SOURCE: "The Motivation of Hobbes's Political Philosophy," in Thomas Hobbes in His Time, Ralph Ross, Herbert W. Schneider, Theodore Waldman, eds., University of Minnesota Press, 1974, pp. 8-30.

[In the following excerpt, Dewey examines Hobbes's political philosophy in historical context. Because the editors were unable to determine the exact date of this essay, Dewey's death date has been used.]

It is the object of this essay to place the political philosophy of Hobbes in its own historic context. The history of thought is peculiarly exposed to an illusion of perspective. Earlier doctrines are always getting shoved, as it were, nearer our own day. We are familiar with the intellectual struggles of our own time and are interested in them. It is accordingly natural to envisage earlier thought as part of the same movement or as its forerunner. We then forget that that earlier period had its own specific problems, and we proceed to assimilate its discussions to our present interest. Hobbes has been especially subject to this temporal displacement. For over a century the chief question in social philosophy has centered about the conflict between individual freedom and public and institutional control. The central position of the theory of sovereignty in Hobbes's thought has made it easy to translate his political philosophy into terms of this debate; the issue which was really acute in his day—the conflict of church and state—now lacks actuality for English and American writers at least.

I

To prove this statement as to the central issue of Hobbes's day would require more than the space allotted to this paper. In general, I can only refer to the voluminous political discussions of the seventeenth century and to the overt history of England during the time of the civil wars. Specifically, let me note the admirable studies of Mr. Figgis.¹ They are enough to relieve my statement from any charge of exaggeration. Some quotations from Mr. Figgis will, then, be used to introduce the discussion. He points out that the controversy regarding the divine right of kings belongs to a day when politics, by common consent, was a branch of theology, and goes on to say, "All men demanded some form of divine authority for any theory of government … Until the close of the seventeenth century, the atmosphere of the supporters of popular rights is as theological as that of the upholders of the Divine Right of Kings."² And again, "There is no more universal characteristic of the political thought of the seventeenth century than the notion of non-resistance to authority. 'To bring the people to obedience' is the object of writers of all schools. When resistance is preached, it is resistance to some authority regarded as subordinate. Nor is the resistance permitted at the pleasure or judgment of private individuals. It is allowed only as a form of obedience, as executing the commands of some superior and ultimate authority, God, or the Pope, and the Law."³

In other words, everybody worked upon an assumption of a supreme authority, of law as command by this authority, and duty as ultimately obedience. Not these conceptions, but rather the special content given them, mark off Hobbes. There was, of course, a party which opposed such centralization as Hobbes argued for, but the opposition was not in the name of the individual, but of something very different, the people.

So far as I can discover, the term people still had its meaning fixed by the traditional significance of Populus—a meaning very different from that of plebs or the French peuple. This notion, as defined, say, by Cicero, was a commonplace among the "civilians" and those trained in scholastic philosophy. In Cicero's words, the people is "not every gathering of men, assembled in any way whatsoever, but is the multitude associated by a common sense of justice and by a common interest." It is a universitas, not a societas, much less a mere aggregate of individuals. And the appeal of the upholders of popular against royal government was to the authority of this organized body, of which the Commons was frequently (but not always) taken to be the representative. The following words from Lawson, taken from An Examination of the Political Part of Mr. Hobbes, His Leviathan (1657) are worth quoting: "The liberty which the English have challenged and obtained with so much expense of blood is … that which is due unto us by the constitution of the State, Magna Charta, the Laws, and the Petition of Right. It is but the liberty of subjects, not sovereigns; when he hath said all he can, we are not willing to be slaves or subject ourselves to Kings as Absolute Lords…. By liberty Aristotle meant such a privilege as every subject might have in a free state … where it is to be noted that one and the same person who is a subject, and at the best but a Magistrate, hath a share in the sovereign power. Yet this he hath not as a single person, but as one person jointly with the whole body or major part at least of the people" (pp. 67-68). This correlativity of three things: the people, a society organized through laws and especially through the fundamental law, or constitution, and liberty is in marked opposition to Locke's conceptions of a natural right or authority found in the individual himself. It is not, I think, paradoxical to say that Locke derived this conception of a natural right belonging to the individual as such from Hobbes rather than from Hobbes's popular opponents.

It is noteworthy that Cumberland, the chief systematic opponent of Hobbes on rationalistic grounds, objects to the latter's political philosophy because "Hobbes's principles overthrow the Foundations of all Government"; they would not suffer any man to enter into civil society; they excite subjects to rebellion. In short, it is Hobbes's psychological and moral individualism rather than his theory of sovereignty to which objection is taken. The same is true of a much less effective writer, Tenison, in his Creed of Mr. Hobbes Examined (1670). He says that since Hobbes identifies the law of nature with the counsels of self-interest "the Fundamentals of your Policy are hay and stubble, and apter to set all things into blaze than to support government" (p. 156); and again, "Woe to all the Princes on earth, if this doctrine be true and becometh popular; if the multitude believe this, the Prince … can never be safe from the spears and barbed irons which their ambition and presumed interest will provide." Hobbes's principles, in their appeal to self-interest, are but "seeds of sedition" (pp. 170-171). That Hobbes himself was aware that, as matter of fact, a government is not likely to retain enough strength to secure obedience unless it has regard to the commonweal, will appear in the sequel—though naturally he never made this moral explicit.

