Hobbes on our Mind

The title of this essay does not refer to Hobbes's conception of mental functioning but to the way he continues to loom in our mind as a philosopher.1 The year 1988 marked the four-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Hobbes, who came into the world on 5 April 1588. A celebrated thinker in his own time, today his fame is greater than ever before. Most students place him among the preeminent British philosophers, to be compared with only a few others such as Bacon, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Mill, or Russell. Beside his giant stature as one of the creators of the philosophic revolution of the seventeenth century, he is also universally regarded as among the most original and penetrating of European political theorists. Others would likewise accord him a prime position as a moral philosopher. The present essay is therefore intended as a belated but necessary offering in observance of Hobbes's four-hundredth anniversary. Its purpose is to survey some of the literature concerning his work which has appeared during the past dozen years or so, with occasional glances further back as well. Because of the mass of writings about him, my treatment must necessarily be highly selective. One of its aims will be to note some of the main tendencies and themes in recent Hobbes studies. The quantity of publication devoted to Hobbes is itself a phenomenon to be reckoned with. Its volume has become so great that students can no longer keep up with it all. Of pre-nineteenth-century British philosophers, only Locke and Hume elicit comparable attention. The reason for this lies mainly, of course, in the fascination his ideas exert on nearly all his readers, an effect as observable in the many seventeenth-century critics and adversaries who were opposed to his principles as it is among modem scholars. It is also due, however, to the extraordinary unity of intellectual vision and literary art which his major works exhibit and which attained its height in Leviathan. There is no greater writer of philosophic prose in English than Hobbes. The lucidity of his language, its compression, penetration, and vitality, its happy fusion of abstraction with striking images and aphorisms, its apparently seamless reasoning in propounding truths and exposing errors, its irony and imperturbable self-confidence-all these qualities combine to give his arguments a captivating force that serves his highest conceptual ambitions as a systematizer and produces a powerful impression in the reader. A vast contrast exists in this respect between the philosophic style

Epistemology · Philosophy · Seventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought

• The Hobbes Industry

  Open Access•M M Goldsmith, Maurice Goldsmith•Political Studies•1991

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