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MALCOLM’S LEVIATHAN: HOBBES’S “THING”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2014

JEFFREY COLLINS
JEFFREY COLLINS*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Queen's University E-mail: collinsj@queensu.ca
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Extract

The publication of the Clarendon edition of the Works of Thomas Hobbes recently entered its fourth decade. The monumental project has unfolded against shifting methodologies in the practice of intellectual history, and the edition's own history exemplifies these shifts. Its first general editor was Howard Warrender, who died in 1985 after a distinguished career as a professor of political theory at the University of Sheffield. Warrender was best known for the Political Philosophy of Hobbes: His Theory of Obligation. This influential book offered a deontological interpretation of Hobbes's theory of obligation, according to which the Hobbesian natural laws were to be understood as divine commands. Warrender's book appeared in 1957 and was resolutely textualist in its approach, exploring Hobbes's arguments in isolation and with considerable interpretive charity. His subject was the “theoretical basis” of Hobbes's writing, the importance of which might not be “historically conspicuous.”

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Modern Intellectual History , Volume 12 , Issue 1 , April 2015 , pp. 95 - 120
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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References

1 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Noel Malcolm, 3 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), vol. 1: Editorial Introduction; vol. 2: The English and Latin Texts (i); vol. 3: The English and Latin Texts (ii).

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5 See below.

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11 Malcolm, Noel, “Citizen Hobbes,” London Review of Books, 19 (1984), 22Google Scholar.

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13 In the front pages of Hobbes's correspondence, the ‘English’ De cive remained listed as volume 2 of the Clarendon edition. As late as 2010, in Paul Seaward's edition of Behemoth (volume 10 in the Clarendon edition), this remained the case. In the new Clarendon Leviathan, however, it has been jettisoned without fanfare. De cive occupies volume 2 alone, without mention of an “English” version. Hobbes's early “Elements of Law” is now planned for volume 1.

14 Malcolm and Mikko Tolonen, “The Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes: Some New Items,” Historical Journal, 51/2 (2008), 481–95, 481–95Google Scholar; see also Jeffrey, Collins, “Christian Ecclesiology and the Composition of Leviathan: An Unknown Letter to Thomas Hobbes,” Historical Journal, 43/1 (2000), 217–31Google Scholar.

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19 Noel Malcom, “The Printing of the ‘Bear’,” in Malcom, Aspects, 338–82.

20 See his thorough poleaxing of the possibility that Hobbes was the author of the so-called “Short Tract.” Noel Malcom, “Robert Payne, the Hobbes Manuscripts, and the ‘Short Tract’,” in Malcom, Aspects, 80–145.

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22 Peter Burroughs, “Sir William Molesworth,” ODNB.

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24 Now housed at the British Library as Egerton MS 1910.

25 Rogers, G. A. J. and Schuhmann, Karl, Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan: A Critical Edition, 2 vols. (London, 2003)Google Scholar. Schuhmann died as this edition was going to press.

26 Ibid., 111–23.

27 Malcolm, Editorial Introduction, 304–5.

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29 Until now, the best effort to account for the Latin variations appeared in François Trincaud's French edition of Leviathan, published in 1971. Malcolm has high praise for Trincaud's efforts.

30 Malcolm, Editorial Introduction, 304–7.

31 Malcolm, Editorial Introduction, 322.

32 Malcolm, Editorial Introduction, 316.

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35 Malcolm, Editorial Introduction, 317.

36 Among their many iterations of this method see Pocock, J. G. A., “The Concept of Language and the Métier d'Historien: Some Considerations on Practice,” in Pagden, Anthony, ed., The Language of Political Theory in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1987), 19–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Skinner, Quentin, “Interpretation and the Understanding of Speech Acts,” in Skinner, Visions of Politics, vol. 1, Regarding Method (Cambridge, 2002), 103–27Google Scholar.

