INTRODUCTION
A half-century ago historiography was dominated by questions of social interpretation, and this was especially so in the historiography of seventeenth-century England. Historians made a conscious attempt to exploit sociological concepts, theories and methods of analysis. This emphasis began to abate in the 1970s and by the 1980s it had largely disappeared. In intellectual history, moreover, the social status and socioeconomic views of major figures were no longer taken generally as key explanatory factors. An older belief that political and religious thought reflects the general social world views of its major figures, that meaning is dependent on social perception, was no longer considered of central importance.
The debates among interpreters of Thomas Hobbes's political thought followed a parallel course. Prior to 1970 a number of prominent writers sought to explain it (at least in part) as bourgeois; the most sophisticated of these class-based interpretations was that of C. B. Macpherson.Footnote 1 Macpherson argued that Hobbes's social model, which he called “the possessive market society,” corresponded to the post-feudal market economy of seventeenth-century England. Relations among individuals are largely determined by the ownership of various forms of property and their maximization of profit. Thus “a possessive market society is a series of competitive and invasive relations between all men, regardless of class: it puts every man on his own.”Footnote 2
The reaction to Macpherson was generally negative.Footnote 3 One of the most thoughtful responses was that of Keith Thomas, a social historian who sought to “reconstruct the social affiliations of Hobbes's thought” but warned that any such move “must necessarily be of a tentative kind” because “the basic sociological analysis of seventeenth century English society remains to be carried out.”Footnote 4 He found that Hobbes's social sympathies were transitional in character, that his ethical ideals were uniformly aristocratic, that his social views reflected a society in which “status is all-important,”Footnote 5 and that his advanced economic views were “the most obviously bourgeois aspect of his thought.”Footnote 6
Today such debates on Hobbes do not occur. The question of Hobbes's political sympathies in the English Civil Wars, which has been hotly debated over the past two decades, offers a good example. Was he a royalist?Footnote 7 Or was he a democrat?Footnote 8 Did he support the Commonwealth or Cromwell?Footnote 9 Or was he an eirenicist who supported whatever cause seemed to provide the most promising basis for lasting peace?Footnote 10 Each of these interpretations has been defended learnedly by experts, with special attention to Leviathan. But the debate has been carried on without reference to broad social factors such as social status, identity and economic position. It is my contention that if the debate had taken these factors into account, it would have had a very different character or would not have taken place at all.
Hobbes's social context is ripe for reexamination. Much empirical work has been done on English social history since the 1960s and it has undercut Macpherson's thesis of a possessive market society. The most salient development has been that, though historians recognize the commercialization of England in the seventeenth century and the development of a market economy, they no longer believe that a market society corresponded to that economy, or that “every man” was “on his own” doing economic battle with everyone else.Footnote 11 Research has made it more difficult to sustain the view that “universally applicable, monolithic ‘structures’ such as ‘class’ determine the circumstances in which people live, and the ways in which they react.”Footnote 12 Competitive self-interested economic relationships were important. But a host of other social relationships also defined the social identity of individuals, locating each in a web of mutualities and obligations—husband and wife; master and servant; landlord and laborer; family, friends, neighbors, churches; and, in London, the guilds and new journeymen's associations. Such relationships placed expectations and obligations on individuals but also provided rewards and satisfactions. They could provide employment in good times and were there to be “mobilized” in adversity.Footnote 13
I will examine Hobbes's social identity, his social theory, his understanding of social class, and his social prejudices. Then I will argue that the royalist interpretation is the only one consistent with his social outlook until the political reversal of the final chapters of Leviathan.
HOBBES'S SOCIAL IDENTITY
Hobbes characterized his origins as “plebeian.”Footnote 14 His father was a semi-educated curate and a family underachiever. His paternal grandfather had been an Oxford-educated vicar,Footnote 15 and seems to have had two prosperous brothers. His uncle Francis was a wealthy glover and alderman of Malmesbury.Footnote 16 His mother was reportedly of yeoman stock.Footnote 17 His father earned 20li per annum, enough for a modest living, and owned a small stone house.Footnote 18 He was excommunicated after an altercation with a fellow clergyman and abandoned the family in 1604 while Hobbes was at Oxford.
When Hobbes left Oxford in 1608 he entered the employ of William (I) Baron Cavendish of Hardwick, later first Earl of Devonshire, as tutor to his son, William (II), later the second earl. Hobbes would be associated with this family, one of the wealthiest and most prominent noble houses in England, for most of the rest of his life, as companion, confidant and secretary of William (II), who became a leader of court society, and as tutor, adviser and pensioner of William (II)'s son, William (III), third Earl of Devonshire. William (II)'s cousin, another William Cavendish, first Earl, Marquis and Duke of Newcastle (hereafter Newcastle), was governor of the Prince of Wales from 1638 to 1641, general of Charles I's northern army in the first Civil War, and Hobbes's intellectual patron after the death of William (II) in 1628.
Through his association with the Cavendishes, Hobbes was introduced into the highest levels of county and national society. He provided support to William (II) as lord lieutenant of Derbyshire and as a shareholder of the Virginia Company.Footnote 19 He accompanied William (II) to the court funeral of his father-in-law in the Rolls Chapel and to a number of parliaments to which William (II) had been elected before succeeding to the earldom in 1626.Footnote 20 Hobbes's surviving early correspondence provides glimpses of family court favor and participation, and there must have been many more such instances to which he was witness.Footnote 21
Hobbes's privileged position in the social network did not whet his own appetite for political power or wealth. Newcastle tried for years and spent huge sums to launch a court career in the 1630s with little to show for them until 1638. By 1636 he had retreated to Welbeck Abbey to lick his wounds and repair his finances. “I am sorry yor Lop finds not so good dealing in ye world as you deserue,” Hobbes sympathized, “but my Lord, he that will venture to sea must resolue to endure all weather, but for my part I loue to keepe aland.”Footnote 22
However, on one occasion Hobbes did seek public office. In early 1640 the king was forced to call a parliament to provide money to repulse the Scottish invasion. The court took a proactive role in trying to ensure that as many compliant candidates as possible were elected in order to avoid a return to the recalcitrant parliaments of the 1620s. William (III) Cavendish met with Charles I in January with his “gentleman” (Hobbes?) and subsequently put Hobbes forward as candidate for the city of Derby.Footnote 23 But Hobbes found insufficient support and withdrew. He later claimed, perhaps reflecting his own experience, “it is vsuall with the Freeholders in the Counties, and with tradesmen in the Cities and Burroughs to choose, as near as they can, such as are most repugnant to the giving of Subsidies.”Footnote 24 His own view was very different and as Devonshire's candidate he must have been tarred with a court brush.
