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THOMAS HOBBES ON THE POLITICAL THEORIST'S VOCATION*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 August 2007

JULIE E. COOPER
JULIE E. COOPER*
Affiliation:
University of Chicago
*
Department of Political Science, University of Chicago, Pick Hall 406, 5828 S. University Avenue, Chicago, IL 60637[email protected]
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Abstract

Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan offers the fiercest modern indictment against pride. Yet seventeenth-century polemicists and contemporary historians of political theory agree that arrogance is one of Hobbes's stylistic signatures. Does Hobbes, the author, fail to practise the modesty which he preaches to political subjects? Against critical consensus, I argue that Hobbes devises protocols of literary self-presentation consistent with his arguments for modesty. I make this argument by way of a close reading of Hobbes's Latin verse autobiography. Although the autobiography is usually cited as evidence of Hobbes's vanity, I read it as Hobbes's perverse profession of modesty. In the autobiography, Hobbes shuns the role of hero, casting himself as a ‘poor worm’ whose endeavours are motivated by fear. Acute consciousness of mortality, rather than lust for renown, moves Hobbes to philosophize. With this account of the affective springs of his own philosophy, Hobbes redefines the political theorist's vocation. Breaking with traditions that define political theory as a vehicle for heroic self-display, Hobbes defines political theory as a vocation for ordinary mortals.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 50 , Issue 3 , September 2007 , pp. 519 - 547
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2007

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References

1 Thomas Hobbes, The life of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury (London, 1680), p. 12.

2 Leo Strauss, The political philosophy of Hobbes, trans. E. M. Sinclair (Chicago, 1963), p. 55.

3 See Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan ed. C. B. MacPherson (New York, 1985), p. 185.

4 Ibid.

5 Throughout, I use male pronouns to refer to the generic political subject and the generic political theorist. I do so because I am persuaded by Carole Pateman's argument that Hobbes's original contract excludes women. See Carole Pateman, The sexual contract (Stanford, CA, 1988), pp. 44–50. However, I argue that the male subject of contract and the male political theorist are modest. Because modesty has historically been a female virtue, the question of the subject's gender is more complicated than it first appears. Hobbes simultaneously upholds male privilege and redefines masculinity. For Hobbes, manliness is not synonymous with martial valour; indeed, manliness is consistent with modesty, cowardice, and fear. Harvey Mansfield has noted Hobbes's redefinition of masculinity with chagrin. According to Mansfield, Hobbes debunks (salutary) manliness, and in so doing ushers in the (misguided) cult of the ‘sensitive man’. See Mansfield, Harvey, ‘Virilité et libéralisme’, Archives de Philosophie du Droit, 41 (1997), pp. 25–42Google Scholar.

6 In Leviathan, Hobbes defines the normative practice of equality as a practice of modesty. In the ninth law of nature, ‘Against Pride’, Hobbes insists ‘That every man acknowledge other for his Equall by Nature. The breach of this Precept is Pride.’ The tenth law of nature, ‘Against Arrogance’, prohibits parties to the original contract from reserving rights that they would deny others. Hobbes explains, ‘the observers of this law, are those we call Modest, and the breakers Arrogant men’. See Hobbes, Leviathan, pp. 211–12.

7 Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 227.

8 John Eachard, Mr. Hobbs's state of nature considered (Cornhil [London], 1672).

9 For the seventeenth-century anti-Hobbes polemic, see Samuel Mintz, The hunting of Leviathan (Cambridge, 1962). For accusations of pride in the seventeenth-century anti-Hobbes polemic, see Alex Rosse, Leviathan drawn out with a hook (London, 1655); The recantation of Daniel Scargill (n.p., 1669); and Edward earl of Clarendon, A brief view and survey of the dangerous and pernicious errors to church and state, in Mr. Hobbes's book, entitled Leviathan (Oxford, 1676). For an eighteenth-century accusation of vanity, see the anonymous biography that prefaces Thomas Hobbes, The moral and political works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury (London, 1750), pp. xviii and xix. The biographer contends that ‘the old man's passion for applause … was his greatest foible’, and discerns ‘a little stroke of vanity’ in the old man's verse autobiography. See also the epigraph to Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the air pump (Princeton, 1985) which is taken from W. Dodd's The beauties of history (1796): ‘What a blessing to mankind, in himself and his writings, was the ingenious, humble, and pious Mr. Boyle; what a common pest to society was the fallacious, proud, and impious Hobbes! Accordingly we find the former bad adieu to this world with utmost serenity, honour, and hope; while the other went out of it in the dark, with an odium on his name, as well as with terrible apprehensions of an unknown future.’

