. Doubt is just alternating opinions about whether something is true or false, and judgment is just the last of these alternating opinions when doubt ends. Hobbes seems to have found the idea of alternating opinions in Stoicism. Intentional mental discourse, which requires accurate predictions of future events, is based in part on a physiological process of comparison and contrast of past and present perceptions, which seems to derive from a similar account in Telesio or the scholastics. Understanding is the conceptions raised in memory by language. Reasoning may occur with or without language. Hobbes’s mature theory of reasoning as a form of addition and subtraction seems to apply Ramus’s metaphor of calculation to reason, as illustrated by an Aristotelian example of an approaching or retreating figure. Scientific knowledge requires sensation, memory, and especially language, which enhances our mental processes through the use of names as universals and the construction of propositions and syllogisms. The most novel feature of Hobbes’s materialistic account of cognition is his restructuring of the concept of ratiocination as computation and its integration with a scheme involving other forms of cognition as mechanistic physiological modes of sense. On the other hand, Hobbes’s account of the passions is generally derivative and not very creative. His idea that all of the passions are reducible to just two, desire and aversion, is original and makes an incremental advance on the traditional reduction of the Aristotelian passions to four. He may have reduced the passions to two to accommodate his physiological explanation of them. He begins from pleasure and pain, which he

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conceives as what seems to help or hinder vital motion. Desire and aversion follow from the sensations of pleasure and pain. We desire the pleasurable and avoid the painful. Similarly, a strain of thought in scholasticism, Telesio, and others, conceives of the appetitive passions or pleasure and pain as what seems to help or hinder vital motion, though accounts of how they do so differ. Hobbes’s most novel concept of a passion is that of felicity, which is a reimagining of the Aristotelian and Hellenistic concept of eudaimonia, often translated as felicity or human flourishing. The ancients conceived of eudaimonia as a life-long process of striving for a good life which is available only to the lucky few. According to Aristotle, people achieve felicity, an inner settled state, through contemplation or as statesmen, because they are acting in accordance with their rational natures. A moderate degree of prosperity is necessary for self-­ sufficiency in our striving for felicity and to protect us from life’s uncertainty. Although people compete for the goods of fortune such as power and wealth for the sake of honor, excessive competition is a vice and there can be no honor without moral virtue. The Hellenistic eudaimonists maintain that felicity requires inner tranquility and withdrawal from the worldly pursuit of wealth, power, and honor which most people think leads to happiness. The Roman Stoics stress the rational control of irrational desires such as greed and ambition and argue that a life of constantly increasing desire for worldly goods, which can never be satisfied, cannot provide tranquility and felicity. In The Advancement of Learning, Bacon, a courtier and high ranking official as well as a philosopher, advocates as the way to happiness the active good of worldly advancement in place of the eudaimonist emphasis on withdrawal from the world and striving for virtue. For Hobbes, felicity is a joy of the mind derived from a long-term process of prospering, an idea which combines Aristotle’s idea of prosperity from the Rhetoric with Bacon’s idea of worldly advancement, and which Hobbes thinks of as an endless competition for ever more worldly power conceived in terms of the Aristotelian goods of fortune. As the eudaimonists taught, Hobbes maintains that felicity is available only to the lucky few, because few people were capable of long-term continuous prospering in early modern England. Dialectical thinking is the integration or synthesis of two opposed or antithetical ideas in a new idea which contains features of the original antithetical ideas. Hobbes seems to have synthesized, by a process of dialectical thinking, the Hellenistic account of felicity as continuous, successful

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striving, and the Baconian preference for the good of the active or worldly life in a new concept of felicity as continuous, successful striving for power after power. His dialectical process was aided by inverting the Stoic teaching of emotional disengagement and condemnation of greed, ambition, and competition, and accepting the worldly life which the Stoics deplored.

7.4   Moral Relativity and the Sovereign One of Hobbes’s most original contributions to the history of philosophy was his apparent integration of Pyrrhonist relativity with the traditional concept of an immutable law of nature by a sepconic articulation process. Sepconic articulation is a cognitive process of concomitant separation and connection of anomalous frames or thought matrixes in which some features are kept separate, and others are integrated but keep their original meanings. The result contains new meaning which was not present in the original thought matrixes. An example is human speech, in which words with separate meanings are integrated into a sentence, creating new meaning while the meanings of the original words remain the same. Like the Pyrrhonists, Hobbes argues that there is no absolute good or evil, no right or wrong by nature. The only absolute, unchanging moral standards are the dictates of reason derived from the ancient, medieval, and early modern doctrine that each person seeks her self-preservation by nature. These dictates of reason, he holds, are divine and natural laws. But Hobbes undercuts this idea with the Pyrrhonist argument that individuals judge value terms such as good and evil and the meaning of virtue and vice in light of their own opinions, interests, and passions, ensuring that biased judgments will make agreement on norms and value terms in practice impossible. Though the laws of nature are immutable, individuals cannot agree on what they mean. Moreover, he undermines the law of nature as divine law by mitigating the moral purchase of the second table of the Decalogue. The commandments against theft, murder, adultery, and false testimony do not apply in the state of mere nature, or do not apply if one’s life is at stake, and only the sovereign can establish uniformity in honoring one’s parents. He supports these positions using Pyrrhonist argumentation and two Pyrrhonist examples (theft, marriage). Hobbes fills out this account with the Pyrrhonist concept of a criterion of action, a person who acts as a judge of right and wrong for political reasons but who may not know what right and wrong truly are. He seems to draw his ideas of the proper criterion or judge from a Reformation

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theological debate. Protestants claimed, using Pyrrhonist argumentation, that the individual is the proper judge of the meaning of scripture and the means to his own salvation. Catholics claimed that the proper judge is the infallible pope. By analogy with the Protestant criterion, Hobbes seems to combine the concept of a criterion or judge of value, moral and theological matters with the concept of the free individual in the state of nature. By analogy with the Catholic criterion, which emerges fully in Leviathan, he seems to combine the concept of the absolute sovereign with the concept of a criterion or judge of all moral, value, theological, and property matters in the commonwealth. The sovereign judge must provide for the settlement of all disputes in accordance with the law of nature to his utmost endeavor. The result is a new concept of greatly expanded sovereign power. The individual in the state of nature decides what is right and wrong and what the law of nature means. He is not obliged to obey the laws of nature if he does not believe that he can do so safely. The competing opinions, interests, desires, and aversions are reinforced by the partial opinion of individuals that they are right and their competitors are wrong. The result exacerbates conflict in the state of nature. In an apparent process of sepconic articulation, Hobbes connects the idea of moral relativity with the theory of immutable natural law but keeps their respective original features of relativity and immutability separate. They are connected by the individual’s differing objective and subjective approaches to moral judgments, which have three synergistic effects. The first is to draw the meaning and applicability of the law of nature into question because of differences of opinion about them, thus undercutting the law of nature’s effectiveness. The second is to make the conflict of the state of nature worse since individuals in disputes are prone to think they are right and their opponents wrong. The third is to require a strong government to eliminate conflict and establish peace. Some of Hobbes’s most controversial doctrines, I suggest, emerged from the integration of these ideas with other aspects of his philosophy. The idea that the existence of sovereignty is co-extensive with the duration of the sovereign’s power to protect his subjects emerged from the combination of the concept of an absolute sovereign and the concept of a criterion of action, and the integration of this combination with the sovereign’s duty to protect his subjects and the individual’s inalienable right of self-­ preservation. If the sovereign cannot perform his duties effectively because he has lost power, each of his subjects is free to protect himself until, in his judgment, he finds some other person or group which he believes will be