Hobbes fled to France after Strafford's impeachment in late 1640 because he feared that his political views would land him in hot water with Parliament.Footnote 25 In 1643 Queen Henrietta Maria arrived in exile in Paris and Newcastle followed, via Hamburg, in 1645. The queen summoned the Prince of Wales from Jersey in 1646 and Hobbes taught him mathematics from the summer of 1646 until the prince departed for Holland in 1648.Footnote 26 The English community was closely knit around the two courts of the Catholic queen and the prince, but disagreements over policy opened up major fissures between their advisers. Hobbes was well known to the “old royalists” like Edward Hyde, who advised Charles from Jersey from 1646 until he arrived in Paris in 1648. But Hobbes felt their hostility and was made more welcome by Newcastle and the “Louvre Group” at the queen's court. He refused to be characterized in the second edition of De Cive as the prince's tutor in part because it implied that he was teaching him politics, which he said the prince's counselors (including Hyde) would have opposed, presumably because of his unorthodox political and religious views.Footnote 27
When Leviathan was published in 1651 it offended both exile factions because of its religious views and acceptance of the new Commonwealth. When Charles returned to Paris following his failed attempt to claim the English throne, Hobbes was denied his presence and fled back to England.Footnote 28 Nothing demonstrates better the extensive access which Hobbes was perceived to have had than a letter to Hyde from Sir Edward Nicholas, who had attended the Duke of York in Holland. Hobbes, “it is said, hath rendered all the Queen's court and very many of the D. of York's family atheists,” Nicholas wrote venomously, “and, if he had been suffered, would have done his best to have likewise poisoned the K's court.”Footnote 29 Whatever the truth of these breathless charges, Hobbes can be presumed to have frequented the queen's court and to have known its personalities and inner workings well.
Hobbes claimed that the future Charles II had sent two messengers to London to assure Hobbes that he had a good opinion of him, and at the Restoration “order was given that [Hobbes] should have free access to his majesty.”Footnote 30 The king had genuine affection for the old man and Hobbes knew that “his majesty loved him well.”Footnote 31 Sorbière thought him a “good courtier” (bon Courtisan)Footnote 32 and his court connections provided protection against his enemies. Henry Lord Arlington, a member of the Cabal, whom Hobbes probably had met in Paris when he was secretary to the Duke of York, seems to have been his principal patron. When the Commons ordered Leviathan to be burned as one of the causes of the Great Fire and Plague, Arlington intervened to prevent it.Footnote 33 Hobbes was also given a pension of a hundred jacobus a year (over a hundred pounds), but the court was in periodic financial straits and had many other calls on its funds and the pension was not always paid.Footnote 34 There were rumors of Hobbes's meeting with the king as late as August 1671.Footnote 35
Hobbes's life traced a rare social trajectory—from the modest home of a disgraced country vicar to Oxford University, to the household and confidences of one of the great aristocratic families, and ultimately to the exiled court and the friendship of a king. He was never rich but he was comfortable. His salary from the Cavendishes in 1638 and 1639 was typical for professionals, 50li per annum, equivalent to the income of a modest businessman with 500li equity, at a time when a day laborer might earn 4li 10s yearly and a “middling” farmer made 40–50li per annum.Footnote 36 He took 500li with him into exile and later inherited 200li from Sidney Goldolphin, though it is not clear how much of it he actually received. He received about 80li per annum while he was in exile,Footnote 37 earned increasing amounts from his writings, and occasionally received gifts from patrons and admirers. When he died he left about 1,000li. The inscription he ordered for his tombstone says that he had served two earls of Devonshire and was a virtuous man famous for his learning.Footnote 38 He did not choose to be remembered as a philosopher or as the author of Leviathan. He chose instead to advertise his humanist credentials for gentle status, an educated and virtuous teacher of the country's leaders.Footnote 39 One of the most important factors of Hobbes's identity at his death was that he was a gentleman.
Social identity can often be a complex affair and Hobbes's is a good example. He was, after all, a self-made man who had become close to the top of English society. He was not born and bred of the ruling elite but had made his living serving it. He admired them and was sympathetic to their social viewpoint but also could wag his finger at them as he had done with the Cavendish boys. If Hobbes was proud of his acquired gentility (by its humanist definition), his social views and prejudices were not always consistent with those typical of the aristocracy (the peerage and gentry). Some were the views of a social conservative, some reflected the views of the Caroline court, some were critical of the pride and moral shortcomings of the aristocracy (especially newcomers), while others were determined by the theoretical requirements of his radical absolutism.
SOCIAL THEORY
We will begin by examining his theory of social structure and human psychology, which is applicable both at the micro and macro levels of analysis. He begins with the individual and gives us, with five basic concepts—happiness, glory, power, honor and worth—an interpersonal psychology based on the pursuit of various forms of power and human reaction to the status relationships that result from the inequalities of power that appear over time. These status relationships, some of which become legitimized formally by the sovereign, constitute the structure of society.
Hobbes defines felicity or happiness as “continuall prospering” or the individual's continual success in attaining what he wants.Footnote 40 He will compete endlessly with others “to assure forever, the way of his future desire”Footnote 41 by attaining “more riches, honours, or other power.”Footnote 42 As he attains the objects of his desire his desires grow ever greater and he needs increasing power to succeed in attaining their objects. Prospering thus means that we have sufficient power to attain the power we desire, to protect it once we have it, and then to use our original power and the added power we have attained to acquire even more power.Footnote 43 For Hobbes even the “moderate” agent, who can be content with as much power as others have, must continually strive to achieve more power to protect what he has.Footnote 44 The resulting competition is not just economic but extends to all forms of social power.
What makes the increasing accumulation of power in its various forms especially pleasurable? Why does it create happiness? There are two reasons. First, there is pleasure of the senses, but not “the acquisition of the grosse pleasures of the Senses, and the things that most immediately conduce thereto.”Footnote 45 Rather the pleasures of the senses proper to happiness are the appetite for future power, the expectation of achieving it, the hope of preserving it, and the hope of achieving even further power.Footnote 46 All appetites are sensual pleasures; hope and expectation are just forms of appetite. Second, there is the pleasure or joy of the mind, the passion of glory, the pleasure resulting from imagining the eminence of an individual's power over that of his competitors, “all joy and grief of mind consisting . . . in a contention for precedence to them with whom they compare themselves.”Footnote 47 An individual may have fleeting episodes of glory, or alternating feelings of glory and shame, as he exceeds his competitors in some attainments and not in others. But the happy person will experience a continuous flow of increasing glory as his successful “prospering” efforts and the power they produce exceed those of his competitors.