10 Siegmund Probst has argued that relations between Hobbes and Ward were initially cordial, but soured after Leviathan's publication, as Ward sought to protect himself from the Hobbist taint. See Probst, Siegmund, ‘Infinity and creation: the origin of the controversy between Thomas Hobbes and the Savilian Professors Seth Ward and John Wallis’, British Journal for the History of Science, 26 (1993), pp. 271CrossRefGoogle Scholar–9.

11 For Hobbes's reputation for irascibility, see Walter Pope, The life of Seth (Oxford, 1961), pp. 28, 125–6; Six lessons to the Savilian professors of mathematics, in Thomas Hobbes, The English works of Thomas Hobbes, vii, ed. William Molesworth (Scientia Aalen, 1962), pp. 337–41; and John Aubrey, Brief lives, i, ed. Andrew Clark (Oxford, 1898), pp. 340, 373.

12 John Wallis, Hobbius heauton-timorumenos, or a consideration of Mr. Hobbes his dialogues (n.p., 1662), p. 3.

13 See Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the air pump, and Sheldon S. Wolin, Hobbes and the epic tradition of political theory (Los Angeles, 1970), p. 17. Gabriella Slomp offers a more measured contemporary assessment, discerning ‘no more than a healthy amount of self-esteem’. See Gabriella Slomp, Thomas Hobbes and the political philosophy of glory (New York, 2000), p. 32.

14 De corpore, in Thomas Hobbes, The English works of Thomas Hobbes, i, ed. William Molesworth (Scientia Aalen, 1962), p. ix. This passage is not anomalous: Hobbes repeatedly lauds De cive in polemical essays. See Considerations upon the reputation, loyalty, manners, and religion of Thomas Hobbes, in Thomas Hobbes, The English works of Thomas Hobbes, iv, ed. William Molesworth (Scientia Aalen, 1962), pp. 415, 435, and 436–7.

15 For an example of the abbreviated form in which this passage is usually cited, see Slomp, Hobbes the political philosophy of glory, p. 2.

16 Hobbes, Six lessons, p. 356. Hobbes explains the classical allusion in Hobbes, Six lessons, pp. 331–2. For an alternative classical source for this ethos, see Hobbes, Considerations, pp. 438–9.

17 Hobbes, Six lessons, p. 333.

18 Ibid., p. 337.

19 Classical rhetoric dedicates the preface or exordium to the task of captatio benevolentiae – winning the reader's/listener's good will. Affected professions of modesty are a key element of this strategy. At the outset, the author primes his readers by apologizing for his literary deficits. See Ernst Robert Curtius, European literature and the Latin middle ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, 1953), p. 83: ‘Now the author protests his inadequacy in general, now bemoans his uneducated and rude speech.’ Hobbes's professions of modesty do not repeat these topoi. Indeed, Hobbes never disparages his literary skills. Rather, Hobbes's modesty consists of acknowledgement of mortality – the recognition that he is no more, and no less, adequate than anyone else. It is precisely the egalitarian conviction that philosophical prowess cannot insulate him from death that qualifies Hobbes to philosophize. For the waning of classical modesty in the seventeenth century, with reference to Hobbes, see Kevin Dunn, Pretexts of authority: the rhetoric of authorship in the renaissance preface (Stanford, CA, 1994).

20 Hobbes, Six lessons, p. 337. See also p. 336.

21 Ibid., p. 332.

22 Ibid., p. 335. See also Thomas Hobbes, On the citizen (de cive), trans. Richard Tuck and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge, 1998), p. 13. In the Epistle Dedicatory to Leviathan, Hobbes asserts that vanity discredits an author. Should the Godolphins, to whom Leviathan is dedicated, feel compelled to disavow the work, they can easily do so, Hobbes explains, by accusing Hobbes of vanity and presumption. See Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 76: ‘If notwithstanding this, you find my labour generally decryed, you may be pleased to excuse your selfe, and say I am a man that love my own opinions, and think true all I say, that I honoured your Brother, and honour you, and have presum'd on that.’

