The leviathan and the chimera: Gian Vincenzo Gravina’s Hobbesianism and its limits

ABSTRACT

In his political thought, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Italy’s premier jurist, Gian Vincenzo Gravina, adopted a Hobbesian state of nature, a Hobbesian social contract, and a Hobbesian idea of law as collective will; he fused these ideas with the Roman legal tradition, a tradition that he trained in and later ordered when he wrote his masterpiece, the Three Books on the Origins of the Civil Law. But Gravina was more than a Roman Hobbesian. While he held a Hobbesian view of political legitimacy, he also held an anti-Hobbesian view of human life’s true ends. Gravina set out to restore these true ends – reason, virtue, and internal tranquility – and to do that he turned to Plato. In synthesizing Hobbes’s legal innovations with prior understandings of law, Gravina demonstrates just how far those innovations reached in eighteenth-century Europe.

KEYWORDS:

• Hobbes
• Plato
• Gravina
• jurisprudence
• social contract

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Abbreviated in-text citations to Hobbes: Elements of Law, from Human Nature and De Corpore Politico, ed. J.C.A. Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 1994) – EL followed by chapter and page number; On the Citizen, ed. Richard Tuck and Michael Silverthorne (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), a translation of De Cive – DC followed by chapter and page number; Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991) – L followed by chapter and page number; and Latin Leviathan, from Leviathan, ed. Noel Malcolm, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon 2012) – LL followed by chapter and page number. Abbreviated in-text citations for Gravina, all of which come from Jani Vincentii Gravinae Jurisconsulti Opera, ed. Gotfried Mascov, 2 vols. (Naples: Joseph Raymund 1756): Originum juris civilis libri tres – OJC followed by book, chapter, and page number; De romano imperio liber singularis – DRI followed by chapter and page number; Oratio de jurisprudentia – ODJ followed by page number; and Oratio de instauratione studiorum – OIS followed by page number. Other Gravina citations refer to the same edition and are by volume and page number. Plato citations use the Oxford Classical Dictionary’s abbreviations and Stephanus numbers from Republic, trans. Allan Bloom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968) and the Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997).

2 If law is collective will represented through the sovereign, then the laws of nature are ‘not properly Lawes’ but rather ‘dictates of reason’ that follow ‘the Passions that encline men to peace’ (L XXVI.185, XV.111, XIII.90; cf. DC I.31, XIII.143). If law is whatever obliges, then the laws of nature are laws, since reason always suggests them (Kinch Hoekstra, ‘Hobbes on Law, Nature, and Reason’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 41 (2003): 112). Regardless, the laws of nature teach us to obey the civil law and they suggest some principles that the civil law should follow (Martin Loughlin, ‘The political jurisprudence of Thomas Hobbes’, in Hobbes and the Law, ed. David Dyzenhaus and Thomas Poole (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 16; David Dyzenhaus, ‘Hobbes on the Authority of the Law’, in Hobbes and the Law, ed. David Dyzenhaus and Thomas Poole (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 188). On natural law theories in Hobbes’s time, see Richard Tuck, Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 92–100, 109–13 and Anthony F. Lang and Gabriella Slomp, ‘Thomas Hobbes: Theorist of the Law’, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 19 (2016): 3–5.

3 As for whether equity limits justice, compare David Dyzenhaus, ‘Hobbes and the Legitimacy of Law’, Law and Philosophy 20 (2001): 461–98 and Larry May, Limiting Leviathan: Hobbes on Law and International Affairs (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 67–84 with Loughlin, ‘Political Jurisprudence’, and Tom Sorell, ‘Law and Equity in Hobbes’, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 19 (2016): 29–46.