The glory a person feels is reinforced by manifestations of the recognition of his eminent power by others (such as by words of respect, hat honor, bowing, kneeling). Hobbes calls the acknowledgment of another's power “honor” and the outward manifestation of honor “civil worship” (cultus ciuilis).Footnote 48 A person seeks honor and to be worshiped because honor increases his reputation for power, adding to his total power.Footnote 49 Hobbes thus departs radically from tradition by conceiving honor as a recognition only of power and not of nobility, lineage, breeding or virtue as such: “Nor does it alter the case of Honour, whether an action (so it be great and difficult, and consequently a signe of much power,) be just or unjust.”Footnote 50
A person's value or worth is a function of his power and the honor he receives. It is not intrinsic but socially determined. The manifestation of the value people place on a person is the honor they show him, and people therefore “estimate and make the value or WORTH of a man” by the manifestations of honor they see other people accord him.Footnote 51 The value of an agent, Hobbes famously declares, is “his Price; that is to say, so much as would be given for the use of his Power.”Footnote 52 The social commodity par excellence is power; the laborer's labor is a commodity because it is a form of power.
The idea that a person had a worth, value, rate or even price was common currency in the seventeenth century, but Hobbes's distillation of worth to considerations of utility and power was not. Contemporary notions of worth in the context of trial witnesses encompassed estimates of wealth in land or goods or, for laborers, dependability and diligence, joined with the appearance of a virtuous life. A reputation for keeping one's word and worldly substance were necessarily linked in an economy where there was too little specie and the use of credit was widespread. Moreover, the higher a person's social standing the higher his virtue and worth were assumed to be.Footnote 53 Hobbes's focus on worth as the social utility of a person's power must be understood in this context as the social value of his wealth and power, which provides an estimation of the degree to which he was able to prosper and the honor he should receive.
When individuals vie for power and honor in pursuit of glory and happiness the result is competition, a universal social phenomenon he captures in The Elements of Law using the well-worn trope of life as a race, in which happiness is not winning but “Continually to out-go the next before.”Footnote 54 Individuals seek to “out-go” their competitors in wealth, power and honor and increase their overall social value. Society becomes a network of individuals conceived as loci of value or aggregate power and honor, engaging in dyadic power transactions with other agents of power in the social network to improve their relative positions with respect to each other. Dyadic relationships hold a privileged place in traditional societies.
Hobbes rejected the accepted dogma that the traditional social order, with a small aristocracy at the top of a pyramid, was part of the divine and natural order of the universe, which conflicted with his extreme materialism and nominalism. Instead he conceived of social distinctions and therefore of social structure as the result of historic change and a country's particular legal arrangements. “The inequality that now is, has bin introduced by the Lawes civill.”Footnote 55 Individuals jockeying for power of different sorts within the restraints of a country's laws create inequalities. The manifestation of their recognition of those inequalities is honor. Social structure is a product of social process and sovereign power, not birthright, individual morality or divine decree. Consequently, no aristocrat can have a claim against the sovereign based on birth, lineage or blood. No one could justify disobedience on the basis of his honor.
“Nobility is Power,” Hobbes declares, “not in all places, but onely in those Commonwealths, where it has Priviledges.”Footnote 56 English peers had a number of legal, financial and political privileges. They had their own house of parliament, with the bishops. They had a near monopoly of lord-lieutenancies and great local influence. They received most of the positions at court though they had no recognized hereditary claim to them.Footnote 57 The gentry controlled the House of Commons and, with the peerage, county government. Hobbes's teaching reflects this reality. He rejected the ancient nobility's claim to be consiliarii nati, counselors by birthright. English titles of nobility and the ancient gentry originated in old Roman, German, Gaulic and French military or governmental functions but had lost those associations long ago. In the seventeenth century, historians agree, titles served, “for the most part, to distinguish the precedence, place, and order of subjects in the Common-wealth.”Footnote 58
Hobbes's doctrine also reflects official attitudes toward honor. The Tudors had attacked the medieval military and chivalric tradition, which privileged moral autonomy and possible resistance to the Crown. Under Henry VIII, the Crown had launched a campaign to establish the monarchy as the source of honor, dignity and gentility. Tudor writers placed new stress on virtue and learning against lineage and arms, and on state creation of nobility against the hereditary ideal. Under James I the Crown sold titles on a vast scale to raise extra-parliamentary funds. By the time of Charles I, service to the Crown had become an accepted part of honor and overshadowed other traditional ideas of honor at court.Footnote 59 Consistent with this trend, Hobbes holds that title, rank, dignity and gentility depend only on the will of the sovereign, “such as are Magistracy, Offices, Titles; and in some places Coats, and Scutchions painted: and men Honour such as have them, as having so many signes of favour of the Common-wealth.”Footnote 60
Thus Hobbes's treatment of these social factors assumes the existence of hierarchy, which he sought to conserve by imposing on the sovereign the duty of enacting sumptuary laws “forbidding the superfluous consuming of food and apparel”Footnote 61 because they promote frugality (parsimonia).Footnote 62 Sumptuary laws, which ended in England in 1604, “sought to maintain sharp distinctions between status groups” to inhibit social mobility and promote virtue, martial spirit and hierarchy.Footnote 63 Excessive spending on luxury by the wealthy was thought to undermine the social fabric by causing rack renting, land sales, inflation and scarcity, which increased poverty.Footnote 64 But Hobbes, true to his aristocratic–sympathetic world view, justified sumptuary laws only to promote “Frugality,” which is “in poor men a Vertue,”Footnote 65 to dispose people to live according to their rank and not to fall into poverty. But magnificence, conspicuous wealth and expenditure on luxury were considered a legitimate political tool for the great. For Hobbes frugality was not appropriate for the rich because it “maketh a man unapt to achieve such actions, as require the strength of many men at once,” such as by dispensing patronage.Footnote 66
Until now our discussion of social structure has focused on the social ranking based on status which characterized the formal description of English society. Parallel to the traditional understanding of social distinctions based on status there developed another based on cultural, economic and authority differences which cleaved society into two groups, the haves and the have-nots. This was the language of sorts, and it was peculiar to the haves: the wiser sort versus the ignorant, ruder or vulgar sort; the greater or better sort versus the poorer, meaner or baser sort. The terms attached to the inferior ranks, which Hobbes uses, carried a degree of social opprobrium. During the 1640s a new term, “the middling sort,” emerged in the Civil War sermons and pamphlet literature to describe those who were neither the urban elite nor the poor, the independent shopkeepers, artificers and tradesmen. The term was rarely used at other times and in other contexts but historians believe that it characterizes accurately a substantial group immanent in English society between the rich and the poor. A study of the provincial middling sort concluded, however, that it had no clear social consciousness as a group with a distinct set of interests and a distinct identity.Footnote 67 Although Hobbes was one of the middling sort by income and assets, he never uses the term nor appears to recognize its existence as a social phenomenon.
