Behemoth and Hobbes's "science of just and unjust"

Filozofski Vestnik

Volumn 24, Issue 2, 2003, Pages

  Springborg, Patricia ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

Behemoth; Civil law; Justice; Legal positivism; Natural law; Thomas Hobbes

Indexed keywords

EID: 34248050562     PISSN: 03534510     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (79)

1. Behemoth, or The Long Parliament, ed. Ferdinand Tönnies (London, 1889, facsimile ed., ed. Stephen Holmes, Chicago: University of Chicago, 1990), p. 39. All citations are to Behemoth are to the Tönnies ed. I wish to gratefully acknowledge the facilities and support extended to me during my fellowship, 2002-3, at the Swedish Institute for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences, Uppsala, when this was written.
2. Drafted in 1666, published in 1681.
3. Aubrey reports on the progress of the poem from 1659 and we have a record of its completion in the account books at Chatsworth in 1671, but it was first published in 1688. See the forthcoming edition by Patricia Springborg and Patricia Stablein (Oxford: Clarendon edition of Hobbes's Complete Works).
4. For translations of the 1668 Latin Appendix, see Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, with selected variants from the Latin edition of 1668, ed, with Introduction and Notes by Edwin Curley (Indiannapolis: Hackett, 1994), pp. 498-548;
5. as well as George Wright's excellent translation with notes, "Thomas Hobbes: 1668 Appendix to Leviathan," Interpretation 18, no. 3 (1991): 324-413.
6. As we can gather, for instance, by A's reference to his Hobbes's patron, William Cavendish, as "My Lord of Newcastle," see Behemoth, p. 122. In the case of the Historia Ecclesiastica, the distribution of the dialogue, which is in any case uncertain on textual grounds, also cannot be assigned with confidence.
7. Behemoth was not the name Hobbes's gave it, and was not the title of the first three unauthorized 1679 editions printed abroad. In August 1679 Hobbes complained to Aubrey "I have been told that my booke of the Civill Warr is come abroad, and I am sorry for it, especially because I could not get his majestye to license it, not because it is ill printed or has a foolish title set to it, for I believe that any ingenious man may understand the wickednesse of that time, notwithstanding the errors of the presse." See Hobbes, Correspondence, vol. 2, ed. Noel Malcolm, p. 772.
8. Malcolm notes, p. 773, note 4
9. that Hobbes's complaint about the title could not refer to Behemoth, which was not yet used, but might rather refer to the famous lines from Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, 83, 101
10. which Voltaire believed would last as long as history, and which the editors of the pirated editions had appended: "Religio pepercit Scelerosa atque impia Facta," and "Tantum Religio potuit Suadere Malorum" ("religion was the mother of wicked and impious deeds," and "Such was the evil which religion led men to commit." See Malcolm p. 773, note 4).
11. However, in the 1688 printed edition of Hobbes's Historia Ecclesiastica, more or less completed, it appears, at the same time as Behemoth, both the names Leviathan and Behemoth appear in conjunction, although not in the Grund ms, which the copyist tells us was made from the copy in "My Lord Vaughan's library," probably the presentation copy. They appear as an interpolation in the 1668 printed edition the Harleian 1844 Ms, corrected to the 1688 printed edition.
12. See Hobbes's Historia Ecclesiastica (1688 printed ed., line 1229), where with reference to the machinations of the Pope he comments: "Leviathan, like Behemoth, had again taken the hook in the nose; both the king and the people were slaves."
13. See Cooper, Thomas and Sir Thomas Elyot, Thesaurus Linguae Romanae & Britannicae (London 1565).
14. Behemoth, pp. 8-9.
