Thomas Hobbes and the problem of exemplarity: from the early engagement with historiography to Leviathan

ABSTRACT

This article traces Hobbes’s account of ‘exemplarity’ from his early writings to Leviathan. It argues that, by tracking Hobbes’s changing views on exemplarity, we get a better grasp on how he construed the effective conditions of an enduring peace in 1651. While these conditions are compatible with the formal structure of sovereignty, they remain distinct from it. I start by inserting Hobbes’s early engagement with historiography in the context of the ‘crisis of exemplarity’ of the late Renaissance. Whereas prior engagement with antiquity had relied on a notion of exemplarity as historical particulars embodying general norms to be imitated in a contemporary setting, a dissatisfaction with this model, characteristic of a revived interest in Tacitus, appears in the sixteenth century. Initially adhering to this ‘Tacitean’ scheme of political theory, Hobbes ended up abandoning exemplarity as the foundational model of politics in Elements of Law and De cive. However, Leviathan reintroduced the scheme of exemplarity as a strategy of effective government. This strategy is based on a retrieval of the sovereign’s appearance as a moral exemplum to be imitated by the subjects. Lastly, I suggest that this change stems from the altered conditions of government at the end of the 1640s.

KEYWORDS:

• Thomas Hobbes
• Machiavelli
• Leviathan
• exemplarity
• sovereignty
• historiography

1. Introduction

In this article, I explore Thomas Hobbes’s somewhat neglected account of ‘exemplarity’ as it develops from his early historiographical writings to Leviathan.¹ Specifically, I home in on how Hobbes changed his conception of the ruler’s need to act as a moral exemplum to his subjects in order to shore up their formal obligations and thus the stability of the state. I argue that, by tracing how Hobbes gradually changed his view on such moral exemplarity, we get a better grasp on the way he construed the effective conditions of an enduring state in 1651. While these conditions are surely not incompatible with the formal structure of sovereignty – more or less in place already in Elements of law – they are nevertheless distinct from this structure.²

I start by inserting Hobbes’s early historiographical writings in the context of what some refer to as the ‘crisis of exemplarity’ in late Renaissance humanist culture.³ Whereas the early renaissance had based its engagement with antiquity upon a notion of exemplarity in terms of general, moral ideals to be dislodged from the fabric of history and imitated in a contemporary setting, an increasing dissatisfaction with this model can be traced to the sixteenth century.⁴ Although initially adhering to this, ‘Tacitean’ rather than ‘Ciceronian’, scheme of political theory, critical of universal models of moral virtue, yet still dependent upon the prudential reading of history, Hobbes abandoned the notion of exemplarity as the foundational model of politics in Elements of Law and De cive.

While this picture of Hobbes’s development is perhaps not controversial, it is not the end of the story. In Leviathan, Hobbes thus reintroduced the model of moral exemplarity as part of any successful sovereign’s governmental strategy. In this regard, we can speak of a form of ‘affective government’, not deduced from the formal principles of sovereignty, but crucial to the stability of the state. This strategy derives from a reinvention of the sovereign’s public appearance in terms of moral exemplum that, if widely imitated by the citizens, would render the formal obligations constitutive of sovereignty effective. In other words, if peace is to endure, the sovereign must make himself the embodiment of the virtues expressed by the natural laws in that only the widespread inculcation of these virtues can make political stability lasting. As I argue, Hobbes proceeds from the view that imitation, although it may derive from a variety of reasons, is an inveterate tendency of human nature. While we could wish for people to exclusively adhere to the laws they are formally obligated to uphold, the fact remains that ‘[t]he examples of Princes, to those that see them, are, and ever have been, more potent to govern their actions, than the Lawes themselves’.⁵ Rather than simply neglecting this tendency, Leviathan seeks to co-opt it by exhorting the sovereign to make publicly manifest those virtues that may alone make peace endure. On that account, Hobbes did change his views in 1651. While this change of direction does not mark an entire philosophical volte-face, so I finally argue, it points towards Hobbes’s realization that, due to the altered conditions of government towards the end of the 1640s, peace cannot rely on the formal structures of sovereignty alone.⁶

In the first part of the article, I sketch out the so-called ‘Crisis of Exemplarity’, whereas the second explores how Hobbes’s early literary production fits within this intellectual framework. In the third part, I assess De cive’s rejection of exemplarity as the guiding scheme of political discourse and practice alike, which marks the temporary end of the sovereign ruler as the embodiment of exemplary virtue. In the fourth and final part, I detail how Leviathan returns to model of moral exemplarity and explore how it translates into specific strategies of governance, premised upon affective adherence consequent to the sovereign ruler’s public appearance.⁷ In guise of a conclusion, I briefly discuss the possible reasons as to this change in Leviathan.

1.1. The ‘crisis of exemplarity’

On the ‘traditional’ account of exemplarity, historiography was thought to provide readers with exempla of virtuous behaviour, guaranteeing practical success if imitated correctly in a contemporary setting.⁸ Among the central aims of Classical historiography, then, was the apt rhetorical narration of the actions performed by the figures of the past in order to solicit the imitation of the same in comparable circumstances.⁹ Moreover, renaissance engagement with the sources of antiquity relied upon the idea that imitation of what had once been could be revived in the present, thus guaranteeing the revivification of the virtue that made the ancients worthy of emulation.¹⁰ It is against this backdrop that Italian humanist Giovanni Pontano in the 1460s exhorts the Neapolitan prince Alfonso to imitate the great figures of the past.¹¹ Indeed, not only is this practise meant to make the prince virtuous in his own right, it is meant to render him an exemplum for his subjects to imitate. As Pontano explains:

you must exert yourself so that all you say and do is such that it not only gives you praise and authority but so that even servants and the people are incited to virtue. To which nothing will incite more than the sight of your virtue and your perfect manners.¹²

To this view, a conspicuous political figure such as a prince ought to imitate the rulers of the past in an effort to become personally virtuous as well as to incite his subjects towards the same. This form of ‘moral exemplarity’ thus serves a double pedagogical function: by imitating the ancients, the prince makes publicly manifest those same virtues that subjects ought to imitate.¹³

The practical use of the study of the ancients, then, relied upon the notion that distant examples of virtuous acts could, indeed should, be doubly re-enacted in a contemporary setting. Crucial for our concerns, this double re-enactment of ancient virtue called for two distinct acts of judgments: first by the prince in order to dislodge ancient exempla of virtue from the material provided by historiography, and second by the subject body through which they take their prince as an object of practical imitation.

The fundamental presupposition of this model was the similarity of historical circumstances. Indeed, imitation of ancient models would only guarantee the rectitude of action if the circumstances under which the original acts and character traits described in the works of history were sufficiently similar to present ones.¹⁴ As Jacob Bornitz would state in his De prudentia politica comparanda from 1608 – responding to the claim that antiquity had nothing in common with contemporary Europe and that the reading of history would necessarily prove unsuccessful in guiding present action – circumstances need not be identical, merely similar to warrant imitation of past exempla.¹⁵ If, then, particular examples of virtue were to provide general rules of action, that is, rules that could guide repeated acts of virtuous conduct, history could not be made up entirely of non-repeatable, singular occasions. For exemplarity to work, history had to follow general patterns of similar circumstances.