37 Malcolm, Editorial Introduction, 324–5.

38 The cases involve Gianfranco Borrelli's argument that Hobbes borrowed metaphors describing unsociable men from Malvezzi's Discoursi on Tacitus, and the efforts of George Klosko and Daryl Rice to map the influence of Thucydides over Leviathan. Borrelli, G., Il lato oscuro del Leviathan: Hobbes contra Machiavelli (Naples, 2009)Google Scholar; Klosko, G. and Rice, D., “Thucydides and Hobbes's State of Nature,” History of Political Thought, 6/2 (1985), 405–9Google Scholar.

39 See, for instance, his introduction to Burke, Edmund, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Pocock, J. G. A. (Indianapolis, 1987)Google Scholar.

40 Locke, , Two Treatises of Government, ed. Laslett, Peter (Cambridge, 1960)Google Scholar; Filmer, Robert, Patriarcha and Other Political Writings of Sir Robert Filmer, ed. Laslett, Peter (Oxford, 1949)Google Scholar.

41 Both re-datings have been debated and refined, but not substantially rebutted, in the decades since. On the dating of Locke's Two Treatises see in particular Milton, J., “Dating Locke's Second Treatise,” History of Political Thought, 16/3 (1995), 356–90Google Scholar; and more recently Armitage, David, “John Locke, Carolina, and the Two Treatises of Government,” Political Theory, 32/5 (2004), 602–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Pocock comments on Laslett's importance in “Quentin Skinner: The History of Politics and the Politics of History,” in Pocock, Political Thought and History (Cambridge, 2009), 123–44, 126–7.

42 For an account of this methodological division see Cowan, Brian, “Intellectual, Social, and Cultural History: Ideas in Context,” in Young, Brian and Whatmore, Richard, eds., Advances in Intellectual History (Houndmills, 2006), 171–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The present reviewer participated in an interesting, if not entirely successful, effort at rapprochement hosted by Princeton's Center for the Study of Books and Media in 2004. Here J. G. A. Pocock answered the elitism charge implicitly levelled by Robert Darnton at the Cambridge school with a responding charge of philistinism. There the matter basically stood.

43 Malcolm, Editorial Introduction, 199–209.

44 Ibid., 215.

45 Johns, Adrian, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McKenzie, D. F., Making Meaning: “Printers of the Mind” and Other Essays, ed. McDonald, P. D. and Suarez, M. F. (Amherst, MA, 2002)Google Scholar.

46 Malcolm, Editorial Introduction, 219–21.

47 Malcolm has established the likelihood that the Bear edition deployed sheets salvaged from this 1670 confiscation, with the missing sheets printed by the Amsterdam printer Christoffel Cunradus. Hence the two printers involved in the production of the edition, and their differing levels of contact with Hobbes. Malcolm, Editorial Introduction, 236–40.

48 Ibid., 231–3.

49 Ibid., 299–300.

50 Ibid., 5–11; the evidence is also investigated to similar effect in Collins, Jeffrey, The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes (Oxford, 2005), chap. 4Google Scholar.

51 Malcolm, Editorial Introduction, 11.

52 Ibid., 12.

53 Hobbes, On the Citizen, 94.

54 Malcolm, Editorial Introduction, 16–20.

55 Hoekstra, furthermore, has observed that Leviathan, in other passages, continued to suggest that commonwealths by institution were originally democratic. Hoekstra, Kinch, “A Lion in the House: Hobbes and Democracy,” in Brett, Annabel and Tully, James, eds., Rethinking the Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge, 2007), 191–218, 212Google Scholar.

56 Hoekstra has chided those inclined to a “democratic” reading of Hobbes for failing to attend to the contrast between sovereignty founded by original agreement and sovereignty achieved by conquest. But the force of this objection works equally against those inclined to attribute a fundamental constitutional monarchism to Hobbes. Ibid., 207–9.

