HOBBES, THOMAS (b. Malmesbury, England, 5 April 1588; d. Hardwick, Derbyshire, England, 4 December 1679), political philosophy, moral philosophy, geometry, optics.

    from each other that the sovereign was brought into being. Hobbes reserves to the citizens the right of rebellion if the sovereign fails to protect their security, but he treats this question warily.

The argument of Leviathan does not end with these views; fully one-third of the book examines the implications of Hobbes's political philosophy in a Christian society. Hobbes recognized that a seventeenth-century audience would demand to know whether his principles conformed to the teaching of Scripture. He himself knew the Bible well, and he was able to find passages in it supporting his doctrine of absolute sovereignty; but other passages were inconvenient and there remained the question, particularly vexing in an age of religious warfare, of which of several interpretations of Scripture was the correct one. Ultimately, said Hobbes, all Scripture is subject to interpretation, there being nothing about it except its existence that is agreeable to all minds. His solution to the problem of conflicting interpretation was both political and philosophical. On the political side he adopted the ultra-Erastian position that the only interpretation of Scripture that may be publicly espoused by citizens in a commonwealth is the interpretation of the sovereign authority. The natural right which citizens, by agreement among themselves, had transferred to the sovereign included the natural right of scriptural interpretation; should they retain that right, the commonwealth would inevitably lapse into a state of nature.

Moreover, Hobbes remained philosophically skeptical about the truth of Scripture. He conceded that a core of mystery in Scripture must be accepted on faith; but the greater part of the Bible is immune to human reason. His skepticism took the form of a surprisingly modern biblical criticism in which he anticipated Richard Simon and Spinoza by calling in question the number, scope, authorship, and general authenticity of the books of the Bible.

The relationship between Hobbes's scientific ideas and outlook on the one hand and his political philosophy on the other is hard to define. The question has provoked disagreement among Hobbes's commentators. Croom Robertson thought that the whole of Hobbes's political doctrine “had its main lines fixed when he was still a mere observer of men and manners, and not yet a mechanical philosopher.” Leo Strauss accepts this view, but he believes that Hobbes had cast his mature political philosophy into an alien scientific mold, which resulted in a distortion of the politics but not in any significant change of its essentially prescientific, humanistic character.

Clearly Hobbes's materialism and physics do not imply his political theory in any simple linear connection; but, as was pointed out by J. W. N. Watkins, the science implies the civil philosophy in the same way, for example, that the law of evidence has important implications for statements made by witnesses in law courts, although the law of evidence does not entail any of those statements. Watkins' treatment of this whole question is illuminating. He has shown how Hobbes came to abandon his earliest political views, set down in the introduction to his Thucydides. Those views were “inductivist”; they advocated the study of history as a guide to rational conduct. Under the shaping influence of the new scientific outlook, however, Hobbes adopted the method called resolutive-compositive, which he derived partly from Galileo, partly from Harvey, but primarily from the philosophers and scientists of the school of Padua. (Hobbes was personally acquainted with a disciple of this school, Berigardus, author of Circulus Pisanus.) The method is described by Hobbes in De corpore. It has a large Aristotelian component. Put in its simplest form, it consists of resolving whole conceptions into their constituent parts or first principles and then recomposing them. It can be seen that this method is not an instrument of discovery in any modern sense of the idea of “science”; it appears to have more usefulness in social enquiries. Hobbes assimilated it into his political theory—as in the striking example of the break-up of society into its constituent parts called the state of nature and its recomposition into a commonwealth.

Not unexpectedly, Hobbes's views in Leviathan, taken altogether, raised a storm of opposition. He was embroiled in controversy for the rest of his life—more, in fact, than any English thinker before or since. The first signs of opposition appeared in France before Leviathan was published. On the recommendation of Newcastle, Hobbes was appointed tutor in mathematics to the prince of Wales, the future Charles II. Because of fears expressed by clergymen that the prince would be contaminated with atheism, Hobbes was obliged to promise that he would teach mathematics only, and not politics or religion. And when Leviathan was published, no one of the English court in France liked it. Although it was absolutist, it expressed no particular bias in favor of monarchy; and it appeared to favor the Puritan regime in England when it insisted that a citizen submit to any government that can secure internal peace. Moreover, its anticlericalism and attacks on the papacy offended French Jesuits and English Catholics. For these reasons Charles ordered Hobbes to leave the English colony in France, and in 1652 the philosopher returned to England.