The Paradoxical Hobbes

Abstract

Attention has turned from Hobbes the systematic thinker to his inconsistencies, as the essays in the Hobbes symposium published in the recent volume of Political Theory suggest. Deborah Baumgold, in “The Difficulties of Hobbes Interpretation,” shifted the focus to “the history of the book,” and Hobbes’s method of serial composition and peripatetic insertion, as a major source of his inconsistency. Accepting Baumgold’s method, the author argues that the manner of composition does not necessarily determine content and that fundamental paradoxes in Hobbes’s work have a different provenance, for which there are also contextual answers. Hobbes was a courtier’s client, but one committed early to a materialist ontology and epistemology, and these commitments shackled him in treating the immediate political questions with which he was required to deal, leading to systemic paradoxes in his treatment of natural law, liberty, authorization, and consent.

Hobbes contra Liberty of Conscience

“…Responding to Deborah Baumgold's attempt to integrate the "history of the book"-that is, the way in which Hobbes's works were constantly revised and rewritten-Patricia Springborg has recently argued that there is a tendency to "overcorrect" the inconsistencies found in Hobbes: scholars try to "winkle out the inconsistencies by means of philosophical analysis." 79 While there are differences with regard to the source of the inconsistencies, Baumgold and Springborg seem to consider the history of Hobbes's writing the most appropriate approach, and they criticise the assumption-exemplified by Kinch Hoekstra-"that Hobbesian inconsistency must have a substantial, intellectual explanation." 80 However, the argument presented in this article will shed light on this and make us take a different road.…”