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able to provide protection. Moreover, the doctrine that the law of nature and the civil law are always consistent in De cive, and co-extensive in Leviathan, results from the integration of the idea of the sovereign as a criterion of action and Hobbes’s radical mitigation of the law of nature. There is no practical difference between civil and natural law because the sovereign authoritatively determines the content of both. Finally, Hobbes’s doctrine that the right of nature in the state of mere nature is the right to all things emerged from the integration of the idea of the individual conscience as a criterion of action, the idea of rights as a form of liberty, and the absence of effective moral constraints imposed by the law of nature. These novel emergent theories are fundamental to his thought.

7.5  The State of Nature Hobbes’s theory of the state of nature in its pure and attenuated forms is perhaps another example of the process of sepconic articulation. He seems to have begun by establishing the antitheses of the state of mere nature, where everyone lives alone, and the civil state, and then to have constructed an account of an attenuated state of nature with some features of each. But his first task was to establish a polarity between them. His account of the state of mere nature has six parts: the concept of the state of nature, the theory of history as progress, the idea of anarchy from the breakdown of society, the theories of moral relativity and subjective right, the idea of human equality, and passions that lead to war. Hobbes did not invent the concept of the state of nature but his secular version of it was unique. In medieval theology the state of nature was the state of innocence, the condition of Adam and Eve before the Fall. The term “state” was not theological but meant a condition of liberty or servitude to the scholastics. By the state of mere nature Hobbes means a condition of absolute liberty where there is no government, a life of primitive existence in which solitary individuals struggle to survive. The origin of this idea was pagan. The ancient Sophists popularized a myth of historical progress in which individuals were originally isolated, wild, and vulnerable to attack by wild animals and other humans. They had no language, no moral code, no laws, no money, no property, no clothing, and no arts. Over time they learned to communicate, came together for common defense, established governments, and instituted laws as remedies for wrongdoing. They gradually became civilized, educated, and prosperous from commerce and industry. Hobbes’s state of mere nature, in which

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people have isolated lives, do not live in families and have not made any agreements with each other, conforms to the first, primitive condition of history. Like the ancients, he describes the lives of such people in negative terms. He claimed that contemporary Native Americans validated his theory (though they did not live in the state of mere nature because they lived in families and tribes), following a long tradition in which primitive contemporaries were viewed as analogous to the first European people. It was natural to conclude on the basis of this theory that if governments fell the result would be a return to anarchy, slaughter, plunder, and rapine, an idea which was common to social conservatives, which had historical precedents, and which, Hobbes claims, the English civil wars confirmed. As we saw, Hobbes’s theory of moral relativity, with its subjective approach to good and evil and supremacy of the individual conscience, makes the conflict of the state of nature worse. He sets up a condition of divergent moral and religious claims among individuals who are inclined to believe that all their acts are justified. His theory of moral relativity is reinforced by an unusual concept of subjective right, which he conceives in the manner of Roman law jurists as liberty limited by natural law rather than created by it. He conceives of natural right as an inalienable right of self-preservation, an idea which had medieval roots. The integration of the doctrine of moral relativity, the concept of the individual as a criterion of action, the resistance of the law of nature to objective interpretation, the concept of subjective right as liberty, and the right of self-preservation justifies a broad range of hostile actions in the state of nature. A person had the right to kill if she sincerely believed that she might be threatened by another person, or the right to take something from another person if she thought that taking it would advance her security or prolong her life. Natural equality and passions that cause conflict round out the causes of conflict in the state of nature. Hobbes played on the traditional belief that civic harmony depends on social hierarchy, and conversely that social equality is a prescription for conflict and disorder. People are not equal in mental and bodily power, but he maintains, perhaps reflecting in part Thucydides’ account of the Corcyraean civil war, that they are equal in their vulnerability to being killed and roughly equal in their ability to kill others. Hierarchy, which Hobbes did not view as natural but as the consequence of social process and sovereign power, is available only in commonwealths and families. Equality in the state of nature provides an incentive to fight when two people want something and think that they have an equal chance to win. The passions which he says cause conflict are

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competition, fear, and glory, which seem to derive from the three motives which Thucydides used to explain the expansion of Athenian power after the defeat of the Persians. Those motivated by glory seek to dominate or take revenge. Fear and distrust encourage prudent people to defend themselves by anticipating attack and attacking first, an idea which is also found in Thucydides. Hobbes thus seems to choose ideas by divergent thinking and cross fertilization from several domains and writers and to integrate them to support his account of the state of mere nature, the antithesis of the civil state. Polar opposites appear in several features of the state of mere nature: the narrative of history as progress from primitive brutality to civilization; the traditional belief in the essential stability of social hierarchy and government, and the anarchy of the equality of individuals; and the moral relativity which undermines the immutable laws of nature. Then he integrates features of the primitive war of all against all, and features of the security of the civil state, while holding some of their features apart. The result appears to be the new construct of the attenuated state of nature. Individuals no longer live alone. There are families and other groups, and the heads of families have sovereign power over their children and servants. But these interpersonal relationships are unstable because they continue to exist in a state of war. He seems to take the idea of the head of the family’s sovereign power from his theory of the civil state, and the idea that they continue to live in a state of fear and danger of death or subjugation from his theory of the state of mere nature. Yet the polarity between the civil state and the state of mere nature where individuals have not established families or made any agreements continues to exist alongside the state of attenuated nature. The result seems to reflect a process of sepconic articulation, which explains why his vision of the family before the establishment of commonwealths is unique.

