Taking authorial liberties: Thomas Hobbes on the occasion of Leviathan

ABSTRACT

How did Thomas Hobbes describe the circumstances that, in his view, allowed him to write Leviathan? And come to express there, without apparent constraint (as many horrified contemporaries attested), his views on politics and religion? The answers to these questions lie in Hobbes’s understanding of the opportunity history afforded him to compose his masterpiece. This essay considers Hobbes as a case study in the complex dynamics of early modern authorial assertions and defenses. While Hobbes is an extreme example—few authors have had to withstand the assault Hobbes endured—his defense of Leviathan, which began in Leviathan itself and continued for decades after its publication, is representative of how a number of authors in this period justified their work by carefully framing the circumstances of its composition.

KEYWORDS:

• Thomas Hobbes
• Leviathan
• authorship

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. On the harsh reception of Leviathan see Mintz, The Hunting of Leviathan; Parkin, Taming the Leviathan; and Parkin, “Baiting the Bear.”

2. Hobbes (1996), 491. All quotations of Leviathan are taken from this edition. Hobbes offers this summarizing description of Leviathan in the “Review, and Conclusion” of the 1651 edition.

3. As Tuck (1998) notes in his introduction to De Cive, “if we are interested in Hobbes’s political thought, we will find it at least as clearly set out in De Cive as in Leviathan,” xxxiii.

4. See Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes for an analysis of Hobbes’s shifting attitudes regarding the use of rhetoric in discussions of civil science; Skinner, 334f., points out how Hobbes embraces the use of rhetoric in Leviathan after largely eschewing it in Elements and De Cive. Much of the best recent analysis of Hobbes, inspired by the seminal work of Pocock, “Time, History and Eschatology in the Thought of Thomas Hobbes”; and Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, has focused on rhetoric and religion in Leviathan: Springborg, “Leviathanand the Problem of Ecclesiastical Authority”; Springborg, “Leviathan, the Christian Commonwealth Incorporated”; Springborg, “Hobbes, Heresy, and the Historia Ecclesiastica”; Springborg (1996); Geach, “The Religion of Thomas Hobbes”; Kahn, Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism in the Renaissance; Johnston, The Rhetoric of Leviathan; Schwartz, “Hobbes and the Two Kingdoms of God”; Pacchi, “Hobbes and the Problem of God”; Condren, “On the Rhetorical Foundations of Leviathan”; Farr, “Atomes of Scripture”; Cantalupo, A Literary Leviathan; Prokhovik, Rhetoric and Philosophy in Hobbes’ Leviathan; Tuck, “The Christian Atheism of Thomas Hobbes”; Tuck (1993); Silver, “Hobbes on Rhetoric”; Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes; Skinner, “Thomas Hobbes and the Renaissance studia humanitatis”; Raylor, Philosophy, Rhetoric, and Thomas Hobbes; and Okada, “Hobbes’s Eschatology and Scriptural Interpretation in Leviathan”. On the question of whether the religious views expressed in Leviathan represent Hobbes’s distinctive brand of theism or offer evidence of his atheism, see Curley, “I Durst Not Write So Boldly” and the exchange between Martinich, “Interpreting the Religion of Thomas Hobbes: An Exchange”; and Collins, “Interpreting Thomas Hobbes in Competing Contexts.” Arguments for a theist or atheist Hobbes—most famously set out by Michael Oakeshott and Leo Strauss—are as old as the contemporary “hunting of Leviathan” as Mintz and Parkin make clear.

5. Hobbes, The Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes, vol. I, 37. I draw here on the “Biographical Register” in Noel Malcolm’s outstanding edition of Hobbes’s correspondence as well as his “Summary Biography of Hobbes” in Sorrell, The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes. See, also, the account of Hobbes’s association with Newcastle in Tuck, Hobbes, 11–14, and the description of the Welbeck circle in Martinich, Hobbes, 98–101. Thomas, “The Social Origins of Hobbes’s Political Thought” offers an insightful analysis of Hobbes’s social and intellectual milieu.

6. In the letter cited here, for example, Hobbes goes on to discuss optics, a particular interest of Newcastle’s Hobbes had taken up with great enthusiasm.

