Hobbes's Nature

...Instead the college principal recommended him as a tutor to the Cavendishes, an aristocratic family with wide-ranging intellectual interests...

...He quietly disdained Oxford's curriculum, or so he later assured Aubrey: "He did not much care for Logick, yet he learnd it, and thought himself a good Disputant...

...The Cavendish family took better care of him in lavish country houses from which they could ward off any rebarbative bishop who sought a prosecution for heresy...

...Cambridge had dispatched its firebrand graduates both to Massachusetts and to parishes throughout England, where they replaced reprobates like Hobbes's father...

...Throughout his long life, Hobbes mocked universities as places in which tenured disputants knotted themselves and their students into a "frequency of insignificant Speech...

...After the philosopher had achieved notoriety, his critics vilified him as "the Atheist of Malmes-bury...

...Some scholars regard this story as too good to be true: Hobbes had surely read Euclid at Oxford, and by the age of forty-two he was sufficiently well-versed in geometry and its scientific applications to need no epiphany...

...Hobbes thus contrived that Thucydides talked "to the English about the need to escape from the clutches of the rhetoricians whom they consulted at that time...

...That at last he was demonstratively convinced of that trueth...

...So what, from all this publication, do we now understand...

...Calvinist dogmas of the "elect" have yielded to Anglo-American faith in democratic "elections" in a way that Hobbes did not, perhaps, anticipate...

...But some epiphany was surely coming for him...

...Universities nurture soi-disant experts whose proficiency is jargon...

...Aubrey begins his narrative of the philosopher's years at Oxford with an arresting anecdote...

...Hobbes's major legacy, Leviathan hangs together as a vision of its age rather than as a blueprint for all time...

...He wrote ceaselessly until the end, adding translations of Homer to his Thucydides...

...Gabriella Slomp adds her own reading in Thomas Hobbes and the Political Philosophy of Glory...

...Implacable in its purport—Hobbes intimates that force and fraud and fear and death will always annul his panacea—Leviathan still retains a glint of the rhetorician's snake oil...

...Over the last eighteen months, a dozen new books have taken up his life and thought...

...When men write whole volumes of such stuffe, are they not Mad, or intend to make others so...

...i In his new biography of Hobbes— i one of the best of recent works, richly informative about his life, times, and writings—A.P...

...I am about to take my last voyage," he reportedly observed on his deathbed, "a great leap into the dark...

...Jurgen Overhoff explores Hobbesian psychology in Hobbes's Theory of the Will...

...As his political philosophy matured, Hobbes scrutinized the deepening crisis of Stuart authority, and he honed his analysis with the instruments of modern science, a subject that had yet to appear on the curriculum at Oxford...

...Thucydides was his favorite historian because "he shows how incompetent democracy is...

...Hobbes continued as a tutor to several generations of Cavendish heirs until 1640, except for two years when he accompanied as tutor a dissolute seventeen-year-old named Gervase Clifton on travels through France and Switzerland...

...Hobbes was physically timorous, but he enjoyed flashing his prodigious brain power in print...

...Hobbes rose early, Aubrey recounts, in order to catch jackdaws in ingenious traps of glued twigs: "This story he happened to tell me, discoursing of the Optiques, to instance such sharpnes of sight in so little an eie...

...Twayne's English Authors Series offers its usual style of small biography and literary study with Conal Condren's Thomas Hobbes...

...That referred him back to another, which he also read...

...Still, Leviathan suggested, on one reading, that the dead king should have taken a ruthless line with the Puritans...

...For the professor, it is an occupational disease to "find himselfe entangled in words, as a bird in lime-twiggs...

...During his three decades in the Cavendish household, Hobbes also accompanied his pupils on Grand Tours to France and Italy in 1614-15 and in 1634-6...

...The state of nature is not just a mythical prehistoric era but (as anyone living in seventeenth-century England could have testified) a living threat, for the "generall inclination of all mankind" is a "perpetuall and restlesse desire of Power after power, that ceaseth onely in Death...

...Hobbes was raised by his paternal uncle, a moneyed glover (like Shakespeare's father) from the local town of Malmesbury...

...More than a theoretical treatise, Leviathan is also a work of literary genius whose nightmares bespeak Medea or King Lear...

...The crowned giant of Hobbes's imagination brandishes a sword and a crozier against a verse from the Vulgate Job: "There is no power on earth which can be compared to him...

...We're in the middle of something like a Hobbes boom...

...provident deliberation, a handsome fear...

...But does it represent a swerve from, or an accen- ; tuation of, positions the philosopher | had already taken before England's ; Civil Wars and Puritan Revolution ; provided him with a pathologist's slab for the body politic...