15. See Springborg, "Review Article: The View from the 'Divell's Mountain'; Review of Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes," History of Political Thought, 17, 4 (Winter 1996), 615-22.
16. Behemoth, p. 1.
17. See Patricia Springborg, "Hobbes on Civil Religion," Proceedings of the Conference on Pluralismo e religione civile, Università del Piemonte Orientale, Vercelli, Italy, May 24-25, 2001, ed. Gianni Paganini and Edoardo Tortarolo (Milano, Bruno Mondadori, 2003, pp. 61-98).
18. Hobbes's indebtedness to Machiavelli has often been underestimated. Leviathan chapter 2, "Of Man," for instance, includes an allusion to the centaur, compounded of horse and man, which suggests Machiavelli's trope of the centaur as reflecting the duality of human nature in the Prince chapter 18. It is a trope which Machiavelli goes on to rework in the famous metaphor of the wolf and the fox, a notion famously redescribed by Hobbes himself in the concept homo homini lupus. Nor could Hobbes have been unaware of his patron, William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle's famous princely mirror, his Advice to Charles II, which so closely follows Machiavelli's Prince. (See Ideology and Politics on the Eve of Restoration: Newcastle's Advice to Charles II, transcribed by Thomas P. Slaughter. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1984.)
19. Behemoth, pp. 119-20.
20. For the details, he refers his pupil to "the history written at large," presumably Clarendon's History of the Rebellion. See, Edward Hyde, First Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, begun in the Year 1641. With the precedent Passages, and Actions, that contributed thereunto, and the happy end, and Conclusion thereof by the King's blessed Restoration, and Return upon the 29th of May, in the Year 1660 (Oxford, 1660).
21. Behemoth, p. 2.
22. Hobbes's Verse Autobiography, lines 84-86, reproduced in Leviathan, Curley ed., p. lvi.
23. Behemoth, p. 39.
24. The Historia Ecclesiastica, lines 1847-82, closely parallels the account in Behemoth, pp. 40-41, of the rise of the universities, beginning with Paris and followed by Oxford, as papal instruments and seats of theology.
25. Behemoth, p. 43.
26. The official theory of the "balanced" or "mixed" constitution of "three estates," king, lords and commons, was set out in the Answer to the XIX Propositions, issued in June 1642 on behalf of Charles I and against his parliamentary opponents. Recent scholars have debated to what degree this is an expression of classical republican theory. At the time the statement was read less as empowering king or commons than as empowering bishops, the lords spiritual, and counterpart to the lords temporal, of the second estate, under attack in the parliament of 1640-41. Clarendon supported the independent authority of the Anglican church and was the principal advocate of "mixarchy." He was the unnamed target of Hobbes' attacks on the doctrine, and its role in the fall of Charles I, in Behemoth. See Michael Mendle, Dangerous Positions: Mixed Government, the Estates of the Realm, and the Answer to the XIX Propositions (Tuscaloosa, Al.: University of Alabama Press, 1985);
27. and the review of Mendle by Richard Tuck, Journal of Modern History 59, no. 3 (1987): pp. 570-72.
28. Among legal theorists, the Viennese Hans Kelsen is most well known for the "hard positivist" position that positive law needs no further justification: there are no universal facts about morality, or objective measures of what the law ought to be like. The origins of positive law are explained either in terms of command theory (Jeremy Bentham, John Austin), or social convention theory (Kelsen, H.L.A. Hart). The latter see Hobbes as a legal positivist in this sense.
29. For the purposes of easy comparison I list the references according to Molesworth.