7. For these details, see Tuck (1993), 319f., and Hobbes’s letters that describe his situation: Hobbes, The Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes, vol. II, 799–801; 817–20.

8. Newcastle, for example, was kept very much in the dark about Hobbes’s book. When Robert Payne, former chaplain at Welbeck and Hobbes’s friend, learned that Hobbes planned to attack the church in Leviathan, he urged him to show restraint: Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 1572-1651, 324; and Hobbes, The Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes, vol. II, 872–77.

9. To what degree Hobbes miscalculated the reaction to his book is difficult to determine. His intention to dedicate his work to Charles, going so far as to commission a special manuscript copy for him, suggests he thought his book would be, or could be made to seem, acceptable. Malcolm, “A Summary Biography of Hobbes” suggests that Hobbes was well aware of the dangers, as well as potential benefits, of publication, 31–33.

10. Leviathan, 311.

11. Hobbes (1996), 489–90.

12. Hobbes (1996), 491; For Hobbes, the public judge of doctrine, spiritual as well as temporal, can only be the civil authority or appointee of that individual or body. See Hobbes (1839–45), vol. ii, 275, 297.

13. The traditional association of leisure and philosophy is a common theme in Hobbes: see The English Works of Thomas Hobbes, vol. I, 8; vol. VII, 4 (hereafter cited as English Works); Hobbes, Leviathan, 71, 145; and Hobbes, On the Citizen, 7–8.

14. Hobbes (1996), 491.

15. Their debate still receives attention in discussions of free will and determinism: see Chappell, Hobbes and Bramhall on Liberty and Necessity, xxx; and Mintz, The Hunting of Leviathan, chapter 6, for a concise survey of the cultural and historical background.

16. These details are recounted by Tucker, “John Davies of Kidwelly (1627–93), Translator from the French.”

17. Bramhall’s insistence that man is a “political creature” responds to arguments made against Aristotle in De Cive and elsewhere: Hobbes, On the Citizen, 69–71; and English Works, II, 2–3.

18. Hobbes had addressed doubts about the idea of a natural state in Leviathan: “It may peradventure be thought, there was never such a time, nor condition of warre as this; and I believe it was never generally so, over all the world: but there are many places, where they live so now. For the savage people in many places of America, except the government of small Families, the concord whereof dependeth on naturall lust, have no government at all; and live at this day in that brutish manner,” 89. See Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 359f., for a recent discussion of the problem of conceiving of the origins of the state and Clement, “Milton, Thomas Hobbes, and the Political Problem of Chaos” for a discussion on the problem of origins in Hobbes.

19. English Works, V, 183–4.

20. On temporal leagues in Hobbes, see Bobbio, Thomas Hobbes and the Natural Law Tradition, 172–96. Hobbes devotes Chapter XXII of Leviathan, “Of Systemes Subject, Politicall, and Private,” to various kinds of private and public leagues, or “systemes,” in the commonwealth.

21. On the importance of the idea of “masterless men” in Hobbes, see Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints, 15f.

22. Parliament seriously considered, though it never passed, a bill against atheism with a provision for very harsh penalties at several points in the 1660s. See Malcolm, “A Summary Biography of Hobbes,” 35–6, and Tuck, Hobbes, 33–4, and Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 340ff. Rumors that Hobbes might be charged with heresy had been circulating well before 1666 at least according to John Aubrey; see Dick, Aubrey’s Brief Lives, 156.

23. There is a detailed analysis of heresy in the 1668 appendix to the Latin translation of Leviathan: see Wright, “1668 Appendix to Leviathan, translated with an Introduction and Notes,” 323f.

24. An Historical Narration Concerning Heresy was not published in Hobbes’s lifetime, though he offered to make changes to the work in hopes of publication. Written in 1668, Narration circulated in manuscript and even received an elaborate response from Thomas Barlow, a leading historian of the ancient church who had been given a manuscript of Hobbes’s work by the Earl of Anglesey. Champion, “An Historical Narration Concerning Heresie” discusses Narration, Barlow’s response, and the vigorous discussion of heresy during the Restoration. Narration and Behemoth—there is a brief, but pointed, discussion of heresy in the first dialogue of Behemoth as well—were written at this time and both works speak to Hobbes’s concerns. As Champion notes, “Hobbes’s reputation as a heretic was a commonplace in the Restoration” (223), a fact that deeply alarmed him.