23 Thomas Hobbes, Thomas White's De mundo examined, trans. Harold Whitmore Jones (London, 1976), p. 27. See also Hobbes, De cive, p. 23, where Hobbes describes vanity as an occupational hazard for philosophers. These warnings about the abuse of publication recall Hobbes's admonitions against laughter, which he reads as a supercilious (and therefore dangerous) expression of scorn and contempt. See ‘Hobbes and the classical theory of laughter’, in Quentin Skinner, Visions of politics, vol. 3 (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 142–76.

24 Michel Foucault, ‘What is an author?’, in Paul Rabinow, ed., The Foucault reader (New York, 1984), p. 101.

25 Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 161.

26 See Davis, Paul, ‘Thomas Hobbes's translations of Homer: epic and anticlericalism in late seventeenth-century England’, Seventeenth Century, 12 (1997), pp. 231Google Scholar–55.

27 Wolin, Hobbes and the epic tradition, p. 4.

28 Ibid.

29 Ibid., p. 5.

30 Ibid., p. 17.

31 Ibid. Wolin is not the first to discern a desire for immortality on Hobbes's part. In the seventeenth century, Hobbes's astonishing longevity prompted contemporaries to accuse him of an impious aspiration toward immortality. For example, see the 1679 broadsheet, Elegie upon Mr. Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, lately deceased.

32 Wolin, Hobbes and the epic tradition, p. 27.

33 Admittedly, Wolin qualifies this assessment in the closing lines of his essay. See Wolin, Hobbes and the epic tradition, pp. 49–50. Hobbes is ultimately an anti-hero, according to Wolin, because his epic achievement involves creating a society in which there is no room for heroism on the part of subject or theorist – a society in which political agon has been effectively extinguished.

34 In Leviathan, Hobbes repeatedly insists that the sovereign must maintain a position of unrivaled pre-eminence in the commonwealth. Toward that end, he censures subjects who court public esteem. See Hobbes, Leviathan, pp. 374 and 225.

35 Wolin, Hobbes and the epic tradition, p. 28.

36 Ibid.

37 Ibid., p. 8.

38 Ibid., p. 9.

39 Ibid.

40 Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 218.

41 Ibid., p. 217.

42 Ibid.

43 Ibid.

44 For a more detailed exposition of this idea, see Hanna Pitkin, The concept of representation (Berkeley, CA, 1967); and Victoria Kahn, Rhetoric, prudence, and skepticism in the Renaissance (Ithaca, NY, 1985), p. 168. For another account of the significance of Hobbes's theatrical metaphors, see Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds apart: the market and the theatre in Anglo-American thought, 1550–1750 (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 98–103.

45 Wolin, Hobbes and the epic tradition, p. 17.

46 Ibid., p. 5. Wolin's epic theorists solicit applause. See ibid., p. 11.

47 Thomas Hobbes, The correspondence, i, ed. Noel Malcolm (Oxford, 1994), p. 22.

48 Ibid., pp. 22–3.

49 Hobbes, Considerations, p. 438.

50 Ibid. Significantly, in the passage in question, Hobbes insists that his boasts are necessitated by (and justified as) self-defence. See Hobbes, Considerations, p. 438: ‘Besides, you can have very little skill in morality, that cannot see the justice of commending a man's self, as well as of anything else, in his own defence.’

51 Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 217.

52 Hobbes, Correspondence, p. 122. In his replies, Hobbes thanks Sorbière for praising his preface to the second edition of De cive – which praise helped convince the publisher that De cive would sell – but blushes at the exaggerated nature of Sorbière's praise. See Hobbes, Correspondence, pp. 126–7, 143–4.

53 Aubrey attempts to depict Hobbes's face through the medium of language, but finds the project daunting. Given the fragmentary nature of Aubrey's text, his eventual description of Hobbes's face captures the experience, described in Hobbes's letter, of glimpsing defacement in ‘short fits’. See Aubrey, Brief lives, pp. 347–8.

