“Justice I Teach, and Reverence Justice” John Aubrey, “The Life of Hobbes”

Abstract

Abstract Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) was an accomplished classicist and mathematician as well as an immensely influential systematic philosopher. His first published work was a translation of Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War; and among his last were translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey. Tutor to the Earl of Devonshire and to Charles II, friend of AbbeÉMersenne, he lived in exile in France during the civil wars. Although his De Cive (1642) and The Elements of Law (1650) had been used as a text by royalists, Hobbes nevertheless became suffficiently reconciled with Oliver Cromwell so that he returned to England in 1651. Always political agile, Hobbes received the privilege of a royal pension from Charles II after the Restoration. Much impressed by the new sciences of Keppler, Galileo and Bacon, Hobbes developed a materialist metaphysics that provided the premises of a mechanistic psychology, and as he hoped, the basis of a contractarian political theory (Leviathan, 1651). His thought experiment posited a natural condition of scarcity that set men at odds with one another to secure a marginal advantage for survival. Prompted by fear and an instinct for self-preservation, foresighted calculative reason led to the contractual establishment of a sovereignty endowed with absolute power. Materialist contractarian that he was, Hobbes nevertheless held that his political views were consonant with Scripture. Indeed he feared that discrediting religion could readily lead to sedition and civil strife. When Parliament passed a bill for the suppression of atheism, a committee was nevertheless appointed to investigate the orthodoxy of the Leviathan. Although the matter was dropped, Hobbes was forbidden to publish his views. He submitted his Behemoth for approval to Charles II, who recommended against its publication. It was eventually published posthumously.