However, the sheer distance between the ancient world and Europe of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries led to an increasing uneasiness over the practical pertinence of past exempla. If the Renaissance was indeed separated from antiquity by the chasm of the ‘dark ages’, and thus subject to radically different historical circumstances than those of the ancient Greek and Roman world, was it possible to imagine the recurrence of circumstances that would warrant the kind of imitation sketched out above?¹⁶ Timothy Hampton describes this worry as ‘a tension between an idealistic faith in the absolute value of models from the past and a gnawing sensitivity to the contingencies that kept ancient models of excellence rooted in their own culture’.¹⁷ If the virtue embodied in a specific act relied exclusively upon the circumstances to which it originally responded, only the exact repetition of such circumstances could assure the rectitude of imitating that act. To be sure, the exempla of the past would be of no practical value if they were altogether dependent upon the singularity of their initial, historical circumstances. Was this the case, it would be impossible to generalize the exempla provided by history and no practical guidance could be extracted from it, no matter the acuteness of the judgement exercised in its reading.

Machiavelli’s Il Principe can be seen to point to the difficulties involved in the imitative engagement with antiquity upon which the Renaissance had been premised. It thus marks an important point in the historical trajectory of the concept of exemplarity. This line of interpretation is surely not meant to deny the existence either of universal rules or strategies of exemplary imitation in Machiavelli.¹⁸ However, his acute awareness of the radical contingency of historical action, explicitly keyed unto an attempt of making the reading of history truly useful, nevertheless points towards a progressive abandonment of any firm belief in the generalizable, historical exempla of virtuous action entailed by the traditional model.¹⁹

Explicitly exhorting the prince to imitate certain figures of the past if he wants to maintain his ‘state’, Machiavelli proceeds to note the insufficiency of following general rules.²⁰ Indeed, the successful prince is the one who succeeds in always accommodating his behaviour to the ‘properties of the times’ (qualità de’ tempi), and unsuccessful, on the other hand, if he fails to do the same.²¹ Thus, if the times calls for it, and despite what traditional notions of justice might prescribe, the prince should not hesitate to break his promises.²² No general prescriptions, nor any static ideals of virtuous conduct, should overrule what the rightly judged specificity of each practical situation calls for. What such situations calls for, then, is not so much the repetition of past exampla as for an invariably singular act, specifically suited to respond to the equally singular historical circumstances.

While such radical pliability to circumstances seems to constitute the ideal of Il Principe, the fact remains, however, that the traditional norms of virtuous conduct that it attempts to leave behind remain in credence among the subjects that this strategy is intended to govern. For instance, the prince still needs to give off the impression that he, according to traditional norms, is indeed just, although he secretly violates whatever is prescribed by such norms.²³ To counteract the mutability of the times and thus allow for the stability of his power, the prince must, somewhat paradoxically, appear as though he does not change although stability remains contingent upon the effective capacity to respond to the incessantly altering circumstances. That is, the prince must appear to uphold the general prescriptions implied by the traditional account of justice, while incessantly evaluating his practical procedures according to what each singular occasion calls for. Only then will the prince, especially if he is ‘new’, appear to uphold the ‘old order’ and avoid being perceived for what he might just be: a usurper having acquired power through whatever means were deemed useful.²⁴

Consequently, it is from the sheer mutability of historical circumstances that Machiavelli derives an intricate strategy of representative manipulation, that is, a strategy for when the prince should appear in a specific manner so as produce the required, and avoid the unwanted, passions among the subjects he governs.²⁵ To this view, the prince must always appear to be just, pious and religious, although such appearances may have no foundation in reality, a task, then, that derives from the need of catering to the ‘doctrinal outlook’, as it were, of the governed subjects.²⁶ This outlook must be appeased although the times may call for actions that, were they to be perceived for what they actually are, would tend to undermine stability by publicly acting contrary to inveterate, practical norms, premised upon general prescriptions of virtuous behaviour.²⁷ Succeeding in this manner may therefore come at the price of sacrificing universal norms of virtue, yet only by reproducing and inculcating specific practical norms among the subjects may the stability of the state be vouchsafed.²⁸

Important to our present concerns is thus the fact that the success of the prince relies upon two capacities: first, pliability to what historical circumstances demand, which is fundamentally derived from a correct understanding of the procedures that were successfully employed by prior agents and, second, the ability to arouse useful passions in his subjects by appearing to embody traditional ideals of virtuous behaviour. Although Machiavelli raises serious concerns over the traditional scheme of exemplarity and, consequently, devises novel strategies for successful governmental procedures, it is quite evident that he remains committed to the fundamental traits of ‘moral exemplarity’ as sketched out above: not only ought the prince to take his practical cues from the prudential reading of history, he must further, as a direct consequence of his perspicuous political position, attempt to inculcate general patterns of behaviour in his subjects through a public appearance cunningly adjusted to the doctrinal convictions of the same. While divorcing appearance from reality in this latter regard, and thus essentially subverting the traditional scheme of exemplarity, Machiavelli still depends upon its fundamental conceptual structure. As we shall see, it is exactly to such a general conceptual structure that Hobbes’s early literary production belongs.

1.2. Hobbes’s early engagement with historiography

Whether Hobbes was its author or just guided his pupil William Cavendish in its drafting, there can be no question that the essay, A Discourse on the Beginnings of Tacitus, originally published as part of the Horae Subsecivae in 1620, displays an adherence to that complex strain of late Renaissance thought that took its point of departure in a ‘monarchical’ rather than ‘republican’ reading of Tacitus and Machiavelli, according to which both taught princes how to maintain power through the use of the secret arts of government (arcana imperii).²⁹ Thus, the author discusses the expediency of Augustus choosing the ‘Title of Tribune’ rather than ‘the name of King, and Dictator’ and concludes that, since ‘it is impossible to please all men’, ‘a new Prince’ ought ‘to join himself to, and obtain the favor of that part in his State, which is most able to make resistance against him’.³⁰ To do so, it is necessary to cater to the passions and opinions currently in credence within that same ‘part’. This was indeed why Augustus chose a title that was less likely to ‘rub upon the Subjects’ wounds, and bring hatred, and envy, to such as use them’.³¹ Although Augustus effectively held the same powers as a king, he had to present himself as something quite different as a consequence of the particular circumstances that had initially brought him to power. To this view, governing the historically determined affects and opinions of the citizen body through a well-orchestrated scheme of public appearance counts for as much, if not more, than the formal authority vested in the prince.

The historical particularity of the situation that Augustus responded to does not, however, preclude that circumstances sufficiently similar to warrant imitation of his behaviour could one day reappear. Indeed, that such circumstances might likely be reproduced is the supposition upon which A Discourse upon the Beginnings of Tacitus is clearly premised. Its author seeks to extract practical guidance from a reading of history that, while not relying upon the general virtues hailed by Ciceronian humanism, still presupposes a conviction of the utility of historiography. In close parallel with the Machiavellian ‘new prince’, it was thus necessary for Augustus, after having arrived at power at the end of a political revolution, to adapt his behaviour to the doctrinal outlook of the subjects he sought to govern. The scheme of ‘moral exemplarity’, although now adapted to the invariably shifting circumstances of political life which we saw Machiavelli was deeply concerned about, continues to inform the reading of history.