...Even topics so recondite as the squaring of the circle brought out the intellectual bruiser in him...

...Rather than let the English text of Leviathan stand on its own harsh merits, Skinner interweaves his commentary with learned glosses on the Latin translation of 1668 (which Hobbes may have intended only as a sop to his Anglican critics...

...If there were degrees of high and low," he recalled in 1668 at the age of eighty, "I verily believe that the highest of time would be that which passed between the years of 1640 and 1660...

...For words are wise mens counters, they do but reckon by them" he observes caustically, "but they are the mony of fooles, that value them by the authority of an Aristotle, a Cicero, or a Thomas [Aquinas], or any other Doctor whatsoever, if but a man...

...Hugh Ormbsy-Lennon teaches eighteenth-century literature and core humanities at Villanova University...

...Other portraits of the author evoke his aquiline sharpness more vividly but without the same narcissism...

...The work's anti-Catholicism enraged not only the French clergy but also the expatriate court (particularly its Catholic queen mother, Henrietta Maria), and in December 1651 Hobbes beat a hasty and homesick retreat back to Cromwell's England...

...In the grand title page to Leviathan,Hobbes shows a fearful Lilliputian mob binding themselves in an irrevocable contract to authoritarian govern-ment—the Brobdingnagian figure who envelops them—as they flee from the anarchy of the 1640s...

...To recover something even close to his meaning and his importance requires that we recover his original shock...

...Leviathan is assigned to thousands of undergraduates in political science courses...

...Uneducated people can also tie their semantic shoelaces together, but their "naturall Prudence" (shared with dogs) ensures that they do not "fall upon false and absurd gener-all rules...

...Indeed the comprehensive theory of body, man, citizen, and state that Hobbes twisted from human fears antagonized everyone, except perhaps the alehouse scoffers and Charles Il's libertine court...

...It adumbrates a physics, physiology, psychology, morality, politics, and critical theology...

...Some of Skinner's readers will feel they have been left with scholarly bathwater...

...His father was a semiliterate Anglican clergyman (of a type often satirized by Shakespeare) who deserted the family after a choleric bout of fisticuffs with a parishioner in the village churchyard...

...BY HUGH ORMSBY-LENNON About his own premature birth in 1588, Thomas Hobbes remarked that "fear and I came into the world together as twins...

...To make his case Skinner marshals whole libraries of books about rhetoric, and pivots his interpretation upon the philosopher's deployment of the once-familiar rhetorical strategies of elocutio and paradiastole...

...Augustine's Press has just reissued The Hunting of Leviathan, a golden oldie in which Samuel I. Mintz chivvies out seventeen-century reactions to Hobbes...

...Hobbes's Nature The life of the liveliest and most fearful philosopher...

...Most Puritans had remained within the Anglican communion, but during the 1640s they broke with the Church of England and finally abolished it...

...A common squabble among scholars of Hobbes concerns Leviathan...

...It is, they agree, his magnum opus...

...But Hobbes can slip through the fingers of his interpreters...

...It was a position that pleased neither his enemies nor his friends (and Hobbes loved company, despite being rabid for controversy...

...Leviathan compellingly records the philosopher's will-to-cerebral-power, a funambulist's ambition that darkly illuminates our human life below...

...And his most famous book, Leviathan (1651), was so belligerent and sardonic in its style, logic, and theorizing, that Hobbes provoked furious rejoinders from both the Royalists and the Puritans, who were at each others' throats...

...he was wont thereafter to draw lines on his thigh and on the sheetes, abed...

...After the restoration of crown and Anglicanism in 1660, Charles II declared that his old teacher should have "free access to his majestie," and he granted the philosopher a generous pension (which he usually neglected to pay...

...Labeling the contents of Hobbes's toolbox can't draw out Leviathan with a hook...

...You can examine, for example, Hobbes and the complicated relation of natural law to natural rights in a forthcoming reprint, Henrik Syse's Na^-^^al Law, Rel^gi^n, and Rights...

...What Skinner forgets is how much Hobbes hated the slush of words, particularly those churned out by intellectuals...

...Hobbes's name is a common token in casual intellectual exchange, and his most famous phrases—beginning with "nasty, brutish, and short"— fall calmly from our lips...

...But Hobbes was ruthless—"the Gods were at first created by human Feare"—par-ticularly about a cosmos now disenchanted by scientists...

...Hobbes skewered the Athenian demagogues who itched for "glory of wit," but he held back from the cut and thrust of politics...

...He treated his position as an extended research fellowship that allowed him to read and publish, and to travel to meet leading continental intellectuals like Galileo and inhale European Catholicism (which he compares, in Leviathan, to "the Kingdome of Fayries...