7.6  The Civil State and Popular Sovereignty The political problem bedeviling late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-­ century Europe, Hobbes thought, was sedition and civil war. In his theory of the state, he accordingly set for himself the ambitious goals of maximizing civil power and proving that violation of the civil law or disobedience to the commands of the sovereign is never legitimate, except for the preservation of an individual’s life or corporal liberty or to prevent his self-­ incrimination, his incrimination of a loved one, or certain other personal

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acts that may dishonor him. The foundation of his account of the state was a theory of absolute sovereignty, the greatest power that a government can legitimately possess. He also sought to rebut or undermine the traditional theory of popular sovereignty in his early works by a process of adversarial thinking. His adversarial thinking takes three forms: redefining concepts and modifying or replacing theories to present compelling alternatives; enhancing or strengthening existing concepts and theories; and refuting, undermining, or qualifying opposing ones. They are not mutually exclusive. Several other cognitive processes assist him in his adversarial thinking: blocking or ruling out opposing views; co-opting opposing views and adapting them for his own purposes; conceptual combination; concept expansion; relativity; inverting the terms of an opposing viewpoint; and divergent thinking. His adversarial thinking produced a number of novel positions and arguments that form an integral part of his philosophy and contribute to its distinctive character. In De cive he objects to nine political and moral ideas associated with the theory of popular sovereignty: (1) that the people is the same as the individuals of which it is composed; (2) that kings are just administrators; (3) that kings are subject to the law; (4) that supreme power may be divided; (5) that subjects have absolute property in their possessions and cannot be taxed without their own consent; (6) that private individuals may question their king’s commands; (7) that subjects sin if they obey an immoral law or command; and (8) that legitimate kings who become tyrants may be deposed or even (9) assassinated. In De cive Hobbes sets up an alternative, absolutist narrative of the nature and origin of government in contrast to that of the theory of popular sovereignty, with many original characteristics. He argues that the people rules in all commonwealths by redefining and apparently inverting the concept of the people. The people is not just the community of individuals who comprise a commonwealth; it is the commonwealth itself, a persona ficta ruled by the sovereign. Even a sovereign monarch or aristocratic assembly is the people. In addition, he blocks the idea that the people can transfer its rights to a sovereign monarch and impose laws and conditions on him, and he rejects the idea that a sovereign monarch can be obligated to the people, because a democracy creates a sovereign monarch and that democracy ceases to exist when the sovereign monarch is established. He narrowly redescribes Grotius’s concept of usufructuary kingship as a monarchy in which a democratic assembly has the right to meet after the monarch’s death to choose a new one. Since almost all European monarchs had the right to summon and dissolve their estates, he effectively blocks

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the possibility that all but a few European monarchies could be considered usufructuary. Hobbes argues that sovereign power cannot be separate from and subordinate to spiritual power, apparently by a process of divergent thinking. He maintains first that in God’s natural kingdom, where scripture is unknown and religion is rational, God rules through the sovereign. Then he holds that the Christian sovereign has the sole right to interpret scripture, judge all religious doctrines, determine the mode of public religious worship, and choose members of the clergy. He thus expands the concept of sovereign power to include religious supremacy and inverts the sovereign’s power relationship with the clergy in spiritual matters, reducing the clergy to preaching approved doctrine, performing the sacraments, and ratifying the sovereign’s choice of clergy. The sovereign’s word, he claims, is the word of God. He also inverts the relationship between civil and natural law by redefining sin as a violation of civil law, and then argues that only the sovereign can judge who should be excommunicated because he is the interpreter of the civil law. He expands the concept of the commonwealth by redefining the church as a civil body which is identical with the commonwealth under the rule of the civil sovereign. And he blocks papal claims to a universal power of excommunication by arguing that the pope cannot excommunicate a sovereign, a commonwealth, or the subjects of a commonwealth because there is no church which is a civil body with universal jurisdiction under a sovereign ruler. He reinforces these views further by analogy with ancient Jewish history, a sacred model for contemporary kingship, which he interprets in a novel way. He incorporates his theory of absolute sovereignty into it and minimizes the role of the priests, except when the High Priest was the civil sovereign. He seems to co-opt the Catholic idea that the High Priest was supreme and to invert the idea that he was the forerunner of the pope. In Hobbes’s telling he has become the forerunner of the civil sovereign instead. Hobbes blocks the idea that subjects may take public action or disobey their sovereign based on their private moral or religious scruples. By inverting civil and natural law he audaciously makes civil law, the sovereign’s command, the measure of natural law. He rules out private claims of conscience in matters subject to law and maintains that subjects will not commit sin if they obey their sovereign unquestioningly. He argues that there can be no conflict between a subject’s obligations to God and to the commonwealth if the sovereign is Christian. He blocks salvation to disobedient Christians and rules out damnation to subjects for obeying their

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sovereign’s religious determinations, because virtually nothing that a Christian sovereign commands is essential to a subject’s eternal salvation. Finally, Hobbes brings together some of his key ideas to block the theory of popular sovereignty’s two extreme sanctions: its claims that a legitimate monarch who becomes a tyrant may be deposed or assassinated. He maintains that subjects have surrendered their right to resist their sovereign by the terms of the covenant of subjection except where a subject’s life is at risk. He blocks subjects from claiming that their sovereign has wronged them, and though the sovereign can act iniquitously, he cannot act unjustly toward his subjects or the body politic because injustice is a violation of a covenant, contract, or promise. But the sovereign has not made or does not retain any commitment made during the establishment of his rule, and he has not undertaken any obligation from which he cannot release himself because his subjects have consented to all his acts. Hobbes also delegitimizes the word “tyranny” by making its use relative to the user, denies that the subject has a right to judge whether legitimate rulers are good or evil, and thus denies that the assassination of a legitimate sovereign who has been accused of tyranny can ever be justified.

7.7   Hobbes’s Creative Virtuosity We have achieved the goal which we laid out in Chapter 1 to provide an account of Hobbes and his creativity within the framework of person, process, product, and press. We are now in a position to identify areas of his transformational creativity, to review the study’s contribution to philosophy and psychology, and to suggest areas for further research. We have found transformational creativity throughout Hobbes’s work. Sawyer states that in transformational creativity “a defining dimension of the conceptual space is altered.”1 Many of Hobbes’s contributions to psychology, moral philosophy, and political theory overcame the cognitive constraints thrown up by traditional paradigms, transformed their defining characteristics, and did so in a philosophically compelling, thought-­ provoking, often audacious and highly controversial way. Hobbes’s reimagination of cognition as thoroughly materialistic and secular, with its unique theory of ratiocination as computation, helped to replace the traditional Aristotelian-scholastic paradigm and pave the way for the future of psychology. His reimagination of the ancient concept of felicity updated traditional ideas for a modern sensibility, with endless greed and ambition for power and status as its defining characteristic. It