57 Democracy for Hobbes required that every citizen “have a right to enter” the ruling Assembly, while in aristocracy “certain men” were “distinguished from the rest.” England's revolutionary regimes fit the latter description. Only the Levellers envisioned anything like a democratic assembly. For an effort to read Hobbes as a royalist based upon Hobbes's presumed “emotional ties” to aristocracy, see Hamilton, James, “The Social Context of Hobbes's Political Thought,” Modern Intellectual History, 11/1 (2014), 1–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Hobbes's social views are of themselves an interesting subject, but their value in explaining Hobbes's evolving political views is not here convincingly established.

58 Ibid., 17–20; Skinner, Quentin, Hobbes and Republican Liberty (Cambridge, 2008)Google Scholar.

59 Malcolm, Editorial Introduction, 22.

60 Ibid., 81.

61 Ibid., 22.

62 As Richard Tuck has pointed out, in the preface to the revised De cive (1647) Hobbes explicitly insisted on the equal status of monarchical, aristocratic, and democratic commonwealths, and seemed anxious not to be misread as an exclusive monarchist. Tuck, “Hobbes and Democracy,” in Brett and Tully, Rethinking the Foundations, 171–90, 186. Tuck also lays stress on the distinction between democratic sovereignty and deliberative democratic administration, arguing that only the latter raised Hobbes's ire.

63 Malcolm, Editorial Introduction, 23; Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Malcolm, 2: 524–6.

64 Malcolm, Editorial Introduction, 22.

65 Hyde, Edward, A brief view and survey of the pernicious errors in Mr. Hobbes's book, entitled Leviathan (Oxford, 1676), 7–8Google Scholar; Hyde to Barwick, 21 June 1651, Bodl. Clarendon MS 61, fol. 206.

66 Malcolm, Editorial Introduction, 72.

67 Ibid., 81.

68 The evidence is surveyed in Collins, Allegiance, 149–51. To cite but one example, Hobbes's associate Abraham Cowley reported Cromwell's “triumphant” return from Ireland to London. It was believed that Cromwell would have a “new great Title conferr’d upon him (as Protector of the People's Liberty, or some such).” This was clearly a serious report.

69 Hobbes, Leviathan, 294

70 Burgess, Glenn, “Contexts for the Writing and Publication of Hobbes's Leviathan,” History of Political Thought, 11 (1990), 675–702Google Scholar; Martinich, A. P., Hobbes: A Biography (Cambridge, 1999), 213–15Google Scholar.

71 Malcolm, Editorial Introduction, 73, citing Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Malcolm, 3: 1135.

72 Hobbes, Thomas, Behemoth, ed. Seward, Paul (Oxford, 2010)Google Scholar.

73 Hobbes, Thomas, Writings on Common Law and Hereditary Right, ed. Cromartie, Alan and Skinner, Quentin (Oxford, 2008)Google Scholar.

74 Hobbes, Thomas, Translations of Homer, The Illiad and the Odyssey, ed. Nelson, Eric (Oxford, 2008)Google Scholar.

75 Noel Malcolm, “Thomas Hobbes and Voluntarist Theology” (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 1983).

76 Malcolm, Editorial Introduction, 87.

77 Ibid., 51.

78 Ibid., 63–4.

79 Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Malcolm, 3: 1114–16.

80 Ibid., 796.

81 Hobbes, De cive, 222–3; Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Malcolm, 3: 834.

82 For Malcolm's reading, see his Editorial Introduction, 60–64; my own is presented in Collins, Allegiance, 124–30.

83 Malcolm, Editorial Introduction, 62.

84 Hobbes to Devonshire, 23 July 1641, Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes, 120.

85 Hyde, View and Survey, 305.

86 For an astute consideration of these issues see Abizadeh, Arash, “Publicity, Privacy, and Religious Toleration in Hobbes's Leviathan,” Modern Intellectual History, 10/2 (2013), 261–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

87 Malcolm, Editorial Introduction, 82.