...In Squaring the Circle: The War Between Hobbes and Wallis, Douglas M. Jesseph referees impeccably "one of the longest and most intense intellectual disputes of all time," the bout between Hobbes and John Wallis, a Puritan mathematician, over his own claim to have squared the circle...

...Instead the philosopher reassumes the mantle of a Renaissance humanist who knows that eloquence rather than axiomatic logic will convince readers...

...Hobbes lambasted the Puritans of Oxford and Cambridge...

...While accompanying Clifton to Geneva in 1630, Hobbes had an epiphany when he saw a copy of Euclid's Elements of Geometry lying open at the Pythagorean theorem...

...For a royalist, Hobbes found himself in a paradoxical position...

...Et sic deinceps [and so on...

...And the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short"— quickens the social contract that government demands...

...In 1679 he was buried near Hard-wick Hall, a Cavendish estate, under the modest Latin epitaph he composed: "He was a virtuous man, and for his reputation for learning, he was well known at home and abroad...

...So he reads the Demonstration of it, which referred him back to such a Proposition...

...That it was ever thus—that mendacity, name-dropping, deceitful rhetoric, and chop-logic have always existed—solves no contemporary problems of sovereignty...

...There he mingled with fellow refugees like the Cavendishes, tutored England's heir apparent in mathematics, and crossed swords with Descartes (whose science was "scarcely that of a sane man...

...But the real Hobbes is Hobbes the antagonizer, not Hobbes the familiar and comfortable old shoe...

...Savvy readers of Leviathan are flattered both with axioms and with countless pithy asides—"to have no desire is to be dead"—which remind us how smart his political geometry is...

...The Greek language had buckled under the impact of war: "The received value of names imposed for signification was changed into arbitrary...

...In Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes—a 1996 love letter, now reprinted in paperback, from a lively don to a dead philosopher that is too brilliant for its own good—Quentin Skinner maintains that in Leviathan Hobbes junks his ambition of creating an ironclad science of politics...

...Our difficulty with all these works is to sort out the ones that perceive the antagonizing man and his shocking mind beneath the accretions that have made him little more than a placeholder, a casual metaphor, for an exaggerated position in political philosophy...

...His mother had gone into labor upon hearing rumors of the Spanish Armada's setting sail to invade England...

...When writing of "the emulation and contention of the demagogues for reputation and glory of wit" (Hobbes loathed the orating Pericles), he glanced at the critics of Charles I who had become increasingly vociferous in parliament...

...modesty, the cloak of cowardice...

...Hobbes's apprehensive mother was an obscure countrywoman from Wiltshire in the west of England...

...But arbitrary signification prevailed during the Puritan Revolution, and Hobbes changed his tack in Leviathan...

...Hobbes received an excellent classical education from Robert Latimer, a young parson, who encouraged the lad to translate Euripides' Medea into Latin iambics, a signal achievement, and later introduced him to John Aubrey, the famous antiquarian...

...As Aubrey tells the story, By G—, sayd he, (he would now and then swear an emphaticall Oath by way of emphasis) this is impossible...

...But Leviathan, he knew, was his real charm against intellectual death...

...Given the humble circumstances of Hobbes's birth—even less propitious than Shakespeare's—no one would have envisioned him as an author of or contributor to anything that amounted to much...

...But Hobbes always has his readers where he wants them...

...No one ever seemed to learn anything other than mischief...

...Most preserved, often with genuine piety, the appearances of some ghost in the machine: a clock-making God, or the immortal souls that He had mysteriously fashioned, or the Light Within...

...Meanwhile, the philosopher's correspondence has been splendidly edited by the noted Balkanologist Noel Malcolm...

...Or, perhaps, in a peculiar way, he did—for his social contract also emerges from the covenant theology of the Reformation...

...to be wise in every thing, to be lazy in every thing...

...Rumor has it that Hobbes wanted his epitaph to read "This is the true philosopher's stone"—a joke that only a gravestone could fulfill the alchemists' dream of extended life...

...For inconsiderate boldness was counted true-hearted manliness...

...He was, instead, animated by a powerful "Lust of the mind, that by a perseverance of delight in the continuall and indefatigable generation of Knowledge exceedeth the short vehemence of any carnall Pleasure...

...which proposition he read...

...The Atheist of Malmes-bury may privately have espoused some heterodox version of Anglicanism (during a life-threatening illness of 1647 a fearful Hobbes requested the church's last rites), but for public appearances, he chose the cool line of geometry that informs his political science...

...This made him in love with Geometry...

