The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (121 page)

(1588–1679)
One of the greatest of all political philosophers, and certainly the most brilliant and profound ever to have written in English. Hobbes was born in Malmesbury, Wiltshire (he joked that ‘Fear and I were born twins’ because his mother went into labour out of shock at the news of the Spanish Armada) and rescued from an unpromising background by a far-sighted schoolmaster. Hobbes studied at Oxford, where he learnt a contempt for the philosophy of
Plato
and, especially,
Aristotle
that stayed for the whole of his life. He then joined the family of the Earls (later Dukes) of Devonshire as a tutor. He remained associated with the family until his death; he is buried at Ault Hucknall, in the parish of the Devonshire house at Hardwick. He had suggested that ‘This is the true philosopher's stone’ be inscribed on his tombstone, but settled for a more modest Latin inscription.
As a political theorist, Hobbes was a late starter. His first publication was a plain and muscular translation of Thucydides'
History of the Peloponnesian War
(1628). Hobbes chose Thucydides because he was ‘the most politick historiographer that ever writ’. Thucydides recounts the decline of
Athenian democracy
from the high ideals of Pericles to incompetence and
realpolitik
. Hobbes saw Thucydides as a warning to the parliamentarians who in 1628 were mounting the challenge to royal authority that was to culminate in the English Civil War. At this point in his life, Hobbes was an anti-democrat first and an absolutist second. Soon after this, Hobbes had an encounter which changed his life. In the words of Hobbes's friend and biographer John Aubrey , ‘Being in a gentleman's library…, Euclid's
Elements
lay open, and 'twas the 47
El. libri I
[which is Pythagoras' Theorem on the relationship between the sides of a right-angled triangle]. “By G—”, sayd he…, “this is impossible!” So he reads the demonstration of it, which referred him back to such a proposition; which proposition he read. That referred him back to another, which he also read.
Et sic deinceps
[and so on], that at last he was demonstratively convinced of that trueth. This made him in love with geometry’, which Hobbes would later describe as ‘the only science that it hath pleased God hitherto to bestow on mankind’. Geometry seemed to him to give certainty in science. Hobbes was fascinated by scientific method, which he studied in the work of Galileo (1564–1642), Sir Francis Bacon (1561–1626), René Descartes (1596–1650, of whom Hobbes said ‘Had he kept himself to Geometry he had been the best Geometer in the world but…his head did not lye for philosophy’), and Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655). Hobbes had briefly worked for Bacon as a young man, and visited Gassendi, Descartes, and Galileo when his patron toured Europe. Hobbes's resolutive-compositive method was influenced by Bacon and Descartes, but was closer to that of Galileo than either. It involved the following thought-experiment. Take something, such as civil society, apart. Examine its fundamental elements. Make a rational reconstruction of the necessary principles on which it works. Hobbes gave several expositions of his political theory, in
The Elements of Law
(written 1640, published 1650), in
De Cive
(
The Citizen
, 1642), and above all in
Leviathan
(1651). Here Hobbes sets out first what he takes to be axioms of human behaviour analogous to the geometrical axioms that underpin Euclid's system. Hobbes's axioms are that men are rational and desire above all their own preservation. Hence they are led by ‘a perpetuall and restlesse desire of Power after power’ to a condition of ‘warre…of every man, against every man’ in the
state of nature
. Realizing, however, that life in the state of nature would be ‘solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short’, rational men would agree to a social contract in which each conditionally hands over his arms to a third party if each other will do the same. The third party thus empowered is called the Sovereign, who has been authorized to do anything except order a subject to kill himself. Thus Hobbes derives absolutist conclusions from individualist premisses. Writing just after the English Civil War, Hobbes insists that one should not challenge authority, denouncing both the Puritan appeal to conscience against the State and the Catholic appeal to the Church against the State. But Hobbes's reasoning is ruthlessly unsentimental. Once Charles I has been overthrown by Oliver Cromwell , the argument for obedience to Charles immediately becomes an argument for obedience to Oliver. (Hobbes's philosophy does not tell the rational citizen when to make that leap.) It is absolutist first, and anti-democratic second. The Sovereign need not be one man. It may be an assembly, so long as it is an assembly with an odd number of members to avoid becoming stalemated (a typically Hobbesian touch). Thus Hobbes's approach is entirely compatible with a doctrine of
parliamentary sovereignty
. He repeats his arguments for undivided sovereignty in his later works
A Dialogue between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Laws of England
(written 1666, published 1681) and
Behemoth
(a history of the English Civil War, written 1668, published 1679). With the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, Hobbes had once again become a monarchist (and indeed was protected by Charles II); however, this simply followed consistently from his views on sovereignty.
Does Hobbes's central argument work? It is frequently objected that if people in the state of nature are as Hobbes says they are, they might sign the social contract but would immediately fail to carry out the promises they had made; whereas if people are not as he says they are, there is no need for the Sovereign to be given absolute power. It is still not clear whether Hobbes can be defended against this attack, but close reading of Hobbes's argument against the ‘Foole’ in chapter 15 of
Leviathan
suggests that he can.
Note that the State of Nature in Hobbes is not, as it perhaps is in both
Locke
and
Rousseau
, an attempt to describe an actual state of affairs. It is a rational reconstruction of what would happen were people the sort of rational maximizers Hobbes has them axiomatically as being. Hobbes tries to construct both physical science and social science on these common deductive principles. On both fronts, his work is generally regarded as a magnificent failure. Hobbes is the main precursor of the modern
rational choice
approach to politics, and many writers have tried to rework the central arguments of
Leviathan
in terms of
game theory
.
Many of the arguments of
Leviathan
have set the terms of subsequent debate. For instance, Hobbes' discussion of sovereignty and authorization (
Leviathan
, chapter 16) insists that sovereignty cannot be divided—the opinion that it can leads to civil war, in his view—and that subjects are the authors of everything the sovereign does as their agent. The first of these claims is generally accepted, the second is not. But what has emerged in recent years as ‘principal-agent theory’ may be regarded as a long footnote to Hobbes. How can principals (citizens) control their agents (governments)? Hobbes sets the question but does not provide a satisfactory answer. As Locke sarcastically observed, the argument that people would hand over their right of self-preservation to one man ‘is to think that Men are so foolish that they take care to avoid what Mischiefs may be done them by Pole-cats, or Foxes, but are content, nay think it Safety, to be devoured by Lions’.
Hobbes's religious position is much disputed. He was not a straightforward atheist or agnostic, although superstitious people blamed the Fire of London of 1666 on him. He was probably a deist, who believed that God was necessary, as a ‘first cause’, to explain how matter came into being. He was witheringly contemptuous of religion (‘For it is with the mysteries of our Religion, as with wholsome pills for the sick, which swallowed whole, have the vertue to cure; but chewed, are for the most part cast up again without effect’) but devotes half of
Leviathan
to theology, essentially in order to pre-empt all religious challenges to his doctrine of absolute sovereignty.
Hobbes is valuable not least because of the beautiful clarity and style of his language. He claimed that ‘True and False are attributes of Speech, not of Things. And where Speech is not, there is neither Truth nor Falsehood’. In this he is one of the fathers of analytical philosophy.