In the preface to the translation of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian Wars, a work that Hobbes unquestionably authored, we find the utility of history affirmed yet again. Hobbes writes that ‘[t]he principal and proper work of history’ is ‘to instruct and enable men, by the knowledge of actions past, to bear themselves prudently in the present and providently towards the future’.³² Moreover, the instruction provided by attentive reading of Thucydides seems to derive directly from the exempla that his work contains. Indeed, Hobbes tells his readers and the dedicatee of his translation, Sir William Cavendish, ‘that notwithstanding the excellent both examples and precepts of heroic virtue you have at home, this book will confer not a little to you institution’.³³ It would seem, then, that Hobbes’s view of the utility of history conforms exactly to a traditional scheme of exemplarity, according to which ‘examples (…) of heroic virtue’ ought to be inculcated especially in ‘noblemen, and such as may come to have the managing of great and weighty actions’.³⁴ Acting as exempla of virtuous conduct to the rest of the citizen body, such persons would seem to function as the conduct for the proliferation of general norms of virtue lifted directly from a reading of the past.

There are, however, clear indications that Hobbes’s translation of Thucydides’ masterpiece falls squarely within the ‘Tacitist’ brand of Renaissance thought outlined above. It should not, then, be considered a return to a traditional, indeed Ciceronian, account of the utility of history and the exempla of virtue it was thought to contain.³⁵ First of all, Hobbes underscores the fact that ‘the narration itself doth secretly instruct the reader’.³⁶ This idea goes hand in hand with the further assertion that Thucydides does not need to insert any commentary, ‘which is the philosopher’s part’, due to the fact that he so vividly narrates the events he treats that he makes the ‘auditor a spectator’.³⁷ Rather than explicitly deriving moral rules form the particular exempla contained within the historical matter he arranges, Thucydides leaves it to his ‘auditor’ to extract the possible lessons contained within. As Hobbes had already hinted at, such a capacity for reading is unlikely to be the property of all and sundry. Rather, only those that ‘may come to have the managing of great and weighty actions’ are likely to ascertain the rules of conduct which Thucydides ‘secretly’ conveys. On this account, political judgment correctly informed by the materials provided by the best historiographers is the exclusively property of a select elite, not a body of knowledge to be distributed equally among the political body.³⁸ Consequent to this ‘epistemic division’, as it were, of the political body, practices of secrecy and cunning orchestration of public appearances would seem to go hand in hand.³⁹

According to Hobbes, then, Thucydides does not so much present his reader with fully fledged moral exempla, manifesting general rules of virtue ready for imitation, as he provides aptly shaped material to aid the formation of a perspicuous judgment. Although Hobbes, quite evidently, remained convinced of the practical utility of the reading of history, his engagement with Thucydides evidences his early adherence to an influential current of late Renaissance thought that was increasingly dissatisfied with the traditional model of exemplarity. Yet in the 1640s even that conviction was to give way to the affirmation that only the formal structures of sovereignty are sufficient to guarantee a political stability that the inculcation of virtue through the mechanisms of moral exemplarity could no longer provide.

1.3. The rejection of exemplarity

To Machiavelli, it was the radical mutability of historical circumstances that made a morally subversive reconstruction of traditional exemplarity necessary. That line of argument seems to be further exacerbated by Hobbes. As he would assert in Elements of Law, ‘[e]xperience concludeth nothing universally’.⁴⁰ While the less-than absolute certainty of inductive reasoning was certainly not a novel idea in 1640, Hobbes would, not least as a function of his overarching metaphysical framework, stress its detrimental consequences for practical reasoning. In 1643, he thus explained that our conjectures fail either when we judge past events to be similar to present events though they are not, fail to observe all that preceded the events in question, when we fail to recall the same, or incorrectly compare what we remember to present circumstances.⁴¹ In each case we take superficial similarity between the past and present to constitute actual similarity or, indeed, identity.⁴² Yet the causal production of every event is essentially singular, and although a full causal account of previous events would ideally yield certain knowledge of the future, we are never in a position to obtain such an account.⁴³ Generalizable patterns provided by past exampla are, if not impossible, exceedingly hard to successfully dislodge from the fabric of history.

Hobbes does, however, allow for successful practical judgement. In Elements of Law, for instance, he affirms that those people ‘shall conjecture best, that have most experience: because they have most signs to conjecture by; which is the reason that old men are more prudent’.⁴⁴ Degrees of prudence are only a possibility because it varies in its capacity for successfully predicting what will happen in the future. Prudence, then, is not impossible, although Hobbes’s constantly stresses its epistemic shortcomings.⁴⁵ Exemplarity, understood merely as a model for private, practical conjectures, is not entirely expelled from Hobbes’s mature political theory, although it, quite clearly, assumes a much less important role than it had held previously.⁴⁶

Worse, however, for a thoroughly Machiavellian scheme of exemplarity – according to which successful government relies upon the prince’s capacity of appeasing his subjects affective and doctrinal outlook through a well-orchestrated public appearance – is Hobbes’s conception of disagreement. Indeed, without the formal structures of sovereignty in place, it is both unavoidable, ubiquitous and deadly.⁴⁷ This is a consequence that flows directly from Hobbes’s construal of the intimate involvement of passion in practical judgement. Indeed, we may say that this construal functions as a ‘subjective’ counterpart to the ‘objective’ problems of a finite intellect trying to ascertain the possibly infinite number of causal factors implied by the production of any singular event. It is thus the invariably singular affective, as well as its derived intellectual, conditions of each individual that precludes any spontaneous agreement to normative, practical judgments.⁴⁸ This is evident already in Elements of Law, according to which we call ‘that which pleaseth (…) GOOD; and that EVIL which displeaseth’ such that ‘while every man differeth from other in constitution, they differ also one from another concerning the common distinction of good and evil’.⁴⁹ On Hobbes’s account, therefore, it is not least the radical impossibility of a natural agreement concerning all vital, practical questions that necessitates the erection of a ‘sovereign arbiter’.⁵⁰ Whereas ‘political animals’ desire the same object on account of their ‘natural appetite’, humans not only seeks pre-eminence over others, they further disagree fundamentally over what is to be called ‘good’, what ‘bad’.⁵¹

What this means is that no uniform affective-doctrinal outlook can be presumed on the part of the subjects as long as they remain in the ‘state of nature’, that is, as long as no widely recognized sovereign is in place.⁵² On this account, successful government derived from cunning manipulation of an informal, doctrinal homogeneity is an impossibility due to the simple fact that no such thing can be presumed to exist.⁵³ People invariably disagree in their evaluation of the acts and doctrines of others, rendering any uniformity in the judgment of a ruler’s virtues and general behaviour impossible.⁵⁴ Certainly, no widespread imitation of a prince whose acts are evaluated according to widely divergent personal preferences ought to be assumed as a principle for political stability. It is impossible, then, to base an entire governmental strategy upon such doctrinal uniformity that functioned as the necessarily presupposed object of manipulation for the Machiavellian account of ‘moral exemplarity’. Even adjusted to the recognition of the particularity of all historical situations, exemplarity as a practical as well as theoretical model of politics fails to provide the stability it was intended to produce.

