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ABSTRACT
Recent scholarship has cast welcome light on the political relevance of Hobbes’s extensive treatment of theology and sacred history. Building on extant contributions, this article argues that God’s historical founding of a Kingdom lends insights into well-known difficulties attaching to Hobbes’s exposition of the Commonwealth by Institution. Although there are evident discrepancies between sacred history and man's natural estate, Abraham and Moses each faced political challenges that persist into the present. Acting as God’s authorized representatives not only allowed them to assuage epistemic uncertainty, it enabled Moses to wield sovereign authority while preserving a claim to natural equality. I argue that Leviathan suggests this model of prophetic authority – conceived of as a particular kind of prudence – is key to meeting the challenges arising from the anthropological vulnerabilities of ignorance and fear. Hobbes’s interest in the role of founding prophets also helps to explain Leviathan’s novel inclusion of representation. This explication of prophetic authority reveals institution to be marked by a greater attention to legitimacy, epistemic authority, and divine sanction, and sheds light on the importance of sacred history for Hobbes’s broader political project.
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Notes
1 Thomas Hobbes, Clarendon Edition of the Works of Thomas Hobbes, Volumes 4 & 5, ed. Noel Malcolm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). (L: Chapter: Page); L: Review, and Conclusion: 1135.
2 L:XVII:262.
3 On this point, see: Kajo Kubala, ‘Hobbes, Ius Gentium, and the Corporation’, History of European Ideas 49, no. 6 (2023): 942–58.
4 L:XVIII:266.
5 J.G.A. Pocock, ‘Time, History and Eschatology in the Thought of Thomas Hobbes’, in Politics, Language and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1989), 148–201; Richard Tuck, ‘The “Christian Atheism” of Thomas Hobbes’, in Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); Richard Tuck, ‘The Civil Religion of Thomas Hobbes’, Filozofski Vestnik 17, no. 3 (1996): 195–213; Joshua Mitchell, ‘Religion and the Fable of Liberalism: The Case of Hobbes’, Theoria (Pietermaritzburg) 55, no. 115 (2008): 1–16; A.P. Martinich, ‘Interpreting the Religion of Thomas Hobbes: An Exchange Hobbes’s Erastianism and Interpretation’, Journal of the History of Ideas 70, no. 1 (2009): 143–63; Laurens van Apeldoorn and Robin Douglass, Hobbes on Politics and Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); Meirav Jones, ‘“My Highest Priority Was to Absolve the Divine Laws”: The Theory and Politics of Hobbes’ Leviathan in a War of Religion’, Political Studies 65, no. 1 (2017): 248–63.
6 Alison McQueen, ‘Mosaic Leviathan Religion and Rhetoric in Hobbes’s Political Thought’, in Hobbes on Politics and Religion, ed. Laurens van Apeldoorn and Robin Douglass (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). See also: Benjamin Milner, ‘Hobbes: On Religion’, Political Theory 16, no. 3 (1988): 400–425.
7 Sarah Mortimer, ‘Christianity and Civil Religion in Hobbes’s Leviathan’, in The Oxford Handbook of Hobbes, ed. A.P. Martinich and Kinch Hoekstra (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016); Tuck, ‘The Civil Religion of Thomas Hobbes’; Jeffrey R. Collins, The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes (Oxford: University Press, 2007), 11–57.
8 Luc Foisneau, Hobbes et la toute-puissance de Dieu, 1st ed., Fondements de la politique. Série Essais (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2000); Luc Foisneau, ‘Omnipotence, Necessity and Sovereignty: Hobbes and the Absolute and Ordinary Powers of God and King’, in The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s Leviathan, ed. Patricia Springborg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 271–90.
9 Arrigo Pacchi, Filosofia e teologia in Hobbes: dispense del corso di storia della filosofia per l’A.A. 1984–’85 (Milano: Unicopli, 1985); Arrigo Pacchi, ‘Hobbes and Biblical Philology in the Service of the State’, Topoi 7, no. 3 (1988): 231–39; Arrigo Pacchi, ‘Some Guidelines into Hobbes’s Theology’, Hobbes Studies 2, no. 1 (1989): 87–103; Patricia Springborg, ‘Hobbes on Religion’, in The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes, ed. Tom Sorell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 346–80; Nicolas Dubos, Thomas Hobbes et l’histoire: système et récits à l’âge classique (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2014); Anne Herla, Hobbes ou le déclin du royaume des ténèbres: politique et théologie dans le Léviathan (Paris: Éditions Kimé, 2006).
