Between Two Worlds: The Reverent Thomas Hobbes

No reputable academic press would nowadays dream of publishing an edition of Hobbes’s Leviathan that amputated its second half, in which Hobbes derives his conclusions from the ‘Supernaturall Revelations of the Will of God’ in Scripture. No reputable Hobbes scholar would now admit to not having read Hobbes’s masterpiece in its entirety. Yet the assumption that once licensed the thought that Parts III and IV are inessential to the ‘scientific’ logic of Hobbes’s argument, and therefore expendable, retains its grip. This essay, like Hobbes’s Leviathan, is divided in two. The first half shows that this assumption – viz. that Hobbes is the ‘exemplary political theorist of modernity’ – was already firmly in place when the history of political thought took rise as a discipline from the later nineteenth century. It continues to determine and define the external limits of legitimate scholarly disagreement among interpretations of Leviathan, and to condition how most readers understand its second half in relation to its first. The second half of our essay subjects this assumption to critical scrutiny. It does so by focusing on the importance of reverence for sovereign authority, on the part of both subjects and sovereigns. Without reverence, Hobbes’s commonwealth will inexorably succumb to the internal causes of death and decay that it was designed to overcome. Yet Hobbes’s civil science in the first half of the work was, by his own admission, incapable of cultivating such reverence. Only in a Christian commonwealth, under a Christian sovereign, might political power be viewed in the necessary light and obeyed unstintingly.