4 On Hobbes and Thomistic law, see Loughlin, ‘Political Jurisprudence’, Jon Parkin, Taming the Leviathan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 49–50, 118–28, 146, 159–62, 195, and Thomas Pink, ‘Hobbes on Liberty, Action, and Free Will’, in The Oxford Handbook of Hobbes, ed. A.P. Martinich and Kinch Hoekstra (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 171–94; on Hobbes and Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero, see Frederick Beiser, The Sovereignty of Reason: The Defense of Rationality in the Early English Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 134–83, Ioannis Evrigenis, Images of Anarchy: The Rhetoric and Science in Hobbes’s State of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 10–12, 48–59, 100–1, 108–10, 117, 137, Daniel Kapust, ‘Thomas Hobbes, Cicero, and the Road not Taken’, in The Ciceronian Tradition in Political Theory, ed. Daniel Kapust and Gary Remer (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2021), 120–39, Karl Schuhmann, Selected Papers on Renaissance philosophy and on Thomas Hobbes, ed. Piet Steenbakkers and Cees Leinhorst (New York: Springer, 2004), 191–218, Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 153–6, 161, 176, 232, 256–7, 274–5, Hobbes and Republican Liberty (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 27–34, and From Humanism to Hobbes (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 185–6, 212–3, Tom Sorell, ‘Hobbes and Aristotle’, in Philosophy in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: Conversations with Aristotle, ed. Constance Blackwell and Sachiko Kusukawa (New York: Routledge, 1999), and Devin Stauffer, Hobbes’s Kingdom of Light (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 10–34; on Hobbes and Coke, see Enid Campbell, ‘Thomas Hobbes and the Common Law’, University of Tasmania Law Review 1 (1958): 20–45 and Michael Lobban, ‘Thomas Hobbes and the Common Law’, in Hobbes and the Law, ed. David Dyzenhaus and Thomas Poole (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 39–67; and on Hobbes and Roman Law, see Daniel Lee, ‘Hobbes and the Civil Law’, in Hobbes and the Law, ed. David Dyzenhaus and Thomas Poole (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 210–35 and Popular Sovereignty in Early Modern Constitutional Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016) along with Patricia Springborg, ‘Hobbes, Civil Law, Liberty and the Elements of Law’, Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 19 (2016): 47–67. As for Hobbes and Grotius, compare Richard Tuck, ‘The “Modern” Theory of Natural Law’, in The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe, ed. Anthony Pagden (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 99–119 with Noel Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford: Clarendon, 2002), 473 and Benjamin Straumann, Roman Law in the State of Nature (New York: Cambridge University Press), 135–42.

5 Dyzenhaus, ‘Legitimacy of Law’, 461; L V.36; cf. EL Ep. Ded. 20; DC Pref. 10. For more on Hobbes and positivism, see Dyzenhaus, “Authority of Law”, 194; on Hobbes’s purpose, see Kinch Hoekstra, ‘The End of Philosophy (The Case of Hobbes)’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 106 (2006): 25, 31–2, 54, 58.

6 See note 4 above. In De Cive Hobbes calls Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, and Plutarch ‘champions of anarchy’, yet throughout the Leviathan, notes Skinner, ‘the chief butts of Hobbes’s sarcasm are the scholastic admirers of Aristotle’ (DC XII.133; Skinner 1996, 406).

7 Noel Malcolm, ‘Introduction: The Writing of Leviathan’, in Leviathan, ed. Noel Malcolm, Vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon, 2012), 48.

8 Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes, 541–5.

9 Donald Kelley, ‘Vera Philosophia: The Philosophical Significance of Renaissance Jurisprudence’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 14 (1979): 267, 270–1, 277–8.

10 Carlo Ghisalberti, Gian Vincenzo Gravina: Giurista e Storico (Milan: Giuffrè, 1962), 3–15; Francesco Moffa, ‘Gian Vincenzo Gravina’, in Studi di Letteratura Italiana, ed. Erasmo Pèrcopo and Nicola Zingarelli (Naples: Giannini, 1907), 263, 348; Oleg Nikitinski, Gian Vincenzo Gravina nel contesto dell’Umanesimo europeo (Naples: Vivarium, 17, 30); Carla San Mauro, Gianvincenzo Gravina Giurista e Politco (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2006), 65–80, 154–5. Gravina’s major legacies in the eighteenth century were his theory of art, his comprehensive history of Roman law, and his political thought. Modern scholars study the first rarely, the second almost never, and the third not at all. An exception to the second point is Douglas Osler, ‘Images of Legal Humanism’, Surfaces IX, https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/surfaces/2001-v9-surfaces04911/1065066ar/; an exception to the third is Carla San Mauro, Gianvincenzo Gravina. Gravina’s history of Roman law has become standard – compare OJC I.130–84 with Peter Stein, Roman Law in European History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 38–97.

11 Alfonso Bertoldi, Studio su Gian Vincenzo Gravina (Bologna: Nicola Zanichelli, 1885), 2–19; Ghisalberti, Gravina: Giurista e Storico, 21–62; Gottfried Mascov, Praefatio to Jani Vincentii Gravinae Jurisconsulti Opera, Vol. 1 (Naples: Joseph Raymund, 1756), xxi–xxii; Adriana Luna-Fabritius, ‘Passions and the Early Italian Enlightenment: Human Nature and the Vivere Civile in the Thought of Gregorio Caloprese’, European Review of History 17 (2010): 93–112; Moffa, ‘Gravina’, 175–85; San Mauro, Gravina Giurista e Politico, 29–36.

