Simon Eassom

When Thomas Hobbes died in 1679 at the age of 91 his reputation as an atheist in religion and an absolutist in politics not only rendered him highly disreputable but also served to shunt his political ideas into relative obscurity for the next three hundred years. He was undoubtedly ahead of his time and his contribution to political philosophy has only been fully recognised more recently in the huge range of scholarship devoted to his most enduring work, Leviathan.

At first, the impact Hobbes might make in the world of philosophy was not at all certain and it appeared his life would be spent in the conventional way for a graduate of the time, as a tutor to the sons of aristocracy. But by chance he gained service with William Cavendish, soon to be Earl of Devonshire. Hobbes spent the next twenty years as much Cavendish’s friend and personal secretary as tutor, and the apprenticeship served him well. Most important, it introduced Hobbes to the scientific circle of England and France.

During this time Hobbes served as secretary to Francis Bacon – it is through Hobbes we know the apocryphal story of how Bacon caught his fatal cold, going out into the winter snow to stuff a dead chicken and prove the preservative power of freezing.

If Hobbes had achieved the acclaim he desired in his lifetime it would have been as a scientist. He achieved a modicum of success and a degree of notoriety, in part through his regular and frequent debates with leading members of the Royal Society and most notably through the open animosity between him and the French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes. Hobbes developed a radical theory of light and optics in the 1630s: he was probably the first person to suggest that colour is a creation of the brain and does not reside in the object. When Descartes published his own theory of vision in one of the appendices to his Discourse On Method (1637), the mutual distrust and jealousy grew. Yet Hobbes and Descartes were actually closely matched in their philosophies. Both were enamoured with mathematics and Euclidean geometry, the power and perfection of transcendental deduction, and their belief that mathematics begets physics and that both can explain the entire nature of reality. The significant difference between them was that Hobbes was a committed materialist on matters of psychology and the mind.

Between 1641 and 1658 Hobbes published the three parts of The Elements of Philosophy, a clear early attempt at a unity of science. De Corpore (1655) combined his views on scientific method, language and logic and formed the first part of his trilogy. De Homine followed in 1658. But ironically it was the third part De Cive – actually written first in 1640 – that gained Hobbes his reputation as a political theorist. In it Hobbes rejected the traditional view of Plato and Aristotle that political life is natural to human beings. By denying any innate desire of humans to be governed, the goal of political philosophy ceases to be the search for a theory of government but instead becomes a justification for accepting or needing government and a determination of what kind of government best fits humans’ natural desires. De Cive served to situate political philosophy firmly within Hobbes’ materialist conception of the world through its requirement for politics to be predicated on a scientific explanation of the nature of human beings.

But it was not until 1651 and the publication of Leviathan that Hobbes developed these ideas into a full and detailed political treatise. He initiated what has become known as social contract theory. He argued the case for the state and a contract between the individuals in a society and the state. Significantly, the state is obligated to protect certain natural rights of citizens, act as arbiter in disputes, and generally enforce the mutually agreed upon contract. If he, she or it fails to do this the right to govern is forfeit. The basis for Hobbes’ contract is twofold: first, humans are selfish and need their egoism restrained in order to act morally; and second, the establishment of a commonwealth is purely for the mutual benefit of its citizens.

The most controversial final stage of his argument is that the commonwealth is best served by a state with absolute powers, able to enforce the contract if necessary. Paradoxically, at a time of civil war and after the execution of Charles I, Hobbes defended the principle of absolute rule with a clear indication that a monarch could best serve the interests of citizens of a commonwealth as an impartial referee. His consummate skill was in arguing his case in a way that was palatable to republicans and royalists alike – a fact that no doubt kept him alive for twenty-eight more years.

Suggested reading
The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes, Ed. Tom Sorrell (Cambridge University Press)
Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition, Jean Hampton (Cambridge University Press)
Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes (many editions)

Simon Eassom is principal lecturer in philosophy and a teaching fellow at De Montfort University Bedford.