Hobbes (review)

152 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 27:1 JANUARY 1989 main outlines derived from Rudolph Agricola and ultimately Lorenzo Valla. In the process of systematization and institutionalization, however, the humanist program lost its "ethical underpinning" (193) . So while early humanism had been envisioned as preparation for a good life, late sixteenth-century humanities were merely seen as the means to get a good job. In order to support these "necessarily speculative" conclusions (17o), Grafton and Jardine provide some case studies. While extremely interesting and valuable in themselves, these concrete examples do not, unfortunately, do much to back up their point of view. For example, their perceptive analysis of Gabriel Harvey's reading habits (demonstrating that he studied Quintilian and Cicero via Ramus) is supposed to prove that arts education was the route to entering the "Tudor establishment ." But Harvey's aspirations to high government office were, they tell us, unsuccessful . So was his pragmatic assumption that the humanities provided a "ticket to preferment " (196), perhaps as deluded as Guarino's idealistic belief that humanism was the means to moral improvement. In their conclusion (rather oddly placed after three appendices), the authors discuss the concept of the "perfect orator" presented by Cicero in De oratore. They find many parallels between Roman and humanistic education, not least "the inevitable discrepancy between an educational goal and the curriculum designed to achieve it" (911). In fact, no pedagogic program has ever lived up to the hyperbolic claims made by its propagandists, nor would we realistically expect them to do so. While Grafton and Jardine are no doubt right to deflate the overblown praise of humanism, they go too far in the opposite direction, making it seem more deceptive and ineffectual than other sytems. Humanism may have provided an education that was no better than that of scholasticism, but it was certainly no worse. JILL KRAYE The Warburg Institute Tom Sorell. Hobbes. The Arguments of the Philosophers. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986. Pp. xii + a63. $34.5o. Sorell's book consists of ten chapters, which can be divided into two parts. Chapters 1 through 7 discuss Hobbes's views about science, construed broadly. Not only natural science in general, but logic, human cognition and psychology and their interrelationships are discussed. The second part consists of chapters 8 through ~o. Hobbes's views about egoism and happiness, sovereignty, and, finally, submission are discussed in successive chapters. Sorell begins his book by saying, "Hobbes's writings are dominated by a preoccupation with science." But is Hobbes more concerned with science than with history, politics, or religion? Did he worry more and think harder about motion or squaring the circle than the English Civil War and the nature of religion? Of course not. Sorell himself understands this, since, at the beginning of chapter 1, he puts Hobbes's worries about the English Civil War on a par with his interest in the new science. Hobbes was occupied, not preoccupied, with science,just as he was with many other things: he was BOOK REVIEWS 153 a Renaissance man. Sorell's overall approach to Hobbes's work, then, is defective, I think. However, Sorell is very good about aspects of Hobbes's work. For example, he has an insightful explanation of what Hobbes considers the nature of analyzing a state. It is not resolutive, in the sense of picking out essential elements and viewing how they function within the whole. Rather, when Hobbes analyzes the state, he dissolves or eliminates rights and duties and then views the consequences of doing so. Thus, it is Hobbes's purpose to "imagine away the rights and duties altogether, and consider men as if they had no ties of justice to one another, no obligations from covenants" (19). In short, Hobbes's analysis of the state is not an instance of the Paduan method of composition and resolution, according to Sorell. A major theme of chapter 2 is that for Hobbes the scientific method appropriate for natural science is quite different from the method appropriate for civil philosophy (94). There are three major differences: first, while natural science is concerned with saying how things are, civil philosophy is concerned with how things...