12 OJC I.31.21, I.104.60; DRI I.1.3; Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes, 483, 511–12; John Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples 1680–1760 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 201–2, 211–14; Emilio Sergio, ‘The Leviathan in Naples: Vico’s Response to Hobbes’s Life and Works’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 33 (2010): 227–44.

13 Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes, 470, 502–7, 510, 523, 526; Parkin, Taming the Leviathan, 200–1, 204–11, 229, 412–3; Tuck, Hobbes, 76–7, 80, 91–3.

14 Dan Edelstein, The Enlightenment: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 61, 72–7.

15 Ghisalberti, Gravina: Giurista e Storico, 65–70; Mascov, Praefatio, xxiv; Moffa, ‘Gravina’, 238–40; San Mauro, Gravina Giurista e Politico, 30, 47, 81, 93 n.40.

16 On Gravina’s place in the mos gallicus tradition, see Nathaniel Gilmore, Montesquieu and the Spirit of Rome (Liverpool: Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, 2022), 117–51.

17 Thomas Hobbes, Prose Life, in Human Nature and De Corpore Politico, ed. J.C.A. Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford World Classics), 248; see also Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes, 459; ‘Writing of Leviathan’, 82; Parkin, Taming the Leviathan, 90–4; Richard Tuck, The Sleeping Sovereign (New York: Cambridge University Press), 172.

18 Cf. L IX.61, XLVI.458; Hoekstra, ‘The End of Philosophy’, 26–8.

19 Tuck, Hobbes, 55; cf. L III.21; Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes, 510.

20 For overviews of Hobbes’s psychology, see A.P. Martinich, Hobbes (New York: Routledge, 2005), 35–47, 57–63 and Stauffer, Kingdom of Light, 184–206.

21 Parkin, Taming the Leviathan, 166; cf. Malcolm, ‘Writing of Leviathan’, 13.

22 Evrigenis, Images of Anarchy, 109.

23 Gravina loved emphatic comparative adjectives, but they translate better as positives.

24 Gravina blames this state on our fathers: patrum culpa, a reference to original sin for whoever wishes to take it. His addressee, for example. Nonetheless, Gravina forgoes Biblical authority when discussing this fault, and it may be no more than the fault of being human (cf. L XIII.89, XXVII.201).

25 ‘Omnes omnia sibi arripiunt, bellum excitat, et mutuas caedes.’ Gravina seems to echo Hobbes’s bellum omnium contra omnes.

26 Cf. Evrigenis, Images of Anarchy, 121, 250.

27 Cf. Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty, 27–30, 127–9; Dig. I.5.4; Inst. I.3.1.

28 Loughlin, ‘Political Jurisprudence’, 19.

29 Malcom, ‘Writing of Leviathan’, 57; L XLVI.461; cf. L XXXI.254; LL XLVI.1059; Ap. 41a-c.

30 Cf. Rep. II.357b-358a; Tuck, Hobbes, 105.

31 And perhaps Machiavelli, Bodin, and Spinoza, too, whom Gravina elsewhere lists alongside Hobbes as Thrasymacheans (OIS 119; qtd. San Mauro, Gravina Giurista e Politico, 81).

32 Gravina applied this difference to the family, asserting – against both Plato and Hobbes – men’s strict superiority to women on the basis of reason (OJC III.3.222–3).

33 In this Gravina seems to unite Plato with the Epicureans, as Mascov describes in a footnote to the passage.

34 In a smaller work, Gravina calls the lex corporis the ‘primary’ law of nature and the lex rationis both the second law of nature and the first jus gentium (the law that reason establishes among men) (Gravina, Jani Vincentii Gravinae Jurisconsulti Opera, 2:200; cf. Adolf Berger, Encyclopedic Dictionary of Roman Law (Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society, 1953), 530–1; Oxford Classical Dictionary, ed. N.G.L. Hammond and H.H. Scullard, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970), 558–9).

