Text and context: Skinner, hobbes and theistic natural law

The Historical Journal

Volumn 28, Issue 1, 1985, Pages 27-50

  State, Stephen A ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN ONTARIO   (Canada)

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EID: 84954601259     PISSN: 0018246X     EISSN: 14695103     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0018246X0000220X     Document Type: Article

References (73)

1. On the concept of ‘revolution’ in this context, see J. Pocock, Politics, language and time: essays on political thought and history (New York, 1973). p. 3.
2. Q. Skinner, ‘Hobbes's Leviathan’, Historical Journal, Vii, 2 (1976), 333.
3. Q. Skinner, 'The context of Hobbes's theory of political obligation', in Cranston and Peters, Hobbes and Rousseau (New York, 1972), p. 141. Skinner does not explain what is involved in the distinction between 'deontological' and 'rationalist-utilitarian' but it seems clear that he takes them to be mutually exclusive.
4. R. Tuck, Natural rights theories: their origin and development, (Cambridge, 1979), p. 102.
5. Anthony Ascham, A discourse: wherein it is examined what is particularly lawful during the confusions and revolutions of governments (London 1648). preface.
6. Skinner, ‘Context’, p. 131.
7. Skinner, ‘Context’, p. 131.
8. Ascham, Discourse, p. 98.
9. Ascham, Discourse, p. 23.
10. Tuck, Natural rights, pp. 121–123.
11. Marchamont Nedham, The case of the commonwealth of England (London, 1650).
12. Skinner, ‘Context’, p. 135.
13. Nedham, Case of the commonwealth, p. 103.
14. Skinner, ‘The ideological context of Hobbes's political thought’, Historical Journal, 9, 3 (1966), 292.
15. John Selden, Table talk (London, 1689), p. 30.
16. A possible exception is Matthew Wren's Monarchy asserted of 1659. But even if we take Wren to be the only true Hobbist with the correct line on Hobbes - we are then faced with the problem of the other so-called Hobbists. If ‘history’ gives us conflicting evidence with regard to interpretation - we must in the end rely on our own interpretation.
17. Francis Osborne, A persuasive to a mutual compliance (Oxford, 1652 [1651 ?]) p. 10.
18. Albertus Warren, Eight reasons categorical (London, 1653), p. 5.
19. Albertus Warren, The royalist reformed (London, 1650), p. 26.
20. Michael Hawke, The grounds of the laws of England (London, 1657), dedication.
21. Michael Hawke, Killing is murder and no murder (London, 1657), p. 7.
22. Michael Hawke, The right of dominion (London, 1655), p. 22.
23. Thomas White, The grounds of obedience and government (no place of publication given, 165[9]), p. 44.
24. John Hall, Of obedience and government (London, 1654), preface.
25. Euctatus Philodemius, The original and end of civil power (London, 1649), p. 15. J. W. Packer (The transformation of Anglicanism, Manchester, 1969, p. 178) suggests that Philodemius is the pseudonym for Anthony Ascham although, despite a search for which I am grateful, he has been unable to locate the evidence for this suggestion; nor have I.
26. Tuck, Natural rights, p. 82. 84 Selden, Table talk, p. 41.
27. Although the Tew writers didn't publish until the 1640s and so could have been influenced by Hobbes, Selden's published work predates that of Hobbes. Strictly speaking, the discussion of influence remains - as in most cases - speculative; we don't know much of what Hobbes was thinking prior to 1628. People can be influential without ever publishing at all.
28. Tuck, Natural rights, ch. 5.
29. Tuck, Natural rights
30. Warrender, H., The political theory of Hobbes: his theory of obligation, (Oxford, 1957), PP. 93-95.
31. Tuck is misleading to suggest that Warrender found the basis of natural law in God's will; this is but one of the possibilities Warrender entertains as the ultimate ground of obligation. See Warrender, The political theory of Hobbes, p. 11 and ch. 13. 90 Tuck, Natural rights, p. 131.
32. Tuck, Natural rights, p. 127.
33. Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 509.
34. Hobbes. The English works of Thomas Hobbes, ed., Molesworth (London, 1889), 1. (Emphasis in original.) E.W. iv xiii.
35. Hobbes, de Cive, E.W. ii, vi.
36. Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 124.
37. Dowling, R. E., review of Warrender's The political philosophy of Hobbes, Australasian Journal of Politics, 1958, p. 226.
38. Mintz, S. I., The hunting of Leviathan (Cambridge, 1962), p. 35.
39. Gierke, O. von, Natural law and the theory of society (Cambridge, 1934) P. 97.
40. Oakeshott, M. Rationalism in politics (London, 1962), p. 283.
41. Hobbes is not a wolf in sheep's clothing although he may be a wolf in wolf's clothing. By announcing his departures from earlier theorists and proclaiming his novelties of method and argument he can hardly be said to be engaged in concealment. His treatment of the role of God is discussed below.
42. McNeilly, F. S., The anatomy of Leviathan (London, 1968), p. 22.