Hobbes’s solution to this problem consists neither in an amelioration of the historiographical practice from which prudential advice is to be drawn, nor in a more pliable accommodation to historical circumstances – should it be possible. On the contrary, it consists in a rejection of the very terms in which the problem was initially framed. Rather than devising a novel scheme for the manipulation of the passions and opinions assumed to be widely shared by the subjects to be ruled, Hobbes simply refuses that stable politics should rely upon such an inherently volatile foundation. The philosophical reasons discovered at the root of the ideological fragmentation of the political communities evidenced all across a war-torn Europe, forced Hobbes to reject a conception of politics based on any presupposed coherence in the affective and intellectual outlook of the body politic.⁵⁵

Essentially, Hobbes’s solution consists in the unequivocal rejection of private judgement as a legitimate source of political evaluation. As De cive explains, the root of all prior, and equally mistaken, views on the right principles of government consists in the notion that ‘the knowledge of good and evil pertain to the individual [citizens]’.⁵⁶ If it pertains to each individual to judge of the right- or wrongness of the sovereign’s actions, we can be assured that there will be almost as many judgements as there are citizens.⁵⁷ Consequently, political stability cannot be a function of the de facto capacity of the ruler to manipulate the doctrinal and affective outlook of the citizen body. Precluded, then, are the governmental procedures of a Machiavellian strategy of a revised moral exemplarity for the simple reason that it amounts to the implicit acceptance of the primacy of private judgment. Appearing however he may, the fact remains that the effectiveness of the ruler’s public appearance remains entirely contingent upon each subject’s private judgement and, crucially, whether or not these judgments actually conform to each other. In fact, in so far as any form of ‘exemplary rule’, Machiavellian or otherwise, relies upon widespread coherence of doctrinal outlook, such a strategy effectively amounts to the acceptance of private judgment as the ultimate source of political legitimacy – exactly what Hobbes seeks to avoid. On this account, even the reliance upon the awe-inspiring power of the sovereign would in effect render private opinion the ultimate source of political stability.⁵⁸ If peace is to be had, the very presupposition of such a strategy, that is, the acceptance of private judgement as the adjudicator of sovereign action, must be firmly rejected. Indeed, so I have argued, such a rejection is exactly what we find in both Elements of Law and De cive.

But as we shortly see, this is not the final word on Hobbes’s part. Rather dramatically, Leviathan reintroduces a strategy of exemplarity as a means of effectively, if not formally, guaranteeing the stability of the commonwealth.⁵⁹

1.4. Exemplarity in Leviathan

In 1651 Hobbes continues to stress the principled insufficiency of practical reasoning based on past examples. He explicitly denies that ‘examples of former times’ should be a good reason to do the like again.⁶⁰ Indeed, ‘through the difficulty of observing all circumstances’ surrounding an example of the past, the conjecture that seeks to assess what will happen in the future is ‘very fallacious’.⁶¹ The misgivings of this form of reasoning is perhaps best exemplified by the figure of ‘the Fool’, basing his behaviour entirely on what simply happened to be the case but not on ‘any thing’ that ‘can be foreseen, and reckoned on’.⁶² To be sure, historical precedent, on Leviathan’s account, can never be an absolute guarantee of success. Moreover, Hobbes continued to hold the primacy of private judgment to be one, if not the, main source of political stability – no doubt due to the sort of argument already present in Elements of Law and De cive.⁶³

However, Hobbes also stresses that people, as a matter of fact, tend to heed the lessons of examples rather than laws. Indeed, ‘[t]the examples of Princes, to those that see them, are, and ever have been, more potent to govern their actions, than the Lawes themselves’.⁶⁴ Hobbes further stresses that without the supernatural intervention of God, things are unlikely to change:

Though it be our duty to do, not what they [Princes] do, but what they say; yet will that duty never be performed, till it please God to give men an extraordinary, and supernaturall grace to follow that Precept.⁶⁵

In virtue of our prior obligation to take the words, not the visible acts, of our ruler as the guidelines for our actions, we ought to disregard the sensual appearance of the sovereign as ‘argument’ for any particular sort of behaviour.⁶⁶ Yet despite the formally binding nature of our obligations, we still tend to take the acts of our ruler as guide for our actions. On this account, the fundamental imitative function upon which moral exemplarity had always relied, that is, the passionate emulation on the part of the subjects of what the prince publicly does, continues in operation even after the erection of the sovereign. We can safely assume that this form of imitation derives from an entirely passionate construal of what is sanctioned by the public acts of our ruler exactly because what the rational terms of the contract binds us to heed are the words of the sovereign.

The fact that such essentially private assessments of what is sanctioned by the acts of the ruler, that is, by what has not been publicly declared as general laws, continues to hold its sway over the ruled forces Hobbes to affirm that the sovereign must maintain ‘the safety of the people’ through ‘publique Instruction, both of Doctrine, and Example’.⁶⁷ Not only should the subjects be instructed through explicit doctrines, supposedly inculcated through the universities, they should further be ‘instructed’ through the public display of the sovereign’s acts, that is, through the example of the sovereign.⁶⁸ Those examples, because they correspond to the doctrines to be promulgated throughout the commonwealth, would consist in the public showing of those natural laws upon which the public peace depends. Indeed, the natural law, understood as the ‘moral law’, consists ‘in the Morall Vertues, as Justice, Equity, and all habits in the mind that conduce to Peace’.⁶⁹ Leviathan, then, retrieves a strategy of moral exemplarity in an attempt to effectively inculcate those virtues that alone may maintain the public peace. Doing so, Hobbes implicitly acknowledges that the continued private assessment of what is sanctioned by the acts of the ruler, despite its formal illegitimacy, is a fact that simply cannot be disregarded.

Part of this strategy consists in teaching that the members of the commonwealth ‘ought not to be led with admiration of the virtue of any of their fellow Subjects, how high soever he stand, nor how conspicuously soever he shine in the Common-wealth’.⁷⁰ Yet to hinder subjects to be ‘led with admiration’ can hardly be a simple matter of intellectual instruction.⁷¹ While we may understand the principle that admiration ought not be an ground for obeying anyone, and, in the best of cases, change our behaviour as a direct consequence of such understanding, the fact remains that admiration, once it occurs, will tend to produce a specific sort of act. Consequently, it seems as if subjects will only be hindered in being ‘led with admiration of the virtue of any of their fellow Subjects’ by being ‘led with admiration’ of the sovereign’s virtue. The sovereign must thus make manifest an exceedingly virtuous behaviour, not simply avoid the worst transgressions of the moral law.

Moreover, a sovereign that allows his people ‘by the flattery of Popular men, to be seduced from their loyalty (…) cannot be imagined to love his People as he ought’.⁷² The sovereign, to ‘be imagined to love his People as he ought’, must not only make sure that ‘Popular men’ are not shown ‘obedience, or honour, appropriate to the Soveraign onely’, but, moreover, that people are convinced of his love for them. To be convinced of the love of another, would seem to derive from the continued as well as evident attempt at procuring what another desires, in that Hobbes claims that what ‘taketh away the reputation of Love, is the being detected of private ends’.⁷³ To obtain such love, the sovereign must consistently seek to procure the good of the people, not whatever he personally desires. Crucially, this attempt must be made visible through public, exemplary acts. For the sovereign to counter the inveterate tendency of people to obey whom they admire or think works for their benefit, he must act so as to appear a shining moral example.

Among such acts are those of justice.⁷⁴ Indeed, ‘to cause Justice to be taught, which (…) is as much as to say, to cause men to be taught not to deprive their Neighbours, by violence, or fraud, of any thing which by the Soveraign Authority is theirs’, the sovereign ought to abstain from such acts.⁷⁵ And as ‘the People are to be taught, to abstain from violence to one anothers person, by private revenges; from violation of conjugall honour; and from forcible rapine’, if such instruction is to take effect, the sovereign must refrain from doing the same. Just as the sovereign must show a continued endeavour to procure the good of his people, so he must conform to those prescriptions of justice that are to hold good among subjects if peace is to be had. Neither, then, can effectual sovereignty be a consequence of a formal framework of rights and duties, nor can it be the de facto consequence of a ruler’s awe-inspiring power. To the contrary, the sovereign must act as a shining beam of moral virtue in order to inculcate those character traits upon which an enduring peace relies.