54 Hobbes, Correspondence, pp. 122–3.

55 Noel Malcolm confirms that Sorbière did, in fact, succeed in obtaining Hobbes's portrait from de Martel. See Hobbes, Correspondence, p. 135. One wonders why Hobbes would allow Sorbière to obtain his portrait, given that Sorbière was likely to violate Hobbes's strictures on the proper use of portraiture. For those strictures, see Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 677: ‘I say not, that to draw a Picture after a fancy, is a Sin; but when it is drawn, to hold it for a Representation of God, is against the second Commandment; and can be of no use, but to worship. And the same may be said of the Images of Angels, and of men dead; unlesse as Monuments of friends, or of men worthy of remembrance: For such use of an Image, is not Worship of the Image; but a civill honoring of the Person, not that is, but that was: But when it is done to the Image which we make of a Saint, for no other reason, but that we think he heareth our prayers, and is pleased with the honour wee doe him, when dead, and without sense, wee attribute to him more than humane power; and therefore it is Idolatry.’ Sorbière's veneration threatens to lapse into idolatry.

56 Cornelis W. Schoneveld, ‘Some features of the seventeenth-century editions of Hobbes's De cive printed in Holland and elsewhere’, in J. G. van der Bend, Thomas Hobbes: his view of man (Amsterdam, 1982), p. 125.

57 Hobbes did not object in principle to inclusion of his portrait, although he would have assigned it a place of lesser prominence. See Hobbes, Correspondence, p. 147.

58 See ibid., p. 135: According to Malcolm, the Dutch Bruno (d. 1664) was ‘a prolific minor neo-Latin poet’ who worked as a tutor in the household of Constantijn Huygens and as rector of the Latin school at Hoorn.

59 Hobbes, Correspondence, pp. 134–5. According to Malcolm, there is some question as to whether the epigrams were written at the same time. There is also a question as to whether they were written expressly for inclusion in De cive. Malcolm holds that the first epigram was written earlier, to adorn the colour portrait that Sorbière acquired from de Martel. Sorbière sends this epigram to Hobbes in September 1646, with no mention of inclusion in De cive. Indeed, Sorbière only mentions inserting the epigrams in De cive in a letter from October 1646. Presumably, the second letter refers to all three poems. See Hobbes, Correspondence, p. 145. For Sorbière's commission to Bruno, see also Schoneveld, ‘Some features’, p. 128; and Horst Bredekamp Thomas Hobbes visuelle strategien (Berlin, 1999), p. 171. The epigrams appeared in Thomas Hobbes, De cive (1647) under the following title: In Effigiem Viri Clarissimi Thomae Hobbii Britanni.

60 Elzevier issued three printings of De cive in 1647, only one of which contains both the engraved portrait and the poems by Bruno. See Hugh McDonald and Mary Hargreaves, Thomas Hobbes: a bibliography (London, 1952); and Schoneveld, ‘Some features’, pp. 129–30.

61 Hobbes, Correspondence, p. 158.

62 Ibid., p. 157.

63 Ibid.

64 Ibid., p. 158.

65 Hobbes, De cive (1647). The translation is my own. For an alternative translation of the verses, and a discussion of their publication history, see Thomas Hobbes, De cive: the Latin version, ed. Howard Warrender (Oxford, 1983), Appendix A.

Ad Spectatorem.
Effigies Hobbi, totum mittenda per orbem,
Hac orbi tabula suspicienda patet.
Quae lateant, meliora puta, neque crede colores,
Ut faciem referunt, interiora dare.
Crede Thomae faciem, potuit quam pingere pictor:
Pingere quod nequiit, crede fuisse Thomam.

066 Hobbes, De cive.

Talis adest Hobbi civem scribentis imago,
Cui faciem virtus induit alta suam.
Pectore grande Sophos habitat, doctrina modesta:
Hic liber effigies hujus &hujus habet.
Tolle manum tabula, posses licet arte magistra,
Pictor, Apellaeas aequiparare manus.
Hobbius in chartis doctoque volumine vultum
Majori retulit dexteritate suum.