Let us hear from Mr. Figgis again. "It is true that with the possible exception of Hobbes, all the political theorists up to the end of the seventeenth century either have religion as the basis of their system, or regard the defense or supremacy of some form of faith as their main object."⁴ Now Hobbes is precisely the exception which proves the rule. He is theological in motive and context in the sense that he is deliberately anti-theological. Along with his exclusive self-interest doctrine, it was his theory of a secular basis for sovereignty, not the doctrine of a supreme authority, which brought him into disrepute.⁵ His familiar title was atheist, so that even the royalists who might be supposed, on purely political grounds to welcome his support, found it necessary to disclaim him. Compare the following from a contemporary letter: "All honest men who are lovers of monarchy, are very glad that the King hath at last banisht his court that father of atheists Mr. Hobbes, who it is said hath rendered all the queen's court, and very many of the Duke of York's family, atheists."⁶ In the apologetic dedication of his Seven Philosophical Problems to the king after the Restoration in 1662, Hobbes in defending himself against this charge says of his Leviathan, "There is nothing in it against episcopacy. I can not therefore imagine what reason any episcopal man can have to speak of me, as I hear some of them do, as of an atheist or man of no religion, unless it be for making the authority of the church depend wholly upon the regal power." In the words which I have italicized Hobbes flaunts his ground of offense.

II

Postponing, for the moment, the important point in Hobbes, his attempt to secularize morals and politics, I take up his own sayings regarding the immediate occasion of his political writings. Croom Robertson and Tönnies have made it clear that the first of his writings⁷ dates from 1640 and is substantially what we have in his Human Nature and De Corpore Politico. In his Considerations upon the Reputation of T. Hobbes (1662) Hobbes says this little treatise "did set forth and demonstrate that the said power and rights were inseparably annexed to the sovereignty," and that the treatise was so much talked of, although it was not printed, that if the king had not dissolved Parliament, it would have brought him into danger of his life.⁸ There is here, indeed, no reference to just what the points were in the quarrel about the regal power, but his Behemoth; or the Long Parliament leaves no doubt. There he says that the Parliament of 1640 "desired the whole and absolute sovereignty…. For this was the design of the Presbyterian ministers, who taking themselves to be, by divine right, the only lawful governors of the Church, endeavored to bring the same form of government into the civil state. And as the spiritual laws were to be made by their synods, so the civil laws should be made by the House of Commons."⁹ And at the beginning of this work, in stating the causes of the corruption of the people which made the civil wars possible, he puts first the Presbyterians, second the Papists, and third the Independents.¹⁰

In the Considerations already referred to he says he "wrote and published his book De Cive, to the end that all nations which should hear what you and your Con-Coventanters were doing in England, might detest you." Not less significant is his letter, from Paris, in 1641 to the Earl of Devonshire. He says, "I am of the opinion that ministers ought to minister rather than govern; at least, that all Church government depends on the state, and authority of the kingdom, without which there can be no unity in the church. Your lordship may think this but a Fancy of Philosophy, but I am sure that Experience teacheth thus much, that the dispute for (the word is variously read preference and precedence) between the spiritual and civil power, has of late more than any other thing in the world been the cause of civil war."¹¹ Of the Leviathan, he says: "The cause of my writing that book was the consideration of what the ministers before, and in the beginning of the civil war, by their preaching and writing did contribute thereunto" (VII, 35). And it may be worth noting that considerably over one-half of the Leviathan is explicitly devoted to the bearing of religious and scriptural matters upon politics as they touch upon the relation of church and the civil power.

In his controversy with "the egregious professors of the mathematics in the University of Oxford" he remarks of the De Cive: "You know that the doctrine therein taught is generally received by all but the clergy, who think their interest concerned in being made subordinate to the civil power" (VII, 333). Again he expresses his surprise that some even of the episcopal clergy have attacked him, and thinks it can be explained only as a "relic still remaining of popish ambition, lurking in that seditious division and distinction between the power spiritual and civil" (IV, 429). Most significant of all, perhaps, are his remarks in the preface of the Philosophical Rudiments, where after saying that he does not "dispute the position of divines, except in those points which strip subjects of their obedience, and shake the foundations of civil government," he goes on to say, "These things I found most bitterly excepted against: That I made the civil powers too large, but this by ecclesiastical persons. That I had utterly taken away liberty of conscience, but this by sectaries. That I had set the princes above the laws, but this by lawyers" (II, xxii-xxiii). In no enumeration of the criticisms brought against his teachings does he mention the principle of absolute sovereignty, nor does he set his doctrine of sovereignty in antithesis to any doctrine except that of divided sovereignty—divided, that is, between the spiritual and temporal power. Locke's doctrine of a sovereignty limited by prior natural rights of those who were its subjects had neither provocation nor justification till after the revolution of 1688 called for some theoretical explanation.

One can hardly, of course, accept Hobbes as an unbiased witness to the way in which his doctrine was received. But Eachard's Mr. Hobbes's State of Nature Considered (1696) (a genuinely witty work) gives corroborative evidence that it was not the doctrine of sovereignty which aroused dissent, for he repeatedly states that that was old matter dressed in new form. "Your book called Dominion chiefly consists of such things as have been said these thousands of years." And again, "it might easily be shown how all the rest (so much as is true) is the very same with the old plain Of the Dunstable stuff which commonly occurs in those who treated of Policy and Morality." Aside from the aspersion on human nature contained in Hobbes's doctrine of self-interest, what Eachard objects to is Hobbes's "affected garbs of speech, starched mathematical method, counterfeit appearances of novelty and singularity."¹² How habitually the ideas of the evils of divided sovereignty were in Hobbes's mind appears from a note in the Rudiments. "There are certain doctrines wherewith subjects being tainted, they verily believe that obedience may be refused to the city, and that by right they may, nay, ought, to oppose and fight against chief princes and dignitaries. Such are those which, whether directly and openly, or more obscurely and by consequence, require obedience to be given to others besides them to whom the supreme authority is committed. I deny not that, but this reflects on that power which many, living under other government, ascribe to the chief head of the Church of Rome, and also on that which elsewhere, out of that Church, bishops require in theirs to be given to them; and last of all, on that liberty which the lower sort of citizens, under pretence of religion, do challenge to themselves. For what civil war was there ever in the Christian world, which did not either grow from, or was nourished by this root?" (II, 79n)