10 For the sharpest statement of this gap see: Naomi Sussmann, ‘How Many Commonwealths Can Leviathan Swallow? Covenant, Sovereign and People in Hobbes’s Political Theory?’ British Journal for the History of Philosophy 18, no. 4 (2010): 575–96; See also: Bryan Garsten, ‘Religion and Representation in Hobbes’, in Leviathan, or, The Matter, Forme, & Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill, ed. Ian. Shapiro (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 519–46; Springborg, ‘Hobbes on Religion’, 354.
11 Kinch Hoekstra, ‘Disarming the Prophets: Thomas Hobbes and Predictive Power’, Rivista Di Storia Della Filosofia 59, no. 1 (2004): 126–7.
12 For treatments of false prophets see: David Johnston, The Rhetoric of Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes and the Politics of Cultural Transformation (Princeton: University Press, 1986); S.A. Lloyd, Ideals as Interests in Hobbes’s Leviathan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Avshalom M. Schwartz, ‘Leviathan Versus Beelzebub: Hobbes on the Prophetic Imagination’, History of European Ideas 49, no. 3 (2023): 543–60; Lloyd, Ideals as Interests; Avshalom Schwartz, ‘The Sleeping Subject: On the Use and Abuse of Imagination in Hobbes’s Leviathan’, Hobbes Studies 33, no. 2 (2020): 153–75; Robin Douglass, ‘The Body Politic “Is a Fictitious Body”’, Hobbes Studies 27, no. 2 (2014): 126–47.
13 David Gauthier, The Logic of Leviathan: The Moral and Political Theory of Thomas Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979); Victoria Kahn, ‘Hobbes, Romance, and the Contract of Mimesis’, Political Theory 29, no. 1 (2001): 4–29; Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: University Press, 1996); Thomas Nagel, ‘Hobbes’s Concept of Obligation’, The Philosophical Review 68, no. 1 (1959): 68–83; Michael Oakeshott, Hobbes on Civil Association (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2000).
14 Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, trans and ed. Harvey Mansfield (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 101–5; Francisco Suárez, Tractatus de legibus ac Deo legislatore in decem libros distributus (Sumptibus Horatii Cardon, 1619).
15 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Major Political Writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Two Discourses and the Social Contract (Chicago: University Press, 2012), 190–4.
16 L:XXXI:245.
17 L:XXXI:556.
18 Thomas Hobbes, On the Citizen, ed. Richard Tuck and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: University Press, 1998), 189. Translation reflects original use of the Latin verb ‘acquiere.’
19 L:XXXV:636.
20 L:XXXI:556.
21 L:XL:736–8.
22 L:XXXV:636.
23 L:XL:740.
24 L:XL:740.
25 L:XL:740.
26 DC:XVI:192.
27 L:XL:740.
28 L:XL:742.
29 L:XV:634.
30 Oakeshott, Hobbes on Civil Association, 134. Peter Vanderschraaf, ‘The Character and Significance of the State of Nature’, in Interpreting Hobbes’s Political Philosophy, ed. S.A. Lloyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 196.
31 L:XVII:254.
32 L:XVII:256–8.
33 Arash Abizadeh, ‘Hobbes on the Causes of War: A Disagreement Theory’, American Political Science Review 105, no. 2 (2011): 298–315; Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government 1572–1651 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 279–345.
34 L:XVII:258.
35 Thomas Hobbes, The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury (J. Bohn, 1840), Vol IV, 10.
36 See for example: Luc Borot, ‘History in Hobbes’s Thought’, in The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes, ed. Tom Sorell (Cambridge: University Press, 1996); G.A.J. Rogers and Tom Sorell, Hobbes and History (New York: Routledge, 2000).
37 Pocock, ‘Time, History and Eschatology.’
38 Thomas Hobbes, Man and Citizen, ed. Bernard Gert (Gloucester, MA: PSmith, 1978), 43.
39 For example see: Franck Lessay, ‘Hobbes and Sacred History’, in Hobbes and History, ed. G.A.J. Rogers and Tom Sorell (London: Routledge, 2000), 146–58. Lessay poses the challenge, but largely does so in relation to Hobbes’s treatment of ecclesiastical history (which is insufficiently distinguished from ‘sacred history’); Lessay’s complaints are thus not as pertinent given the more traditional scriptural history at issue in the present paper.
40 L:XXXII:580.
41 L:XXXII:584.
42 Compare this to what S.A. Lloyd identifies as the core condition of the natural estate, namely, the ability to act on one’s individual private judgment: S.A. Lloyd, ‘The State of Nature as a Continuum Concept’, in A Companion to Hobbes (John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2021), 156–70.
43 See especially L: Review, and Conclusion: 1132–41.
44 Alissa MacMillan, ‘Conditioned to Believe: Hobbes on Religion, Education, and Social Context’, Hobbes Studies 30, no. 2 (2017): 156–77.
