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In the late pre-Reformation period, re-urbanization and increasing monetization impacting on what had become a profoundly rural civilization gave rise to political structures markedly different from those of the pre-Christian Mediterranean world. The increasing availability of energy from water power and wind power was one important (and much underestimated) factor enabling economic growth. Another was the expansion of the monetary mass as a result of the establishment of a supralocal financial system (unknown to the ancient world) and the easy availability of credit. This helped to give the more important princes an increasing edge over lesser actors, at the same time that development was both furthered and impeded by conflicting cultural and ideological currents — as reflected in the thinking of such authors as Enea Silvio Piccolomini, Nicolaus Cusanus, Jean Bodin, Johannes Althusius, and Thomas Hobbes. Even 18th-century ‘absolute’ monarchies like the French or Prussian ones remained closer to the ‘heteronomous’ political structures of the pre-Reformation period than to today's state.

Delineates the principal ideas that make up my theory of freedom as negative liberty. Raises a number of challenges to positive-liberty theories and to the civic-republican conception of freedom, with sustained criticisms of the work of Quentin Skinner and Philip Pettit. It likewise objects to moralized conceptions of particular freedoms and unfreedoms. It pays particular attention to the ways in which such freedoms and unfreedoms exist over time.

From the early 17th century onwards, the dominant natural philosophy was mechanism: the view that all explanations must ultimately take the form of a reduction to a very economical range of features at the micro-corpuscularian level, e.g., in the paradigm case, size, speed, and direction of motion. Gassendi and Beeckman offered very different routes to mechanism: Gassendi's was a legitimatory programme that focuses on matter theory, whereas Beeckman's approach comes directly out of mechanics, which it attempted to transform into natural philosophy by fleshing it out in micro-corpuscularian terms. The crucial stage in mechanism comes with the rise of concerted attempts to integrate mechanics and matter theory into a consistent whole, at the same time offering the mechanism so devised as a complete theory of the cosmos, and it is the approaches of Hobbes, whose closest affinities are with Gassendi, and Descartes, whose closest affinities are with Beeckman, that bring out most clearly what is at issue here.

Shortly after turning eighty, the Savilian professor of geometry John Wallis penned his apologia pro vita sua, in the course of which he indicated that during his student days at Cambridge University mathematics was hardly considered a proper university subject and experimental philosophy was nowhere to be found. Another octogenarian, Thomas Hobbes, recalled in his autobiography an Oxford system of education based on incomprehensible logic and sterile physics. For his part, John Locke regaled his admirers with how he, too, had misspent his time at Oxford, the upshot of which was that he was to lay the blame for his lack of application on the reigning tyranny of Aristotle. These and similar recollections need to be taken seriously in any historical study. In their haste to judge the universities as unenlightened institutions, incapable of contributing appreciably to the intellectual formation of great thinkers, scholars fail to realize that deprecatory expressions by aged alumni often recall events after a lifetime devoted to extending the frontiers of their respective fields.

This chapter deals with experimental philosophy, as represented in Gilbert on magnetism, Hobbes on the air pump, and Newton on the production of the spectrum. It is shown that experimental philosophy differs from mechanism in quite radical ways. In particular, it has explanatory success but in apparently very localized domains, and it construes causation not in terms of underlying causes but in terms of causes acting at the same level. Its difference from mechanism is manifest in the contrast between Descartes' and Newton's accounts of the production of the spectrum: Descartes provides a fully geometrical account of the separation of coloured rays, but then shifts into a different register, a qualitative and speculative one in attempting to provide a micro-corpuscularian account of the physical basis of colour production; Newton manages to account for the spectrum without leaving the phenomenal geometricized level, eschewing any recourse to ‘underlying’ causes.

This chapter states that Thomas Hobbes writes on morals as a moralist. His primary aim is to demonstrate what men ought, and ought not, to do. In pursuing this aim, Hobbes introduces, and explains, certain moral concepts, of which the most important are right of nature, law of nature, obligation, and justice. However, his interest is in using these concepts in moral conclusions, not in explicating them. When the contemporary moral philosopher turns to Hobbes, however, his concern is with the concepts themselves, rather than the conclusions in which they appear. He wants to analyse moral terms, not draw moral conclusions. This shift of interest is entirely legitimate, but it is not always sufficiently noticed. The chapter further claims that, according to Hobbes, moral philosophy is nothing else but the science of what is good and evil in the conversation and society of mankind.

This chapter explores the Victorian interpretations of Thomas Hobbes and the pursuit of Victorian Hobbesian revival. Studies have varied in detail, but have concurred in claiming that arguments derived from Hobbes were systematically deployed by Victorian theorists, in order to resist the rise of democracy and to foster new forms of state power on a scale undreamt of by ‘absolutist’ rulers of Hobbes's own era. By the 1890s Hobbes was widely referred to, even by those who disliked his ideas, as England's ‘greatest’ political philosopher. His most important work, Leviathan, was portrayed as ‘one of the English bibles’, ‘the first great fountain of original ideas’, and ‘nothing less than the cornerstone of the science of politics’.Yet it had not always been thus. After his death in 1679 detailed knowledge of Hobbes's life and thought had largely disappeared from the mainstream of intellectual debate in Britain for well over a century.