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broke the boundaries of the most common concept of felicity, which was still for a time a version of the ancient moralistic model of eudaimonia. His theory of a relativistic, subjective morality, in association with a traditional concept of immutable natural law, was both transformative and had philosophically important emergent consequences. He subjected the meaning of the paradigmatic immutable law of nature to pervasive uncertainty and biased interpretation by sincere but self-interested individuals. He turned the prevailing conceptual space on its head by subjecting divine and natural law to the will of the civil sovereign, and by rejecting the traditional subjection of the acts of the ruler or rulers to private interpretations of divine and natural law. These developments, in conjunction with other Hobbesian doctrines, led him to a radical form of secular supreme power (caesaro-papism), a new theory of the duration of civil obligation (begins and ends with the power of the sovereign), and a new assessment of the status of the law of nature (co-extensive with civil law). The state of nature, both in its pure and attenuated forms, also challenged conventional paradigms. The influential Aristotelian-scholastic model posited a continuum between life before the establishment of the state and life inside the civil state and saw the defining characteristic of all human life as essentially rational and moral. But there were other ancient precedents for Hobbes’s view of life before the civil state as primitive and brutal, and his view had parallels with the Augustinian view of the effects of original sin on social life. Hobbes’s account was transformational in its secular, multidimensional character and its moral justification of the brutality of the state of nature within a natural law framework. The attenuated form of the state of nature, which he seems to have derived from the concept of the state of pure nature, the formation of the family and his theory of the civil state, was completely new. The paradigm of popular sovereignty had long occupied an important part of the conceptual space of political thought. Hobbes subjected its most important doctrines to withering and systematic attack. He identified the people with every form of sovereign. He blocked the idea that a sovereign king can have legal and other conditions imposed on him and defined a usufructuary monarchy so narrowly that it could rarely exist. He demolished the idea that spiritual power is superior to temporal power, the right of the individual to question his sovereign’s actions and commands, and the individual’s right to disobey a command or a law which he thought was immoral or impious. He also blocked the doctrine that there is recourse against a legitimate king who has been accused of tyranny. The

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total effect of his criticisms was to strengthen and transform the theory of absolute sovereignty in a radical way. This study offers new insights into what made Hobbes a great innovator, how his education, employment, career development and personality helped him, what motivated him, how he thought, and why his philosophy deviated from philosophic tradition so strongly in some ways but not in others. It shows experts on philosophy that the psychology of creativity can add value to their work. It can offer new perspectives on a philosopher and her environment which helps us better understand her philosophy. All important thinkers engage in some form of creative cognition. Intelligence and logic are not enough. Hobbes’s claim that his method was synthetic was plausible in an age when the nature of creative processes was unknown. But logic was only part of his thought processes, and not the most important part. He is often thought to have been the most systematic of thinkers and any ambiguities in his philosophy must be apparent and not real. But it is the ambiguity which is systematic and reflects his tolerance of it.2 His most controversial positions are not conclusions that he drew by formal argumentation. His formal argumentation often seems to have come later to justify and elaborate positions which he had reached by other processes. The argumentation is of a high caliber, but it may disguise the true genesis of his ideas and the prevalence of ambiguity. What is moral obligation? Is it derived from the command of God, human nature, or something else? Are human actions governed by an instinct for self-­ preservation, or do people sometimes sacrifice their lives for reasons important to them? What does Hobbes mean by liberty? How do families survive long enough to produce and raise children in the state of nature? How do fathers and not mothers become the heads of families in the state of nature, how do babies covenant to obey fathers and what prevents servants from destroying the family for personal gain? Do individuals or fathers of families establish commonwealths? Is force sufficient to maintain civil peace or are justice and education necessary? Do subjects have a right to rebel? Why would democracies transfer sovereign power to a monarch or aristocratic assembly? These and other questions provide philosophers with seemingly endless sources of new analyses and interpretations as they try to divine what he meant, resolve the ambiguities, and fill the voids that Hobbes left behind. Hobbes’s enduring interest lies chiefly in his eminent creativity, its variety, and its manifold occurrences. If he had been just another conveyer of traditional philosophic ideas, though brilliant in both articulation and

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presentation, we would pay little attention to him today. Creative cognition is probably the most important component of the psychologists’ approach to creativity. The striking thing about Hobbes’s creative processes is how many he seems to use. Analogy, metaphor, dialectical thinking, relativistic thinking, sepconic articulation, cross fertilization, conceptual combination, concept expansion, inversion, divergent thinking, adversarial thinking, blocking, and co-optation all play important roles. Perhaps the most important philosopher of the twentieth century was Ludwig Wittgenstein. His picture-theory of language was based on a remote analogy. During World War I he read about a Paris lawsuit involving a car accident. A model of the accident was introduced in court using dolls, miniature houses, and streets, which corresponded to the actual people, cars, houses, and streets. Wittgenstein transferred the idea of a correspondence to a linguistic proposition, which he thought of as a portrait in which the proposition’s parts correspond to the world. He argued that all philosophical theories are based on pictures which constrain us and that we must overcome them by replacing them with new pictures.3 His creative analogy was of the first importance. But there can be no suggestion that he matched Hobbes for the variety and incidence of his modes of creative cognition, if only because his writings are not nearly as numerous. The creative geniuses studied by psychologists tend to group toward Wittgenstein’s end of the creativity spectrum rather than Hobbes’s. A few highly creative ideas can and do go a long way, as the examples of Einstein, Picasso, and Freud illustrate. But Hobbes’s creative cognition takes so many different forms that we may aptly characterize him as a creative virtuoso. The contributions of this study to psychology are fourfold. First, and most obviously, it begins to fill a virtual vacuum in the psychology of creativity, which has had little to say about philosophic creativity. Second, it shows that the basic types of creative cognition are as applicable in the domain of philosophy as in other domains. It thus adds further weight to the view that the same creative processes operate across all domains. Third, the study reveals a new dimension to the processes of an eminent creator, which I have called adversarial thinking and which gives his works part of their distinctive character. Fourth, the field of philosophy has produced a creative virtuoso, a creative genius whose many creative processes have transformed the philosophy of his day in many ways.

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There are a number of promising avenues for further research. We need to know if other areas of Hobbes’s philosophy such as his metaphysics or his theory of obligation are as creative as those we have studied, and if so, what makes them highly creative. Studying the creativity of his theory of obligation presents special challenges because there is no agreement about what it is. But it may yield to the application of our knowledge of his processes and do so in such a way as to clarify its genesis, whether it is cogent, and which of the competing interpretations, if any, is correct. It is also worth asking whether there are any more creative virtuosos, and if so, in what domains. Are creative virtuosity and adversarial thinking specific to the domain of philosophy, or are they domain-general? Were they more likely to occur in the early modern period than today? The highly abstract nature of philosophy may make it fertile ground for them. Ward observes that high-level abstract thinking can lead to more original products.4 Creative virtuosity may be more likely to occur in a highly abstract domain, and highly abstract thinking may foster adversarial thinking of a highly abstract nature. There is much work to be done by philosophers and psychologists, intellectual historians, and historians of philosophy and political thought.

Notes 1. Sawyer, Explaining Creativity, 124. Also Runco, Creativity, 14. 2. I am indebted to Cheryl Welch for this point. 3. Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (New York: Penguin, 1991), 118, 364–65. 4. Ward, “Creativity as a Continuum,” 341.

