The Little Lettered Hobbes

The Little Lettered Hobbes Conal Condren Malcolm, Noel, ed., The Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes. Volume I: 1622-1659 (The Clarendon Edition of the Works of Thomas Hobbes), Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1994 (cloth), 1997 (paper); pp. 586; 28 line drawings; R.R.P. AUS$180.00, NZ$220.00 (cloth), AUS$49.95, NZ$64.95 (paper). Malcolm, Noel, ed., The Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes. Volume II: 1660-1679 (The Clarendon Edition of the Work of Thomas Hobbes), Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1994 (cloth), 1997 (paper); pp. 510; 28 line drawings; R.R.P. AUS$180.00, NZ$220.00 (cloth), AUS$49.95, NZ$64.95 (paper). There is a sense in which Thomas Hobbes is a modern invention. be sure, he was by no means as marginal in his own day as might be thought; but it was not really until the twentieth century that he was truly rehabilitated and his stature is greater now than ever. One of the leading inteUects of his age, Hobbes, as Michael Oakeshott once boldly claimed, is now accepted as probably the most significant political philosopher to have written in English.1 He has proved an 1 Introduction, Leviathan (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 19 PARERGON ns 15.1 (July 1997) 162 Conal Condren endlessly demanding and rewarding point of entry into a wide range of early modern experience. At the same time, he is a philosophical topos in his o w n right, constantly re-workable as expressive of m o d e m preoccupations, in fields as diverse as psychology, linguistic philosophy and rational choice theory. N o w the range and suggestive power of his printed works have been given considerable depth by the publication of his correspondence. N o other figure of similar standing could have waited proportionately as long for such a work to appear, even if through one of those ironies of history, it is under the auspices of a press carrying the title of one of Hobbes's least appreciative associates. These volumes are a tour de force ot scholarly care and are preliminary to a fuU modern biography for which they whet the appetite. The Correspondence comprises 210 letters (plus a fragment of one) to or from Hobbes between 1622 and 1679, gathered from archives in Britain, Holland and France. Along with the originals, the letters in French and Latin have all been lucidly translated. Noel Malcolm has maintained original spelling, erasures, alterations and punctuation and noted all signs of blots and blemishes. The point of this is to avoid errors which can creep into the processes of modernisation. For instance, one printed version of a letter to William Cavendish, August 1635, seeming to praise Walter Warner's capacity to explain optics, has actually inverted the point of the original unimproved letter (pp. lviti-lix). There is a biographical register of all the fifty-three correspondents, fuU scholarly apparatus, substantial introduction and a fine index. M a n y of the letters have been printed before in a diversity of often obscure coUections, but many have not; the final fragment (62A) turned up just before pubtication. The whole has been beautifully set out by the publishers and it is to their credit that from August 1997 a paperbound version wtil make this invaluable tool of seventeenth-century intellectual history more available. The deceptively complex notion of a letter provides a difficult criterion for inclusion. Letter writing had become a distinct genre by the seventeenth century. Allowing for topical digression and casualness of theme and development, it could be a form of essay; and The Little Lettered Hobbes 163 because of the formal requirement of a specific addressee there could be a sense of a lack of authorial control.2 The letter also permitted a spurious show of intimacy in what was crafted for the public world. More specifically, letter writing had become a vehicle for the volatile exchanges which were helping to distinguish natural philosophy in its more empirical and experimental forms from the sort of philosophy still found most happily in substantial tomes (pp. xxvi-xxvii).3 As Malcolm notes, however, Hobbes did not write letters mainly with an eye to publication, though some of his...