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BOOK REVIEWS 305 chez Descartes et Spinoza. Descartes a peur du chaos possible puisque Dieu peut rendre m~me les contradictions vraies, et Spinoza a peur du potential disruptif des d~sirs sexuels. En somme, c'est une collection d'articles diverse et provocatrice. RICHARD A. WATSON Washington University Jules Steinberg. The Obsessionof ThomasHobbes:The English Civil War in Hobbes'sPolitical Philosophy. American University Studies, Series 1o, vol. 12. New York: Peter Lang, 1988. Pp. xvi + 267. $37.5o. This is scholarship as total war. Steinberg is angry and he hurls chapters like weapons at his opponents. These are textualists such as Kenneth Minogue, John Plamenatz, Howard Warrender and others, who at times make startling hermeneutic claims suggesting that philosophic writings manage to float free from their historical moorings and soar into, one must suppose, a sort of quasi-Platonic realm where theorists of any era may hold conversations with one another free of the confusions one might reasonably expect to arise from the passage of time and the inevitable changes that occur in such things as semantics and problem-identifying assumptions. Such claims are particularly odd-sounding when we know we are dealing with a political philosopher very much engaged in the ideological struggles of his time, as Hobbes certainly was. There is little question that approaching historical texts as though they address perennial problems with timeless semantics adds to the confusing welter of scholarly interpretations of major historical figures. As interpreters' assumptions and interests change within the developing context of contemporary theorizing, their understanding of the structure of the "perennial" problems must shift. And with such changes come ever new possibilities of anachronistic misunderstandings and Procrustean readings which pare away all parts of the historical text that cannot be seen as relevant to or made coherent with the interpreter's sense of what the "real" perennial problems now are. Typically, unassimilable portions of text are attributed to confusions on the part of the author, who is saved from his own ineptness by the superior clarity of his interpreter. On the other hand, contextualists are subject to the opposite error of tying texts so tightly to their historical roots that it becomes a profound mystery how philosophy can do what it so typically does, make significant use of its past. If one could successfully argue, for example, "The Unimportance of the Great Political Texts" (the title of a conference paper by Quentin Skinner, which was the urtext of his now famous "Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas" [Historyand Theory 7 0969): 118-38]), one would render the history of political philosophy a series of confusions. As anyone knows who has followed the controversies arising from Skinner's work, deep philosophic problems lie at the heart of the textualist/contextualist debate. Of such complexities Steinberg is oblivious. The evil textualists are to be proved wrong about Hohbes and smitten at every opportunity. He steadily blasts their work ~o6 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 29:2 APRIL 1991 with immoderate characterizations such as "ludicrous," "dishonest scholarship," and "scholarly fantasy." And so for Steinberg, obsessed as he is with his crusade, it turns out that Hobbes is not really a political philosopher or theorist at all, but a polemicist, an ironist, an allegorist, who "was engaged in a polemical mode of reasoning in which he manipulates the literal sense of words to convey a variety of figurative meanings, all of which are associated with the English Civil War" (18). Thus, the state of nature is not part of an argument for the necessity of government, but an allegory of England's fall into civil war. Similarly, the rights of nature, the laws of nature, the social covenant, and Hobbes's scientific claims are all reduced to ideological maneuvers. The Hobbes that emerges from this vehemently overzealous book is merely a long-winded Anglican apologist who cannot be taken at his word, a constructor of "figurative puzzles" (25) requiring ideological decoding. Steinberg is indeed usefully sensitive to those places where Hobbes's texts have relevance to those he wished to counteract. Had he been more aware of the legitimate issues involved in the textualist/contextualist debate, Steinberg might have produced...

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