67 In what follows, English citations from the Vita are taken from Thomas Hobbes, The life of Mr. Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury (London, 1680), an anonymous translation, and Latin citations taken from Thomas Hobbes, Thomae Hobbesii Malmesburiensis vita, authore seipso (London, 1679). The Vita has a convoluted publication history, and there is some dispute about which edition is most authoritative. Hobbes wrote the Vita in 1672, and it was first published in an unauthorized edition in 1679 (the edition to which I refer), immediately following Hobbes's death. In 1681 and 1682, Richard Blackburne included a version of the Vita in a volume (Thomae Hobbes angli Malmesburiensis philosophi vita) that contained two additional accounts of Hobbes's life: a Latin prose biography attributed to Hobbes and a Latin biography attributed to Blackburne, which is largely a translation from Aubrey's Brief lives. By his admission, Blackburne altered the text of the Vita to correct misprints, grammatical mistakes, and metrical problems. In some cases, Blackburne takes metrical lapses as pretexts for editorial licence; for example, Blackburne changed the poem's final couplet. See Aubrey, Brief lives, p. 363: ‘These two last verses Dr. Blackburne altered (because of qua in quatuor, long) in the copie printed with Mr. Hobbes's life in Latine, and some other alterations he made, but me thinkes the sense is not so brisque.’ As Aubrey notes, Blackburne's alterations dilute the sense and force of the original. Blackburne seems determined to recuperate Hobbes for the pantheon of philosophical heroes by muting the motif of fear that runs through the Vita. Toward this end, Blackburne removes the reference to fear in Hobbes's final couplet, and he prefaces the Vita (1681) with a tag from Virgil's Georgics which implies that, through philosophy, Hobbes has vanquished fear (‘Foelix qui potuit rerum cognoscere Caussas,/Atque metum omnes &inexorabile Fatum/Subiecit pedibus, Strepitumque Acherontis avari’). William Molesworth reproduces the text of Blackburne's Vita in the first volume of Thomas Hobbes, Thomae Hobbes Malmesburiensis opera philosophica quae Latine scripsit omnia, ed. William Molesworth (Scientia Aalen, 1961). In personal correspondence (Aug. 2002), Quentin Skinner confirmed that the unauthorized 1679 edition was typeset from a manuscript of the Vita in James Wheldon's hand with corrections by Hobbes (Chatsworth: Hobbes MS A.6: Untitled), and is therefore the best printed text of the Vita (that is, the edition which most closely reflects what Hobbes originally wrote). For that reason, I cite from the 1679 edition, rather than from Molesworth. Although based on the 1679 edition, the 1680 English translation from which I cite is quite loose, and, at key points, departs from the literal sense of the Latin. (For deficits of this translation, see the prefatory note to the reprint edition, Thomas Hobbes, The life of Mr. Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury and Thomae Hobbesii Malmesburiensis vita (Exeter, 1979). For its publication history, see Anthony Wood, Athenae Oxonienses (London, 1692), p. 481.) Nevertheless, I have decided to cite from it (including the original Latin when the translation fails to capture connotations of the original) for two reasons: First, this translation has been in circulation since Hobbes's death, and has therefore played an influential role in shaping Hobbes's public persona. Second, the translation is reproduced in Thomas Hobbes, Human nature and De corpore politico (Oxford, 1994). and so is widely available to contemporary readers. For an alternative translation of the Vita, see Thomas Hobbes. ‘The autobiography of Thomas Hobbes’, trans. Benjamin Farrington, The rationalist annual (1958), pp. 22–31.

68 Aubrey catalogues Hobbes's portraits. See Aubrey, Brief lives, p. 354. Hobbes offers a similar catalogue in The prose life. See Hobbes, Human nature, p. 252. Hobbes is not opposed to portraiture in principle, although he does place strictures on its proper use.

69 Thomas Hobbes, The prose life, in Hobbes, Human nature, p. 250: ‘Therefore, I do not write and publish the life of a man in terms of his business, or his involvement in matters of peace and war, but rather in terms of his excellence and virtual singularity in all branches of science. When his abilities became known (as has already been demonstrated), innumerable men gathered about him, both from our own country and from foreign parts, and amongst those who came were the emissaries of princes, as well as others of the highest nobility. It may reasonably be supposed that learned man as yet unborn, and that posterity, will be grateful for this transmission of the text of his life. They will first wish to understand his involvement in the sciences, and then something of the nature of his life.’

70 Hobbes, The life of Thomas Hobbes, p. 2.

71 Ibid.

72 Hobbes, Thomae Hobbesii, p. 2.

73 Hobbes, Leviathan, Introduction, p. 82.

74 I have argued that Hobbes invites readers to interpret the Vita through constant reference to Leviathan. Quentin Skinner identifies a different intertext for the Vita: Ovid's autobiography. See Quentin Skinner, Reason and rhetoric in the philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge, 1996), p. 233.

75 Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 188.

