When Hobbes pauses to characterise his own contributions to political theory, he generally describes himself as engaged in the writing of scientia civilis or civil science. In the Epistle Dedicatory to his first work on politics, The Elements of Law of 1640, he promises to explain ‘the true and only foundation of such Science’. In the 1647 Preface to De Cive he begins by speaking of his treatise as a contribution to scientia civilis, adding that this is the most valuable of all the sciences. In the Leviathan of 1651 he reiterates that his aim is to demonstrate the benefits of ‘Morall and Civill Science’, and in the revised Latin edition of 1668 he speaks of the dangers incurred by those who lack the scientiae needed for appreciating the duties of citizenship.

By the time Hobbes began his formal schooling in the 1590s, the humanist educational theorists of Elizabethan England had put into widespread currency a distinctive view about the nature of civil science. The sources from which they principally drew their understanding were the major rhetorical treatises of ancient Rome, especially Cicero's De Inventione and De Oratore, together with Quintilian's great summarising work of the next century, the Institutio Oratoria. These treatises chiefly offered expositions of inventio, dispositio and elocutio, the basic techniques necessary for speaking and writing in the most persuasive style. But they also embodied an explanation of why the acquisition of these rhetorical arts should be regarded as a matter of social and cultural importance.