35 Because the sovereign exists to secure each citizen’s life and prosperity, it can command a man to die, but it cannot command him to not defend himself: ‘no man can transferre, or lay down his Right to save himselfe from Death, Wounds, and Imprisonment’ (L XIV.98; cf. DC II.39). The limit here is not justice – nothing the sovereign does can be unjust – but rather self-interest and self-contradiction because a human being cannot will that they end their own life. Every citizen consents to live under justice’s blade, but they keep the right to dodge its arc. Praising what Hobbes’s royalist contemporaries blamed, Dyzenhaus expands this into a ‘right of resistance’ so broad that it risks becoming the ‘seditious’ doctrine ‘That every private man is Judge of Good and Evill actions’ (Dyzenhaus ‘Authority of law’, 189; L XXIX.223; cf. DC XII.131-2; Parkin, Taming the Leviathan, 111).

36 L Ep. Ded. 3; Kinch Hoekstra, ‘Tyrannus Rex vs. Leviathan’, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 82 (2001): 425; cf. DC X.115–17; Kinch Hoekstra, ‘A Lion in the House: Hobbes and Democracy’, in Rethinking the Foundations of Modern Political Thought, ed. Annabel Brett and James Tully with Holly Hamilton Bleakley (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 211, 214; Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty, 126.

37 In splitting the legislative will from the government Gravina follows a path like Samuel Pufendorf’s, but Gravina is not Pufendorf: Gravina legitimizes rebellion (cf. Samuel Pufendorf, On the Duty of Man and Citizen, ed. James Tully and trans. Michael Silverthorne (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), II.7.4–12).

38 Springborg, ‘Elements of Law’, 55; cf. Lee, ‘Hobbes and the Civil Law’, 211, 222–35. On the lex regia and political thought, see Lee, Popular Sovereignty, 25–50.

39 Cf. Tuck, Sleeping Sovereign, 90–1.

40 Cf. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, trans. J.E. King (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1927), V.10. Gravina adopts at least six traditional stories about Greek wisdom and Roman law: (1) In the second century A.D. the Romans discovered books written by King Numa that contained reflections on Greek philosophy; (2) The Pythagorean sects of Southern Italy influenced the early Republic; (3) The Romans sent emissaries to visit Greece and study their laws at some point before the Decemvirs wrote the Twelve Tables; (4) Hermodorus of Ephesus, a Platonist, advised the Decemvirs; (5) Servius Sulpicius Rufus, Cicero’s student, infused Roman law ‘with dialectic’; and (6) The great Roman jurists were Stoics (ODJ 86). Although he dismissed the fables that Gravina believed, the greatest modern Roman historian wrote that ‘it is impossible to doubt’ that ‘Hellenic influences exercised a powerful effect’ on the early Roman polity, even if ‘it is equally impossible to demonstrate the mode or the degree’ (Theodor Mommsen, The History of Rome, trans. William P. Dickson, 5 vols. (London: Bentley, 1862), 1:118).

41 OJC Ad cup. xix; Kelley, ‘Vera Philosophia’, 275–6; Moffa, ‘Gravina’, 312.

42 Gravina, Opera, 2:80.

43 Hoekstra, ‘End of Philosophy’, 32, 58.

44 Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty, xii.

45 Cf. DC Pref. 14; Kinch Hoekstra, ‘The de facto Turn in Hobbes’s Political Philosophy’, in Leviathan After 350 Years, ed. Tom Sorell and Luc Foisneau (Oxford: Clarendon, 2004), 46–7, 60–1; Parkin, Taming the Leviathan, 158, 177, 219, 315; Tuck, Hobbes, 27.

46 Cf. DC III.49; Hoekstra, ‘Lion in the House’; Skinner, Humanism to Hobbes, 208–11, 217; Richard Tuck, ‘Hobbes and Democracy’, in Rethinking the Foundations of Modern Political Thought, ed. Annabel Brett and James Tully with Holly Hamilton Bleakley (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 171–90, and The Sleeping Sovereign, 114.

47 Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty, 140–3, 157, 161–2, 210.

48 Hobbes would ask, ‘Who judges?’ and since the answer isn’t the sovereign, Gravina opens a door that Hobbes blockaded. As for Aristotle, Gravina regularly denounces the ‘Peripatetics’ and their successors – ‘the Arabs’, the scholastics, and the Bartolists – but his views on Aristotle himself may be more ambivalent (OJC I.164.88; cf. OIS 118; Opera, II.97, II.114, 116).

49 Cf. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Social Contract, in The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, trans. Victor Gourevitch (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), II.6.67. This is not the only similarity between Gravina and Rousseau – a subject for another article.

50 Hoekstra, ‘Tyrannus Rex’, 432.