76 I thank Victoria Kahn for this insight.

77 Hobbes, The life of Thomas Hobbes, p. 2.

78 Ibid., p. 1.

79 For an example of Hobbes as an antic character, constantly in motion, never at rest, see Hobbes, The life of Thomas Hobbes, p. 6: ‘Whether on Horse, in Coach, or Ship, still I/Was most intent on my Philosophy./One only thing I'th’ World seem'd true to me,/Tho’ several ways that Falsified be./One only True Thing, the Basis of all/Those Things whereby we any Thing do call./How Sleep does fly away, and what things still/By Opticks I can Multiply at will./Phancie's Internal, th'Issue of our Brain,/Th'internal parts only Motion contain:/And he that studies Physicks first must know/What Motion is, and what Motion can do. /To Matter, Motion, I my self apply.’

80 See Aubrey, Brief lives, p. 390: ‘His extraordinary timorousnes which he himself in his Latine poem doth very ingeniously confess and attributes it to the influence of his mother's dread of the Spanish invasion in 88, she being then with child of him.’ However, Aubrey goes out of his way to dispel the notion that Hobbes's fears were superstitious. See Aubrey, Brief lives, p. 353: ‘For instance, one (common) [slander against Hobbes] was that he was afrayd to lye alone at night in his chamber, I have often heard him say he was not afrayd of sprights, but afrayd of being knockt on the head for five or ten pounds, which rogues might think he had in his chamber.’ Hobbes also takes pains to rebut this slander in Hobbes, The life of Thomas Hobbes, p. 4 – ‘My Slumbers pleasant in Nights darkest Shade’ – and Hobbes, Prose life, in Hobbes, Human nature, p. 251.

81 Hobbes, The life of Thomas Hobbes, p. 7.

82 Ibid. Here, Hobbes implicitly numbers himself among the ‘men of feminine courage’ for whom allowances should be made in wartime. See Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 270.

83 Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 190.

84 Hobbes, The life of Thomas Hobbes, p. 18.

85 Ibid., p. 12.

86 Ibid., p. 15.

87 Ibid.

88 Hobbes, Thomae Hobbesii, p. 12.

89 Hobbes, The life of Thomas Hobbes, p. 16.

90 Ibid.

91 Hobbes, The life of Thomas Hobbes, p. 9.

92 Hobbes, Thomae Hobbesii, p. 8.

93 Wolin, Hobbes and the epic tradition, p. 16.

94 Hobbes, The life of Thomas Hobbes, p. 8. See Skinner, Reason and rhetoric, pp. 243–4.

95 See also Hobbes, The life of Thomas Hobbes, p. 13: ‘And in Six Dialogues I do Inveigh/Against that new and Geometrick way,/But to no purpose, Great Men it doth please,/And thus the Med'cine yields to the Disease.’ On Hobbes, The life of Thomas Hobbes, p. 11, Hobbes admits the ferocity of attacks on his political conduct: ‘When that Book [Leviathan] was perus'd by knowing Men,/The Gates of Janus Temple opened then;/And they accus'd me to the King, that I/Seem'd to approve Cromwel's Impiety,/And Countenance the worst of Wickedness:/This was believ'd.’ For a different interpretation of Hobbes's willingness to acknowledge his enemies' ferocity, see Skinner, Reason and rhetoric, pp. 350–1.

96 Hobbes, Six lessons, p. 336.

97 Hobbes, The life of Thomas Hobbes, p. 16.

98 Ibid., p. 17. For a more modest assessment of Hobbes's finances, see Hobbes, Prose life, in Hobbes, Human nature, p. 253.

99 Hobbes, The life of Thomas Hobbes, p. 18.

100 Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 226. For another critique of bourgeois complacency, see ibid., p. 677. Here, I take issue with critics, like C. B. MacPherson, who anoint Hobbes the apostle of a new bourgeois ethos. See C. B. MacPherson, The political theory of possessive individualism (Oxford, 1964). MacPherson fails to discern the threat bourgeois contentment poses to political stability; material comforts threaten to render subjects oblivious to existential insecurity, and the need for absolute sovereignty. See Strauss, The political philosophy, p. 122: ‘Hobbes “prefers” these terrors of the state of nature because only on awareness of these terrors can a true and permanent society rest. The bourgeois existence which no longer experiences these terrors will endure only as long as it remembers them.’ If commodious living fosters complacency, and complacency conduces to pride, Hobbes must identify a discourse that recalls even the most prosperous subjects to their finitude.

101 Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 188.

