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Extensive Notes on Hobbes
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Notes on Hobbes
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HOBBES READING NOTESSOURCES:
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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