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My intention throughout this book has been to pull Hobbes away from his scientific admirers and to move him too close for comfort to the antifoundational critics who disparage the aspirations attributed to him by his scientific admirers . Thoughtful antifoundational political theory is mindful not only of the unexamined presuppositions that guide and inform others, but acknowledges its own. Bringing Hobbes a bit closer will help with the latter, and so I will conclude by indicating where I think his example could inspire introspection. Along the way, I will also locate my reading of Hobbes in relation to the tradition within political theory that has tried to pull him from scientific admirers in the past. An Audience Denied In light of the previous chapter it is now possible to expand upon the idea of Leviathan as a gift, and how this gift bespoke Hobbes’s failed political efforts within the patronage system. In this specific context, Hobbes can be said to have failed because as a gift (like Newcastle’s grand parties for Charles I discussed in Chapter 8), Leviathan was something given with an eye to receiving something in return.1 We know of Hobbes’s efforts from Edward Hyde (the Earl of Clarendon), his adversary within the exiled Royalist community. His, and others’, accounts of the matter and the existence of a handwritten vellum copy indicate that Hobbes delivered Leviathan to his math student, Charles II.2 In the context of court culture, or in any relationship between persons ranked within the patronage economy of the seventeenth century, gifts were no simple affair. Hobbes has been associated with the beginnings of modern free-market forms of exchange. This is in no small part because Hobbes was a theorist of contracts , and not least because the social contract is formed between equals in 9 conclusion 202 p mortal gods the state of nature. He also uses the language of “price” in a way that some associate with the free market’s tendency to commodify its world. This focus may lead us to overlook the fact that Hobbes retained the extraordinarily subtle knowledge of the complexity of gift exchanges characteristic of earlier premarket, hierarchical ages.3 On the part of the gift-giver, there was an expectation that the item given be something worthy, both of the receiver and of the giver him- or herself. A bad gift was an insult. It was either too little from you, or not good enough for him or her. Daring to give a gift to the king was therefore all the more challenging. Decorum indicated that it had to be the best one could provide. A king commanded something magnificent. On the other hand, those whose gifts the king accepted (for bad gifts, or gifts from a bad source, could be refused) were rewarded. They were recognized as being capable of providing something praiseworthy. Moreover, within the logic of the gift, the receipt of a gift created an obligation on the part of the one who received it.4 Something had to be given in return. An absolutist sovereign, immune from the rules binding others, might be free to ignore the expectation of reciprocity, but decorum indicated that the great person’s return gift should exceed the original offering in the same way that the great person exceeded the person who initiated the exchange. Hobbes was well aware of how gifts raised questions of status. He noted, for example, how a disproportionate benefit from a person one considered an equal could be seen as a challenge. It could become a source of animosity, whereas a benefit exchanged with an equal or a recognized superior would be something different. As he tells us in Leviathan: “To have received from one to whom we think ourselves equal, greater benefits than there is hope to requite, disposeth to counterfeit love, but really secret hatred; and puts a man into the estate of a desperate debtor. . . . For benefits oblige, and obligation is thralldom; and unrequitable obligation, perpetual thralldom. . . . [However,] to receive benefits, though from an equal or inferior, as long as there is hope of requital, disposeth to love; for in the intention of the receiver, the obligation is of aid and service mutual.”5 A happy rivalry may come about, notes Hobbes, “the most noble and profitable contention possible,” when each side in this exchange wishes to exceed the other “in benefiting.” In such a circumstance, “the victor is pleased with his victory, and the other...

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