The term “better sort” sometimes was used to refer to the aristocracy but, more often, it included the middling sort as well. Hobbes uses the term in the first sense. Among the “better sort” were the men who had read about and were tainted by the classical republicanism of Greece and Rome, part of a gentleman's general education, and “became thereby in loue with their formes of gouernment.”Footnote 68 Socially the ideological divide lay between those who were assumed to have leisure, the peerage and gentry, and those who did not, everyone else. Hobbes is speaking only of those who had leisure to read, the “Democraticall Gentlemen.”Footnote 69 The evidence therefore suggests that Hobbes was inclined to see a clear division when viewing the population en masse—the rich and poor, rulers and ruled, aristocrats and common people—a cleavage which may have been reinforced by growing social and economic polarization during his lifetime.Footnote 70
THE CAROLINE COURT, APEX OF SOCIETY
At the top of the traditional social hierarchy stood the monarch and his or her court, which Hobbes had observed for decades and which provides the perfect model of Hobbes's social theory. To Hobbes sovereignty is the greatest earthly power because it represents the united power of the commonwealth, and in Caroline England the sovereign was the king.Footnote 71 He was the ultimate decision maker on matters of policy and the fountain of all patronage and dignities.Footnote 72 He determined the “publique worth of a man” such as by “offices of Command, Judicature, publike Employment; or by Names and Titles, introduced for distinction of such Value.”Footnote 73 The court was the focus of great ambition and, before the wars, the national forum for the pursuit of “riches, place of authority, friendship [of the powerful] or favour,”Footnote 74 where “men are continually in competition for Honour and Dignity.”Footnote 75 Winning the monarch's favor was the courtier's principal goal and competition was shaped by the dynamic of royal favor and perceptions of it. Competition was understandably intense and success was uncertain. As Lawrence Stone pointed out, Hobbes's definition of felicity in Leviathan as “a perpetuall and restlesse desire of Power after power, that ceaseth onely in Death,” describes perfectly the behavior of the courtier.Footnote 76 In discussing divine worship Hobbes aptly defines “Courting” as “a winning of favour by good offices; as by praises, by acknowledging their Power, and by whatsoever is pleasing to them from whom we look for benefit.”Footnote 77 “Whatsoever is pleasing” included flattery, services, gifts, gratuities and other doceurs of various sorts.
Office or “authority” is honorable, Hobbes asserts, “because a sign of strength, wisdom, favour or riches by which it is attained.”Footnote 78 Strength was an asset for military and naval command, royal favor could open any door, riches could buy patronage or the reversion of an office, while wisdom was supposed to be important for privy counselors and judges. Courtiers sought financial gain in many forms, such as through the grant of Crown lands and industrial monopolies. “Covetousnesse of great Riches, and ambition of great Honours, are honourable; as signes of power to obtain them.”Footnote 79 But court grandees also incurred enormous expenses. Conspicuous consumption was visible proof of a courtier's power and served to reinforce that power. “To be Conspicuous, that is to say, to be known, for Wealth, Office, great Actions, or any eminent Good, is Honourable,” Hobbes declares, “as a signe of the power for which he is conspicuous.”Footnote 80
Courtiers inhabited and actively manipulated a network of occasional and persistent dyadic personal relationships (friends and followers, clients and servants) for advantage and mutual support. They sought, brokered or dispensed rewards and favors and arranged powerful family alliances. Men sought the favor of the great by “Whatsoever is pleasing” with the intention of getting something in return, though not strictly as a quid pro quo. Such men “benefitteth or contributeth to the power of another . . . only upon confidence and trust of obtaining the grace and favour of that other, whereby he may procure a greater, or no less benefit or assistance to himself.”Footnote 81 The patron who could afford to ignore a favor seeker was in an admirable position, but it was painful for a man to see the preferment of his equals or enemies instead of himself, or to lose the favor of someone he was counting on for advancement.Footnote 82 Luxury gift giving was a common way to curry favor. The gift giver hopes “to gain thereby friendship, or service from another, or from his friends.”Footnote 83 For “no man giveth, but with intention of Good to himselfe.”Footnote 84 But the code of the court forbade gifts to be presented or referred to in terms of commercial transactions, exchange of merchandise or satisfaction of interests.Footnote 85 People gave gifts to initiate or cement relationships of alliance, patronage or service. A patron's gift, Hobbes explains, is a “benefit proceeding from the grace of them that bestow it to encourage, or enable men to do them service.”Footnote 86 The client, on the other hand, gave “great gifts to a man” for “the buying of Protection.”Footnote 87
The court thus embodied Hobbes's psychology of happiness, power, glory, honor and worth in its purest form, a place where “the Businesse of the world . . . consisteth in nothing else but a perpetuall contention for Honour, Riches, and Authority.”Footnote 88 Hobbes provides a powerful application of his theory in relation to the court in his account of the rise of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, a political opportunist whom Hobbes thought Charles I should have punished rather than preferred to high office. Wentworth had the reputation in the 1620s of being a “good Patriot”Footnote 89—for Hobbes, as we will see, a damning characterization—for opposing the forced loan in Parliament. But, Hobbes argues, Charles opened the floodgates to stubborn opposition by preferring and coopting Wentworth, who became the king's most valuable adviser:
I have obserued often that such as seek preferment by their stubbornesse, have missed of their aime, and on the other side that those Princes that with preferment are forc'd to buy the obedience of their subiects, are already or must be soon after in a uery weak condition. For in a market where honour and power is [sic] to be bought with stubbornesse, there will be a great many as able to buy as Lord Strafford was.Footnote 90
Wentworth “bought” high office and titles in the court “market” of honor and power with the power he acquired by opposing the king, while the king “bought” the power of Wentworth's loyalty, abilities and service with preferment, wealth and honor. In each case, power was the commodity purchased as well as the currency with which it was purchased.
