Julian Baggini
The village of Malmesbury in South West England is a location scout’s dream. In the heart of the Wiltshire countryside, with its abbey, river and market place, it is the quintessential image of rural Albion. However, many visitors who pass through leave without realising that it is also the birthplace of one of England’s most famous philosophers. Others may have forgotten the association but he never did. Look at the famous frontispiece of his magnus opus, Leviathan, and you’ll see the philosopher’s name: Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury.
Now, however, a group of locals have decided that enough is enough. The Thomas Hobbes Society was founded in the village by Ian Henderson, who is now its secretary. In October, another member, Michael Cuthbert, led its most ambitious venture yet: the Thomas Hobbes Festival of Ideas.
For three days the Town Hall was host to a series of talks by a very impressive line up of speakers, including Anthony Kenny, Mary Warnock, John Cottingham and Tom Sorrell, while only late quirks of fate robbed the large audience of Terry Eagleton and Philippe Sands.
Based on a straw poll in the market square, it’s high time the townspeople learned a little more about their most famous son. “Personally I don’t know too much about him,” said a man dressed in traditional Quaker dress. This was a typical reaction to the question of what people knew about Hobbes. His co-religionist had been in the same boat, until the festival came along. “I went to the lecture yesterday to find out the importance of Hobbes in our present day society and I learned quite a bit then,” she told me. “The Hobbes festival has certainly brought it to prominence and we have this series of lectures which is wonderful.”
So what should they know about Hobbes? I asked several of the festival’s speakers how they saw him as a philosopher.
“In the history of British philosophy I would say that he’s in the first XI,” said Anthony Kenny, “but I wouldn’t rank him with Locke, Hume, Bertrand Russell or John Stuart Mill. As a political philosopher he’s very important as a kind of default position: everybody else takes up political philosophy where he leaves off and tries to brighten it up a bit in one way or another.”
What is it that Kenny thinks Hobbes lacks that prevents him from taking his place among the very best?
“He was very ignorant of logic, for instance. If you compare him with Mill and Russell that is a great defect. His materialism is a very crass form of materialism. His theory of language is a very crude form of language theory.” It’s not all bad news though. “I would however say that I think he writes the best English of any philosopher writing in that language and Leviathan is one the great masterpieces of English literature.”
Bristol University’s Finn Spicer, however, takes a more positive view.
“Amongst English philosophers I can only think of Locke as his peer. Amongst British philosophers, for me Hume towers above him but Hume is a towering figure. As a political philosopher he’s peerless, and Andrew Pyle said this a week ago. He said that Locke’s ideas have had more influence on the actual state, perhaps, but Hobbes’s ideas were essential. You couldn’t do without Hobbes.
“He also said they were inevitable – somebody had to think about them because it’s such a clearly carved-out niche in the terrain of political views. But the fact that Hobbes thought of it first, Andrew said, did philosophy a great service because he articulated it so well and so clearly. So Hobbes is, I think, a great philosopher.”
Mary Warnock also stresses Hobbes’s virtues more than his vices. “I think he’s a marvellous presenter of ideas,” she says. “I admire him enormously because he’s got a sound bite, hasn’t he? I mean everybody knows about life being nasty brutish and short and he’s very, very clear. I think he’s a great British philosopher, actually, I really do.”
However, she also acknowledges that his philosophical ideas are no longer as central to political debates as they were.
“I think the actual idea of the original contract doesn’t have the power that it used to have because I think people like Rawls, Herbert Hart and Ronald Dworkin have analysed the concept of law in such a way that it doesn’t need a contract to explain it. So in that way a lot of Hobbes’s thinking has dropped off like a carapace that we don’t really need any more.”
John Cottingham sees the relevance of Hobbes for today as residing more in his materialism than his political philosophy. “I think he’s in the great canon of early modern philosophers alongside say Descartes, Locke, Hume. I suppose to some extent the prevailing trend in philosophy now is naturalistic, that is to say, thinking we can give an account of all human experience in terms which ultimately depend on the movement of matter, matter in motion. Hobbes has an early version of that which is quite worked out in quite interesting philosophical detail. I think he’s perhaps to some extent the patron saint of the modern materialist and naturalist movement.”
Jonathan Rée took perhaps the dimmest view of Hobbes among the philosophers present.
“I’ve never found his books and his doctrines particularly interesting, but I find his position interesting, especially his relationship with Descartes. He was enormously jealous of Descartes. Hobbes was a bit older, Descartes was young and famous and hadn’t written very much, and Hobbes had produced lots of stuff and nobody took it seriously.
“Then there was this fantastic opportunity when Hobbes was in Paris of getting a preview of Descartes’s Meditations and writing set of objections to it. Hobbes leapt at the opportunity and I think he made a complete idiot of himself. His friend Gassendi wrote quite a good set of objections. Basically Gassendi’s objection was that you can’t have a soul that doesn’t have a corporeal side to it. Hobbes was making the same point but in an incredibly heavy-handed and rude kind of way and Descartes was rude in return. He really thought that Hobbes had made an idiot of himself and I think that Hobbes smarted from that for more than 20 years, before he did write something which is in a way a masterpiece, Leviathan. But it wouldn’t be a desert island book for me.”
Such diverse views were completely in keeping with the festival, the programme of which took its cue from Hobbes, but ventured into areas of politics and philosophy far from him. There was even a Leviathan Pie supper, the titular dish a special recipe of chef Tom Rains. The festival is set to be annual and Michael Cuthbert has already started booking speakers for 2009’s event, to be held over the weekend that links October and November. Rooms at the charming Old Bell Hotel will no doubt fill early.
The Thomas Hobbes Society has plenty of other plans too. “If you take a parallel person called Descartes in France,” says Henderson, “they’ve renamed the town there Descartes. We’re not going to do that here. They have a statue of Descartes, they have a museum to Descartes. Malmesbury also ought to have a statute and a lot more ought to be made of him locally. He’s world-famous and people come all over the world to visit and to see what there is here of Hobbes – not a lot. But what we have got we have to make as much use of as possible.
“We are going to have a bench dedicated in the market cross so that people see that and know, and there may be one or two other little items plopped around the town that might have some associations with Hobbes and one day we might even have a statue of him. I think that will be the point at which we’ll be able to say at last Thomas Hobbes is fully recognised in Malmesbury.”
In the meantime, the Thomas Hobbes festival is doing a good job of raising the profile of both its eponymous philosopher and his subject.
“I think it’s absolutely marvellous,” says Mary Warnock. “I think it’s a wonderful idea and if it gets more people to place Hobbes in the political and philosophical hierarchy so much the better. But I also think it’s such a wonderful town, such a coherent place, and Hobbes is a great figure – nothing is more rational than to use the place and the figure to have this kind of coming together.”