As an argumentum ad bominem in his own time, it is impossible to overestimate the force of his argument. All Protestants united in declaiming against the claim of the Roman Church to interfere in matters temporal. Yet some of the episcopalian bishops declared that in matters of religious actions, such as rites, appointments, preferments, the church represented God, not man, and had a superior right to obedience. The Presbyterians in general were committed to a dual theory of authority and obedience. Yet all of these ecclesiastical institutions united in reprimanding the fifth monarchy men, Anabaptists, Levellers, etc., who claimed that their personal conscience as enlightened by the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit was the ultimate source of knowledge of divine law, and hence the rule for obedience. Luther, Calvin, English bishop, and Scotch presbyter alike attacked this doctrine as anarchic and immoral. Hobbes, in effect, points out that all churches are in the same anarchic class, for they all appeal to something other than publicly instituted and proclaimed law.

In connection with the sectaries, it is interesting to note that they expressly cried out for "natural rights derived from Adam and right reason." According to this view, "all men are by nature the sons of Adam, and from him have derived a natural propriety (property), right, and freedom…. By natural birth all men are equally free and alike born to like propriety, liberty, and freedom; and as we are delivered of God by the hand of nature into this world, every one with a natural innate freedom and propriety, even so we are to live, every one equally and alike, to enjoy his birthright and privilege."¹³ That this anarchic doctrine of the Levellers was wrought by Locke into a stable foundation for a reasonably conservative Whig doctrine, testifies to his altered background and outlook. There is no evidence that Hobbes was influenced by the doctrine, but it is more than a coincidence that he makes a precisely similar notion of natural rights the origin of the war of all upon all, and the basis of demand for absolute sovereignty. If he had this notion in mind in his picture of the state of nature, it adds a piquant irony to his sketch, as well as to his repeated assertions that there was no difference of principle between the sectaries' appeal to the court of private judgment and the doctrines of Papist, Presbyterian, and of such Episcopalians as did not recognize that the authority of the Established Church was by grace of the political sovereign and not by divine right.

Lawson was one of the better tempered and more moderate opponents of royal sovereignty, an episcopalian rector with obvious sympathies with Cromwell. He admits as a "certain truth" that sovereignty is above all civil law, but asserts the supreme legislator "is subject to the superior will of God"—which, of course, was Hobbes's own doctrine. "All the sovereignty's power of making laws, judgments, etc., are from God…. Men may give their consent that such a man or such a company of men shall reign, but the power is from God, not them." From this doctrine, it is not a long step to his statement that the true believer in God "may, must within himself, even of laws, so far as they are a rule, and bind him, enquire, examine, and determine whether they are good or evil. Otherwise, he can perform only a blind obedience even to the best; and if he conform unto the unjust, he in obeying man disobeys God, which no good man will do. Romans, xii, 14-15." Subsequently he adds, "Nor does this doctrine anyways prejudice the civil power, nor encourage any man to disobedience and violation of the civil laws, if they be just and good as they ought to be; and the subject hath not only liberty, but a command to examine the laws of his sovereign, and judge within himself and for himself, whether they be not contrary to the laws of God."¹⁴ Yet Lawson joins in the common animadversions upon the leveling sectaries. Moreover, Lawson deplores the disorder and divisions of the time. "Our form of government is confounded by the different opinions of common lawyers, civilians, and divines who agree neither with one another, nor amongst themselves." Nor can the history of England be appealed to as an umpire—as many were doing, for as Lawson, clearer-headed than most, perceived, it shows "only as matter of fact how sometimes the King, Counties, and Barons, sometimes the Commons were predominant and ascendant." And he concludes, "Yet for all this, a free parliament of just, wise, and good men might rectify all this, and unite the supreme power so miserably divided to the hazard of the state." ¹⁵ In a situation where a writer sees that the great need is for a unified authority or sovereignty, and yet argues in support of that very principle of private judging of laws which had been a large factor in bringing about the situation he deplores, Hobbes's case almost states itself.

III

A few words are now to be said about another motif in Hobbes's ardent assertion of a unified sovereignty. The part of his doctrine which was not directed against the claim of the churches to obedience was aimed at the claim of the authority of Law set up by the lawyers. To go fully into this matter would require a summary of certain phases of parliamentary history in England, beginning in the time of Elizabeth and becoming highly acute in the reign of James. On the one side were the lawyers and judges, and on the other were the claims of the legislature representing statute law, and of the chancellor representing equity. The king then largely dominated Parliament, and this made the party of the judges against Parliament essentially the popular party of later controversy. In the earlier words of Aristotle, and the later words of the Constitution of Massachusetts, they proclaimed a government "which was a government of laws, not of men."¹⁶

Consider, for example, such a statement as this of John Milton, arguing against Salmasius: "Power was therefore given to a king by the people, that he might see by the authority committed to him that nothing be done against law, and that he keep our laws and not impose upon us his own. Therefore, there is no regal power but in the courts of the kingdom and by them." And Harrington's constant contention is that only a commonwealth is a government of laws, since law must proceed from will, and will be moved by interest; and only in a commonwealth is the whole will and the whole interest expressed. In a monarchy or oligarchy, the laws are made in the interest of a few, so that what exists is a government of men. Harrington, however, is an innovator in connecting law with legislation rather than with the courts. "Your lawyers, advising you to fit your governments to their laws, are no more to be regarded than your tailor if he should desire you to fit your body to his doublet"—another point of sympathy between him and Hobbes.