SOCIAL CLASS
The concept of social class did not exist in the seventeenth century; it was a later invention. But Hobbes did have an understanding of a number of groups which we would recognize as social classes, in the sense that they characteristically disposed of social assets (land, money, education or training, status, governmental position, armed force), which colored their points of view and translated into political power, or, lacking these advantages, were relatively powerless. They included the landed aristocracy (peerage and gentry), the business or commercial class, the professions (particularly the clerical class, the lawyers and the military officer class), and the lower class or common people. I will address the professions last because they became more important to him as the crisis of the 1640s wore on.
The most socially important part of the aristocracy was that segment whose local power and prestige rested on the ownership of land and wealth. The peerage and the leading or county gentry displayed the acquisitiveness and competition for power and honor which Hobbes considered typical of human nature. Property supported the extravagant competition in hospitality, entertainment, gifts, clothing and house building which had become hallmarks of the aristocratic lifestyle—“gifts, costs, and magnificence of houses, apparel, and the like.”Footnote 91 The minutest gradations of prestige were expressed in local feasts, processions and parish churches in seating, public displays of deference (to “speak with consideration; to approach unto in decent manner, to keep distance from; give the way to”Footnote 92), imposing tomb images (“a civill honoring of the Person”Footnote 93), and the inevitable squabbling that slight differences in manifestations of esteem could provoke. The passions that cause conflict, Hobbes first proclaimed in The Elements of Law, are “vanity,” “comparison,” and “appetite.”Footnote 94 Obtaining county office conferred power, status and other rewards, and to obtain office the “good will” of powerful “friends” (power brokers such as judges, royal favorites and privy counselors), “that affection wherewith men seek to assist those that adhere unto them,”Footnote 95 was all-important. “To have friends” at Westminister was “Power.”Footnote 96 However, Hobbes correctly observed, “of them that haue leisure [the aristocracy] the greatest part haue their minds wholly imployed, and taken vp by their priuate businesses or pleasures.”Footnote 97 The “chief private business” of the landed aristocrat was “marrying his children, disposing of his Lands, governing his Household, or managing his private Estate.”Footnote 98 The inflation of prices of agricultural commodities and cheap wages because of the great increase of population from 1540 to 1650 meant that most aristocrats did not require any special expertise to prosper, though failure was possible from incompetence: “the busines of their priuate estates . . . require [sic] nothing but diligence, and naturall wit to gouerne them.”Footnote 99 Indeed, if “those men that have great estates . . . when they are unwilling to take the paines of administring the businesse that belongs to them, choose . . . to trust one Servant [as manager],”Footnote 100 they did not need to spend much time on business at all.
Business, particularly the wholesale trade, was another important source of wealth, but businessmen as a class did not have the same level of social power as the aristocracy. Hobbes harbored traditional prejudices against the greed of those engaged in trade and tried to explain their subordinate influence to that of the aristocracy by their unwillingness to deploy their money to obtain real power.
Hobbes seems to distinguish qualitatively between those for whom riches are the main form of power (businessmen) and those for whom riches are a foundation, concomitant and consequence of power (landed aristocrats). Both classes “have the service of the poor,”Footnote 101 and take pride in their prudence, the wealthy businessman in his entrepreneurial skill, and the wealth- and office-seeking aristocrat in his supposed wisdom in worldly affairs.Footnote 102 But there is an important difference between them. Among aristocrats, “Riches joyned with liberality, is [sic] Power; because it [sic] procureth friends, and servants”; that is, allies and clients. But businessmen do not use their wealth characteristically for protection, are “Without liberality,” and consequently are exposed “to Envy, as a Prey.”Footnote 103
Unlike traditionalists, Hobbes had no principled objection to business as such. The sovereign has a duty to establish a system of property and penal laws within which people have the liberty to prosper. But it is difficult to find any passages of unqualified praise for businessmen. He held the common aristocratic, religious and literary prejudice about the immorality of merchants and the corrupting influence of the profit motive at the expense of the common good. He thought it “Prudence . . . in priuate men, iustly and moderately to enrich themselues.”Footnote 104 But he complained that “the most part of rich subiects, that haue made themselues so by craft and trade,” care only about “present profit.”Footnote 105 He decreed that a person is “Worthiest of Riches, that has the qualities most requisite for the well using of them”Footnote 106—presumably aristocratic qualities such as liberality and display. “Contempt for riches [is] excellent, unless they are great,”Footnote 107 he says, a dictum which appears to encompass the wheeling and dealing of court grandees but not the incremental long-term wealth building of businessmen. Thinking perhaps of clergy presented to City benefices or employed by merchant companies and guilds who “were predisposed to extol the virtues of business,”Footnote 108 he railed against puritan preachers who were lenient on “the Lucratiue Vices of men of trade and handicraft,” which “was a great ease to the generality of Citizens and the inhabitants of Market towns.”Footnote 109 As Thomas points out, their leniency could not have given “great ease” unless Hobbes thought that commercial vices were widespread.Footnote 110
The two largest employers were the agricultural and cloth sectors. There were practices in the agricultural sector to soften the harsh consequences of business and harvest declines for most employees,Footnote 111 but there was nothing corresponding to them for textile laborers. Macpherson counterintuitively dismisses Hobbes's condemnation of the exploitation of textile laborers by manufacturers, who grew rich “at the expense of endemic marginal poverty” among their employees,Footnote 112 as evidence against his bourgeois thesis. But Hobbes was criticizing businessmen for acting out of greed and against the public good. He considered the corruption and profiteering of the whole business class, its “Craft, Shifting, [and] neglect of Equity,” its “Covetousness . . . of little [incremental] gaines,” to be “Dishonourable.”Footnote 113
The common people consisted of the middling sort, perhaps 20–25 percent of the population, and the poor, who represented a majority. Although most of the men—yeomen and husbandmen, artisans, shopkeepers, tradesmen, lesser merchants, apothecaries, attorneys—who made up the middling sort were struggling to maintain their status and living standards, some prospered and even grew rich. But Hobbes was not impressed by such success. He considered that in all people “to be descended from obscure Parentage” is “Dishonourable.”Footnote 114 The poor were the servants, day laborers, vagabonds and paupers on parish relief. To them the psychological effect of the threat of famine was always present, and up to 70–75 percent of the annual expenses of laboring and pauper families went for food. Day laborers, who accounted for over a third of the population, were motivated by “consumer survival.”Footnote 115 Hobbes seems to have shared the contemporary view that the poor majority spent every waking hour providing for necessities and that their lives were miserable.Footnote 116 Those “whom necessity . . . keepeth attent on their . . . labour” suffered the greatest grief of mind because they were unable to provide what was necessary to protect their lives and dignity.Footnote 117 Reflecting the views of the well off, he considered “Poverty,” “Obscurity,” and “Servitude, for need” to be dishonorable.Footnote 118