The central mechanisms that moral exemplarity must rely upon to take effect would seem to be that of ‘honour’.⁷⁶ In fact, Hobbes is explicit on this point: ‘To imitate, is to Honour; for it is vehemently to approve’.⁷⁷ Crucial in this regard is the fact that ‘the Honour of the Soveraign, ought to be greater, than that of any, or all the Subjects. For in the Soveraignty is the fountain of Honour’.⁷⁸ We ought thus to imitate the sovereign on account of the honour we owe him. For the sovereign to maintain the peace, then, he should simply act according to the natural laws in that imitation of the virtues embodied by these laws would ensue on account of the supreme honour he is owed.

It is one thing, however, what we ought to do and quite another what we actually do. Yet even on this count, we can see how honour may serve to shore up the mechanism of exemplarity. For we bestow honour upon others when we have the ‘inward thought, and opinion’ of their power ‘with a purpose to make benefit by it’.⁷⁹ On this account, it is in view of what we may hope to obtain that we publicly honour others, including the sovereign, and not because it is our duty to do so. When we honour the sovereign, more often than not, we do so with a view of something we desire. The sovereign can in turn ‘repay’ such acts of honour by the granting of ‘Magistracy, Offices, Titles; and in some places Coats, and Scuthions painted’, which is also a way of honouring.⁸⁰ The imitation consequent to ‘vehement approval’ may thus be the product of a desire after power, the effect of actual ‘love’ or ‘admiration’ or derive from our formal obligation of honouring our sovereign.⁸¹ Either way, the sovereign can effectively inculcate virtuous behaviour through his own example due to the fact that, for whatever reason, we will tend to honour him through imitation.

However, the long-term feasibility of moral exemplarity as a strategy of government would seem to be restricted by several aspects of Hobbes’s own thought. First, if we tend to see our sovereign, not as someone to be unconditionally obeyed, but rather as someone we may ‘honour’ in order to obtain what we want, we might only be a small step away from considering him a competitor for power, not our unquestionable superior. As Julie Cooper has shown, ‘distinctions designed to promote peace’ can end up rendering it near impossible.⁸² In this regard, ‘emulation’, seemingly close to ‘imitation’, which, by the way, is never defined by Hobbes, is altogether incapable of promoting peace in that it is defined as ‘Griefe, for the successe of a Competitor in wealth, honour, or other good’ and is ‘joyned with Endeavour to enforce our own abilities to equall or exceed him’.⁸³ Hobbes’s conception of emulation, then, is keyed onto the deadly pursuit after power, not an attempt a imitating the virtuous conduct we see in others. Somehow or other, the sovereign must attempt the seemingly impossible balancing act of transcending the power struggles of ordinary subjects while still acting as an object of practical imitation. Second, and worse still, by making peace reliant upon what amounts to the personal assessment of our rightful ruler’s behaviour, Hobbes seems to grant private judgment the role of ultimate, political adjudicator in spite of his express statements to the contrary. If how we act is effectively determined by how we view the sovereign’s behaviour, we, and not he, determines what is done within the commonwealth.

Yet despite these conceptual difficulties, it seems that Hobbes gradually came to realize that the sheer inveteracy of private judgment and the passionate pursuit of desires was a force that had to be reckoned with, not simply relegated to disciplines at best found at the periphery of his ‘civil science’. In guise of a conclusion, I will briefly point to the political development that may have caused this realization on Hobbes’s part.

2. Conclusion

By the time Leviathan appeared in 1651, much had changed in Hobbes’s native country since he had left. Of the crucial developments in the 1640s was the exacerbated struggle to win public favour as well as the change in the means to do it. This struggle was conditioned by the progressive constitution of something akin to a ‘public sphere’ around the turn of the sixteenth century.⁸⁴ An explosion of pamphlets, political tracts and newsbooks thus involved hitherto unprecedented numbers in an early form of ‘political debate’, subjecting acts of government to the judgment of the wider population. Through these means, public opinion, although to the dismay of almost everybody, effectively came to assume the role of supreme arbiter in political matters. An integral part of this struggle for public support was the attempt to project a favourable image of oneself onto this fleeting, yet increasingly important, public opinion. Indeed, Charles I reluctantly agreed to publish his parliamentary responses in order ‘that we may appear to the world in the truth and sincerity of our actions, and not in those colours in which we know some turbulent and ill-affected spirits (…) would represent us to the public view’.⁸⁵ Although political legitimacy might be asserted in the face of this fleeting ‘public view’, doing so implicitly argued that the public, not those who asserted their legitimacy, had the final say in political affairs.

Crucially, it seems as if this dynamic was given increased impetus in period after Hobbes had written De cive and to which his added preface of 1646 seems to constitute a partial response.⁸⁶ Moreover, Leviathan testifies to Hobbes’s acute awareness of these altered conditions of politics when it speaks of ‘Popular Men’ and stresses that some of them have vied for public support by proclaiming ‘Marriage’ to the people ‘in facie Ecclesiae by Preachers; and by publishing the same in the open streets’.⁸⁷ On this account, the popularity of ambitious subjects, increasingly seen by Hobbes to constitute the central threat to an enduring peace, relied entirely upon their, from now on, public attempts to secure the allegiance of those who could further their cause. No longer confined to the workings of secret ‘cabals’, the challenge represented by dissatisfied ‘potent subjects’ spilled out into ‘the open streets’.⁸⁸

The emergence of a public struggle for support may thus help explain the increased awareness of Leviathan to the conditions of effective rule as well as the sovereign ruler’s revived need to project a specific image of himself unto the ‘public opinion’. To Hobbes’s view, this was to be achieved through the display of ‘exemplary virtue’. Although his continued condemnation of private judgment makes evident that the retrieval of ‘moral exemplarity’ was simply a pis aller, conceptually ill-fitted to the rest of his theoretical construct, it is equally evident that Hobbes saw no way around it. To maintain the effective allegiance of his subjects, the sovereign needed to act in exemplary ways that not only testified to his respect for the justice he ultimately conditioned, but also to his continued endeavour to procure the good of his people. Since only the widespread inculcation of the virtues of the ‘Morall law’ may guarantee an enduring peace, the sovereign must manifest such qualities even at the price of admitting that ultimate political arbitration rests not, in fact, with him but with the subjects that ought to unconditionally obey him.

Consequently, the conceptual developments of Leviathan, keyed unto an increased awareness of the sovereign’s desperate need to appeal to ‘public opinion’, gives us a picture of Hobbes’s late political thought more in terms of practical strategies than formal rights and duties.⁸⁹ On this account, the sovereign is not so much someone whose over-whelming power is to be feared as a moral exemplum to be imitated. We find, in other words, a version of Hobbesian sovereignty much less terrifying than has traditionally been assumed. It should not be forgotten, however, that this version of sovereignty might be the result primarily of exterior circumstances rather than purely doctrinal needs. The fact that Hobbesian exemplarity squares poorly with the formal structure of sovereignty should not, then, come as a major surprise.

Acknowledgements

A (very) early version of the article was presented at the International Hobbes Association Meeting, held online on January 8–9, 2021. I thank all participants for their comments.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

I wish to thank the Carlsberg Foundation [grant number CF22-0666] and Linacre College (Oxford) for the generous support making the final edition of this article possible as well as this journal’s anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback.