...Entangled in Hobbes's propositional demonstrations, readers squawk like limed jackdaws...

...As Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, Skinner declares that he is "less interested in Hobbes as the author of a philosophical system than in his role as the contributor to a series of debates about the moral sciences within Renaissance culture...

...His dispiriting vision was shared by many of his contemporaries...

...Beneath the landscape are vignettes that illustrate literal war and the war of words...

...In particular, Hobbes loathed the tomes of medieval schoolmen and their seventeenth-century disciples, both Catholic and Protestant, in which, he jeered, one might encounter discussions "of a round Quadrangle...

...or accidents of Bread in Cheese...

...Still, Skinner joins Martinich in topping the bumper crop of recent books about Hobbes...

...Hobbes's response to Euclid uncannily foreshadows the exclamations elicited by Leviathan, which Hobbes began not long after the beheading of Charles I in 1649 and published in 1651, when the author was sixty-three...

...In 1603 Hobbes matriculated at his schoolmaster's old college at Oxford, Magdalen Hall, where his academic progress is harder to monitor...

...On its title-page, the book appraises us with the beady eyes of none other than a youthful Hobbes...

...In Hobbes and Bramhall on Liberty and Necessity, Vere Chappell painstakingly edits Hobbes's altercation with Bishop John Bramhall about "true liberty" and "antecedent and extrinsical necessity...

...He sneered, "there can be nothing so absurd, but may be found in the books of Philosophers...

...It hardly seems worth reminding Skinner, in the dazzling spume of his own linguistic analysis, that Samuel Butler—who, like Hobbes, flailed away at Puritan neo-scholasticism—taught us that all a Rhetorician's rules / Teach only but to name his tools...

...And in that combination, Hobbes saw an omen of his own philosophy: Human misery in the state of nature— "continuall feare, and danger of violent death...

...Sects multiplied crazily...

...We can forget, if we aren't careful, just how antagonizing the man still remains, for he has grown so familiar...

...Instead Hobbes took refuge in the pure and wordless axioms of geometry, "the one-ly Science that it hath hitherto pleased God to bestow on mankind...

...Today, of course, visitors to Emmanuel College, Cambridge—then a hotbed of Puritan dissent—routinely stop to admire the stained glass windows of John Harvard and other Puritan luminaries that have since been installed in the college chapel...

...In post-Reformation England, Oxford and Cambridge were envisaged as bastions of Anglicanism (holy orders were a prerequisite for dons), but by 1651, when Leviathan was published, Hobbes had come to believe that they had been overwhelmed not only by "absurdity" (that staple of university education) but by militant Puritanism...

...On another reading, however, Leviathan suggested that Cromwell's autocracy was preferable to a failed royalism...

...Worse still, universities incubate political sedition when dons preach radical ideas...

...or Im-materiall Substances...

...the more he struggles, the more belimed...

...Hobbes became dissatisfied both with classical history and with treatises like Machiavelli's The Prince as guides to political theory and practice...

...In 1629 Hobbes published a rugged translation of the History of the Pelo-ponnesian War...

...In September 1651 Hobbes presented a manuscript copy of Leviathan to Charles II, who had escaped to Paris after his defeat at the Battle of Worcester...

...In a mechanical world of matter in motion, from which the agency of God evaporates, fears of death will always drive us to accede to the power that Hobbes dictates...

...Hobbes portrayed himself as a layabout, keen to educate himself as he saw best, but he had taken care not to offend his college's authorities...

...Such warring Hobbes blames upon disputes that simmer in universities and churches unregulated by civil authority...

...Martinich underscores the importance of Leviathan...

...Nonetheless, Hobbes torched many of his manuscripts and penned a treatise arguing that heretics should not be burned...

...In the vibrant intellectual life of Paris Hobbes participated fully, enjoying the friendship of philosophical clerics like Marin Mersenne and Pierre Gassendi, as he mastered the republic of learning...

...As a graduate of Magdalen Hall in 1608, Hobbes was clearly not cut out to be a don or clergyman...

...Hobbes told Aubrey that he would rather "take Physique from an experienced old Woman, then from the learnedst but unexperienced Physician...

...Hobbes also told Aubrey how he "tooke great delight there to goe to the Booke-binders shops, and lye gaping on Mappes...

...Even if : the same ideas were present in Hobbes's earlier works, "it is Leviathan that deserves to be called 'A Bible for Modern Man' because no other work of his or any of his contemporaries presents such a forceful, eloquent, and comprehensive statement of the doctrine that expresses the spirit of modern thought...

...In 1641 Hobbes fled the coming wars in England for Paris...

...Hobbes lived in interesting times...