30. Carl Schmitt, The Leviathan in The State Theory of Thomas Hobbes (1938), trans. George Schwab and Erna Hilfstein. (London, 1996).
31. See the seminal piece by François Tricaud, "'Homo homini Deus,' 'Homo homini Lupus': Recherche des sources des deux formules de Hobbes," in Hobbes-Forschungen, ed. R. Koselleck, and R. Schnur (Berlin, 1969), pp. 61-70.
32. See Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogensis of Modern Society (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988 ed.)
33. chapter 2, "Hobbesian Rationality and the Origins of Enlightenment," pp. 23-24, and notes.
34. Koselleck, op. cit., p. 24, citing Leviathan, book 1, ch. 6.
35. See Job 30:29, verses 40 and 41, 42:6, etc.; see also Patricia Springborg, »Hobbes's Biblical Beasts: Leviathan and Behemoth," Political Theory 23, no. 2 (1995): pp. 353-75.
36. For Ratae Sententiae XXXI-III, I have used the English translation of Cyril Bailey in Epicurus, the Extant Remains (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926), p. 103.
37. Hobbes, Historia Ecclesiastica, lines 2155-58. Translations of Hobbes's Historia Ecclesiastica (1688) are from the forthcoming edition by Patricia Springborg and Patricia Stablein.
38. Behemoth, p. 38.
39. See, Ferdinand Tönnies, "A Short Tract on First Principles," in Tönnies, ed., The Elements of Law, including "A Short Tract on First Principles," (New York, 1969), pp. 208-9.
40. For the debate about Hobbes's authorship of the "Short Tract," see the late Karl Schuhmann's seminal piece, "Le Short Tract, premièoeuvre philosophique de Hobbes," Hobbes Studies 8 (1995): pp. 3-36.
41. Hobbes, EW 2, p. 8.
42. For Hobbes and Valla, see Gianni Paganini, "Hobbes, Valla e i problemi filosofici della teologia umanistica: la riforma 'dilettica' della Trinità," in L. Simonutti, ed., Dal necessario al possibile: Determinismo e libertà nel pensiero anglo-olandese del XVII secolo (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2001), pp. 11-45;
43. and Paganini, "Thomas Hobbes e Lorenzo Valla: Critica umansitica e filosofia moderna," Rinscimento, Rivista dell'Instituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento, 2nd series, 39 (1999): pp. 515-68.
44. See Juan Luis Vives, De prima philosophia, in his Opera, 2 vols, (Basle, 1555), vol. 1, pp. 532-33
45. trans. Richard Waswo, Language and Meaning in the Renaissance (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 128-29.
46. For a more extensive discussion of Hobbes and Vives, see Patricia Springborg, "Hobbes and Epicurean Religion," in Der Garten und die Moderne: Epikureische Moral und Politik vom Humanismus bis zur Aufklärung, ed. Gianni Paganini and Edoardo Tortarolo (Stuttgart: Rommann-Holzboog Verlag, 2003 [forthcoming]).
47. Gregory Vlastos, "Ethics and Physics in Democritus, I," The Philosophical Review 54 (1945), p. 591.
48. Gregory Vlastos, "Ethics and Physics in Democritus, II," The Philosophical Review 55 (1946), p. 53.
49. For definitions of ratio see Lewis & Short's standard Latin Dictionary and Cooper's Thesaurus LinguaeRomanae & Britannicae (London 1565): ratio-ionis (f.), from reor and ratus (1) reckonning; account, calculation; list, register; affair, business; (2) relation; respect, consideration; procedure, method, system, way, kind; (3) reason; reasoning, thought; cause, motive, science, knowledge, philosophy. (Cooper) "reason: counsayle: purpose: care: respecte: consideration: regarde: cause: the mattier: the way: the facion: the fourme: proportion: the trade: the feate: the meane. An accompte or reckenyng."
50. Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 14, §1, Curley ed., p. 79.
51. Curley notes the parallel to Grotius, De jure belli ac pacis 1.1.10.12.
52. For Roman Law concepts of jus and lex, see H.F. Jolowitz, A Historical Introduction to the Study of Roman Law, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967).