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Index1

NUMBERS AND SYMBOLS 10-year rule, 43, 44, 60nn196–197 A Adversarial thinking, 9, 173, 216–218 definition of, 155 explanation of, 155–156, 160, 173, 212 popular sovereignty, attack on, 185–187 Analogy, 7, 8 cognition, 68–70, 155, 204–205 moral relativity, 106–107, 116, 118, 125n80, 155, 208 popular sovereignty, attack on, 213 See also Wittgenstein, Ludwig Anti-White, 27 See also under Felicity

Aristotle heart, 67, 92n39 and Hobbes on cognition, 64, 67, 69, 74–75, 204–205 knowledge of fact, 72–73 memory, 68–69, 205 sensing one thing, 69 sequence of thoughts, 70, 205 See also under Civil state; Eudaimonia; Passions, the B Bacon, Francis, see under Cognition; Felicity; Hobbes, Thomas; Role models, coaches, supporters Behemoth, 32, 55n117, 130

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ or ‘nn’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. J. Hamilton, Hobbes’s Creativity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27733-7

247

248 

INDEX

Blocking, ruling out, 9, 155–156, 187n5, 212, 217 popular sovereignty, attack on, 174, 180, 212–214; creation of state by multitude, 174–175, 185, 212; deposition and tyrannicide, 214–215; moral claims against sovereign, 182, 184, 213; most usufructuary monarchies, 176, 185–186, 212, 215 Bramhall, Bishop John, 29–32, 111, 172 Briefe of the Art of Rhetorique, 22, 75 C Campanella, Tommaso, see under Cognition Cavendish, William (II), second earl of Devonshire author of essays, 22, 50n32 Hobbes servant of, 21, 22, 24, 40, 41, 49n15, 50n26 Cavendish, William (III), third earl of Devonshire, 21, 75 Charles II, 28, 31, 33, 35 Chillingworth, William, 107, 108, 110, 111, 122n32 adiaphorism and eirenicism, 52n69, 26 Pyrrhonist argumentation, 106, 108 See also Great Tew circle Civil state, 155 absolutism, description of, 158–159, 204, 212 adiaphorism, 183 Aristotle, 155, 167, 168, 193n92 Bodin, Jean, 170, 171, 194n105 body politic, civil body, 170, 195n108

civil war, rebellion, 157–159, 185, 188n17, 211 clerical infallibility, 172–173 common consent insufficient, 168, 174, 193n95, 197n130 covenant of subjection, 168–170, 214 interpretation of scripture, 213; sovereign vs. clerics, 171–173, 196n124, 196n127 lex regia, 171 liberty, 157, 169 maximizing civil power, 157–158, 185, 211 natural right, 169–170 obligation not to resist, 169, 193n99, 213–214 original democracy, 171, 175–176, 212 originality, novelty, 156, 168, 212 right of self-defense, 158, 162, 188n17 right of self-preservation, 158, 162, 169, 170, 173 St. Augustine, 179, 198n156, 215 seditious doctrines, 159–160, 167, 189n20 simple obedience, 170, 183, 186; a philosophical goal, 48, 159 sovereign right, creation of, 169, 170, 193n99 state or commonwealth, 155, 170, 174, 187n1, 197n132, 215 transfer of rights, 169, 212 unity of, 170 virtual representation, 171, 195n111 See also under Blocking, ruling out; Conceptual combination;

 INDEX 

Co-optation; Divergent thinking; Emergence; Inversion Cognition, 63, 64, 67, 74, 89n1 addition and subtraction, 63, 73–74, 205; Ramus, Petrus, 74–75, 94n71, 205 analytic knowledge, 73 anima, animus, 65 animal spirits, 66–67, 95n91 approaching figure, 73, 74, 94n71, 205 Bacon, Francis, 64, 66, 67, 91n31; and scepticism, 71, 93n60 brain, 65–67, 205 Campanella, Tommaso, 66–68, 73, 205 comparison and contrast, 72, 74, 93n64, 205 deliberation, 71 doubt, 71, 205 experience, 68, 69, 71 Fracastoro, Girolamo, 66, 71, 73 Galen, 66, 91n25 Galileo, 63, 65, 68 Harvey, William, 65–66, 70, 91n28 heart, 65–67, 69–70, 76, 92n40, 205 hunting metaphors, 71 imagination, fictitious, 69, 92n49 imagination, phantasm, 67, 70, 74, 75, 92n41, 205; Bacon’s concept different, 67; a cognitive power, 64–65 inclusiveness, 64, 69, 74, 90n6 instrumental thinking, 70–71, 74, 205 judgment, 71–72, 74–75, 205 knowledge of fact, 72 language, 63, 72–74, 205 materialism, 63–64, 69–70, 74, 205, 214; in Western tradition, 65, 66, 90n17

249

memory, 68–70, 75, 205; a cognitive power, 65; and prudence, 70, 71, 93n55; and thoughts, 70–73 mental discourse, 70–72, 74–75, 205; a cognitive power, 64–65 names and nominalism, 73–74, 205; universal concepts, 68, 73, 205 novateurs, 64, 90n7, 204 originality, novelty, 63, 70, 205; reasoning, 73–74, 94n77; rebound, 67, 70 prudence, 70–71, 74, 205 reason, reasoning, 70, 72–74, 93n53, 94n70, 205; a power of the mind, 64–65 rebound, 67–68, 70, 205 recollection, 70–71, 74, 205 retinal image, 68, 92n44; Kepler, Johannes, 68, 92n43 science, 63, 64, 74, 89n2, 90n10 secular theory of, 75, 89, 204, 214 sense, 67, 68, 204–205; a cognitive power, 64–65; materialist explanation of, 70, 204 sequence of thoughts, 70–71, 74, 205 soul, 64–66, 69, 90n19, 204; Aristotelian view of, 64, 67–68, 74, 75; rational, 63–65, 68, 72, 74, 89 the Stoics, 67–69, 71–72, 74–75, 93n62, 205 synthetic knowledge, 73, 216 Telesio, Bernardino, 64–66, 70, 72, 90n20; and Hobbes, 66–69, 74–75, 204–206 understanding, 64, 72–73, 205 vital spirits, 66 See also under Analogy; Aristotle; Creativity, transformational; Cross fertilization; Metaphor