It was lawyer's law then which was usually meant—the law of courts, not of legislation. As Figgis says, speaking of the reliance of the popular party upon government by law, "Nor is it of statute law that men are thinking; but of the common law … which possesses that mysterious sanctity of prescription which no legislator can bestow. The common law is pictured invested with a halo of dignity, peculiar to the embodiment of deepest principles and to the highest expression of human reason and of the law of nature implanted by God in the heart of man. As yet men are not clear that an Act of Parliament can do more than declare the common law."¹⁷ It is with this doctrine in mind that Hobbes is so insistent that the sovereign is absolved from all law save the moral law—which, as we shall see later, is for him the law of an enlightened hedonism. But Hobbes is not just begging the question. Bacon before him had pointed out many of the defects of common law and the need of codification and systematized revision. The demand for legislative activity was constantly increasing; the Long Parliament in effect restated the common law. Courts of equity had been obliged to assume an extensive activity, and it is not unimportant that the chancellor's court was essentially a royal court and followed the law "of reason," the law "of nature," the law of conscience and of God. Hobbes's essential rationalism was shocked at calling anything law which expressed, as did the common law, merely custom and precedent (III, 91).

Hobbes does away at one sweep with any alleged distinction between written and unwritten law. All law is written, for written means published. And as published, it proceeds only from him (or them) who has authority—power to require obedience. And that, of course, is the sovereign. "Custom of itself maketh no laws. Nevertheless, when a sentence has once been given, by them that judge by their natural reason, … it may attain to the vigor of a law … because the sovereign power is supposed tacitly to have approved such sentence for right…. In like manner those laws that go under the title of responsa prudentum, the opinions of lawyers, are not, therefore, laws because responsa prudentum, but because they are admitted by the sovereign" (IV, 227).¹⁸

But Hobbes is most explicit in a work, too infrequently made use of by historians of philosophy, entitled A Dialogue between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Law of England (VI). This dialogue opens with an attempt to prove that it is the king's reason which is the soul even of the common law. He quotes Coke's saying (and it is to be recalled that Coke had been on the lawyers' side against King James) that law is reason, although an artificial reason, got by long study and observation; such a perfection of reason, however, that "if all the reason that is dispersed into so many several heads were united into one, yet could he not make such a law as the law of England is, because by many successions of ages it hath been fined and refined by an infinite number of grave and learned men." As against this view, Hobbes inserts his usual caveat; it was not the succession of lawyers or judges that made the law, but the succession of kings who created the judges and who enforced the decisions. "The king's reason, when it is publicly upon advice and deliberation declared, is that anima legis, and that summa ratio, and that equity … which is all that is the law of England." And even more emphatically: "There is not amongst men a universal reason agreed upon in any nation, besides the reason of him that hath the sovereign power. Yet though his reason be but the reason of one man, yet it is set up to supply the place of that universal reason which is expounded to us by our Saviour in the Gospel; and consequently our King is to us the legislator both of statute law and of common law" (VI, 14 and 22).¹⁹ Later he suggests that common law and its lawyers are the chief source of excessive litigation "on account of the variety and repugnancy of judgments of common law," and because "lawyers seek not for their judgments in their own breasts, but in the precedents of former judgments," and also in the liberty they have to scan verbal technicalities (VI, 45). Still later his aversion to reference to mere custom and precedent becomes more marked, and he even goes so far as to say that all courts are courts of equity in principle if not in name (VI, 63)—than which it would be hard to find a doctrine more obnoxious to lawyers—all of which throws light upon the opening sentence of his book, that the study of law is less rational than the study of mathematics, and possibly suggests a slight irony in his reference to the reason of kings as the source of the supreme rationality of common law claimed for it by such a writer as Coke.

IV

When I first became aware of these specific empirical sources for Hobbes's political philosophy, I was inclined to suppose that he had made the latter a necessary part of a deductive system from that inordinate love of formal system to which philosophers are given. And the closing words of the Leviathan seem to bear out the impression, when, as if in a relieved tone, he says that having brought to an end his discourse on Civil and Ecclesiastical Government "occasioned by the disorders of the present time," he is now free to "return to my interrupted speculation of bodies natural." Croom Robertson, no mean judge where Hobbes is in question, says "the whole of his political doctrine … has little appearance of having been thought out from the fundamental principles of his philosophy. Though connected with an express doctrine of human nature, it doubtless had its main lines fixed when he was still an observer of men and nature, and not yet a mechanical philosopher. In other words, his political theory is explicable mainly from his personal disposition, timorous and worldly, out of sympathy with all the aspirations of his time."²⁰

Further study led me, however, to a different position, to the position that Hobbes was satisfied that (even if his ideas had arisen in his own experience) he had given them a strict scientific or rational form. And while this point is of no great importance as merely an item in Hobbes's biography, it is, I think, of fundamental importance in the theme that Hobbes's great work was in freeing, once for all, morals and politics from subservience to divinity and making them a branch of natural science. So I offer no apology for setting forth the evidence that Hobbes himself believed in the scientific status of his politics.

