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Extensive Notes on Hobbes

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Notes on Hobbes

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  • January 5, 2021
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  • 2020/2021
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HOBBES READING NOTES

SOURCES:

YALE OPEN COURSES, STEVEN SMITH
RICHARD TUCK, INTRO TO LEVIATHAN
David Runciman, ‘The sovereign’​ in The Oxford handbook of Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2013).
David Runciman, ‘Hobbes’ theory of representation: proto-democratic or
anti-democratic?​’ in Ian Shapiro (ed.) Political representation (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2010).
Oxford Dictionary Biography of Hobbes: Noel Malcolm
Kinch Hoekstra, ‘Hobbes on the Natural Condition of Mankind’, in Patricia
Sprinborg (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s Leviathan, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Quentin Skinner. ‘ The State’, in Political Innovation and Conceptual Change, ed.
Terence Ball, James Farr, and Russell Hanson. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1989.


HISTORICAL CONTEXT

● Lived during Elizabethan/Shakespearian era; ​1588-1679
● Context of ​war and political disorder:​ English and French Civil Wars (left to France
during English CW)
● Treaty of Westphalia​ ended a century of religious war ignited by protestant
reformation ​ ​ declared ​individual ​sov state highest source of political authority ​and
that the ​head of the state ​decides religion

GENERAL INFO

● Humanist, moralist
● Differed from previous thinkers
o Turning point towards political science during a​ ​scientific revolution
o More materialistic less teleological vs. Aristotle eudaimonia. Hobbes believed
humans don’t enter society to achieve this but to ​avoid death
o Blamed Aristotle’s ​man as the political animal bc implies only fully human if
you take part in pol. Thought it caused the civic chaos of his age -​ ​ must
abstain from pol and have a filtered rep
o Thought we must become the ​masters of nature ​(similar to mastering
fortuna [Aristotle]).. bc science is knowing consequences
o Turn away ​from looking at liberty as internal domination from a Caesar that
reduces citizens to subjects, or from foreign domination.. ​renaissance
republicanism​ ​(which also thought that individuals ought to engage in public
life​… ​also “since antiquity, ideas about the natural world were intimately
bound up with ideas about human action and morality” (Tuck intro)
o Break from ​theological conceptions of political authority ​ ​secular

, o Hobbes is radical because of what it means to be sovereign and his
promulgation that the sovereign can be anyone and is unlimited

KEY CONCEPTS

A) HUMAN NATURE/HUMAN CONDITION

● Early closeness to ​Francis Bacon ​(who emphasised stripping away knowledge and
experience)
o Hobbes’ views on the ​relationship bw perception and the external world​:
“our thoughts and mental life are constituted by material objects” ​ ​ ​bodies
in constant motion​.. materialistic and mechanistic view of our psychology
and tendencies… same rules as cause and effect
o “​our subjective sense of freedom ​to choose how to live is no more based on
real freedom than our subjective sense of colour is based on real colour” ​
“deliberation and persuasion are causally efficacious” according to Hobbes
o Therefore also our concepts of good and evil are ​projections of inner
psychologies…
o Importance of naming things and materialism, and lack of belief in anything
transcendent
o Link to manipulation.. believed this understanding of philosophy could
overcome conflict .. believed that the key to understanding conflict was
understanding that it was a ​conflict of belief (tuck – “cognitive content”)​ and
nothing material… all conflicting passions and desires can be reduced to
beliefs about one’s position in the world . ​Hobbes believed “in the world as
presently constituted there was no such shortage” ​[of genuinely scare
resources… all such beliefs and therefore conflict (?) were inadequately
founded
o Hobbes gets over the difficulty of people having different moralities by
suggesting the ​renunciations of freedom and the entering into of a
contractual relationship
● Men by nature “​roughly equal in​ ​their mental and physical capacities”
● N.b. Natural not primitive – we are in the natural condition when without
commonwealth

Chapter 6: “the Passions and the speeches by which they are expressed

● “These simple Passions called ​Appetite, Desire, Love, Aversion, Hate, Joy, and
Griefe… are diversly called from the opinion men have of the likelihood of attaining
what they desire” (pp 41)
o based on “vitall” and “voluntary” motions (breathing, nutrition vs. speak,
move)
o out of appetite/desire comes love and from aversion, hate.
o Good and evil are protections/ ​object of hate and love​ – “But for so farre as a
man seeth, if the Good in those consequences, be greater than the Evill… [it
is] seeming good”

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