Hobbes: A Very Short Introduction

"I chose this book because it’s a wonderful introduction to all the different facets of Hobbes’s life and writings and context. It’s very short. It’s very readable. If you don’t know Hobbes, it’s a great way to get a first taste. The first part is dedicated to biographical details and is particularly of relevance for understanding the intellectual context he’s operating in. The second part deals with the various branches of his philosophy, his science, his ethics, his politics. The third part of the book is also interesting. He gives you an overview of the scholarship on Hobbes—all the different ways that Hobbes has been interpreted. Absolutely. This book is not just an introduction to Hobbes, Tuck is also making his own particular argument about our understanding of Hobbes. And what is relevant is precisely what we were talking about earlier. Tuck emphasizes and shows that the reduction of Hobbes’s account of war to self-interested individuals clashing with each other over their material interests and so on, misses out on, in a way, the heart of Hobbes’s concerns for politics. The way that Tuck characterizes Hobbes’s ethics sets up a problem that his politics is supposed to solve. The problem with ethics is that there is no universal basis for agreement about morals, except for self-preservation. And because there is no universal basis for agreement, people are going to disagree. On the basis of that disagreement, they will get into conflict with each other. So there’s ideological conflict. The only way out of this is by reference to this potential agreement over self-preservation. If my self-preservation is served by the same thing that serves your self-preservation, then we can come to an agreement. That’s peace. This political solution, the way Tuck sees it, is that you set up a sovereign that can secure peace for us, because what we do is we agree to let the sovereign resolve these controversies for us. “We continue to read Leviathan because it very powerfully articulates a worldview that continues to have power in our thinking today” It’s precisely because there’s no objective standard by which to resolve, for example, theological controversies—it’s not entirely clear in Hobbes whether there is no standard or whether we just don’t have access to it. Regardless, we can’t know with any certainty what the right answer to these theological and evaluative questions are. So, the best thing that we should do, is just say, ‘You know what? We’ll just let someone else arbitrarily decide for us. Let them decide, and we’ll live in peace.’ That will serve the one thing that we all know we want, which is to preserve ourselves. That’s the picture that it gives us. It’s an interesting way of thinking about Hobbes that, I think, captures a lot of what’s going on. For Hobbes, the state of nature is not a pre-social state. All the state of nature means for Hobbes, is that there is no effective sovereign. You’re outside of political society, you’re not outside of society, in the sense of there being social relations, and so on. It’s very difficult to have those kinds of industry in the way that he’s describing it. Why? Because you’re in a state of war. His paradigmatic example of a state of nature is civil war. It’s not necessarily pre-political: it can be post-political. What he is really worried about is not how we get from the state of nature into political society. What he’s really concerned with is how we stay out of the state of nature when we’re in political society. He’s worried about the collapse of the Commonwealth. For him the most relevant instance of a state of nature is civil war, where there are all these effects of socialization and so on. He’s not Rousseau , he’s not theorizing about the pure state of nature prior to any social relations. That’s not what he has in mind."