As a point of departure, take the following passage from the preface to his Rudiments (the original De Cive). "I was studying philosophy for my mind's sake and I had gathered together its first elements in all kinds, and having digested them into three sections by degrees, I had thought to have written them, so as in the first I would have treated of body … ; in the second of man … ; in the third of civil government and the duties of subjects…. It so happened in the interim, that my country, some few years before the civil war did rage, was boiling hot with questions regarding the rights of dominion and the obedience due from subjects; and was the cause which, all those other matters deferred, ripened and plucked from me this third part" (II, xix-xx).²¹ And in a letter written in 1646 to Mersenne, speaking of his delay in completing his first part, namely, that on Body, he says that laziness is in part the cause, but chiefly because he has not yet been able to satisfy himself in the parts relating to the senses, and adds, "for that which I hope I have done in moral doctrine, that I am anxious to do in First Philosophy and in Physics."²²

More specifically we have the claims he puts forth for his De Cive (claims which he continued to put forth even after he was aware that they exposed him to the accusation of actuation by egregious vanity) that it was the first treatise to put morals and politics on a scientific basis. Molesworth quotes from an unpublished manuscript on Optics the following concluding paragraph. "If it be found to be true doctrine, I shall deserve the reputation of having been the first to lay the grounds of two sciences: this of Optiques, the most curious, and the other of natural justice, which I have done in my books De Cive, the most profitable of all other." In the epistle dedicatory to his Elements of Philosophy, in which he executed his plan to give a systematic treatment of his entire philosophy, he says that geometrical science dates from antiquity; natural philosophy from Galileo, while "civil philosophy is much younger, being no older (I say it provoked, and that my detractors may know how little they have wrought upon me) than my own book De Cive " (I, ix).

The matter becomes one of more than biographical importance when we recall Hobbes's conception of science or demonstrative knowledge and the importance attached by him to science. Science is reasoning from cause to effect, and hence universal and certain, while empirical knowledge, or prudence, reasons from effect to cause, and is but probable and hypothetical. The end or object of science is power, control, for if we know the generation or cause of things, we have it in our power to determine them. The question of the scientific character of morals and politics is, then, a question of the possibility of enduring social security and safety—"peace." Unless men attained to first principles from which any one could proceed, as by mathematical reasoning, to determinate conclusions, politics would remain still a matter of opinion, uncertainty, controversy, in short, of war. It is in this light that we have to understand his assertion that geometry, physics, and morals form one science, as the "British, the Atlantic, and the Indian seas … do altogether make up the ocean" (II, iv). Strictly speaking, moreover, natural philosophy cannot be a science, for in it we must, perforce, reason from effects to causes, and thus arrive only at what "may be." "The science of every subject is derived from a precognition of the causes, generation, and construction of the same; and consequently where the causes are known, there is place for demonstration…. Geometry, therefore, is demon strable, for the lines and figures from which we reason are drawn and described by ourselves; and civil philosophy is demonstrable, because we make the commonwealth ourselves" (VII, 184).²³

Moreover, the situation of the times made Hobbes's belief, whether it were rightly grounded or not, of more than academic import. We have already seen the extent to which private and variable opinion was to him the source of the ills from which the state suffered. Scientific demonstration is the sole alternative to the continuation of the troubled regime of opinion. Hobbes is in the somewhat paradoxical opinion of holding that while all order proceeds from the unquestioned authority of the sovereign, the permanent and settled institution of sovereignty itself depends upon a recognition of the scientific truths of morals and politics as set forth by him. While his controversies with Wallis and Ward doubtless gave asperity to his attacks on the universities, there is no questioning the fact that they were sincerely actuated by the belief that the doctrines of morals and politics therein taught were largely responsible for the evils of the time. They are to England as the Wooden Horse to Troy; the core of rebellions; the source of opinions contrary to the peace of mankind; the shops and operatories of the clergy; the fountains of civil and moral doctrine.²⁴ Hobbes was equally sincere in believing that the new science of morals and politics ought to be taught in the universities, and that such inculcation was a precondition of lasting social security.²⁵ If this nation was "very lately an anarchy and a dissolute multitude of men, doing every one what his own reason or imprinted light suggested" (IV, 287), a considerable part of the remedy is to be found in the control, in the future, of instruction by the civil authority. "Because opinions, which are gotten by education and in length of time are made habitual, can not be taken away by force and upon the sudden; they must, therefore, be taken away also by time and education." And then he goes on, as usual, to charge the universities with having been the corrupters of opinion, and to add that if the true doctrine of a body politic and of law were taught to young men "whose minds are as white paper," they would teach it to the people even more sedulously than false doctrine is now taught (IV, 219). It is in this context, then, that we have to take Hobbes's famous contention that the practical utility of moral science is to be found more in what men have suffered from its absence than in what they have gained by its presence, and his contention that he is the first in morals to "reduce the doctrine to the rules and infallibility of reason."²⁶

V

Such are some of the grounds for thinking that the final importance of Hobbes's political philosophy is found in its attempt to make the subject secular and scientific. Not merely in external matters was he motivated by the conflict of civil and ecclesiastic power, but even more in intellectual aim and method. We fail to get the full force of Hobbes's conception of sovereignty until we see that to Hobbes the logical alternative is setting up the private opinions of individuals and groups of individuals as the rule of public acts—a method whose logical inconsistency has division and war for its practical counterpart.

