1 - The Political Economy of Thomas Hobbes

Summary

In the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, arguably we are witness to one of the most important harbingers of the dawning of the modern conception of the state. Hobbes’ account of the origins, character and limitations of political association displays a level of theoretical sophistication that surpassed his immediate predecessors such as the arch-realist Niccolo Machiavelli or the master politique Jean Bodin. The distinct historical context out of which Hobbes’ political philosophy emerged is marked by both the specific political history of his native England and the more general intellectual milieu in mid-seventeenth-century Europe.

As is well-known, Hobbes’ political writings are in some sense an extended reflection upon the long simmering constitutional and religious disputes in England that exploded into civil war in the 1640s. What Hobbes perceived in this conflict was nothing less than the complete shattering of the feudal order that had dominated not only England, but much of Europe, since the medieval period. Under pressure of events in the first decades of the seventeenth century, the theological and social pillars of the Stuart monarchy splintered apart as the commercial towns, dissenting Protestants and their proponents in Parliament grappled in a struggle for supremacy with the defenders of the Crown's prerogatives among the adherents of the established Church of England.

To Hobbes’ mind, so complete was the disintegration of the once well-established grounds of legitimate authority that by the time the civil war broke out ‘not one perhaps of ten thousand know what right any man had to command him’. The centrifugal forces that tore apart the delicate Elizabethan political and religious settlement proved to be impervious to the effects of traditional modes of moral and civil discourse. Of course, Hobbes was not surprised that even the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660 could not fully resolve the crisis of legitimacy in the English government, which would not be settled, more or less decisively, until the Glorious Revolution of 1688–1690 a decade or so after Hobbes’ own long life came to an end.