Civility and Sociability: Hobbes on Man and Citizen

Civility and Sociability: Hobbes on Man and Citizen STEPHEN H. DANIEL IN PRESENTING A HOBBESIAN THEORY OF MAN, interpreters often rely heavily on the descriptions of the state of nature Hobbes provides in De Cive and Leviathan. However, in the prefatory material of these works and in the body of other works such as De Homine, Hobbes warns that what he says about men in the state of nature must be understood as part of his treatment of men as citizens of ecclesiastical or civil commonwealths . He does not intend his De Cive or Leviathan descriptions of man in the state of nature to be his final theory of man and society. What Hobbes says about men in De Cive and Leviathan is limited to his treatment of them as citizens. In order to get a complete picture of Hobbes's view of man, we have to augment these works with works like De Homine; for it is not until Hobbes writes De Homine that the distinction between man as man and man as citizen becomes explicit. As Hobbes makes clear there, "what is to be understood about men insofar as they are men is not applicable insofar as they are citizens. ''j What Hobbes says about men as citizens is regulated by his methodic analysis of civil government, not by his analysis of the entirety of human existence. My remarks have a twofold thrust. First, they are intended to show why Hobbes chooses to concentrate his energies on the description of man as citizen rather than man as man. Secondly, they are intended to show how his description of man serves, for Hobbes, as a guide indicating how civil relationships among men can be improved. In short, I will suggest that Hobbes's theory of men as citizens is regulated by the ideal of attaining certainty through a science of human political behavior. Hobbes's theory of men as men, on the other hand, is intended to show that, even though human social behavior cannot be treated with scientific certainty, it can serve to regulate and guide the development of civil relationships. I. The Methodic Distinction of Man and Citizen At the beginning of his treatise on the citizen, De Cive, Hobbes notes that his method dictates that he begin his treatment of civil behavior with a consideration of how men are fit or are not fit to engage in An earlier version of this article was presented to the Alabama Philosophical Society in October, 1978. t De Homine, trans. Bernard Gert, Charles T. Wood, and T. S. K. Scott-Craig in Man and Citizen (New York: Doubleday and Co., 1972), p. 68. Other editions cited in this paper are: The English Works of Thomas Hobbes, ed. Sir William Molesworth, 11 vols. (London: John Bohn, 1839);Leviathan, ed. Michael Oakeshott (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1948); De Cive or the Citizen, ed. Sterling Lamprecht (New York: AppletonCentury -Crofts, 1949); The Elements of Law: Natural and Politic, ed. Ferdinand TOnnies, 2nd ed. (London: Frank Cass and Co., 1969). [209] 210 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY civil government. Beginning with what he calls "the very matter of civil government," Hobbes discusses man as apoIitical component of civiI government, not as an entity which precedes civil government. 2 Employing his method of resolution and composition , Hobbes first analyzes his topic (civil government) into its components, and then reunites them so that the recomposition of elements not only respects the original integrity of the topic but also provides for understanding the topic with certainty. Hobbes wants to distinguish between the discussions of men as men and men as citizens because he believes that a science of human political behavior is impossible apart from a consideration of human nature as it appears within the understanding of the structure of civil government. Once he completes this description of man as citizen by means of this analytic movement, Hobbes is then ready to indicate not only how men can form a civil government but also how they promote or detract from the foundation of a stable civil government. The result of Hobbes's discussion of men as components of civil government is his description of men in the state of...