There exists, indeed, a paradox in Hobbes. On one hand, we have the doctrine of the sovereign's arbitrary institution of duties, and rights and wrong. On the other, we have his doctrine of the strictly scientific character of morals and politics. In view of the seeming contradiction it is little wonder that his opponents—notably Cudworth and his school—passed over the latter strain and assumed that the whole content of Hobbes consisted in an assertion of the purely arbitrary character of all moral distinctions. Nevertheless Cudworth's view is thoroughly one-sided. Cumberland, not Cudworth, was Hobbes's most intelligent opponent, and in his De Legibus Naturae we find an attempt to meet Hobbes on his own ground in a way which reveals the positive influence of Hobbes's conception of morals as a branch of natural science. In speaking of the natural light and innate ideas of the Platonizers, he remarks scornfully, "I have not been so happy as to learn the laws of nature in so short a way." He argues for an order of logical precedence in moral laws from the analogy of the laws of motion in natural science. He expressly points out that other writers, in reasoning from approved sentiments and the common consent of mankind (e.g., Grotius and his followers), had reasoned from effects to causes only, and in his search for laws of nature commits himself to the essentially Hobbesian conception that they are "the foundations of all moral and civil knowledge" in such a way as to compel the use of a deductive method. He differs radically as to substance of the fundamental axioms, but agrees as to the form of morals as a science. He "abstains" from theological matters, because he will prove the laws of nature only from reason and experience. He believes that "the foundations of piety and moral philosophy are not shaken, but strengthened by Mathematics and the Natural Philosophy" that depends thereon. In making benevolence, or regard for the happiness of all, his fundamental principle, instead of egoistic regard for private happiness, the influence of Hobbes may be seen in the fact that he, too, starts from Power, but argues that the effective power of man in willing his own happiness is limited to willing it along with the happiness of others. And since Hobbes had held that the desire for purely personal good contradicts itself when acted upon, the transformation upon the basis of Power of Hobbes's axiom of self-love into one of benevolence was not difficult.

VI

I do not mean, however, that Hobbes is free from the paradox mentioned. On the contrary, his position is precisely the paradox of attempting to derive by mathematical reasoning the authority of the sovereign to settle arbitrarily all matters of right and wrong, justice and injury, from rational, universal axioms regarding the nature of good and evil. His method of dealing with the paradox takes us to the meaning given by him to natural law, and to his conception of the aim and purpose, or "offices" of sovereignty. Both sides of the matter are worth attention because they reveal a thoroughgoing utilitarianism.

The mistake of so many of Hobbes's critics in thinking that he identified morals with the commands of the sovereign because he identified justice and injustice, right and wrong, with the latter, arises from overlooking the fundamental distinctions which Hobbes draws between good and right, and between intention and act—or forum internum and forum externum. Good is simply, to Hobbes, that which pleaseth a man; that which is agreeable to him—which, in turn, means "whatsoever is the object of any man's appetite or desire." It follows, of course, that since men differ in constitution and circumstance from one another, conflict or the state of war ensues; from difference of constitution, because what one man calls good another man finds evil; from circumstance, because when two men find the same object good it ofttimes cannot be shared or mutually possessed. But besides the good of passion or desire of appetite, which is immediately determined by the momentary desire, whatever that may be, there is the good of reason, or rational good. To Hobbes, of course, the rational good does not differ from the sensible good in kind or quality; it is as much the pleasing as is the good of appetite. But it differs in being the object of a survey which includes time, instead of being a momentary estimate. For since finding good in present appetite brings a man into conflict with others, it puts his life and possessions in jeopardy; in seeking present pleasure he exposes himself to future evils "which by strict consequence do adhere to the present good," or even to destruction of life. Hence, when a man is in a "quiet mind" he sees the good of present passion to be evil, and is capable of perceiving that his true good lies in a condition of concord or agreement with others—in peace which preserves his body and institutes secure property. "They, therefore, who could not agree concerning a present, do agree concerning a future good; which indeed is a work of reason; for things present are obvious to the sense, things to come to our reason only" (II, 44, 47-48).²⁷

Moral laws, ²⁸ laws of nature, are then equivalent to the counsels or precepts of prudence, that is to say, of judgment as to the proper means for attaining the end of a future enduring happiness. The rules of good and evil are the procedures which any man, not perturbed by immediate passion, would perceive to be conducive to his future happiness. Let it be remembered that according to Hobbes all reason (in matters natural as well as moral) is simply a sequence of thoughts directed toward an end which regulates the sequence. Hobbes, then, really believes in laws (or at least counsels) of morality which in their origin are wholly independent of the commands of the sovereign. He ascribes to these all the eulogistic predicates which were scholastically current regarding the laws of nature: they are eternal, immutable, divine, etc. Right reason is the "act of reasoning, that is, the true and peculiar ratiocination of every man concerning those actions of his which may redound to the damage or benefit of his neighbors…. I call it true, that is, concluding from true principles rightly framed, because that the whole breach of the laws of nature consists in the false reasoning, or rather folly of those men who see not those duties they are necessarily to perform towards others in order to their own conservation" (II, 16n).²⁹

It is not easy to estimate just how sincerely meant were all of Hobbes's professions of piety. I think it may safely be assumed, however, that whether or no he believed in a theological God, he did believe that reasoning was divine, and that there is a sincere piety toward reason in his regarding rational precepts as divine; and that accordingly he believed in some genuine sense that God was reason. There is something besides accommodation in the following language: "Finally, there is no law of natural reason that can be against the law divine: for God Almighty hath given reason to man to be a light unto him. And I hope it is no impiety to think that God Almighty will require a strict account thereof at the day of judgment, as of the instructions which we were to follow in our peregrinations here, notwithstanding the opposition and affronts of supernaturalists nowadays to rational and moral conversation" (IV, 116).