This is the third of three chapters on the three traditions of war, and introduces the republican tradition, which is represented partially through the writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau, who, along with Pasquale Paoli and Tadeusz Kosciuszko, advanced a unified system of the republican good life and war in conjunction with the laws of war. The way in which this tradition developed in the nineteenth century is depicted. The different sections of the chapter are: The Republican Tradition of War; Republicanism; The Three Founders [Rousseau, Paoli and Kosciuszko]; Rousseau’s Republican War; Rousseau, Paoli and Kosciuszko; The Nature of Man and the State of Nature: Rousseau contra Hobbes and Grotius; The Nature of War; Liberty; Government, Society, and the Republic; Republic; Patriotism and Nationalism; Republican Nationalism; Republican Founders of the Tradition of War: Paoli and Kosciuszko; The Republican Tradition in the Nineteenth Century; The Nineteenth-Century Republican Tradition of War; and The Development of the Republican Tradition of War.

This chapter suggests that the political doctrine of Leviathan represents a major advance in Thomas Hobbes's thinking, one which depends almost entirely on the introduction of the concept of authorisation. It sets out the structure of Hobbes's mature political theory in a manner that shows the essential role played by authorisation. The chapter employs the method of analysis used in setting out Hobbes's theory of morality: first, it gives formal definitions of Hobbes's primary political concepts; second, it provides material definitions of these concepts, and indicates briefly the content of the theory; third, it discusses a number of problems that arise in stating Hobbes's theory; fourth and finally, it assesses the adequacy of the theory, both in terms of Hobbes's aims and in terms of its interests.

This chapter examines some questions in Thomas Hobbes's political philosophy, with the objective of identifying what, if anything, Hobbes thought to be the central problem, or problems, of politics. It links these questions to an account of why the state of nature is so intolerable, of how we may leave it, and whether the manner of our leaving is well explained by Hobbes. The chapter also considers the implications for Hobbes's account of the rights and duties of the sovereign, along with the contentious issue of the subject's right, in extremis, to reject his sovereign and rebel. Finally, it analyzes Hobbes's account of the nature of punishment, his conception of the law of nature, his theory of political obligation, the role (or lack of a role) of religious belief in his political system, and his views on liberty.

This chapter provides an overview of the key arguments in the debate on war and peace carried on from the time of Thomas Hobbes up to the Napoleonic Wars between philosophers, political economists, and political thinkers. This era, which was bookended by the names of Hobbes and Carl von Clausewitz, reveals four highly disparate theoretical standpoints from which authors explored these topics. There is the power-political realist position, associated with the name of Hobbes; the utilitarian-liberal conception, directly linked with the name of Jeremy Bentham, but which undoubtedly has roots in the work of Montesquieu as well; the republican-universalist stance that goes back to Immanuel Kant, though certain arguments can be found in the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau; and finally the position linked with the “neo-Roman understanding of history” and the associated emphasis on the ideal of virtue.

This chapter discusses the role played by God. It treats God last, partly because Thomas Hobbes does so, partly because God plays only a secondary part in the system. Hobbes's theory is intended for rational men who aim at their own preservation, whatever their religious views may be. The chapter serves as a positive interpretation, against recent critics, such as A. E. Taylor, Howard Warrender, and F. C. Hood, who consider theism central to Hobbes's position. However, the chapter also shows that what Hobbes says about God does not require it to revise that interpretation. Hobbes never questions the theoretical supremacy of the authority of God to human authority. It does mean that in any conflict, God takes precedence. The chapter shows that this supremacy does not receive any satisfactory recognition in Hobbes's conceptual scheme, but that it could be accommodated with no basic revision to that scheme.

The central thesis of this chapter is that the scope and structure of Hume's Treatise is modeled or planned after that of Hobbes's The Elements of Law and that in this respect there exists an important and unique relationship between these two works. The immediate significance of this relationship between Hobbes's and Hume's project of the “science of man” is that it indicates the underlying unity and coherence of Hume's entire project in the Treatise. However, although the “plan” of the Treatise is modeled closely after Hobbes's work, we should not infer that there are no significant issues where Hobbes and Hume diverge. On the contrary, there are (several) significant issues where Hobbes and Hume do indeed diverge—an observation that is in no way inconsistent with the fact that Hume's project is modeled after Hobbes's similar project of a “science of man.” Nevertheless, once we recognize the nature and significance of Hume's Hobbist plan in the Treatise, we are in a position to excavate and systematically uncover Hume's fundamental irreligious intentions throughout the Treatise.

How did it come about that humans live together in a community? This chapter argues — in contrast to ‘social contract’ approaches — that human society is a spontaneous ordering of the natural sociability of humans. Civil society is a spontaneous order that gives rise to a spontaneous jural order made up of the ‘living law’ or communal moral law, which state or positive law expresses in part and develops. It emphasizes the similarity between the practice of language and the social and jural domains, and argues that the function of all law is to sustain a peaceful social order. The discussions in the chapter are drawn together with reference to Thomas Hobbes's De Cive (1642) and Leviathan (1651).

This chapter discusses the logic in Thomas Hobbes's book, Leviathan. To understand morals and politics is to understand man. The chapter argues that the body politic that gives substance to moral conceptions is the product of human reason reflecting on human passion. It also asserts that Hobbes's psychology is essential to his moral and political theories. This view has been challenged by many recent interpreters and critics. The chapter begins with a statement of that argument and then examines Hobbes's conception of his own method. It shows why Hobbes considers psychology to be the necessary foundation of moral and political science, and leads into his account of the nature of man. The chapter also states that the Introduction to Leviathan compares the making of Commonwealth by the art of man with the making of man by the art of nature.