25. This accords with the idea of discursive liberty Hobbes describes in Leviathan: “So when we Speak Freely, it is not the liberty of voice, or pronunciation, but of the man, whom no law hath obliged to speak otherwise then he did,” 146.

26. The royalist bishops who tried to have Hobbes investigated for heresy were motivated as much by politics as religion. See Malcolm, “A Summary Biography of Hobbes,” 35f.

27. Hobbes speaks here of the “ordinary subjects” who choose to submit to draw a distinction from others, like soldiers, who owe a greater obligation to the sovereign. See Hobbes, Leviathan, 485. The “Review and Conclusion” was dropped from the 1668 Latin edition of Leviathan prepared by Hobbes which suggests how much he felt the force of the accusations of disloyalty made against him.

28. Wallis had first tangled with Hobbes, not over politics, but mathematics; in 1655, Wallis questioned some of the mathematical claims made in Hobbes’s De corpore (1655). The notable bitterness of that dispute sets the tone for the dispute over Leviathan. See Grant, “Hobbes and Mathematics.”

29. Skinner 403f. Heauton-timorumenos (“Self-tormentor”) is the title of a play by Terence where intrigues are engineered by a wily slave; so, it may be said, both authors make use of scornful rhetoric. Hyde, A Brief View and Survey of the Dangerous and Pernicious Errors to Church and State in Mr. Hobbes’s Book Entitled Leviathan also saw in Leviathan an attempt to find favor in London, calling its conclusion a “sly address to Cromwell,” 317. Hobbes’s arranging to have his book printed in London suggests he had a mind to ease his return to England. On accusations of disloyalty made against Hobbes, see Mintz, 13f, and Malcolm, “A Summary Biography of Hobbes,” 31–2. The passage from the “Review and Conclusion” lies at the heart of the debate over the link between Leviathan and the Engagement Controversy: see Skinner, “Conquest and Consent”; Skinner, “Thomas Hobbes on the Proper Signification of Liberty”; and Burgess, “Contexts for the Writing and Publication of Hobbes’s Leviathan”. Collins, The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes, 214f., discusses Hobbes’s pamphlet war with Wallis in detail and offers a persuasive analysis of Hobbes’s sympathy for Cromwell and the religious concerns of the Independents.

30. English Works, IV, 413.

31. English Works, IV, 420.

32. English Works, IV, 421.

33. English Works, IV, 421.

34. When Hobbes speaks of subjects having a liberty, or consenting, to submit, he alludes to the argument made in Leviathan that forced submissions—torturing or imprisoning subjects until they agree to submit—are illegitimate. For Hobbes, submissions of the kind described here, made in the absence of direct compulsion, are free. Hobbes’s distinction between forced and free submissions is, admittedly, a fine one. See Leviathan, 141–2. Hobbes debated this same issue with Bramhall: see Hobbes and Bramhall on Liberty and Necessity, 78, 82–3. On this section of Considerations, Burgess, in “Contexts,” suggests that Hobbes offers his comments on protection and obedience “tongue-in-cheek” (678), but it is difficult to see why this is so: the tone of this argument in Considerations seems quite serious throughout.

35. English Works, IV, 423–4.

36. In his reply to Wallis, Hobbes ostentatiously embraces a traditional code of honor in a strong affirmation of the aristocratic sympathies described by Thomas, “The Social Origins of Hobbes’s Political Thought.”

37. Hobbes, Behemoth, or the Long Parliament, 107. Hobbes completed Behemoth in 1668 around the same time he wrote Historical Narration Concerning Heresie. Like Narration, Behemoth remained unpublished in his lifetime after Charles II denied Hobbes permission to publish. An unauthorized printing of Behemoth appeared in 1679 with the title, The History of the Civil Wars of England; a posthumous edition with the proper title, Behemoth, or the Long Parliament, appeared in 1682. The unauthorized text circulated widely as Hobbes complained in his correspondence: Hobbes, The Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes, vol. 2, 771–2.

38. Behemoth, 159.

39. Several commentators have argued that Leviathan was, in part, a rhetorically enhanced attempt to reach a wider audience after the muted response to De Cive: see Johnston, The Rhetoric of Leviathan, 66f; for a different view, see Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes, 427–8.