43. Watkins, J. W. N., Hobbes's system of ideas (London, 1965), p.p. 98–99.
44. Hooker, R., Works, ed., Keble, rev. Church and Paget, 7th edition (Oxford, 1889), 1, 334.
45. See Lagarde, G., Recherches sur l'esprit politique de la reforme (Paris, 1926), p. 25.
46. Suarez, F., Selectionsfor three works, in Classics of International Law, Oxford 1927), vol. 20, p. 197.
47. Perhaps because of this famous passage scholars disagree about Grotius's position in the history of political thought. d'Entrèves sees him as the beginning of ‘rationalist’ hence secular modern natural law (.Natural law, 2nd edition (London, 1970), p. 55). Pollock (postscript to Sir H. Maine, Ancient law, (London 1930), p. 120) and Rommen (The natural law, trans. T. Hanley (St. Louis, 1949), p. 70) emphasize links to earlier Scholastic thought as does A. H. Chroust (‘ Hugo Grotius and the Scholastic natural law tradition’, The New Scholasticism, xvn, 1943, p. 125). The latter explains this passage as a rationalist rebuke of voluntarism and nominalism while Rommen (p. 72) sees Grotius as an exponent of voluntarism.
48. This issue is perceptively treated in Largarde, Recherches, p. 25. See also J. T. McNeill, ‘Natural law in the teaching of the reformers’, The Journal of Religion, xxvi (1946), 177–8; J. W. Allen, ‘The political conceptions of Luther’, in Tudor Studies, ed., Seton-Watson (London, 1924), p. 101.
49. Lagarde, Recherches, p. 25.
50. Peters, R., Hobbes, 2nd edition (Harmondsworth, 1967) p. 245.
51. Filmer, R., Observations concerning the original of government (London, 1651), p. 3. (emphasis added).
52. Chroust, ‘Hugo Grotius’, p. 114.
53. d'Entrèves, Natural law, p. 77.
54. No case is made here to establish links between Suarez and Hobbes. Hobbes had, of course, read at least some of Suarez's work and described it as ‘amongst the many sorts of madness’. England generally was also familiar with him since James I publicly burnt his treatise Defensio Fidei in front of St Paul's church in London. See J. B. Scott's introduction to Suarez, Selections, in Classics, xx, 20a.
55. Plamenatz, J., Man and society (London, 1964), 1, 123.
56. Suarez, Selections, p. 188.
57. Locke, Second treatise, ch. 2, par. 5: 'if I cannot but wish to receive good… how should I look to have any part of my desire herein satisfied unless myself be careful to satisfy the like desire, which is undoubtedly in other men, being of one and the same nature?… from which relation of equality… what several rules and canons natural reason hath drawn, for direction of life, no man is ignorant. '
58. Munz, P., The place of Hooker in the history of thought (London, 1962), p. 46.
59. Gierke, Political theories of the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1927), p. 80-90; Natural law, p. 40; see also Rommen, The natural law, p. 75.
60. Some commentators have seen in this an Italian connexion but S. R. Letwin pointedly and, I think, correctly notes that ‘ Hobbes did not need Padua to teach him this commonplace ’ - ‘ Hobbes and Christianity’, Daedalus, winter, 1976, p. 10.
61. Compare, for example, Hobbes, E.W.I., p. 81: the synthetical procedure consists ' of the order of speech which begins from primary or most universal propositions, which are manifest of themselves, and proceeds by a perpetual composition of propositions into syllogisms, till at last the learner understand the truth of the conclusion sought after' with Aquinas, Selected political writings, ed., d'Entrèves (Oxford, 1948), p. 123: 'reason proceeds from general principles (which are manifest and indemonstrable) to matters of detail'. Note what appears to be the philosophically realist assumptions of both.
62. Aristotle, Politics, Bk. I, ch. I, 1252a.
63. Hobbes, E.W. vii, 3-4; 184.
64. Hobbes, E.W. 1, 81; see also E.W.1, 84.
65. Hobbes, E.W. 7, 460.
66. Consider the following passage from Hobbes's objection to Descartes: ‘reason gives us no conclusion about the nature of things, but only about the terms that designate them, whether, indeed or not there is a convention (arbitrarily made about their meanings) according to which we join these names together.’ in Descartes, Meditations, in The philosophical works, ed., Haldane and Ross (Cambridge, 1911), 11, 62.
67. Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 35.
68. Aquinas, Selected political writings, p. 123.
69. Rational action as teleologically appropriate is sometimes referred to as the doctrine of naturalis inclinatio. See Armstrong, R. A., Primary and secondary precepts in Thomistic natural law teaching (The Hague, 1966), pp. 41–2 and Maritain, J., The range of reason (London, 1953), pp. 26–9.
70. See Leviathan, p. 40: ‘… the names of virtues and vices… can never by true ground of any ratiocination’.
71. Aquinas, Selected political writings, p. 125.
72. Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 115.
73. This is the point of Rommcn's, The natural law.