250 

INDEX

Concept expansion, 9, 212 moral relativity, 102, 117, 155, 207–208 popular sovereignty, attack on, 156, 213; concept of commonwealth, 177–179, 185–186, 213; concept of sovereign power, 178, 185–186, 208, 213 Conceptual combination, 3, 8–9, 208 felicity, 84, 89, 206, 207 moral relativity, 117, 118, 155, 206, 208 popular sovereignty, attack on, 156, 176, 179, 186, 213 state of nature, 135, 155 Concerning Body, see De corpore Co-optation, 9 civil state, 170 popular sovereignty, attack on, 156, 182, 186, 213 Cowley, Abraham, 51n55, 55n115 Cox, Catherine Morris, see IQ, Hobbes’s Creative cognition, 3, 7, 216–217 See also individual types of creative cognition (e.g. Analogy) Creativity, 3 acquisition of knowledge, 39, 42, 59nn188–189, 202 “asynchrony,” 44, 60n202 “centers of vital creativity,” 41, 59n183, 202 constraints on, 4, 42, 59n190, 214 courage necessary, 6 developmental theory of, 37, 57nn155–156 domain, 3 evidence, 9–10, 15n44 and existing knowledge, 3, 6–7, 10, 14nn31–32 and failures, 44, 60n198

“Faustian bargain,” 34, 56n138 field, 4, 12nn15–16, 12n18 four Ps framework, 6, 201, 214 genius, 4–5, 12n17 and intelligence, 5–6 “legislative” style of thought, 6 “network of enterprise,” 42–43, 59nn192–193, 202 and originality, 3, 7–10, 218 personality, 6, 17, 37, 57n154, 201 person, creative, 6, 201, 214 press, 6, 201, 214 processes, cognitive, 6, 214; Hobbes’s, 7–10, 216–217 product, 4, 6, 7, 10, 12n12, 13n30, 201, 214 rationalist ideal, 4, 5, 12n12, 12n20 Romantic ideal, 4, 5 threshold hypothesis, 5, 13nn25–26 transformational, 214; cognition, 70, 214; felicity, 215; moral relativity, 101, 120, 182, 215; popular sovereignty, attack on, 182, 215–216; state of nature, 146, 215 Critique du De Mundo de Thomas White, see Anti-White Cross fertilization, 9, 204, 217 cognition, 63, 74, 75, 155, 204 state of nature, 127, 144, 211 Crystallizing event, 24, 25, 51n56, 52nn57–59 D De Cive, 27–29, 54n94 De corpore, 28–30, 43–44 Descartes, René, see under Hobbes, Thomas; State of nature, equality Dialectical thinking, 8, 14n36, 14n38 felicity, 63, 78, 88, 155, 206

 INDEX 

Dialogue of the Common Laws, 31, 32, 55n116 Divergent thinking, 9, 38, 212 fluency, flexibility, 34–36, 156, 187n4 popular sovereignty, attack on, 181, 184, 213 state of nature, 127, 144, 146n4, 155, 211 E Ecclesiastical power subordinate, 178–180, 186, 198n156, 199n158, 199n161, 213 church redefined, 179, 186, 213 civil law measure of natural, 186, 213 clergy chosen by sovereign, 179, 180, 186, 213 excommunication, 180–181, 213 multi-faceted argumentation, 181, 199n165–166 public worship, 178, 180, 186, 213 religious doctrines, 180, 186, 213 sin, 186, 213 See also Moral relativity, sin Elements of Law Natural and Politic, The, 23, 25, 43 Emergence, 8, 116, 125n82 civil state, 194n102 moral relativity, 101, 118–120, 208–209, 215 Eudaimonia, 77–78, 206 Aristotle’s concept of, 78–79, 206 Hellenistic concept of, 78–80, 97nn112–113, 206; selfrealization, 78, 82, 96n103; self-sufficiency, 79–80; tranquility, inner, 79, 86, 97n111, 206 Hobbes vs. Aristotle, 83–84, 87 Hobbes vs. the Hellenists, 87–88 See also Felicity

251

F Falkland, Lucius Carey Viscount, see Great Tew circle Felicity Anti-White, 85–86, 88 Bacon, Francis, 82–84, 88, 98n143, 206; Advancement of Learning, The, 24, 51n51, 77, 78, 82; and Hobbes’s concept, 77–78, 83–84, 87–88, 206, 207 contentment, earthly, 81, 88, 97n128 continual delight, 83–84, 88 corrupt human nature, 80, 86–88, 97n117, 97n119 for the few, 78, 84, 87, 96n102, 99n165 glory, 80, 84–86, 88, 99n159 vs. hedonism, 77, 80, 96n93 increasing desire, 80, 83–85, 87–88, 206 itching and scratching, 82, 85, 98n156 joy of the mind, 83–86, 88, 98n140, 206 originality, novelty, 63, 77, 88, 206 power, 84–87, 98n146, 206–207 process, 78, 84–87, 206 prospering, 83, 84, 86, 206–207 race, metaphor of, 80, 84, 88, 97n118, 97n120 security, 85, 87, 88 sensual pleasure, 80, 82, 83, 85 striving, 83–87, 207 ultimate end, 83, 86, 88 and virtue, 81, 83, 86, 87, 97n123, 206 See also Conceptual combination, felicity; Dialectical thinking; Eudaimonia; Inversion, felicity; Metaphor, felicity

252 

INDEX

Five-factor personality model (FFM), 45–47, 60nn207–209, 61n214 and Hobbes, 45–47, 61nn215–220, 203 See also Personality traits, Hobbes’s Four Ps framework, see under Creativity Fracastoro, Girolamo, see under Cognition G Galileo, see under Cognition Gatekeeper, see under Mersenne, Marin Great Tew circle, 23, 26, 31, 52n65, 52n67 common interests of, 26, 52n69 Falkland, Lucius Carey Viscount, 26, 41 Hobbes’s views later offended, 26, 31, 53n70, 55n111 See also Chillingworth, William; Role models, coaches, supporters H Harvey, William, see under Cognition Historiometry, 11n1 Hobbes, Thomas and alcohol, 36, 57n144 Bacon, Francis, 22–24, 50nn33–34, 51n50, 51n52 controversies in old age, 29–31, 44, 54nn101–104, 60nn200–201; and self-regulation, 44, 46, 60nn203–204, 203 Davenant, Sir William, 29, 54n97 Descartes, René, 26–28, 53nn78–81, 72, 93n66 enjoyed school, 18, 39, 58n167 family, 17–19, 38, 48, 49n14, 58n165

flight to Paris, 22–23, 51n48 French disciples, 27, 32, 33, 55n124 grand tours, 21, 27, 34, 50n28 and heresy, 32, 55n119 influence of, 32–33, 55n125 method of composition, 24, 51n54 old age, 31–33, 46–47, 55n113, 60n199 return to England, 29, 54n98 and Short Tract, 22, 25–26, 50n39 studia humanitatis, 20, 22, 49n25, 50n30 varied interests of, 21–22, 50n29, 50n31, 50n41, 202 Hoekstra, Kinch equality, 141, 142, 152n103 inversion, 98n139 See also Inversion I Insight, 43 incubation, 42–43, 60n195 Inversion, 9, 83, 98n139, 212, 217 civil state, 156, 168 felicity, 83, 88–89, 155, 207 popular sovereignty, attack on, 180–181, 186; people and sovereign, 174, 185, 212 state of nature, 136, 155 IQ, Hobbes’s, 5, 13nn21–23 L Latimer, Robert, 18, 38, 39, 48n6, 49nn8–9, 58n168, 58nn170–171, 202 See also under Role models, coaches, supporters Leviathan, 4, 29, 32, 43, 55n118 Library of the Cavendishes, 10, 15nn45–46, 22

