In 1839, the English radical Sir William Molesworth1 had all the works of Thomas Hobbes reprinted and published at considerable cost. George Grote, another radical, published a notice of the new edition in the Spectator that same year. The notice is a good summary of what these radicals, who were passionate democrats, considered to be the most useful and praiseworthy features of Hobbes’s work. I have excerpted some interesting passages from Grote below.2 They are sorted by topic.
Hobbes’s Originality
‘Had the tendency of English education been such as to inspire the reading public with any sincere love of truth, or with any serious anxiety to verify their own conclusions on the most important topics connected with human society … we are persuaded that the moral, the metaphysical, and the political works of Hobbes would have been considered as entitled to a very distinguished place in the esteem of every instructed man. For, in order to peruse them with interest and advantage, it is by no means necessary that the reader should sit down with the submissive faith of a disciple, or that he should acquiesce implicitly in the conclusions which he finds laid out for him. No frame of mind can be less suitable for the perusal of Hobbes, who addresses himself exclusively to the rational convictions of every man, and who disdains, more perhaps than any other philosopher ancient or modern, all indirect and underhand methods of procuring mere passive adhesion. There is a fearless simplicity and straightforwardness in his manner, which, while it conveys his own meaning without reserve, operates at the same time most powerfully to awaken a train of original reflection in the reader; and this fruit of his writings, rare and valuable to the last degree, is admitted even by the least friendly critics.’
Hobbes ‘dared to depart from received opinions; and not only from those opinions which were current among the Aristotelians of his own day … but also from the opinions prevalent among the greater number of metaphysical writers of the present day, and which the Scotch school, the least analytical of all writers who ever meddled with philosophy, have taken under their especial protection.’
Hobbes on Religion
‘But it is not simply to his deviation from received and popular methods of thinking, that the subsequent discredit of Hobbes as a philosopher is to be attributed. He not only questioned customary prejudices, but he also exasperated powerful classes of men, and especially that class which is rarely offended with impunity—the priests. It was essential to his principles of government to prove that there could be only one supreme power in the state, and that the ecclesiastical power both must be and ought to be subordinate to the civil. Such a doctrine was well calculated to rouse the antipathies both of the Roman Catholic and of the Presbyterian clergy; but we might have expected that the clergy of the Church of England would have listened to it with patience since they could not well forget that their brethren, from the time of Henry the Eighth down to Elizabeth, had altered more than once both their faith and their discipline in obedience to the secular authority. Yet so it happened, that the clergy of the Church of England were no less irritated than the Roman Catholics with this doctrine of the inherent supremacy of the civil power; and Hobbes became the object of fierce hatred from ecclesiastics of all denominations.’
‘Whatever effect the clergy may have unintentionally produced in promoting the circulation of the “Leviathan” during Hobbes’s life, has been effectually reversed since his death. Their unanimous outcry has branded him with the stigma of impiety and atheism, and placed his writings on the index of prohibited books. Nevertheless, there is not, so far as we are aware, a single sentence in his writings which either discloses such sentiments in himself, or is calculated to inspire them in others: the tone in which he speaks both of religion and of the Divine Being is uniformly reverential. But the denunciations of the clergy, however unfounded, have not been the less successful: the works of Hobbes have been decried as irreligious, and this is one powerful reason why they have been comparatively so little studied. We may add, that Hobbes incurred the enmity of the clergy, not simply by overthrowing their pretensions to a jurisdiction independent of the civil power, but also by exposing their glaring defects as teachers of youth and administrators of the Universities. The passages in which this exposure is performed are among the most striking and emphatic of all his writings.’
Hobbes’s Politics
‘It might have been anticipated that the man who incurred so much obloquy by his protest against sacerdotal ascendency, would at least have been signally extolled by that civil power the importance of which he took so much pains to magnify. But no such countenance was shown to him. And it is a remarkable testimony to the single-minded purpose and really philanthropic spirit which pervade his works, that they have never found favour with the commonplace rulers of mankind. A sovereign like Frederick the Second of Prussia, both animated with beneficent intentions towards his subjects and possessing sufficient force of personal character to conceive and work out his designs, might perhaps take delight in the relation of subject and government as depicted by Hobbes. But the monarchical form, as it has commonly existed, and still continues to exist, in most countries of Europe, has been a government not of the monarch alone, but of the monarch in confederacy with various powerful classes and fraternities, which have aided him in keeping down the people, and whose interest has been much more at variance with the public good than the interest of the monarch himself.
‘Now the doctrine of Hobbes, despotic as it may be, is at any rate an equalizing doctrine; not sanctioning the enthronement of any favoured or predominant class to intercept for themselves the rays emanating from the governing power, but enforcing a like claim on the part of every subject to partake in this common benefit. Such recognition of a supreme power nakedly and simply, apart from its accompanying congeries of auxiliary sinister interests, and exerting itself without favour or preference for the protection of the entire people, might have found favour at court had it been published under the vigorous and self-directing Queen Elizabeth; but it was not likely to be of much avail to its author, either during the precarious tenure of the Commonwealth or amidst the intrigues and personal helplessness of Charles the Second. In truth, it is this repudiation of all idea of privileged classes—falsely calling themselves checks upon the supreme power, but in reality fraternising with it and perverting it to their own purposes—which has contributed to render the political theories of Hobbes odious in England, quite as much as his denial of constitutional securities to the people at large. He has paid the forfeit of his anti-oligarchical as much as of his anti-popular tendencies.
