Hobbes and Existentialism: Some Affinities

Abstract

From the distant shores of Stuart England Thomas Hobbes still speaks to us in a strangely familiar and captivating idiom. Having traversed the rugged expanse of three centuries, some of his words are obviously muffled and obscure, but whatever the obstacles, our generation seems willing to strain in order to perceive more clearly the subtle inflections of this voice. During the past decade the literature devoted to Hobbes has expanded rapidly both in volume and in breadth of focus, covering the most diverse topics of his natural and civil philosophy. The reasons for this preoccupation are complex and elusive. To some extent the preoccupation may stem from the fact that Hobbes stood at the beginning of various intellectual and social trends that have culminated or have been eclipsed in our own time. According to Crawford Macpherson, Hobbes was one of the first advocates of possessive individualism, an anthropological doctrine that concentrated on the accumulation and protection of property as man's primary motives and became a cornerstone of the market economy and modern industrial society. Taking a broader view, Jurgen Habermas identified IHobbes as one of the ancestors of technological rationalism, a rationalism that in its combination of rigorous analysis and technical invention continues to animate the revolution of our age.' These and similar interpretations undoubtedly possess great plausibility and persuasiveness, but they hardly tell the entire story. Neither Hobbes's vocabulary nor our own seems restricted to this range of discourse. While attractive to the scientific mentality of a technological era, Hobbes's voice also reaches us on a different level of frequency-the level of basic