 INDEX 

Almain, Jacques, 189n33 Aristotle, 96n94 Bacon, Francis, 91n31, 96n94 Beza, Theodore, 191n47 Bodin, Jean, 149n50 Chillingworth, William, 121n23 Cicero, 148n28 Diodorus Siculus, 148n27 Diogenes Laertius, 90n17 Dominis, Marco Antonio de, 199n158 Galen, 91n25 Gerson, Jean, 189n33 Grotius, Hugo, 192n76 Guicciardini, Francesco, 153n115 Hippocrates, 91n25 Hooker, Richard, 149n50 Horace, 148n30 Mariana, Juan de, 192n74 Plato, 146n3 Plutarch, 71, 93n61 St. Augustine, 198n156 Sarpi, Paolo, 198n149 Selden, John, 150n51 Stoic writers, 96n94 Thomas Aquinas, 95n89 William of Ockham, 189n33 M Medea, translation of, 18, 39, 49n11 achievement striving, 45 devotion to work, 39, 59n177 meaningful learning, 39, 59n176 self-concept, 39, 58n175 self-confidence, 39 self-efficacy, 39, 58n173 self-learning, 40, 58n172 See also Latimer, Robert; Personality traits, Hobbes’s Mental illness, 33–37, 56n126, 56n129, 56n140

253

ancient idea, 33, 35, 56n127 cyclothymia, 36, 37, 57nn145–147 eccentricity, 33, 56n131, 56n133 Eysenck, Hans, 33, 56n128 gatekeeper, 53nn71–73 mood disorder, 33, 35–36, 57n143 problems with hypothesis, 36, 37, 57nn149–153, 203 schizotypy, 33–35, 56n130, 56n134 writers and artists favored by, 37 Mersenne, Marin, 26–28, 41–42, 53nn74–75, 59n187 gatekeeper, 26, 27, 53nn71–72, 53n73, 202 promotion of Hobbes, 27, 53n77 See also under Role models, coaches, supporters Metaphor, 7, 8, 217 cognition, 65, 66, 74, 155, 205 felicity, 80, 84, 85 Moral relativity caesaro-papism, 118, 125n85, 215 Christian sovereign unassailable, 107, 112, 124n62 civil and natural law co-extensive, 114, 119, 125n76, 209, 215 conscience, individual, 103, 106, 117–120, 209 criterion of action, 107, 207–209; the individual, 108, 112, 114, 116–120; sovereign, 108, 111, 114, 117–119 criterion of reality, 107, 121n21 duration of sovereignty, 118, 208, 215 in foro interno, 107 fundamental article of faith, 107 immutability of natural law, 119; and Pyrrhonism, 103, 108, 110, 111, 117, 207–208

254 

INDEX

Moral relativity (cont.) interpretation of scripture, 105–107, 111, 115, 118 law of nature, undermining, 102–103, 109, 120n6, 207, 209; and divine law, 109–111, 119, 207 legal positivism, 112, 115, 119, 124n61, 125n86 Modes of Aenesidemus, 101–102, 104, 108–111; Leviathan, marginalized in, 113–114; in Reformation theological debate, 105 Montaigne, Michel de, 104, 107, 110, 111, 121n9, 121n13, 121n16 natural right, 103, 109, 119–120, 210 objections to relativity thesis, 112–113 originality, novelty, 117, 120, 207, 209 paradiastolic redescription, 104, 109, 121n16 political criterion, 106, 122n25 pope, 106, 116, 125n80, 208 private judge, 116 property, 105, 107, 109, 110, 118, 208; Cicero, 123n45 Pyrrhonist examples, 110–111, 113, 120, 125n70, 207; sexual practices, 104, 109, 114 Reformation theological debate, 101, 103, 105, 106, 121n19 Sextus Empiricus, 102–104, 106, 110, 121n13 sin, 115 sovereign as antidote to, 101, 103, 113, 118 Ten Commandments, Decalogue, 109, 114, 120, 207; adultery, 109–111, 113, 119,

123nn43–44, 207; coveting, 109, 115; divorce, 111, 124n56; false testimony, 109, 115, 119, 207; marriage, 109–111, 115, 124n55, 207; murder, 109, 111, 115, 118, 207; theft, 109, 115, 118–120, 123n42, 207 utmost endeavor, 107, 108, 208 value subjectively determined, 102–103, 109, 112 virtue and vice, meaning of, 104, 109, 114, 122n39, 207 See also under Analogy; Chillingworth, William; Concept expansion; Conceptual combination; Creativity, transformational; Emergence; Relativity; Sepconic articulation Motivation, Hobbes’s, 47, 48, 61nn222–223 See also Personality traits, Hobbes’s, intrinsic motivation N Newcastle, William Cavendish, earl of, 25–26, 29, 54n93 See also under Role models, coaches, supporters O Originality, novelty, see under Civil state; Cognition; Creativity; Felicity; Moral relativity; Popular sovereignty, attack on; State of nature Oxford education, Hobbes’s, 18–20, 49n13, 49nn16–17, 49n20, 202 autonomy and independence, 40, 59n179

 INDEX 

dialog, importance of, 40, 59nn180–181, 202 disputations, 19, 20, 49n18, 49n20, 202 leisure activities, 20, 49n22 social isolation, 40, 59n178 solitude, working in, 39, 46, 58n169, 203 P Passions, the, 63, 75–77, 89 Aristotle, 75–77, 95n79, 95n83, 95n85, 205, 206 Burton, Robert, 66, 76, 91n32 desire and aversion, 76, 95n87, 205–206 Hobbes on, 75–77, 95n82, 95n86, 205–207 and vital motion, 76, 95n91, 206 See also Eudaimonia; Felicity; State of nature, passions Personality development, Hobbes’s active imagination, 20, 37, 202; playfulness, 18, 37, 57n158 birth order, 37, 38, 58nn159–160 early home life, 37–38, 57n157, 58n162, 202 loss of parent, 38, 58n161 multiculturalism, 47, 61n219 schooling, 18, 39 social marginalization, 37, 39–41, 59n182 Personality traits, Hobbes’s, 45, 60nn205–206 achievement striving, 45, 203 agreeableness, 30–31, 45–47, 203–204 assertiveness, 46–47, 203 autonomy, 40, 41, 45, 59n179, 203 competence, 41, 45, 203