 
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(1864–1929)
Political philosopher, journalist, sociologist, and political activist in the field of labour relations and social policy. Hobhouse was a crucial figure in the emergence of ‘social liberalism’, which justified increased state intervention as necessary for the achievement of both social and individual goods.
Hobhouse argued, and defended through a series of physiological, anthropological, and historical studies, that the human mind was the central force in human development. The culmination of this unfolding teleological process, he maintained, lay in the deliberate construction of certain social and political forms (such as common property) representing the ethical principles of co-operation and rational humanitarianism. The relationship between the individual and society was a symbiotic one, and their ends were harmonized by the regulative activity of the state.
Like nineteenth-century liberals, Hobhouse asserted the moral primacy of individual autonomy, but maintained that it was an impoverished liberalism that failed to appreciate the social bases of the formation and flourishing of human personality. Consequently, and contra Locke and other liberal predecessors, the individual and his claims to rights and property cannot be said to be prior to society and its claims on the individual in the name of its members. While arguing that, properly understood, individual liberty and the social good were complementary, Hobhouse suspected any group that defended sectional interests at the expense of other members of the social body. The state in Hobhouse's work is therefore conceived as an intelligent director of social interaction, sustaining the conditions for individual development while simultaneously preserving the priority of common over particularistic goods (and entitled to coerce individuals to this end).
SW 

 
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