53. For the development of modern natural rights theory out of Roman Law jus naturale and jus gentium, see M.P. Gilmore, Argument for Roman Law in Political Thought, 1200-1600 (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1961)
54. and Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories, their Origin and Development (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1981).
55. Published in J. O. Halliwell, A Collection of Letters Illustrative of the Progress of Science in England from the Reign of Queen Elisabeth to that of Charles the Second (London, Historical Society of Science, 1941), p. 85
56. and cited in Gianni Paganini, "Hobbes, Gassendi e la psicologia del meccanicismo," in Hobbes Oggi, Actes du Colloque de Milan (18-21 May, 1988), ed. Arrigo Pacchi (Milan, Franco Angeli, 1990), pp. 351-445, n. 12.
57. Gassendi's "dialogue at a distance" with Hobbes has now been documented by Gainni Paganini. See Gianni Paganini, "Hobbes, Gassendi et le De Cive," in Materia Actuosa: Antiquité, Âge Classique, Lumières; Mélanges en 'honneur d'Olivier Bloch, ed. Miguel Benitez, Antony McKenna, Gianni Paganini, Jean Salem (Paris 2000), pp 183-206.
58. In the ethical part of the Syntagma, dating to the years 1645-46, after the publication of the first edition of Hobbes's De Cive in 1642, and before the second, which Gassendi helped his friend Samuel Sorbière promote, Gassendi made transparent reference to Hobbes on freedom in the state of nature, as Paganini argues. For further elaboration on Hobbes's debt to the Epicureans see Arrigo Pacchi's seminal piece, "Hobbes e l'epicureismo," in Rivista Critica di Storia della Filosofia 33 (1975): pp. 54-71.
59. This was noted by Paganini, "Hobbes, Gassendi e la psicologia del meccanicismo," p. 438;
60. a discovery made simultaneously by Olivier Bloch in his "Gassendi et la théorie politique de Hobbes," in Thomas Hobbes, Philosophie première, théorie de la science et politique, Actes du Colloque de Paris, ed. Yves Charles Zarka and Jean Bernhardt (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1990,), p. 345.
61. Gassendi's Latin translation of Epicurus RS XXXIII, indicated in italics, with his own interpolations in roman, reads: "Iustitia per se (et quatenus quidem id quod heic est iustum, illeic est iniustum) nihil est; ac in homine solitariè spectato reperitur nulla, sed dumtaxat in mutuis hominum societatibus, pro ea cuiusque regionis amplitudines in qua possunt pacta de non inferendo, accipiendove nocumento iniri." See Gassendi: Animadversiones in decimum librum Diogenis Laertii, qui est de vita, moribus, placitisque Epicuri (first published 1649, 1675 edition), vol. 2, p. 302a
62. cited by Paganini, "Hobbes, Gassendi et le De Cive," p. 188-89.
63. Behemoth, p. 44.
64. Leviathan, ch. 13, §13, Curley ed., p. 78.
65. Leviathan, ch. 14, §3, Curley ed., p. 79
66. where Curley notes that John Finnis, in Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980, pp. 205-10), emphasizes the parallel between Hobbes's position and that of Suarez (On Latus and God the Lawgiver, 1.2.5).
67. EW 6, p. 73
68. see Curley, p. 79, n. 4.
69. Grotius De jure belli ac pacis 1.1.5, noted by Curley, p. 79.
70. Leviathan, ch. 13, §14, Curley ed., p. 78.
71. See De Cive (EW 2, pp. 45-46).
72. Leviathan, ch. 15, §3, Curley ed., p. 89.
73. Curley note to Leviathan, ch. 15, §4, Curley ed., p. 90;
74. cf. De Cive (EW 2, p. 46).
75. I have developed this argument elsewhere, see Patricia Springborg, "Leviathan, the Christian Commonwealth Incorporated," Political Studies 24, no. 2 (1976): pp. 171-83
76. (reprinted in Great Political Thinkers, ed. John Dunn and Ian Harris [Cheltenham: Elgar, 1997], vol. 2, pp. 199-211).
77. See J.G.A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957).
78. See M.P. Gilmore, Argument for Roman Law, p. 97, who dicusses the sovereign as the source of legal proprietary rights in Roman Law.
79. Leviathan, ch. 18, §10, Curley ed., p. 114.