255

curiosity, 33, 46–47, 203 deliberateness, 45, 61n211, 203 dependability, 45, 203 dutifulness, 45–46 ego strength, assertiveness, 38, 46–47, 58n164, 203 generosity, 46, 61n212 intrinsic motivation, 28, 39, 45, 203 orderliness, 34, 46, 203 self-concept, 39, 40, 45, 58n174, 203 self-confidence, 28, 39, 45, 46, 203 self-direction, 40, 202 self-efficacy, 39–40, 45–46, 203 self-learning, 39–40, 203 tolerance of ambiguity, 46, 203, 216 See also Five-factor personality model Philosophicall Rudiments concerning Government and Society, see De cive Popular sovereignty, attack on, 157–161, 215 Calvinists, 178–179 Catholic church, 155–156, 178–181 disobedience a sin, 178, 182, 183, 199nn169–170, 199n173, 213 kings not administrators, 175–177, 185, 186, 197n137, 212, 215; right to assemble estates, 175–176, 186, 197n139, 212 kings not subject to laws, 175, 212; not bound by promises, 176, 177; not bound to themselves, 176–177 no absolute property rights, 177, 178 no conflict of obligations, 183, 186 no deposition or tyrannicide, 183–187, 214; impunity of sovereigns, 184, 186, 200nn178–179; kings cannot injure, 183, 200nn178–179

256 

INDEX

Popular sovereignty, attack on (cont.) no divided sovereignty, 170, 177–178; no separate spiritual authority, 178–181, 213 no people without commonwealth, 174, 181, 185 no private covenant with God, 180 obedience to immoral law, 181–183 originality, novelty, 185–187; kings not administrators, 174, 176, 185; kings not subject to laws, 173, 175–176; no absolute property rights, 177–178; no conflict of obligations, 183; no deposition, no tyrannicide, 185–187; no divided sovereignty, 177–179, 181, 186; no people without commonwealth, 174, 185; no private covenant with God, 180, 181 overdetermined theory, 156, 181, 187n2 people as body politic, 173–175, 185–187, 197n129, 212 scriptural history, 179–181, 186, 213 See also Adversarial thinking; Ecclesiastical power subordinate See also under Analogy; Blocking, ruling out; Concept expansion; Conceptual combination; Co-optation; Divergent thinking; Inversion; Relativity Popular sovereignty, theory of, 159–161, 167, 189n24, 212 Althusius, Johannes, 161, 165–166, 174–175, 178 Buchanan and Mariana, 162, 166 conciliarists, 162, 189nn130–133, 190nn134–135 Grotius, Hugo, 166, 167, 175, 184, 192n75, 192n86 medieval civilians, 161, 189nn26–29 monarchomachs, 163–165, 174

“neo-Roman” republicanism, 192n87 neo-scholastics, 163, 174, 178, 180, 191n66 Psychology of creativity, 1–2 and philosophy, 2–5, 11nn6–7, 12n8 Pyrrhonism, 79–80, 101, 102, 207 See also Crystallizing event; Moral relativity R Relativity, 7, 8, 14n39 moral relativity, 101, 103, 155, 207, 210 popular sovereignty, attack on, 182, 184–187, 214 state of nature, 128, 136, 209–211 See also Moral relativity Role models, coaches, supporters, 23, 24, 41, 42, 48, 59nn184–185, 203 Bacon, Francis, 23–25, 41, 43, 47, 202 Great Tew circle, 23, 26 Latimer, Robert, 18, 38, 39, 58nn170–171 Mersenne, Marin, 23, 26–28, 41–42, 202 Newcastle, William Cavendish, earl of, 23, 25–26, 29, 41–43 See also Chillingworth, William; Hobbes, Thomas, Descartes, René Royal Society, 30, 54nn105–106 S Sepconic articulation, 8, 14n37, 207, 217 moral relativity, 102, 116, 117, 125n83, 207, 208

 INDEX 

state of nature, 127–128, 144–146, 146n5, 211 tension, 116, 117 Slavery, see under State of nature State of nature, 127–130, 147n17, 148n24, 209–210 anarchy, 132–133, 138, 141, 144, 210, 211 ancient myths of history, 129, 130, 147n18, 148n20; history as decline, 129, 131, 147n18; history as progress, 128–132, 209–210 anticipation, 142, 143 attenuated state of nature, 127–128, 145–146, 211, 215 civil war, 133, 140, 210 competition, 211 earliest European people, 131, 148n34 equality, 137–140, 144, 210; Descartes, René, 139, 144, 152n94 family, 130–131, 140, 141, 145, 211, 215 feminist interpretation, 140–141, 152nn100–101 hierarchy, 137, 138, 140–141, 144, 151n86, 210 international affairs, 127, 136, 137, 151n71 interpretation of natural law, 133, 134, 137, 150n54, 210 law of nature and nations, 136–137, 139, 151nn80–81 Native Americans, 128, 131–132, 147n9, 210 natural liberty, 128, 135, 137, 209, 210 natural right, 134–137, 143, 144, 209, 210

257

negative description, 128, 130, 144, 210 originality, novelty, 137, 138, 145 pagan origins, 128, 129, 148n20, 209; Cicero, 130–132, 144; Diodorus Siculus, 130, 144; Horace, 130–131, 144; Lucretius, 130–131, 148n31 paradiastolic redescription, 134 passions, 142–144; competition, 142–144, 210; diffidence, fear, 142–144, 211; glory, 142–144, 153n114, 211 patriarchy, 140, 141 Plato, 127, 129, 136, 144 polar opposite of commonwealth, 127, 144, 153n118, 209, 211 pre-lapsarian, post-lapsarian, 128, 146n6, 147n10 reason of state, 136, 151n73 right of self-defense, 135–136, 143, 145, 150n68 right of self-preservation, 135–136, 144, 210 right, subjective, 134, 135, 144, 150nn55–56, 150n58, 150n65, 209–210 right to all things, 134, 150n51, 209 secularity of, 128, 209, 215 slavery, 138–139, 152n97 state, concept of, 128 state of mere nature, 130, 133, 134, 139, 145, 207, 209; Sir Walter Raleigh, 133 state of war, 128, 136, 145, 211; Sir Walter Raleigh, 133 Thucydides, 131, 136, 142, 144, 210, 211; Corcyra, 133, 134, 139, 210

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INDEX

State of nature (cont.) See also Hoekstra, Kinch, equality; Moral relativity, criterion of action; Moral relativity, sovereign as antidote to See also under Conceptual combination; Creativity, transformational; Cross fertilization; Divergent thinking; Inversion; Sepconic articulation Subversive integration, 156, 187n6 See also Co-optation

T Telesio, Bernardino, see under Cognition Thucydides, translation of, 22, 50n35 V Virtuosity, creative, 7, 201, 217–218 W Weisberg, Robert A., 12n20 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 217, 218n3