Hobbes had no more positive view of the common people than he had of the business class. He held conservative antipopular social attitudes about the “multitude,” the “ignorance” of the people, and the political terms “popularity” and “patriots.” He associated the word “people,” whom he labeled at one point “almost the mud and stench of humanity” (quasi lutum & fex hominum)Footnote 119 with “tumult,”Footnote 120 and deplored the use of “the ignorant multitude” by the leaders of the Commons to terrify the king and Lords into submission when the crisis erupted.Footnote 121 He knew that the common people could not fully grasp sophisticated thought and asserted that “commonly truth is on the side of the few, rather than of the multitude.”Footnote 122 Yet he believed that “the poore seduced People”Footnote 123 could learn, in their own fashion, his principles of obedience, as they had learned the Christian mysteries and disobedience from “democratical gentlemen” and puritan ministers, presumably if they were fed their duty in simplified form as a constant diet, as they had learned the Ten Commandments.Footnote 124 His antipopular attitude is also evident in his usage of the terms “popularity” and “patriot.” They represent two opposing political narratives that came especially to the fore as a result of the elections to the Short Parliament. The first, popularity, dated back to Archbishops Whitgift and Bancroft. According to this idea, a faction of demagogues devoted to puritanism wishing to help the Scots “destroy royal authority” had “hijacked” the elections.Footnote 125 The people were just a tool to help them achieve their political ends. According to the second narrative, this faction was actually a group of patriots representing the ideal of the uncorrupted “country” and fighting for the common good against the abuses of the “personal rule” of Charles I. Hobbes held that the sovereign should severely punish “Popularity,” the “Reputation of love of a mans Country.”Footnote 126
In view of the great upheavals of the 1640s and 1650s it would be a surprise if Hobbes did not adjust his social viewpoint in some way. In fact his overall aristocratic–sympathetic world view seems to have remained remarkably stable.Footnote 127 The principal change was his attitude to three professions—the clerical class, the lawyers and the officer class—which he saw as players in the great national drama that led to the regicide and the Commonwealth.
Hobbes charged the clergy and the lawyers with placing their self-interest above the common good. Their power stemmed from their education or training; those with liberal educations had gentle status.Footnote 128 The sons of the landed gentry usually studied some law at the Inns of Court to prepare them for future duties in running their estates and holding county magistracies. The universities were dominated by clergy, which Hobbes viewed as a pernicious historical remnant of the power of the Pope before the Henrician Reformation. Uneducated preachers claiming divine inspiration proliferated in the 1640s.
Hobbes blamed the judges and lawyers for promoting litigiousness,Footnote 129 a common complaint, and of helping to perpetuate the widespread beliefs that the monarch was subject to the law, that the lawyers independently should control what the law was and meant, and that the subject had an absolute liberty in his property against taxation without parliamentary consent. He argued vigorously against these doctrines, which he believed had undermined the monarch's sovereignty and were causes of the Civil Wars.Footnote 130 But Hobbes had a particularly low assessment of the clergy. He began in his early works by attacking the traditional ideas that the individual's conscience could interpret the civil laws and that salvation requires passive obedience to those laws that conflict with the laws of God. He also attacked the doctrine of puritan preachers that faith is divinely inspired, which empowered them to claim that they had been authorized directly by God to oppose the approved doctrines of the Church, its canons and discipline.Footnote 131 In Leviathan and later works he came to see a vast clerical conspiracy to usurp the power of the secular state, a conspiracy which had begun under the Roman Empire and gathered steam under medieval popes. Calvin had perpetuated this conspiracy with the Presbyterian system of clerical assemblies independent of the civil power. The Arminians under Laud and the English and Scottish Presbyterians had reasserted the claim of independence and it was, for Hobbes, one of the principal causes of the Civil Wars. “For whatsoever Power Ecclesiastiques take upon themselves (in any place where they are subject to the State) in their own Right, though they call it Gods Right, is but Usurpation.”Footnote 132 Hobbes elaborated this theme at great length in the second half of Leviathan.
Most intriguing, perhaps, is his interest in the officer class, an interest which seems not to have existed before Leviathan. The military success and political ascent of the New Model Army appears to have focused his attention especially on Cromwell, as well as on the yeomanry and other common people who formed the army's backbone. The times had proven the importance of good commanders: “An able conductor of Souldiers, is of great Price in time of War present, or imminent; but in Peace not so.”Footnote 133 Cromwell and his officers had been unknown before the wars. Traditional aristocratic commanders such as the Earls of Arundel and Essex, who had no special qualifications for military command except the glorious history of some forebear,Footnote 134 had proven themselves to be inadequate when compared to the disciplined professional which Cromwell became.
A passage from Leviathan commenting on the reasons that attract the poor, the discontented and military adventurers to propel and take advantage of a civil conflict already under way seems to have been written with the New Model Army in mind:
needy men, and hardy, not contented with their present condition, as also, all men that are ambitious of military command, are enclined to continue the causes of warre; and to stirre up trouble and sedition: for there is no honour Military but by warre; nor any such hope to amend an ill game, as by causing a new shuffle.Footnote 135
Here was a threat not only to the King but to the ruling social elite, the landed aristocracy, though Hobbes insisted that the common soldiers understood nothing about the questions in dispute. The aristocracy had already lost power to the army and the Rump, and now they stood to lose it to the ignorant people.Footnote 136
The whole army consisted of opportunists, which is how he saw Cromwell himself in chapter 29. There Hobbes—invoking the narrative of the popularity he detested—warned of “the popularity of a potent Subject,” particularly in “a Popular Government” such as the new English Commonwealth, “because an Army is of so great force, and multitude, as it may easily be made believe, they are the People.”Footnote 137 He used the example of the Roman dictator Julius Caesar at a time when royalists believed Cromwell intended to make himself king, protector or dictator. A great part of the New Model Army, Hobbes charged in Behemoth, “aymed onely at rapine and sharing the lands and goods of their enemies,”Footnote 138 part of the program of the Levellers calling for “a new shuffle.” There had been reports of widespread looting by soldiers in 1646–7.
