Lecture 21 Notes

A.   Time of Great Intellectual Ferment

• Hobbes (1588-1679) was born 8 years before Descartes and died 29 years after.  This was a wonderful time to be young, brilliant, and privileged.
• He was a contemporary of Shakespeare, Rembrandt, and Newton.  He knew Galileo and corresponded with Descartes.
  
• He was born at end of the Renaissance, by death the modern period was under way.  He was born into age of humanism, died in an age of science.
  

B.   An Age of Religious Reform

• The Reformation began less than 70 years before Hobbes’s birth.  The English Reformation under Henry VIII began later.
• There were deep religious divisions in England among Catholics and several forms of Protestantism, including the Church of England and congregationalism.  Protestantism had upper hand, but this was not firmly cemented in England until the Glorious Revolution, a decade after Hobbes’s death.  That it took revolution to cement Protestantism suggests that religious divisions had political implications.

C.   Highly Politicized Religious Divisions Set the Stage for Political Divisions:

• 1642: English civil war breaks out.
  
• 1649: Charles I executed.
  
• 1653: Protectorate established under Oliver Cromwell.
  
• 1660: Restoration.  Charles II assumes throne.
  
• 1680’s: "Exclusion Crisis".
  
• 1689: Glorious (and bloodless) Revolution.
  
• Hobbes did not live to see a peaceful resolution to political unrest.  He saw only the civil wars of his adulthood.
  
• In Aquinas we studied a thinker who helped to make Catholic church.  Hobbes, like Descartes, is a thinker who helped to make modern world.  He stood at point at which great forces of modern world intersected: Humanism, Modern Science, Modern Religion, Modern Politics; all of which he helped to invent.
  

A.   Hobbes’s Work Was Shaped By the Confluence of Several Forces

• Age of Humanism
  

1. Hobbes is noted for a command of the classical languages and his translations.
   
2. Hobbes did the greatest translation of Thucydides into English.  Recall the passage from Thucydides.
3. Thucydides’ analysis of the Peloponnesian War suggested that power in Greek world differed from Plato vastly; this influenced Hobbes profoundly.
   

• Age of Science
  

1. Hobbes, like Descartes had abiding interest in modern science.
2. Like Descartes, he takes geometry as paradigm of knowledge.  Geometry is certain because it is founded on clear definitions.  Politics could be a science if it were begun the same way.
   
3. According to Hobbes, definitions must comport with the terms of Modern Science.  Since politics studies human beings, we can give a mechanistic description: "For what is the heart but a spring, and the nerves, but so many strings; and the joints but so many wheels, giving motion to the whole body, such as intended by the artificer." (Introduction)
   

• Age of Reform: Religion and Religious Upheaval Everywhere
  

1. Leviathan takes its title from the Biblical book of Job.  It names a beast which, once disturbed, cannot be controlled.  The name becomes a symbol of primordial chaos.  Hobbes’s title plays on these associations
   
2. Leviathan  addresses conditions of English civil war.  The English civil war was in large part, as mentioned, a religious war. England is society disturbed by a religiously based war.  This disturbance reawakens the primordial chaos of the original human condition.  Question: now that beast has been awakened, how can it be controlled?  Hobbes’s Answer: the Leviathan can be controlled only if subjected to a keeper with unlimited power.
   

• Hobbes is a defender of "Absolute Monarchy", an idea which included unlimited power over politics and religion vested in the sovereign. In an Age of Reform (and chaos) Absolutism is only way to peace.
• The argument for Absolutism shows how Hobbes draws on Humanism and Science to solve problem set by Reform.

B.   Hobbes's Method

• Modern Science sees everything as aggregation of material parts.
  

1. We understand a phenomenon by analysing it into constituent parts.  We then understand how those constituent parts work singly, followed by they work together.
   
2. Hobbes thinks that political phenomena should be studied this way: (i) political society is an artificial human being; (ii) human beings are mechanically described; so (iii) we can analyse political society into its parts: people. Moreover, people can be analysed into their working parts, hence the painstaking analysis in early part of Leviathan.
   
3. Once the scientific analysis is done, we have a clear view of human beings and their motives.
   
4. A clear scientific view of human beings and their motives is crucial: human conflict is rooted in confusion about, e.g. religious claims.  It is exacerbated by sloppy thinking about conflict itself.  A good contemporary example is abortion.

• Geometry

1. Religious and political conflict is rooted in linguistic confusion.  This includes confusion about ethical terms, such as what 'good' and 'right' mean and the obscurantism of Scholastic theology, e.g., 'transsubstantiation'.  The conflict can be eliminated only if we understand terms clearly.  It is characteristic of geometry to begin with clear definitions so, the study of politics should, in this way, follow geometric model.
   
2. In Leviathan Hobbes sets himself the task of attaining geometric clarity through scientific analysis of politics and humanity.  Thus, Hobbes draws on Science to solve problem set by Reform.

• It is not enough that Hobbes define religious and ethical terms clearly to avoid conflict.  We must also  insure that everybody adheres to right usage so that confusion is not reintroduced by introduction of new opinions.  Thucydides explained that conflict can be avoided only by ruthless use of power.  Following this model,  Hobbes argues that conflict can be avoided only if the Sovereign exercises absolute power over religion, politics, thought and speech.  In this way, he draws on Humanism + Science to solve problem set by Reform.

C.   Hobbes Invents Modern Politics

• Hobbes's defense of absolute sovereignty is a radical conclusion.
  
• Returning to the contemporary American political dispute, abortion seems to be rooted in linguistic and political uncertainty uncertainty about moral terms such as "human being" and "human life"  These terms are also rooted in great theological uncertainty.  But why doesn’t this lead to greater violence than it does?  Why doesn’t this religious conflict lead to civil war?  Why doesn’t it lead to the problem for which Hobbes thought Absolutism the only solution?  Why is our America different from Hobbes’s England?
  
• Let us now turn to Hobbes’s arguments and see his method at work.