‘Again, it is a standing reproach against his political writings, that they degrade the dignity of mankind: and this imputation may be well founded, if we compare them with the best and most liberal theories of government. But if we compare them with any political doctrines which have ever been generally recognised or practically acted upon in England, we shall find them the very reverse of degrading. The system of Hobbes is based wholly upon the willing and deliberate submission of the people to their existing rulers; which he professes to obtain simply by appealing to their reason, and by demonstrating that submission is essential to their safety as well as to their comfort. Such a doctrine both supposes and favours the widest diffusion of intelligence among the body of the people; and the French Economists, who reproduced a similar system in the last half of the eighteenth century, laid greater stress upon this necessary basis of universal instruction, than upon any other part of their reasonings. Contrast the state of passive and animal subservience to which the non-voting multitude have always been held bound in the theories most current among English politicians, with the rational obedience and exercised understanding supposed by Hobbes and the French Economists, and we are very sure that it is not the latter who will appear chargeable with inculcating principles debasing to the human race. The persons most interested in these writings, within our own observation, have usually been men of Radical principles, who entertained the loftiest ideas both of the functions of government and of the possible training of the people—men who agreed with Hobbes in his antipathy to those class-interests which constitute the working forces of modern pseudo-representative monarchy—but who differed from him by thinking that their best chance for combining rational submission on the part of the governed with enlarged and beneficent views on the part of the governors, was to be found in a well-organised representative system.’
Hobbes’s Ethics
‘The moral and metaphysical doctrines of Hobbes have not escaped similar charges to those which have been advanced against his politics. He deduced all the passions, appetites, and sympathies of man from the simple feelings of pleasure and pain; he derived moral obligation from the rational desire entertained by every man of his own conservation and happiness; he judged moral right and wrong by the test of utility. These doctrines are disagreeable to a large proportion of readers and writers, as giving a degrading representation of the human race; and the censure which they have drawn upon the author has been another of the causes which have operated to restrict the circle of his readers. Woe to the philosopher who will not condescend to flatter in his picture of man! Divines in the pulpit may depict the incorrigible wickedness of man in the darkest and most overcharged colours, and their sermons are extolled by every religious person; but let any moralist so conduct his analysis of the human heart, as to bring out a result not congenial to the sympathies of sentimentalists, and he sets the reading public against him; he is refuted beforehand, or worse than refuted, for he is laid aside unread. It seems to us that this disposition—to test metaphysical tenets by examining, not whether they are true and can be substantiated by sufficient evidence, but whether the admission of them as truths would tend to exhibit man as a better and more admirable being—has become more fashionable of late years than ever it was before; at least it has been largely adopted by the Scotch metaphysicians, as well as by the modern French school (an emanation from the Scotch), in their multiplied attacks on the French philosophy of the eighteenth century. And the frequency of such attacks is to us a proof that, however much physical science, which has no adverse predispositions to conquer, may have been enlarged and perfected in its details, there is very little of reverence among us for the purity of philosophical truth. For the argument really involved in this mode of handling the question is, that the truth or falsehood of any position in morals is a matter of small moment; that although it be true, it ought to be stifled and put down, if the belief of it would tend to lower our estimate of human nature; and that although it be false, it ought to be held sacred and unquestioned, if it would lead us to entertain a higher notion of our species. This is not indeed expressly stated, perhaps it is not deliberately intended, by those who run down Hobbes as preaching tenets debasing to human nature; but unless it be assumed as a postulate, the cry against him on such a ground can have neither force nor meaning.
‘To admit or reject particular doctrines, not on account of the weight of affirmative or negative evidence, but on account of the inferences to which they may give rise respecting the excellence or turpitude of human nature, is in effect to subvert the whole scientific edifice of moral and metaphysical philosophy—to degrade the science into a mere assemblage of conventional fictions, which it is dangerous to scrutinise and criminal to overthrow. The less analytical philosophers have been generally but too ready to employ this method of discrediting those who pushed the process of analysis further than themselves, unconscious that they were at the same time undermining the fabric and destroying the trustworthiness even of such doctrines as were common to both. If Hobbes had spoken of human nature in terms of the most stinging Cynicism, or with the sternness of an Antinomian divine, it would still have been unworthy of sound philosophy to employ this method of refuting him; but, in reality, he has dealt in no such unmeasured censure. He speaks of mankind like a shrewd and penetrating observer, applying his remarkable powers of analysis to the phenomena which he saw before him. Sir James Mackintosh complains that Hobbes “strikes the affections out of his map of human nature:” and others have alleged in like manner that he denies the existence of any benevolence in man, because he treats the benevolent as well as the other affections as being not inherent or original, but as derivative, and resolvable into the primary sentiments of pleasure and pain. It is common with metaphysicians of the Scotch school to represent such a doctrine as tantamount to a denial of the existence and efficacy of the benevolent affections: but this is a great injustice; for our compound and derivative feelings are just as real, and just as much a part of human nature, as our simple and original feelings. And it would be full as reasonable to say that Bishop Berkeley, when he showed that the perception of distance by the eye was not original, but acquired, denied the reality of the visual power in human nature—as to accuse Hobbes of disputing the fact that there were benevolent affections, because he disputes their title to originality.’
Notes in the Margins of the Days 