These six social classes—the landed aristocracy, the business class, the clerical class, the legal class, the military officer class, and the common people—have something in common. Hobbes believed that the “democratical gentlemen”; the merchants of London and the major towns who provided funding for the rebellion; the Presbyterians and even the Arminians, who weakened the monarchy by fomenting unnecessary theological disputes and claiming divine rights against the state; the lawyers, who championed the law and the subject's liberties against the Crown; Cromwell and the poor and discontented common people who formed the London mob and provided foot soldiers for Cromwell's army, all contributed to the overthrow of the Stuart regime. This is a key reason why they drew Hobbes's interest. But he had a special place in his heart for the vast majority of the landed aristocrats who tended to their private business and supported monarchy, though they were not absolutists.Footnote 139 Only the democratical minority, Hobbes charged, sought glory by promoting their political and religious errors and conspired with the Presbyterians to change the form of church and state into an oligarchy. All this is consistent with Hobbes's conservative aristocratic–sympathetic world view. But the story is not over yet, as we will see, because much happened to Hobbes and Cromwell after chapter 29. Cromwell and the major generals were destined to rule England.Footnote 140
HOBBES'S SOCIAL WORLD VIEW AND POLITICAL SYMPATHIES
What can Hobbes's social world view and social identity tell us about his political sympathies? Before we make any inferences about which of his theories were factors driving his political preferences or his allegiance—as commentators often do—what was the general social context of those theories?
Hobbes himself had absorbed much of the Cavendishes’ aristocratic social point of view and value system; shared their prejudices against professionals, businessmen and common people who had to earn a living or seemed to be motivated by greed; and supported the Stuarts politically. He could hardly conceive of honor attaching to men who were not aristocrats, a term which was attached conventionally only to them.Footnote 141 As a longtime observer of the court and then as a participant, he developed a strong court imaginary.Footnote 142 This is the social world view of a royalist, a man tied emotionally to the aristocracy and the court, a world view which has its expression even in the heart of Leviathan, all or most of which was written after the regicide. Suggestions that he was simply a democrat or republican seem far-fetched, particularly in view of his explicit preference for absolute monarchy. The idea that the people should rule was repugnant to him. But this conclusion must be considered further in light of the concluding chapters of Leviathan, where he shockingly endorses the congregational ecclesiology of the Independents and, as Quentin Skinner first pointed out,Footnote 143 seems to defend the new Commonwealth government. In chapter 47 he uncharacteristically holds that
we are reduced to the Independency of the Primitive Christians to follow Paul, or Cephas, or Apollos, every man as he liketh best: Which, if it be without contention, and without measuring the Doctrine of Christ, by our affection to the Person of his Minister . . . is perhaps the best.Footnote 144
Nothing that had gone before could give the reader any confidence that people would treat religion “without contention” if each person worshiped “as he liketh best,” or that they would not adhere to different ministers in interpreting the Gospel of Christ; religious contention and the power of preachers were causes of sedition and civil war. One of the principal purposes of his Christian sovereign is to prevent religious conflict by deciding how the people should worship and what they need for salvation.
Hobbes further declares in “A Review, and Conclusion” that a person is freed from his or her subjection and may submit to a conqueror “when the means of his life is [sic] within the Guards and Garrisons of the Enemy.”Footnote 145 Here Hobbes comes down firmly on the side of the Commonwealth on the key issue in the Engagement Controversy, a controversy about whether royalists had to remain loyal to the Stuarts or could take the Commonwealth's Engagement and obey the new government in good conscience. It was probably this position, as well as his unusual theology, that forced the future Charles II to banish him in 1651.
One school of thought interprets Hobbes's doctrine of acceptance of and consequent duty to obey whoever has sufficient power to rule as the constant and determining motive in his political life, that the importance of peace at the foundation of his theory is the overriding factor driving his political views. He thus supported the Stuarts when they held power and the Rump when the king was overthrown. The problem with this view is that it dismisses entirely any human dimension of the philosopher other than his doctrines, and in particular his social world view. We are asked to believe that he supported the regicides for no other reason than that doing so accommodated his eirenicist theories. But was he likely to support a government of significantly lower social standing than that of the traditional monarchy only for that reason? Hints at the Levellers’ “new shuffle” in Leviathan suggest that he was concerned about the danger to the landed aristocracy as well as about the prospect of popular rule. It is unlikely that he would have deserted the future Charles II as long as there was a chance that he could restore the old order.
According to another interpretation, Hobbes wrote Leviathan to support the Commonwealth and Cromwell because he supported the Independents’ Erastianism and anticlericalism. But this conclusion was reached without any consideration of Hobbes's fear of Cromwell's popularity with the common men of the New Model Army and his political use of the Levellers to promote his own political ambitions. The suggestion that Hobbes could have written his masterpiece to support a demagogue who exploited the multitude is clearly at odds with its social world view. It also overlooks Hobbes's apparently last-minute, tentative and doctrinally incongruous endorsement of congregationalism in chapter 47.
Why did Hobbes suddenly support congregationalism and the Commonwealth at the end of Leviathan? And what about his view of Cromwell and the Independents? Attitudes on the last question run the gamut. Some argue that Hobbes had nothing in common with the Independents other than being strongly anti-Presbyterian,Footnote 146 others that he was an enthusiastic supporter of Cromwell's ecclesiastical program,Footnote 147 and still others that he was ambivalent toward Cromwell, admiring him to the extent that he was able to provide strong centralized government.Footnote 148 Can Hobbes's social attitudes help settle the matter when there is apparently so little trustworthy evidence on the subject? Is there evidence that cannot be questioned because Hobbes may have been trying to hide his true thoughts to protect himself?
My view is that Hobbes did not support the Commonwealth until after the Battle of Dunbar, when the royalist cause seemed lost and that, as Hobbes told Hyde, he wanted to go home when the conditions were right, when the Stuart cause was finally a dead letter and England was made secure.Footnote 149 He was not a republican but he used eirenicism to fashion a new future for himself. William (III) Cavendish was living in England, Mersenne was dead, Gassendi had left Paris in ill health, and Hobbes was old, seemed to have nothing to gain by staying in France, and decided to seek protection from the Independents against the Presbyterians he hated by conditionally endorsing congregationalism. Congregationalists at least had the merit of not making divine-right theological claims against the state.
When Hobbes returned to England in 1652 he threw in his lot with a regime that represented social revolution, one that brought common people to power for the first time. The influence of the Levellers had waned but he still must have found the rule of non-aristocrats distasteful. Yet the evidence suggests that Hobbes held his nose and accepted Cromwell and the army because they served an indispensable role in the circumstances of mid-seventeenth-century England. He believed that since the people did not accept his principles of obedience; since they thought they could make moral, legal or religious claims and defend them against the state; since the country was riven by religious contentiousness; and since the London militia was ready to take up arms to enforce Presbyterianism, the only means of securing peace was a strong standing army under the command of a strong commander.
