Civility and Sociability: Hobbes on Man and Citizen

Abstract

IN PRESENTING A HOBBESIAN THEORY OF MAN, interpreters often rely heavily on the descriptions of the state of nature Hobbes provides in De Cive and Leviathan. However, in the prefatory material o f these works and in the body of other works such as De Homine, Hobbes warns that he says about men in the state of nature must be understood as part of his treatment of men as citizens of ecclesiastical or civil commonwealths. He does not intend his De Cive or Leviathan descriptions of man in the state of nature to be his final theory of man and society. What Hobbes says about men in De Cive and Leviathan is limited to his treatment of them as citizens. In order to get a complete picture of Hobbes's view of man, we have to augment these works with works like De Homine; for it is not until Hobbes writes De Homine that the distinction between man as man and man as citizen becomes explicit. As Hobbes makes clear there, what is to be understood about men insofar as they are men is not applicable insofar as they are citizens. ''j What Hobbes says about men as citizens is regulated by his methodic analysis of civil government, not by his analysis of the entirety of human existence. My remarks have a twofold thrust. First, they are intended to show why Hobbes chooses to concentrate his energies on the description of man as citizen rather than man as man. Secondly, they are intended to show how his description of man serves, for Hobbes, as a guide indicating how civil relationships among men can be improved. In short, I will suggest that Hobbes's theory of men as citizens is regulated by the ideal of attaining certainty through a science of human political behavior. Hobbes 's theory of men as men, on the other hand, is intended to show that, even though human social behavior cannot be treated with scientific certainty, it can serve to regulate and guide the development of civil relationships.