40. Behemoth, 190.

41. As already noted, Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes, 13f., urges us to place Hobbes in the satiric tradition and in the company of writers like Erasmus, More, Rabelais, and Montaigne; many of Hobbes’s contemporaries, like Hyde who clearly perceived Hobbes’s “ludic” temper, as we shall see, would certainly agree.

42. Behemoth, 6-7.

43. Hobbes discusses mistaken notions of tyranny in Chapter XIX, “Of the Several Types of Commonwealth by Institution”; the dangers of republican thought in Chapter XXI of Leviathan, “On the Liberty of Subjects”; and the perils of “Mixed Government,” in Chapter XXXVIII, “Of Punishments and Rewards.” Tuck, Philosophy and Government discusses Hobbes’s criticism of the humanist affection for classical republicanism.

44. Behemoth, 318.

45. In Questions Concerning Liberty, Hobbes had suggested that those who have attacked Leviathan might use “behemoth” as the title of a book: “I desire not that he or they should so misspend their time; but if they must needs will do it, I can give them a fit title for their book, Behemoth against Leviathan” English Works, V, 27. A few years later, it was Hobbes who acted on his suggestion.

46. Springborg, “Hobbes’s Biblical Beasts.”

47. Paradise Lost, VII 471. For an overview of Hobbes’s historicism that focuses on the connections between Leviathan and Behemoth, see Borot, “History in Hobbes’s Thought.” Nelson, The Hebrew Republic, 122–30, offers an incisive reading of the way Hobbes draws on classical and Biblical ideas of history and Cromartie, “Hobbes, History, and Non-Denomination” discusses how Hobbes’s notion of liberty is grounded in ideas of political obligation informed by his reading in historical texts.

48. English Works, IV, 407.

49. English Works, IV, 355. This passage is quoted by Sommerville, Thomas Hobbes, 112. Answer to Bramhall and Narration were published in one volume in 1682. The emphasis on publication is significant: for Hobbes, it was the freedom to make one’s views public that distinguished the time of civil crisis. Ryan (1997) offers an acute analysis of Hobbes’s views on the interest civil authority should take in published and privately held opinions.

50. Hobbes traces the authority of civil sovereigns over the church to Abraham and Moses: see Chapter XL, “Of the Rights of the Kingdome of God, in Abraham, Moses, the High Priests, and Kings of Judah.” In this regard, Leviathan, as Collins, The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes argues, marks the apotheosis of Erastian thought.

51. Tuck, “The Christian Atheism of Thomas Hobbes,” 127–8.

52. Collins, The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes, 32. Collins discusses the “momentous circumstances that moved … Hobbes to publish his distinctive religious doctrines” (36).

53. Johnston, The Rhetoric of Leviathan, 130; for a similar view on the radical nature of Hobbes’s theology, see Sommerville, Thomas Hobbes, 112–3; Tuck, “The Civil Religion of Thomas Hobbes,” 135–8, and his introduction to Leviathan, xlii, and Johnston, “Hobbes’s Mortalism,” 655f. Collins argues that Hobbes’s thinking about religion is “at once neo-pagan and strikingly modern,” 14.

54. Hobbes (1996), 311.

55. A Brief View and Survey of the Dangerous and Pernicious Errors to Church and State in Mr. Hobbes’s Book Entitled Leviathan was written in 1673 and published in 1676. On the relationship between Hobbes and Hyde, see Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes, esp. 244, and Martinich, Hobbes: A Biography.

56. Hobbes (1996), 306–7.

57. Hobbes had expressed concern over the harmful political effects of the fear of divine punishment as early as Elements of Law and in Chapter IV of De Cive, “That the natural law is the divine law.” What is new in Leviathan are the solutions proposed for the alleviation of such fear: mortalism and elimination of eternal suffering for each sinner.

58. Hobbes (1996), 311.

59. “Paradox” here has the sense of something difficult to believe because it is novel or contradicts traditional views. Hobbes uses the word in this sense in his discussion of purgatory in Chapter XLIV: “and then the forgivenesse of sins in the world to come, has no need of a Purgatory. But in both these interpretations, there is so much of paradox, that I trust not to them; but propound them to those that are throughly versed in the Scripture, to inquire if there be no clearer place that contradicts them,” 436. The OED cites Hobbes’s Questions Concerning Liberty for its definition of paradox as “a statement or tenet contrary to received opinion or belief, esp. one that is difficult to believe.”