In 1656, the first year of Cromwell's Protectorate, Hobbes claimed (in the same work in which he boasted that he was responsible for the submission of a thousand royalist gentlemen) that he hoped Leviathan would contribute “to the peace of our country, and the settlement of sovereign power without an army.”Footnote 150 He said that he had written Leviathan as an educational vehicle to teach his countrymen obedience. For as he observes in Behemoth, “the Power of the mighty has no foundation but in the opinion and beliefe of the people.”Footnote 151 But this observation did not apply where the power of the mighty had a foundation on armed force under a talented, popular, Tacitist leader like Cromwell.Footnote 152 His concern in 1656 seems to have been the future transformation of England into a country where obedience did not need to be enforced at the point of a gun; where the basis of Cromwell's power, the army, would be unnecessary; and where the traditional social order derived from the socially powerful, especially the landowners, would reassert itself. If we read these passages in their social context, Hobbes must have been profoundly ambivalent about Cromwell.
INTELLECTUAL HISTORY AND SOCIAL CONTEXTUALIZATION
That social analysis is vital to our understanding of intellectuals and ideas was once commonly accepted in intellectual historiography. Social structure and the sociology of knowledge were thought to be important parts of the intellectual historian's toolkit. Today historians commonly believe that understanding the history of intellectuals and ideas requires their placement in historical context, while at the same time sociologists have updated their theories and applied new, relational models for understanding them.Footnote 153 It is my contention that contextualization cannot be considered complete unless a broad socioeconomic dimension has been taken into account, an approach which is underrepresented in current intellectual historiography.
The central insight of the sociology of knowledge is that an agent's ideas, perceptions and modes of thought in some sense reflect her situation in the social structure, and that they cannot be understood if their social origins are unknown. We need to understand concepts, thoughts and utterances as outgrowths of the total situation in which the individual participates, and not just political, intellectual, cultural or religious organizations and institutions. Ideologies should be conceived in this way. Karl Mannheim held that over time members of groups gradually develop a style of thought, a world view, through their repeated responses to typical situations affecting their interests. Individuals perceive and speak through the language of their group with the meanings they find available. One reason why intellectual historians study Hobbes is because he seems to radically redescribe many concepts conventionally in use.
The dispute between Macpherson and Thomas about Hobbes was informed by the principles of the sociology of knowledge. They compensated for their insufficient information about seventeenth-century English society by substituting Marxist class assumptions which have been proven by later social historians to be too rigid and deterministic. Karl Mannheim accused Marx of confusing the sociology of knowledge with “the unmasking of ideologies since for him social strata and classes were the bearers of ideologies.”Footnote 154 Similarly, Macpherson and Thomas were really debating whether and to what extent Hobbes's political thought was just bourgeois ideology.
Perhaps it will be objected that I am pushing on an open door, that intellectual historians are already attuned to the importance of the social dimension to contextualization. That is certainly true of the followers of Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault, who are in a sense the heirs of Karl Mannheim.Footnote 155 Indeed the concept of social is so broad that any historian who takes seriously the commitment to contextualization as a method of interpretation must be engaged in some kind of social approach. Since any activity involving language may be considered social, even interpretations that focus solely on linguistic contexts are social, let alone political, religious, cultural and economic contexts.
But what I especially have in mind is the social interpretation of texts at the macro level; that is, interpretation involving whole societies, their processes and economic systems. Analysis at the micro and meso levels (personal biography, families, communities, political and religious organizations and so forth) is important too, but the macro level has been particularly neglected. Historians are familiar with this type of analysis from the work of the French Annales historians who mined the distinctive mentalité and cultural patterns of the eighteenth-century French lower classes (and were once thought to provide a possible model for a methodology of the social history of ideasFootnote 156). And they can perhaps recognize a similarity between the principles of the sociology of knowledge and Sir Lewis Namier's view that political thought is merely the ideological legitimation of high politics.Footnote 157
It remains to point out the advantages of the approach I am recommending, and I will do so using some examples involving two distinguished Hobbes interpreters, Quentin Skinner and Annabel Brett.
Skinner is well known for his linguistic hermeneutics and for locating intentionality in language. “The social context,” he avers, “figures as the ultimate framework for helping to decide what conventionally recognisable meanings it might in principle have been possible for someone to have intended to communicate.”Footnote 158 Thus he has always supplemented his linguistic analysis of texts with their intellectual and political contexts.Footnote 159 He has occasionally resorted in interpretation to the relationship between language and society in the macro sense, as in his discussion of the change in the use of words as social activities once denigrated became acceptable.Footnote 160 But he is openly suspicious of grand social theories and their hermeneutic use.Footnote 161 This prejudice is especially problematic when, to use Skinner's categories, the linguistic intention of a statement is different from the author's motivation. I have been describing precisely such a case in the difference between Hobbes's doctrinal eirenicism and his political royalism. By ignoring the evidence of Hobbes's aristocratic and pro-Court sympathies, Skinner was led to interpret his doctrinal intention as his political motivation; that is, that his eirenicism represented his political sympathies.Footnote 162 Here we have a pretty dramatic example of the utility of the kind of social analysis I am recommending. They are rarely so dramatic.
Brett shares Skinner's linguistic emphasis on hermeneutics but not his suspicion of social interpretation. She has highlighted the importance of doing more “in relating intellectual history to the dimensions of human reality postulated in social, economic and political history.”Footnote 163 But in two important essays she focuses mainly on the linguistic interpretation of texts and their intellectual contexts.Footnote 164 As in the case of Skinner, motivation is often fully intelligible only with reference to the larger social dimension. Thus in tracing Hobbes's concept of natural right to a specific Renaissance concept, Brett has given us no explanation of why Hobbes chose to adopt this concept rather than another. Nor did she explain why Hobbes borrowed from late Renaissance Aristotelians the idea that there is no people without a sovereign to give it unity. In my view, both of these moves admirably suited his project of supporting the Stuarts and all other governments with a theory of absolute sovereignty and citizen quietism while attempting to demolish the theoretical basis of all traditional political, moral and religious challenges to their authority except self-defense. Understanding Hobbes's broader social context would have given her the perspective to draw this conclusion. But this would have required a foray into intellectual biography as well as conceptual history.
The heyday of the social history of ideas is gone and with it, I hope, much of its simplistic socioeconomic reductionism. But now we need a much more sociohistorical practice that is more empirically based, carefully researched and appropriately nuanced than that of the mid-twentieth century. Such an approach would not only provide a more complete picture of the context of an intellectual or an idea; it would also provide a potentially powerful basis for explanation of theories and concepts and occasionally even prevent unnecessary errors in interpretation.