102 Hobbes does explain that Leviathan's title alludes to difficulties of governing proud men, difficulties diagnosed in the book of Job. See Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 362: ‘Hitherto I have set forth the nature of Man, (whose pride and other Passions have compelled him to submit himselfe to Government;) together with the great power of his Governour, whom I compared to Leviathan, taking that comparison out of the two last verses of the one and fortieth of Job; where God having set forth the great power of Leviathan, called him King of the Proud. There is nothing, saith he, on earth, to be compared with him. He is made so as not to be afraid. Hee seeth every high thing below him; and is King of all the children of pride.’

103 Job 1:1.

104 Job 42:6.

105 Job 42: 12–13.

106 Hobbes, The life of Thomas Hobbes, p. 18. Hobbes lived to the age of ninety-one.

107 Hobbes, Thomae Hobbesii, p. 14.

108 Hobbes, Leviathan, pp. 129–30.

109 Michael Oakeshott, Hobbes on civil association (Indianapolis, IN, 1975), p. 153.

110 Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 161.

111 Ibid., p. 227.

112 White Kennett, Memoirs of the family of Cavendish (London, 1708), p. 17. For Hobbes's actual epitaph, see Aubrey, Brief lives, p. 386: ‘Condita hic sunt ossa Thomae Hobbes/Qui per multos annos servivit duobus comitibus Devoniae (patri et filio)./Vir probus, et fama eruditionis./Domi forisque bene cognitus/Obiit Anno Domini 1679, mensis Dec die 4, Aetatis suae 91.’

113 Hobbes, De corpore, p. xii.

114 Phaedo, in Plato, The last days of Socrates, trans. Hugh Tredennick and Harold Tarrant (New York, 1993), p. 116.

115 Ibid.

116 For Hobbes's critique of the doctrine of an immortal soul, see Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 483.

117 Although see ibid., p. 162, where Hobbes ascribes ethical force to the desire for immortality: ‘Desire of Praise, disposeth to laudable actions, such as please them whose judgement they value; for of those men whom we contemn, we contemn also the Praises. Desire of Fame after Death does the same. And though after death, there be no sense of the praise given us on Earth, as being joyes, that are either swallowed up in the unspeakable joyes of Heaven, or extinguished in the extreme torments of Hell: yet is not such Fame vain; because men have a present delight therein, from the foresight of it, and of the benefit that may rebound thereby to their posterity: which though they now see not, yet they imagine; and any thing that is pleasure in the sense, the same also is pleasure in the imagination.’

118 Ibid., p. 374.

119 Ibid., p. 688. See also Aubrey, Brief lives, p. 348 – ‘He desired not the reputation of his wisdome to be taken from the cutt of his beard, but from his reason’ – and Hobbes, De cive, p. 6.

120 The desire for impersonal authority places Hobbes in the mainstream of seventeenth-century science, as described by Foucault. See Foucault, ‘What is an author?’, p. 109. In the seventeenth century, ‘scientific discourses began to be received for themselves, in the anonymity of an established or always redemonstrable truth; their membership in a systematic ensemble, and not the reference to the individual who produced them, stood as their guarantee’. However, the fact that Hobbes failed to resist incorporation into the culture of celebrity suggests that seventeenth-century attitudes are more fluid than Foucault allows. Although Hobbes subscribed to ideals of anonymous philosophy, many of his readers did not, and their commitments helped determine his authorial persona. Thus, the vagaries of Hobbes's reception suggest that the ideal of anonymous philosophy was already embattled in the seventeenth century. In this sense, Hobbes belongs rather to the period described in Foucault, ‘What is an author?’, p. 101: the moment when ‘we began to recount the lives of authors rather than of heroes’.

121 Wallis, Hobbius, p. 5.

122 For example, see Book Four of Leviathan, where Hobbes indulges in sarcasm, glory, and contempt at the expense of scholastic philosophers and other opponents. However, Quentin Skinner notes that Hobbes excised the most haughty and contemptuous passages from Book Four when he republished Leviathan in Latin the 1660s. See Skinner, Reason and rhetoric, p. 395. The decision to suppress scornful passages would support my claim that, for the most part, Hobbes was concerned to avoid the appearance of vanity.

123 John Rawls, A theory of justice (Cambridge, 1971), p. 440. For the liberal recuperation of self-assertion, see John Stuart Mill, On liberty and other essays (Oxford, 1991), p. 69. I thank Victoria Kahn for helping me to formulate the conclusion.