45 Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, 334–43; Johnston, The Rhetoric of Leviathan, passim.
46 L:VI:68.
47 L:III:44.
48 L:II:34.
49 L:XII:170.
50 L:XII:166.
51 L:XII:168.
52 L:XII:170.
53 L:XII:170.
54 L:XII:164.
55 L:XI:158–62.
56 L:III:42.
57 L:III:44.
58 L:VIII:104.
59 L:VIII:108. See also: Art Vanden Houten, ‘Prudence in Hobbes’s Political Philosophy’, History of Political Thought XXIII, no. 2 (2002): 266–87.
60 L:X:134.
61 Johnston, The Rhetoric of Leviathan; Lloyd, Ideals as Interests in Hobbes’s Leviathan; Hoekstra, ‘Disarming the Prophets’; Schwartz, ‘Leviathan Versus Beelzebub’; Leo Strauss, Hobbes’s Critique of Religion & Related Writings (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2011).
62 L:XXXVI:658.
63 L:XXXVI:658.
64 L:XXXVI:660.
65 See note 62.
66 Brian FitzGerald, Inspiration and Authority in the Middle Ages: Prophets and Their Critics from Scholasticism to Humanism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
67 FitzGerald, Inspiration and Authority, 89–94.
68 L:XII:170.
69 L:XII:176.
70 L:XII:176.
71 L:XII:178.
72 L:XII:170.
73 Fitzgerald, Inspiration and Authority, 152–92.
74 Ibid., 197–229.
75 L:III:44. Emphasis added.
76 L:XII:174. Emphasis added.
77 L:XXXVI:666.
78 L:XXXVI:668. Emphasis added.
79 L:XXXVI:670.
80 Takuya Okada, ‘Hobbes on the Supernatural from the Elements of Law to Leviathan’, History of European Ideas 45, no. 7 (2019): 917–32.
81 L:XXXII:584; Jean-Louis Quantin, The Church of England and Christian Antiquity: The Construction of a Confessional Identity in the 17th Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
82 For example: Quentin Skinner, ‘Hobbes and the Purely Artificial Person of the State’, The Journal of Political Philosophy 7, no. 1 (1999): 1–29; Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics, Volume 3: Hobbes and Civil Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 177–208. David Runciman, ‘What Kind of Person is Hobbes’s State? A Reply to Skinner’, The Journal of Political Philosophy 8, no. 2 (2000): 268–78; Arash Abizadeh, ‘The Representation of Hobbesian Sovereignty: Leviathan as Mythology’, in Hobbes Today: Insights for the 21st Century, ed. S.A. Lloyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Mónica Brito Vieira, ‘Revisiting Hobbes on Representation’, Hobbes Studies 31, no. 1 (2018): 25–29; Sean Fleming, Leviathan on a Leash: A Theory of State Responsibility (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020), especially Chapter 2.
83 L:XVI:244.
84 L:XVI:244.
85 L:XVI:245.
86 L:XVI:244.
87 See footnote 78.
88 Fleming highlights this lacuna and begins to offer an explanation of the relevance of theological musings, Fleming, Leviathan on a Leash, 52–5.
89 L:XVII:260.
90 L:XXVI:444.
91 For example: L:XIV:210; L:XLIV:1044.
92 L:XVI:246. Emphasis added. L:XVIII:266.
93 L:XIV:210.
94 L:XVI:246.
95 L:XVI:248.
96 Arash Abizadeh, ‘Hobbes’s Conventionalist Theology, the Trinity, and God as an Artificial Person by Fiction’, The Historical Journal 60, no. 4 (2017): 927.
97 L:XVI:244.
98 L:XII:180.
99 L:XVI:246.
100 L:XXXVII:688.
101 L:XVI:246.
102 L:VII:102; emphasis added.
103 L:XXXVI:674.
104 L:XXXVII:696.
105 L:XXXVI:674; emphasis added.
106 Lloyd, ‘The State of Nature as a Continuum Concept.’
107 L:XXXVI:674; emphasis added.
108 L:XVII:262; emphasis added.
109 L:XX:306.
110 L: Introduction: 16; emphasis added.
111 L:XII:216.
112 L:XIV:216.
113 L:XXV; L:VI:94.
114 L:VI:94; L:XXV:398. For more on the delineation of this time period see: Amy Chandran, ‘Hobbes in France, Gallican Histories, and Leviathan’s Supreme Pastor’, Modern Intellectual History 20, no. 2 (2023): 359–87.
115 L:XXV:402.
116 L:VI:84.
117 L:XXVI:444.
118 Max Weber, ‘Politics as a Vocation’, in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans and ed. H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 77–128.