One of the necessary conclusions of such ratiocination on future well-being and conservation is the conclusion that it is not safe for any individual to act upon the moral law—which in effect is not to do anything to another which one would not have him do unto us—until he has some guarantee that others will do likewise. A person so acting renders himself exposed to evil from others. Hence suspicion and mistrust, even on the part of one disposed to regard the happiness of others, are inevitable where there is no power or authority which can threaten the evilly minded with such future pains as to give assurance as to their conduct. Hence, it is one of the laws of sound reasoning to enter into a civil state, or to institute a sovereign authority with power to threaten evil doers with evils in return, to such extent as to influence their conduct.³⁰

Hence it follows in Hobbes, quite as much as with any of the upholders of the popular theory, that the end or purpose of the state is the "common good." He but insists upon the correlativity of this good with implicit obedience to the commands of a protecting power. To set up any private judgment about the acts by which the common good is to be attained is to weaken the protective power, and thereby to introduce insecurity, mutual fear, and discord—all negations to the attaining of that happiness for whose sake the state was instituted. No matter how arbitrary the sovereign's acts, the state is at least better than the anarchy where private judgments as to good (that is to say, immediate appetite and passion) reign.

But there are other checks. The sovereign is himself under the law of nature: that is to say, he is subject to the "sanctions" of utility. As a reasoning creature, he will perceive that his interests as sovereign coincide with the prosperity of the subjects. "The profit of the sovereign and the subject goeth always together" (IV, 164). Hobbes uniformly lays down certain precepts which bind the sovereign's conscience. In his Leviathan he develops at length the "Offices of the sovereign." They include equality of taxes, public charity, prevention of idleness, sumptuary laws, equality of justice to all, and the care of instruction. In his earliest writing he mentions all these, and also lays emphasis upon the duty of the civil authority to foster husbandry, fishing, navigation, and the mechanical arts.³¹ In his discussion of the need that the state take charge of education, he clearly recognizes the limitations placed upon power to control action through positive commands appealing to fear. Allegiance to the state is not a matter of positive command, but of moral obligation. "A civil law that shall forbid rebellion (and such is all resistance to the essential rights of the sovereignty) is not, as a civil law, any obligation but by virtue only of the law of nature that forbiddeth the violation of faith." Hence, its ground has to be diligently and truly taught; it cannot "be maintained by any civil law, or terror of legal punishment" (III, 323-324).³²

Moreover, there are natural, or utilitarian, checks to the exercise of the power of sovereignty. In the first place, it cannot affect, and (except through education) is not intended to affect inner inclinations or desires, but only acts—which are external. There is always a distinction between the just man and a just act; the former is one who means to obey the law or to act justly to others, even if by infirmity of power or by reason of circumstance he fail to do so. Even more significant is the check upon despotic action on the part of sovereignty in the mere fact that all acts cannot be commanded. "It is necessary that there be infinite cases which are neither commanded nor prohibited, but every man may either do or not do them as he lists himself…. As water, inclosed on all hands with banks, stands still and corrupts; having no bounds it spreads too largely, and the more passages it finds the more freely it takes its current; so subjects, if they might do nothing without the commands of the law, would grow dull and unwieldy; if all, they would be dispersed; and the more that is left undetermined by the laws, the more liberty they enjoy. Both extremes are faulty; for laws were not invented to take away, but to direct men's actions; even as nature ordained the banks not to stay, but to guide the course of the stream" (II, 178).³³ The sovereign who attempts too much dictation will provoke rebellion.

This summary account should make it clear that Hobbes deduces the need, the purpose, and the limits of sovereign power from his rationalistic, or utilitarian, premises. Undoubtedly a certain arbitrariness of action on the part of the sovereign is made possible. It is part of the price paid, the cost assumed, in behalf of an infinitely greater return of good. Right and wrong are nothing but what the sovereign commands, but these commands are the means indispensable to procuring good, and hence have a moral or rational sanction and object. To use Hobbes's own words: "In sum all actions and habits are to be esteemed good or evil by their causes and usefulness in reference to the commonwealth" (VI, 220). No franker or more thoroughgoing social utilitarianism could be found.

When we seek for Hobbes's natural historical associates, we should turn not to the upholders of political absolutism for its own sake, but to Jeremy Bentham. They are one in opposition to private opinion, intuition, and ipse dixitism as sources of the rules of moral action; they are one in desire to place morals and politics upon a scientific basis; they are one in emphasis upon control of present and private good by reference to future and general good, good being understood by both as pleasure. Their unlikenesses flow from the divergent historic settings in which their ideas were generated. To Hobbes the foe was ecclesiastic interests, the source of divided allegiance and of the assumption of a right of private judgment over against a public law of right and wrong. His remedy was a centralized administrative state. Bentham found the foe in vested economic interests which set private or class happiness above the general good, and which manipulated the machinery of the state in behalf of private advantage. His remedy was a democratizing of government to be obtained by a mass participation in it of individuals, accompanied by a widening of personal initiative in the choice and pursuit of happiness to the maximum possible limit. To both, however, moral science was one with political science, and was not a theoretical luxury, but a social necessity. It was the common fate of both to suffer from a false psychology, from an inadequate conception of human nature. But both are protagonists of a science of a human nature operating through an art of social control in behalf of a common good. Progress beyond them comes not from a hostile attitude to these conceptions, but from an improved knowledge of human nature.

