“How He Did Grow”: Hobbes, Hobbes, and Hobbes

Abstract

As A. P. Martinich clarifies, Hobbes wrote “two trilogies.”1 One houses increasingly long versions of his political philosophy, with each time a greater emphasis on religion: The Elements of Law (manuscript circulation 1640), De Cive (1642, revised edition 1647), and Leviathan (1651). The other presents Hobbes’s complete philosophical system in Latin: De Cive again (Elementorum Philosophiae Sectio Tertia De Cive), De Corpore (1655), and De Homine (1658). Such doubling reveals conflicting priorities: to be as comprehensive and as topical as possible. For Tom Sorell, the British Civil Wars constituted one of “two great upheavals” that shaped Hobbes’s thought: it “was local, political, dangerous, and as Hobbes believed, deeply irrational,” whereas The other was largely Continental, benefited people in obvious ways, showed what reason could accomplish when properly guided and applied. This was the upheaval in scientific ideas that Hobbes thought had been started by Galileo. Mainly on the strength of writings occasioned by the first upheaval Hobbes claimed to have contributed something important to the second.2 But the completion of Elementorum had to await the Interregnum, a relatively quiet period for Hobbes.