Notes

1 Ewin, Boonin-Vail and Berkowitz all provide important elements to the study of exemplarity by emphasizing the role of virtue in Hobbes’s thought but fail to relate the concept of virtue to exemplarity. See Boonin-Vail, Thomas Hobbes, 145–60; Ewin, Virtues and Rights, 113–32; Berkowitz, Virtues, 35–73. Zarka considers the figure of the ‘hero’ but does not deal with the notion of ‘exemplarity’. See Zarka, Hobbes et la pensée, 27–44. Éric Marquer, on the other hand, has some illuminating remarks on exemplarity in Hobbes’s works, although without any sustained treatment of the topic. See Marquer, Léviathan et la loi, 238–74, 354–5. See also Kahn, ‘Hobbes, Romance’. Here, Kahn details Hobbes’s account of ‘mimetic desire’ and the political dangers it involves, yet without mentioning ‘exemplarity’. See also the valuable work of Hoye who takes seriously the sovereign as a moral figure. Whereas Hoye mentions ‘exemplary virtue’ and discusses what he calls ‘exceptional figures’, he does not explore the nature of this exemplary function in any detail. See Hoye ‘Natural Justice’, 182–93; Hoye, ‘Obligation and Sovereign Virtue’, 23–47. Although Roman and especially Senellart provide valuable contributions to the history of exemplarity, neither provide a sustained engagement with Hobbes’s role in this history. See Senellart, Les arts, 215–30; Roman, Nous, Machiavel, 105–8.

2 See Hobbes, Elements, 172. Of course, some things did change in Leviathan’s account of sovereignty, most notably Hobbes’s introduction of the concept of ‘representation’. See Skinner, From Humanism, 190–221; Zarka, La décision, 325–56; Jaume, Hobbes et l’État, 84–124. Although I address the effective conditions of a stable state, I do not discuss Hobbes’s view on ‘de facto power’. See Hoekstra, ‘The de facto Turn’; Baumgold, ‘When Hobbes’.

3 See Rigolot, ‘The Renaissance Crisis’, 557–63; Stierle, ‘Three Moments’, 581–95; Hampton, Writing from History, 298; Gaylard, Hollow Men, 31–5. See also the brief remarks in Foucault, Sécurité, 279 and Marin, Le portrait, 101–3. Of course, ‘exemplary history’ did not suddenly disappear but remained a prevalent form of political discourse all through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. See Guion, Du bon usage, 99–146. Justus Lipsius and Scipione Ammirato thus stressed the usefulness of Tacitus, although both showed a marked awareness of the highly specific, historical contingencies that conditioned the practical value of the Roman historian: only in times of tyrants, as Guicciardini had already hinted, were the Annales and the Historiae truly useful. See Lipsius, Cornelii, Epistola dedicatoria; Ammirato, Discorsi, Il proemio; Guicciardini, Ricordi, 18, 28. Note, however, that the meaning of Tacitus’s exemplary lessons was widely discussed, and it was sometimes questioned whether his works had any practical value at all. On this latter point, Degory Wheare in 1623 noted that two camps had formed, exemplified by Justus Lipsius and Isaac Casaubon. See Wheare, The method, 108; Bradford, ‘Stuart Absolutism’. Whereas Giuseppe Toffanin in 1921 spoke of ‘red’ and ‘black’ Tacitists – ‘republicans’ and ‘monarchists’ respectively – some authors claimed that Tacitus primarily provided guidance for courtiers. See Toffanin, Machiavelli; Ducci, Arte, 27; Cavriana, Discorsi, 6. See also Snyder, Dissimulation, 90–8. For the complex issues involved in the ‘republican’ readings of Tacitus, see Soll, Publishing. For the eclipse of the idea of history as magistra vitae, see Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft, 38–66; Hartog, Régimes, 116–17. For explicit criticism of exemplarity, see Guicciardini, Ricordi, 110, 136; Storia, 84; de Rohan, De l’interêt, 159; Montaigne, Essais, 410. See also Kahn, Rhetoric, 135; Lyons, Exemplum, 149–53.

4 See Tuck, Philosophy and government, 31–64. For the reception of Tacitus in the sixteenth century, see Schellhase, Tacitus; Senellart, Machiavélisme, 57–84; Momigliano, The Classical Foundation, 109–31. This reception is intimately linked with the rise of the so-called ‘reason of state’ literature as well as the multiform reception of Machiavelli’s works. See Burke, ‘Tacitism’; Cateeuw, Censures; Borelli, Ragion di stato. For the English reception of Tacitus, and as relates to Hobbes, see Raylor, Philosophy, 36; Peltonen, Classical Humanism, 124–35.

5 Hobbes, Leviathan, 476.

6 The account of Hobbes’s development as a marked change of orientation, especially as concerns the relation between rhetoric and philosophy, was proposed by Quentin Skinner. See Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric. Leo Strauss had already proposed an interpretation in terms of a radical shift in Hobbes’s thinking. See Strauss, The Development. See also Lupoli, Nei limiti, 25–52; Evrigenis, Images, 5–12.

7 For the frontispiece of Leviathan, related to Hobbes’s increasing attention to the pictural representation of the sovereign, see Bredekamp, Thomas Hobbes; Malcolm, Aspects, 200–28. For Hobbes on pictural representation, see Brito Vieira, The Elements, 15–74.

8 Polybe, Histoires, 18; Titus Livius, Ab urbe condita, 3. See also Chaplin, Livy’s Exemplary History.

9 The relation between rhetoric and exempla was already established by Aristotle in Ars rhetorica, 1356b5.

10 See Petrarca, De viris illustribus, 4 as well as Ianziti, Writing History and Cochrane, Historians. See also Sir Philip Sidney’s remarks on the aim of imitation and its propagation through reading in Sidney, The Defence, 9.

11 Pontanto, ‘De principe’, 1023.

12 Ibid., 1045–46: ‘praebetque sese spectandam omnibus, studendum est ut dicta factaque tua omnia eiusmodi sint, quae non modo laudem tibi atque auctoriatem pariant, sed et familiares et populares ipsos ad virtutem excitent. Ad quam nulla eos res magis excitabit, quam spectata ipsis virtus tua et mores quam probatissimi’. See Gaylard, ‘Re-Envisioning the Ancients’, 245–65. See also Skinner, Vision of Politics, 39–117; Hankins, Virtue Politics, 510.

13 ‘Moral exemplarity’ is distinct from both ‘intra-statal’ imitation as well as imitation of actions restricted to rulers. For Hobbes’s criticism of ‘intra-statal’ imitation, see Hobbes, Leviathan, 506. Of course, Machiavelli explicitly encouraged this form of imitation in his Discorsi, a form of imitation that continued to be in vogue long after Hobbes. See Machiavelli, Opere, 507; Harrington, Commonwealth, 99. See Ménissier, Machiavel, 87–126 for Machiavelli’s notion of imitation and Rahe, Against, 323–6 for Harrington’s relation to antiquity. Similarly, when Hobbes suggests imitation of biblical figures, these cases falls short of ‘moral exemplarity’ in that this imitation is strictly reserved for rulers. See Hobbes, Leviathan, 678–80; De cive, 242–4.

14 See Couzinet, Sub specie, 143–55. Of course, virtuous conduct had always been considered relative to time and circumstances. See Cicero, De officiis, 32, 146–8; Aristotle, Ethica, 115b7.

