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Human Nature and the State in Hobbes WILLIS B. GLOVER I A FUNDAMENTALPROBLEMin the interpretation of Hobbes is the relation of his political philosophy to his mechanism. Hobbes himsel~ certainly claimed that his civil philosophy was an integral part of a system in which bodies and their motion are the ultimate, and indeed the only, reality. But his repeated assertion that one might proceed directly to civil philosophy on the basis of principles derived from introspective discovery of the nature and predicament of man raises the suspicion that the connection of political theory with mechanistic metaphysics is not so close in Hobbes as he would have us believe? The suspicion is strengthened by the content of the political philosophy itself and by the late date at which Hobbes tells us he first became interested in geometry and through this in mechanics. In a valuable study published in 1886 George Croom Robertson remarked of The Elements o] Law and De Cive, the first two of Hobbes's three major treatises on politics: The whole of his political doctrine.., has little appearance of having been thought out from the fundamental principles of his philosophy.... It doubtless had its main lines fixed when he was still a mere observer of men and manners, and not yet a mechanical philosopher. 2 This interpretation, which has been widely held, but also controverted, in the twentieth century, has received its most elaborate defense and exposition in Leo Strauss, The Political Philosop.hy o/Hobbes, a Despite disagreement with some of his conclusions, it is here assumed that Professor Strauss has successfully established the hiatus between the moral basis of Hobbes's civil philosophy and the mechanistic system within which he sought to develop it. More than that, the mechanistic system tended "to disguise the original motivation-nexus and thus to undermine Hobbes's political philosophy ". 4 Professor Strauss not only denies that the view of man which is funda1Thomas Hobbes, De Cive, ed. Sterling P. Lamprecht (New York: ca. 1949), p. 15; Concerning Body, The English Works oJ Thomas Hobbes, ed. Sir William Molesworth, 11 vols. (London: 1839-45), I, 74; Leviathan, ed. with an Introduction by Michael Oakeshott (Oxford: 1957), p. 6 (Introduction), pp. 465-466 (Review and Conclusion). Cf. Leslie Stephen, Hobbs (London : 1928; first published in 1904),pp. 112-113. George Croom Robertson, Hobbes (Edinburgh and London: 1886), p. 57. 8Leo Strauss, The Political Philosophy o] Hobbes (Chicago: 1952; first published at Oxford in 1936). See also John Laird, Hobbes (London: 1934), pp. 192, 195; and Howard Warrender, The Political Philosophy o] Hobbes (Oxford: 1957), p. 1. Dissenting views are presented by Michael Oakeshott in his Introduction to the Leviathan (Oxford: 1957), pp. xix-xxi; and Arthur Child, "Making and Knowing in Hobbes, Vico, and Dewey," University o] Cali]ornia Publications in Philosophy, XVI : 13 (1953), 280-282. 4Strauss, op. cir., pp. 167-170. [293] 294 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY mental to Hobbes's political theory originates in modern science; he is equally emphatic that it does not derive out of traditional philosophy. Both Dilthey's derivation out of Stoicism and Laird's out of medieval philosophy are specifically repudiated. 5 Strauss is inclined to stress the originality of Hobbes at this point and to interpret him as an early expression of a characteristically modern humanism. 6 But there is a strange lacuna in the whole discussion. Although Strauss does point out that Hobbes's emphasis on internal motivation as determining the moral significance of acts is "at one with Kant as with the Christian tradition," he never seriously considers the Biblical-Christian tradition as a possible source of those aspects of the ethics and anthropology of I-Iobbes in which he is most interested. 7 Professor Strauss's analysis of the moral grounds of Hobbes's political thought contains many penetrating insights of fundamental importance for any future study; but he himself recognizes that the definitive statement of the basic conceptions of Hobbes is yet to be made. He remarks in conclusion: If, then, only inconsistent naturalism is compatible with Hobbes's political philosophy, the consistent naturalism which Hobbes displays in his scientific writings cannot be the foundation of his political philosophy. The...

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