60. Hobbes (1996), 308; 311.

61. Hobbes (1996), 310–11.

62. Hobbes first expressed this heterodox view in Leviathan; Johnston, “Hobbes’s Mortalism,” 655–60, and Sommerville, Thomas Hobbes discuss the political implications of his mortalism; Strong, “How to Write Scripture,” examines its roots in the protestant tradition. See also Collins, The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes, 31–2, who discusses Hobbes’s mortalism as part of his strategic “uses of Christianity.” Hobbes’s use of Job to support his view on the mortality of the soul was common. See Burns, Christian Mortalism from Tyndale to Milton for an overview of mortalism and Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 123f. on the rise of the mortalism in this period.

63. Hobbes (1996), 432–3.

64. In Chapter XXXVIII, Hobbes cites scripture on the unmarried and nonprocreative life of the elect: “Again, that saying of our Saviour (Mat. 22.30.) that in the Resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the Angels of God in heaven, is a description of an Eternall Life, resembling that which we lost in Adam in the point of Marriage. For seeing Adam, and Eve, if they had not sinned, had lived on Earth Eternally, in their individuall persons; it is manifest, they should not continually have procreated their kind,” 308. Almond, Heaven and Hell in Enlightenment England, 50–1, discusses how unusual Hobbes’s eschatology was in many of its aspects, while Okada, “Hobbes’s Eschatology and Scriptural Interpretation in Leviathan” compares Hobbes’s eschatology to the writings of Richard Overton—a well-known proponent of mortalism—and John Archer. Doubts about eternal punishment were not uncommon in this period: see Hill, The World Turned Upside Down, 177f.

65. In positing the perpetual generation of the reprobate Hobbes retains, in revised form, the idea of an eternal punishment that seems to have scriptural support: “These things considered, the texts that mention Eternall Fire, Eternal Torments, or the Worm That Never Dieth, contradict not the Doctrine of a Second, and Everlasting Death, in the proper and naturall sense of the word Death,” 432.

66. Johnston, “Hobbes’s Mortalism,” 658–9; and Tuck, “The Civil Religion of Thomas Hobbes,” 132.

67. Pocock, “Time, History, and Eschatology,“ 174-5.

68. Hobbes (1996), 314.

69. Johnston, “Hobbes’s Mortalism” concedes that Hobbes’s eschatology has “some decidedly undesirable features,” 659.

70. In his own way, Hyde anticipates the arguments of Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes that we would do well to read Hobbes, in part, as a satirist: “Hobbes can be placed with no less justice in a tradition running from Erasmus and More to Rabelais, Montaigne and other Renaissance satirists who deal with their intellectual adversaries less by arguing with them than by ridiculing their absurdities” (13).

71. Edward Hyde, A Brief View and Survey, 18. Hyde composed his Survey while in exile in France after his political downfall; both the Survey and Leviathan, then, were conceived in exile, an irony that must have struck Hyde and Hobbes, though perhaps in different ways. Hobbes was able to return to England while Hyde died in France never having regained the favor of the monarch. The Survey could certainly be read as an attempt, in part, to make clear his continuing usefulness and loyalty.

72. Hyde, Survey, 199.

73. Hyde’s mention of possible “Disciples” of Hobbes—one thinks of John Davies’s praise of Hobbes’s attacks on religion in the unauthorized printing of Of Liberty and Necessity cited above—points to concerns in this period about what seemed to many a rise in heresy. See Parkin (2009) and Champion, “An Historical Narration Concerning Heresie.”

74. Hyde, Survey, 16.

75. Hyde, Survey, 378.

76. Or nearly so: Hobbes feels the need to make special provision in Leviathan for martyrs—individuals for whom the rule of fear does not seem to apply and who present an unsettling problem for Hobbes. See the section, “Of Martyrs,” in Chapter XLVII of Leviathan, “Of Power Ecclesiastical.”

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Samuel G. Wong

Samuel G. Wong teaches early modern literature, literary theory, and popular literature at the University of Victoria.