CHAPTER TWO HOBBES' CONCEPTION OF THE PRE-CIVIL STATE

2019

Philologia

The Historical Journal, 1966

T H E modern reputation of Hobbes's Leviathan as a work' incredibly overtopping all its successors in political theory' 1 has concentrated so much attention on Hobbes's own text that it has tended at the same time to divert attention away from any attempt to study the relations between his thought and its age, or to trace his affinities with the other political writers of his time. It has by now become an axiom of the historiography 2 that Hobbes's 'extraordinary boldness' 3 set him completely 'outside the main stream of English political thought' in his time. 4 The theme of the one study devoted to the reception of Hobbes's political doctrines has been that Hobbes stood out alone ' against all the powerful and still developing constitutionalist tradition', 6 but that the tradition ('fortunately') 6 proved too strong for him. Hobbes was 'the first to attack its fundamental assumptions ', 7 but no one followed his lead. Although he 'tried to sweep away the whole structure of traditional sanctions', 8 he succeeded only in provoking 'the widespread re-assertion of accepted principles', 9 a re-assertion, in fact, of 'the main English political tradition'. 10 And the more Leviathan has become accepted as 'the greatest, perhaps the sole masterpiece ' u of English political theory, the less has Hobbes seemed to bear any meaningful relation to the ephemeral political quarrels of his contemporaries. The doctrine of Leviathan has come to be regarded as 'an isolated phenomenon in English thought, without ancestry or posterity'. 12 Hobbes's system, it is assumed, was related to its age only by the 'intense opposition' which its 'boldness and originality' were to provoke. 13 The view, however, that Hobbes 'impressed English thought almost entirely by rousing opposition', 14 and that consequently 'no man of his time

2023

Nowadays, it seems evident to us that a society, or a political body (such as a nation, a state or humanity as a whole), is composed of “individuals.” “Individuals” are, so to speak, the “atoms” of which our societies are made. These individuals sometimes voluntarily gather together in a new territory, but most of the time they are born into an already constituted society. The word “individual” is therefore a fundamental part of our basic political vocabulary and our moral horizon. Individuals are obviously different in some respects and similar in others, but today it seems inconceivable to us not to recognize that men are all equal, in a deep moral sense. As opposed to the classics that compared men in accordance with some ideal of excellence, it seems to us that the equality of men is more evident if we compare what they all share, a kind of lowest common denominator. Indeed, all men have several fundamental characteristics, but the most basic seems to be the desire to live and thus a right to life, which cannot be waived under any circumstances (not even, as many think, because of a serious crime). This is a right that all individuals have regardless of gender, color, creed, age and merit, and with which an individual can morally rebut the claims of not only other human beings, but a political sovereign and society as a whole (and perhaps God himself). This approach centered on the basic moral equality of individuals appears with the formulation of the idea of the “state of nature,” that is, of an age of human life before the foundation of civil society. In ancient literature there are reports of the state of nature in the sophists, or Lucretius, and late scholasticism, with Juan de Mariana in particular also mentioning it, but this type of state of nature never represented a moral reference. On the contrary, it is rather like the situation of the savage Cyclopes. The expression “state of nature” itself seems to derive from Christian theology, as opposed to both the “state of grace” and the state of man after the fall of Adam, with its corrupted nature. However, the idea that the “natural man” is a solitary individual who at the same moment in time joins civil society implies replacing the biblical view of the origins of human history with an unbiblical, or ungodly, rational conception. The replacement of the state of nature / state of grace dichotomy by the state of nature / civil status distinction further reveals the novel idea that the cure for the defects and problems of the individual in the state of nature is not grace, but political government.

2020

Jurnal Office, 2020

The origin of the modern state has left many scholars intellectually engaged. Sociologists, psychologists, political scientists, jurists, anthropologists, and philosophers have variously grappled with the issue of the origin of the state. Thomas Hobbes is one of the great thinkers who has contributed to the discussion on the origin of the state. Thomas Hobbes is of the view that naturally, that is, man in the state of nature, is a-social, atavistically thinking about himself alone. Because of this atomistic and solitary disposition of man in the state of nature, the society was accentuated by an unprecedented degree of rancor, acrimony and obfuscation. Given this picture of man and the pre-civil-society depicted by Hobbes, one would feel that justifying the emergence of the civil society would become difficult. This paper examines how Hobbes migrated man from the state of nature to the civil society in spite of the gory picture of him he had painted. Thomas Hobbes’ theory of the ori...

The paper means to propose a comprehensive understanding of Hobbes' Political-philosophy connecting the political works of the same Author with those regarding his scientific activity. Hobbes, in his political philosophy, produces, as rational deduction and definition, concepts constituting the paradigm of the modern political theory, as those of individuals, power, sovereignty, State, etc. The one approached by Hobbes is a vision of the human being and of the relations among them that actually represents the canonic and generally accepted dimension of the human relations. His philosophy has in sé the paradigm of the modernity. A conflictual modernity, that leaves the man alone with himself, an independent microcosm in which the principle of the desire does not find any interpersonal pre-existing limitation. In this sense the Hobbes' political philosophy represents at the same time a starting and an arrival point for all the students of this subject. However, he was not only a political philosopher, but also a scientist (half of his works are about science). So, to holistically understand of of the major Author of the Modernity, and at the same time the period and the institutions we are living in, it is important to read together the political and the scientific works. The society must be analyzed via basic concepts that constitute the natural world in general. Society, human being and nature are not completely divisible one from each other, being ontologically similar. The project is constituted essentially by two moments: on one hand there is the rational reconstruction of the natural sciences, while on the other the one of the ethics and politics. These aims, just apparently far from each others, are connected by a specific element, the explanation of everything: the movement. The works taken into consideration are: De Corpore, Elements of Philosophy, De Cive, De Homine, Leviathan. The main focus regards the definition of " Time " given by Hobbes in the De Corpore, considered as a key concept to understand the human experience, so the institutions deriving from this.

This paper is based on a talk I gave in a series on the lives of philosophers.

Beyond the Pale: Reading Ethics from the Margins