Hobbes's Political Theory (review)

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS 619 that he started his Genevan ministry (in August 1659) with a series of sermons on the imminence of the Kingdom of God, getting embroiled in a controversy with the Genevan professor of theology Frangois Turrettini about his chiliastic beliefs (1o6, l t6). Moreover, it was Labadie's vehement defense of millenarianism in the later 166os that formed one of the main issues leading to his condemnation by the Walloon Synod. It may also be noted that his millenarianism possessed a philosemitic flavor. One does not get a fair picture of Labadie's religious thought when an analysis of such important notions is lacking. So for the history of Labadie's ideas one still needs to go back to the older standard works by Max Goebel and Wilhelm Goeters. The value of Saxby's book is that now at last we have a full story about the facts of Labadie's life and of the rise and fall of his community. Undoubtedly it will stimulate further research on the religious thinking of this controversial seventeenth-century theologian (the controversy has still not ended, as may be seen from the fierce debate between Kurt Aland and Johannes Wallmann on Labadie's influence on German Lutheran pietism), who often declared that it was necessary to join the head of a Protestant and the heart of a Catholic to make a good Christian. E. G. E. VA~ DER WALL Rijksuniversiteitte Leiden Deborah Baumgold. Hobbes'sPolitical Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Pp. xi + 2xa. $39.5o. Hobbes's political writings incorporate several theories, psychological, moral, political, and religious. Recent books on Hobbes have argued that his political theory, especially his account of political obligation, is founded on either his psychology or his moralreligious philosophy. Baumgold's brief but interesting book is an attempt to challenge this entire tradition of reading Hobbes. Focussing on Hobbes's political writings of the 164os, The Elements ofLaw, De Cive, and Leviathan, Baumgold tries to show the centrality of Hobbes's political theoryand particularly of his absolutism, his concern with elite ambition, and his worries about civil war. What she proposes is a reading of Hobbes that emphasizes roles, institutions, factional strife, and the defense of absolute monarchy against parliamentary constitutionalism. It is a reading that pays more attention to the second part of Leviathan than it does to the first and attends more to the art of government, the defense of undivided and absolute monarchy, and the responsibilities of government than it does to Hobbes's account of the state of nature, of the laws of nature, and of the contractual reasoning that justifies civil authority and political obligation. Moreover, it is an account that takes the history of conflict in the 164os very seriously. In context, Hobbes is a royalist, whose justification of engagement with a conquering government and acknowledgement of defacto rule is disengaged from his absolutism and used by some in the argument for supporting the Commonwealth after Charles's execution. Baumgold articulates, then, an alternative interpretation of Hobbes's political thought and one that reorients attention from psychological and moral issues to ones 620 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 28:4 OCTOBER 199o that are more strictly political and historical. She has performed a valuable service by reminding us of the important political dimension of Hobbes's thinking that expresses itself in his concern for the "'victimization of common people in the power struggles of political elites" (135). But in the end one comes away from this book with a deep uncertainty. What exactly is being argued, and what effect is Baumgold's interpretation to have on our understanding of Hobbes? What is Baumgold really arguing about the relationship between Hobbes's political theory with its concern for roles, for elites, and for absolute political rule, on the one hand, and the psychological-moral theory of the state of nature, the sodal contract, and the establishment and authorization of sovereignty, on the other? She denies that political obligation is the "controlling problem, and central puzzle" of Hobbes's theory (e) and affirms that "the defense of absolutism, preferably monarchic absolutism, is... central to his theory of politics" (3). She claims...