Notes

¹The Divine Right of Kings and From Gerson to Grotius.

²Divine Right of Kings, p. 11.

³Ibid., p. 221. Technically, discussions centered on the nature of Jus. The ambiguity of Jus, meaning both command and law on one side, and right, on the other side, has been frequently noted. At this time, it was not so much ambiguity which existed as two sides of one notion. Jus is primarily authority, and secondarily authorization, depending, of course, upon authority.

⁴Ibid., p. 219.

⁵ See, for example, the quotations from royalist writers, Falkner and Filmer, in ibid., pp. 388-389.

⁶ Quoted by Tönnies in Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie (1890), p. 223.

⁷ Now published (from manuscript) by Tönnies under the title of The Elements of Law Natural and Politic (London, 1889).

⁸ William Molesworth, ed., The English Works of Thomas Hobbes IV (London, 1839; first, published, 1655), 414. References to the Works will hereafter be cited in the text by volume and page numbers.

⁹ Tönnies's edition, p. 75. See also pp. 63, 57, 49, 95, 172, etc.

¹⁰Ibid., pp. 2-3.

¹¹ Quoted by Tönnies in Archiv, XVII, 302. See also Works, IV, 407.

¹² Harrington, on the contrary, who was a genuinely democratic writer with an interest which was modern, economic, and secular, in differing radically from Hobbes as to respective merits of royal and popular government, says, "In most other things I believe Mr. Hobbes is, and in future ages will be, accounted the best writer in this day in the world."

¹³ Quoted from Ritchie, Natural Rights, p. 9. He quotes from the preface of Firth to the Clarke Papers.

¹⁴ Lawson, An Examination of the Political Part of Mr. Hobbes, His Leviathan, pp. 96, 123, 127. When one considers the prevalence of this idea of the duty of private judgment, one is almost inclined to align Hobbes's criticism of it with that passed by Auguste Comte upon Protestantism.

¹⁵Ibid., pp. 133-134. Italics mine.

¹⁶ As Hobbes saw, this doctrine is either a negation of sovereignty or works out practically (as it has done so largely in this country) in placing the judges in the seat of sovereignty—a "government of lawyers, not of men," to paraphrase the old saying. Locke comes close to this legal position, and historically is half way between Hobbes's location of sovereignty and Rousseau's ascription of sovereignty to the legislative body alone.

¹⁷ Figgis, Divine Right of Kings, p. 229. See his note for references in support of the text.

¹⁸ See also Works, VI, 194-195.

¹⁹ In the Leviathan (Works, III, 256), he criticizes this definition of Coke's on the ground that long study only increases error unless the foundations are true and agreed upon.

²⁰Hobbes (London, 1886), p. 57.

²¹ See also Works, II, xxii, in which he says that there is only one point not demonstrated in the whole book—namely, the superior commodiousness of monarchy; for, as we must remember, Hobbes always means mathematical method by demonstration.

²² Tönnies, Archiv, p. 69.

²³ I think that there is more than a shadowy reminiscence of Hobbes in Locke's contention that morals and mathematics are the two demonstrative subjects. What we "make ourselves" and general notions which, being the "workmanship of the understanding," are their own archetypes, are not, after all, far apart.

²⁴Works, VI, 213, 236; III, 330; VII, 345; III, 713. See also IV, 204.

²⁵Works, III, 713, for his suggestion to Cromwell to have his doctrines taught in the universities; see ibid., VII, 343-352, for a defense of the proposal.

²⁶ In his dedication to the Earl of Newcastle, dated in 1640, where men's agreement in mathematics, due to dependence on reason, is contrasted with their controversies and contradictions in policy and justice, due to their following passion.

²⁷ Compare with this the following from the Leviathan: "For all men are by nature provided with notable multiplying glasses, that is, their passions and self-love, through which, every little payment appeareth a great grievance; but are destitute of those prospective glasses, namely, moral and civil science, to see afar off the miseries that hang over them, and can not without such payments be avoided" (III, 170).

²⁸ They are called laws only metaphorically, since only a command is a law. But in the sense in which the faculty of reason is a gift of God, and God may be said to command us to act rationally, they are true laws or commands.

²⁹ In his own day, Hobbes had logically the benefit of the fact that "self-preservation" was laid down by practically all writers as the first article of the law of nature. Moral laws are "eternal" to Hobbes in exactly the same way as are geometrical propositions. They flow from original definitions whose subjects include their predicates in such a way that the latter cannot be denied without falling, at some point, into formal self-contradiction. The absolute "obligation" which the subject is under not to withdraw from the compact by which he entered the State is the obligation not to contradict his own premises.

³⁰ Hobbes never attributes physical omnipotence to the sovereign, but only a power to threaten and to enforce threats which arouses enough fear to influence men's outer conduct. His whole position very closely resembles that of Kant regarding the relation of the moral and the legal, much as the two differ in their conception of the moral.

³¹Leviathan, pt. II, chap. XXX. Vol. III, chap. XIII, "Concerning the Duties of Them That Rule." See also vol. IV, De Corpore Politico, chap. IX, which sets out from the proposition, "This is the general law for sovereigns, that they procure, to the uttermost of their endeavour, the good of the people."

³² It is in the same vein when Hobbes says that rebellion is not an offense against the civil law, but against the moral or natural law, for they violate the obligation to obedience which is before all civil law—since the institution of civil law depends upon it (Works, II, 200).

³³ Compare the Leviathan, III, 335.