15 Bornitz, De prudentia, f. D10^v. See also Scattola, Dalla virtù, 135–9.

16 See Muhlack, Ausgewählte, 124–41.

17 Hampton, Writing from History, 298. See also Ullyot, The Rhetoric, 1–2; Grafton, What was History?, 227–8.

18 Examples are legion, but see Machiavelli, Opere, 307–8, 507.

19 Pocock warns against overstating the conceptual differences seemingly implied by Guicciardini’s harsh criticism of Machiavelli’s belief in the practical value of ancient exempla. See Pocock, Machiavellian, 268–9.

20 See Machiavelli, Opere, 806, 820, 876. See also Machiavelli, Opere, for his ‘theory’ of the difficulties involved in imitating the extraordinary ‘virtù’ of what, following the judgement of Eugene Garver, simply cannot be imitated ‘because there is nothing there to imitate’. See Garver, Machiavelli, 119. As is widely noted, ‘stato’ for Machiavelli means the rule of a specific prince, not the abstract entity with which that word and its derivations were eventually to be associated. For the heavily debated meaning of this expression that shall not concern us here, see Viroli, From politics, 126–54; Skinner, From Humanism, 341–5; Gilbert, Machiavelli, 177–8.

21 Machiavelli, Opere, 898.

22 Ibid., 868–9.

23 See Garver, ‘After Virtù’, 195–223. For the view that Machaivelli is neither to be seen as an ‘a-moral’ writer, nor as a clean break with the preceding tradition, see Skinner, Foundations, 128–38; Le Mauff, Généalogie, 396–7.

24 Machiavelli recognized that maintaining a state was particularly difficult for a new prince: arriving at the end of political turmoil, proving the possibility of contesting the powers in place, a new prince must exert himself to appear as the legitimate ruler, that is as an ‘old ruler’. See Machiavelli, Opere, 807.

25 Machiavelli, Opere, 864–7. For the capacity of virtue to secure adherence, see Cicero, De officiis, 184.

26 Machiavelli, Opere, 860, 869. This does not imply that the governmental strategies that Machiavelli proposes are nothing but ‘politics of appearance’. Indeed, the prince must sometimes display a cruelty that cannot be hidden beneath an appearance of moral virtue. See Machiavelli, Opere, 828; Sfez, Machiavel, 270–9; Landi, Le regard, 175–97.

27 For the difficulty of exercising the demanded level of adaptability, see Machiavelli, Opere, 899.

28 By allowing for different sets of norms according to whether you are a prince or subject, Machiavelli seems to consummate a development that had already begun with Thomas Aquinas’s distinction between ‘prudentia regnative’ and ‘political’ prudence. Thomas Aquinas, ST, II, IIae, q. 47, a. 12; q. 50, a. 2. See also Senellart, Les arts, 176–9, 221–2. For Machiavellis’ conception of ‘prudence’ and its relation to the preceding tradition, see Lazzeri, ‘Prudence’, 79–128. For the distinction between a ‘royal justice’ and the justice among subjects, see also Botero, Della Ragion, 30–5. In Behemoth, Hobbes also distinguishes between ‘the Ethicks of subiects and the Ethicks of Soueraignes’. See Hobbes, Behemoth, 165. Yet the ‘Vertues of Soueraignes are such as tend to the maintenance of peace at home’, which, following the argument from Leviathan’s chapter 15th, precludes the general neglect of promises made. On that account, the temptation to assimilate Hobbes’s political thought with the ‘ragion di stato’-literature should be avoided. Pace Wooton, ‘Thomas Hobbes’s’. See also Foisneau, ‘Sovereignty’; Parkin, ‘Thomas Hobbes’.

29 At least after Giovanni Botero, it was common to associate Tacitus and Machiavelli. See Botero, Della Ragion, 3; Schellhase, Tacitus, 127; Baron, Crisis, 58–61. For the authorship of the essay, see Coli, Hobbes, 9–26; Malcolm, Reason of State, 110–12; Raylor, Philosophy, 56. For the concept of arcana imperii, see Donaldson, Machiavelli.

30 Hobbes, A Discourse, 44.

31 Ibid., 43. See also Botero, Della Ragion, 23. Yet as Sarah Mortimer notes, while Botero repudiates Machiavelli’s reliance on appearances, he recognized that ‘it was appearances that shaped people’s opinions, and it was those opinions which were largely responsible for the prince’s success or failure’. See Mortimer, Reformation, 191.

32 Hobbes, The Peloponnesian, xxi. Knowledge of the past had always been a fundamental presupposition for the concept of ‘prudence’. See Aristotle, Ethica, 1143b11–14. For the difference between the historiographical models employed in the foreword to Thucydides and the Discourse, see Dubos, Thomas Hobbes, 58–84. Dubos compares Hobbes’s early historiographical practice with the different genres listed in Bacon’s Advancement of Learning. Indeed, Bacon affirms that such a ‘scattered history of those actions which they have thought worthy of memory, with politic discourse and observation thereupon; not incorporate into the history, but separately (…) which kind of Ruminated History I think more fit to place amongst books of policy (…) than amongst books of history’. See Bacon, Major Works, 183. That paradigm, then, would seem to fit the Discourses upon the Beginnings of Tacitus rather than the preface to Thucydides where Hobbes affirms that the superiority of Thucydides is due to the fact that he ‘is one, who, though he never digress to read a lecture, moral or political, upon his own text’. See Hobbes, The Peloponnesian, xxii, 577.

33 Hobbes, The Peloponnesian, xx.

34 Ibid., xx.

35 For the reception of Thucydides in the Early Modern period, see Hoekstra, ‘Thucydides’.

36 Hobbes, The Peloponnesian, 577.

37 Ibid., xxii. See also Hoekstra, ‘Politic History’, 131; Rossini, ‘The criticism’, 306.

38 The Hobbes of the late 1620’s would then seem to belong to what Giuseppe Toffanin once called ‘black Tacitism’, that is, a strand political writers committed to rule by one or few and convinced of the dangers of widely promulgating knowledge of the practices of government. See Toffanin, Machiavelli. For Hobbes’s relation to the ‘politiques’, such as the Earl of Newcastle, closely related to this strand of political practice, see Collins, The Allegiance; Jackson, Hobbes.

39 Indeed, this concern with ‘secrecy’ goes hand in hand with the Tacitists’ (and Machiavellians’) preoccupation with ‘secrets of government” (arcana imperii). Indeed, Hobbes affirms that Thucydides is the ‘most politic historiographer that ever writ’. See Hobbes, Peloponnesian, xxii. As Malcolm stresses, ‘the notion of ‘policy’ often had slightly Machiavellian overtones’. See Malcolm, Reason of State, 113. Moreover, Hobbes’s seeming endorsement of Thucydides’s criticism of democracy points in the same direction. Indeed, ‘he that gave’ the Athenian people ‘temperate and discreet advice, was thought a coward’ and his counsels consequently not heeded. Hobbes, Peloponnesian, 572. Better, then, to keep the discussion of truly profitable acts out of sight of the public.

40 Hobbes, Elements, 33.

41 Hobbes, Critique, 355. For the impossibility of observing all circumstances responsible for the production of any specific effect, a direct consequence of Hobbes’s account of the ‘total cause’ (tota causa), see Hobbes, De corpore, 96; Hobbes, Critique, 316–17; Hobbes, EW V, 302; Hobbes, EW IV, 246–7; Pécharman, ‘Philosophie première’, 47–66; Foisneau, Hobbes et la toute-puissance, 110–28.

42 See Hobbes, Critique, 353.

43 As Hobbes would affirm in his Historia ecclesiastica, we can never the know the past with sufficient detail to warrant an absolutely certain judgment of what will happen in the future. See Hobbes, Historia, 338. See also Hobbes, Leviathan, 42, 1052.

44 Hobbes, Element, 33; Hobbes, Leviathan, 42. For Hobbes’s account of prudence see Abizadeh, Two faces, 97–118; Hance, ‘Prudence and providence’; Hanson, ‘Science’.

45 See also Hobbes, Leviathan, 458.

46 Hobbes’s rejection of history as civil science is well noted. See Hobbes, Leviathan, 124; Lessay, Souverainté, 49–52; Borot, ‘Science’, 125–6. But note that Hobbes later returned to historiography, most notably with Behemoth. See also Tuck, ‘Hobbes and Tacitus’; Springborg, ‘Thomas Hobbes’. For the criticism of the ‘pretenders to political prudence’, see Hobbes, Leviathan, 516; Hobbes, De cive, 194; Hobbes, Behemoth, 198; Borelli, Il lato, 108–13.

47 See Hobbes, De cive, 140–1; Hobbes, Elements, 110. See also Montaigne, Essais, 406. For the idea that Hobbes’s construal of the state of war is one of intellectual disagreement, see Abizadeh, ‘Glory’, 293; Tuck, Hobbes, 55–7.

48 See Hobbes, Leviathan, 104-108; Hobbes, Elements, 60–1, 74–7.

49 Hobbes, Elements, 44. See also Hobbes, De cive, 91, 94. Recall that Hobbes’s definition of deliberation, while explicitly a succession of passions, is deeply informed by opinions, in that these determine the way we envisage the future and thus what passions are consequently produced. Pace van Apeldoorn, ‘Reconsidering Hobbes’s’. While deliberation is the ‘alternate succession of appetite and fear’, fear is another word for ‘displeasure expected’, ‘expectation’ being a ‘prevision or conjecture of things to come’. See Hobbes, Elements, 32, 44, 71. See also Abizadeh, ‘Hobbes on Mind’.

50 Hobbes, Levitathan, 270–4.

51 Hobbes, De cive, 132; Hobbes, Leviathan, 80, 242; Hobbes, Opera, 96. The fact that all people prefer their own judgment to that of all others only enhances this dangerous dynamic: some degree of glory is indeed universal, but this exacerbates, rather than minimizes, the reasons for doctrinal quarrels. See Hobbes, Leviathan, 188.

52 Hobbes, Leviathan, 1090.

53 Sharon Lloyd suggests that Hobbes’s argument for an ‘absolute’ sovereign relies upon the historical circumstances to which it responded. However, it is evident that ideological conformity, on Hobbes’s account, is inherently feeble and thus a constant source of violent conflict. See Lloyd, Ideals, 299–309.

54 Hobbes, De cive, 75.

55 Indeed, the worst form of civil strife comes from within groups formerly characterized by uniformity of doctrinal outlook. Hobbes, De cive, 94.

56 Hobbes, De cive, 185: ‘Cognitionem de bono & malo pertinere ad singulos’. See also Hobbes, Leviathan, 502.

57 For the centrality of private judgment to Hobbes’s account of the state of war, see Lloyd, Morality.

58 See Hobbes, Leviathan, 522: ‘the rights of the sovereign ‘have the rather need to be diligently, and truly taught, because they cannot be maintained by any Civill Law, or terrour of legal punishment’. See also Brett, Liberty, 234. Many interpreters, however, continue to think that Hobbes’s argument, even in Leviathan, relies entirely upon fear of the sovereign. See McClure 2016; Pye 1988; Gauthier 1969. Had this been the case, Locke would certainly have been right. See Locke, Two Treatises, 328.

59 Some continue to see Hobbes’s argument in Leviathan as essentially dependent upon the formal structure of sovereignty. See Saada 2010; Warrender 1966. See, however, Tarlton, ‘The Creation’; Blau ‘Hobbes’s’.

60 Hobbes, Leviathan, 458.

61 Ibid., 42, 1052.

62 See Ibid., 224. For the Machiavellian roots of the argument of ‘the Fool’, see Foisneau, La vie, 268–72; Terrel, Hobbes, 179–80. See also Springborg, ‘Hobbes’s Fool’; Hoekstra, ‘Hobbes and the Foole’. For Hobbes’s concept of justice, see Lloyd, Morality, 300–9; Gauthier, Logic of Leviathan, 76–89; Kavka, Hobbesian, 137–57.

63 Hobbes, Leviathan, 188, 502.

64 Ibid., 476–7. This is why ‘[t]hose facts which the Law expresly condemneth, but the Law-maker by other manifest signes of his will tacitly approveth, are lesse Crimes, than the same facts, condemned both by the Law, and Law-maker’. Sovereigns should ‘not to countenance any thing obliquely, which directly they forbid’.

65 Hobbes, Leviathan, 476. Although this passage disappears from the Latin edition, one may speculate that the reference to an end of the world appeared something to be avoided in an attempt to efface any millenarist expectations. See McQueen, Political Realism, 105–46; Pocock, Politics, Language & Time, 148–201.

66 Hobbes, Leviathan, 274; 328; 414.

67 Ibid., 520.

68 See Ibid., 532–4.

69 Ibid., 442; Hobbes, De cive, 190–1. See also Rutherford, ‘Hobbes’.

70 Hobbes, Leviathan, 526.

71 See Hobbes, Elements, 57–8; Hobbes, Leviathan, 86–7. See also Barrier, Le Temps, 443–7; Milanese, Principe, 268–74.

72 Hobbes, Leviathan, 526.

73 Ibid., 182.

74 The sovereign is not, then, characterized by arbitrary expressions of his will. Pace Meinecke, Die Idee, 249–55. See also Foisneau, ‘Sovereignty’.

75 Hobbes, Leviathan, 530.

76 See also Field, Potentia, 80–91.

77 Hobbes, Leviathan, 138.

78 Ibid., 280.

79 Ibid., 560.

80 Ibid., 138.

81 Ibid., 136.

82 Cooper, ‘Vainglory’, 260. Amy Gais stresses that ‘[h]ypocritical conformity does not succeed in securing uniformity’. Exterior signs of honour, ultimately expressed through imitation, are not necessarily sufficient if not the effect of corresponding, inward conviction. See Gais, ‘Thomas Hobbes’, 1219.

83 Hobbes, Leviathan, 90, 276.

84 See Zaret, Origins; Peacey, Print; Braddick, God’s Fury. For the history and breakdown of censorship in the 1640s see Clegg, Press Censorship.

85 Quoted in Gardiner, The Constitutional Documents, 83. See also Hobbes, Behemoth, 128: ‘the Power of the mighty has no foundation but in the opinion and beleefe of the people’.

86 Note that the events that Hobbes describes as a ‘Warre between Penns’, that is, the struggle between parliamentarians and the King to win public support through the incessant publication of remonstrances and responses only took place after Charles I had left London in January 1642. See Hobbes, Behemoth, 212, 261–2. See also Sharpe, Image Wars.

87 Hobbes, Leviathan, 526.

88 Hobbes, Behemoth, 106.

89 This picture, or something quite similar, has recently been excavated by a host of commentators. See Blau, ‘Hobbes’s’; Jakonen, ‘Thomas Hobbes’; Skinner, ‘Hobbes’; Dietz, ‘Hobbes’s Subject’; Bejan, ‘Teaching’. They still, however, tend to neglect the notion of exemplarity.