You're Here:
Home > Chapter 3 > Section 3.2
In this section, I will compare the philosophy of the 17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes to that of several British Idealists. I will also discuss the influence Hobbes has had upon these Idealists.
Thomas Hobbes was a seventeenth-century philosopher, whose times have highly influenced his work. He for example ran from the English Civil War. Hobbes’ most famous work is his Leviathan, in which he set forth a theory of how people should live in societies. He said that in the natural condition, all people would only try to fulfill their own needs and desires and as a result would be each others’ enemies. There would be a war of all against all and hence no-one could live securely. This is also connected to Hobbes' ideas on religion, cause he states that we have religion to cope with our fears of the future in the nature state.
Hobbes then said that people would make contracts to be able to live safely. For example: I will not rob you if you don’t rob me. However, people would not be able to contract securely, for they could not have confidence in the other’s keeping the promise, and hence there’d exist a “prisoners’ dilemma”. Hobbes therefore argued that the citizens in a society would contract to have an absolute ruler, who himself would not be a contract partner but who could make laws and watch over the citizens’ sticking to them. If one contracts to have a ruler, obedience to the ruler is superior to other contracts. Hobbes, namely, also states - both in his initial chapters on authority, before coming up with the idea of the absolute ruler, and in his definitions of the rights of a governor - that if a person does something in obedience to another person whom he contracted to obey, he is not at fault, cause he is not the "author".
In his Philosophical Theory of the State, Bernard Bosanquet discusses Hobbes’ ideas about will. Hobbes, according to Bosanquet, would, with the construction of society in which a sovereign’s will is the law people had to obey, make the will in a society actual (ie. it is indeed someone’s will) but not general. It namely is not the will of the community. Bosanquet writes:
We may say then, in short, that Hobbes places the unity of political society in a will, and that, in his sense, a real or actual will, but emphatically not in a general will. (7)Bosanquet therefore views Hobbes’ political theory as not really meaningful, and thinks that "the social right, which they are intended to account for, remains a mere name." (7)
Michael Oakeshott was greatly influenced by Hobbes’ political philosophy. He considered Leviathan to be the greatest, perhaps the sole, masterpiece of political philosophy in the English language. (56) Oakeshott uses Hobbes’ ideas to define the “civil association”, which is similar to how Hobbes “created” a state: the people collectively obey the governor; their contracts are not directly about reaching mutual goals, but about a mutual acknowledgement of Respublica. This authority, then, does not preclude the questioning of the desirability of these laws. (70)
Like in Hobbes’ view, the ruler according to Oakeshott does not “participate in the game” himself either. Oakeshott says that the relation between people in “civil association” is that of “subscribing to a practice”. (70) Laws, regulations etc. are there to provide conditions for this; civil association does not automatically assume a common belief or goal. Moral conduct, to Oakeshott, involves the acknowledgement of authority of a practice and as a result to these conditions.
Bosanquet was fairly critical of Hobbes’ ideas, because the real or actual will that is represented through the sovereign in Hobbes is not a general will and hence the social right becomes vanity. Oakeshott, on the other hand, was much influenced by Hobbes and held some of the same ideas. He read Hobbes in a way so that he, as an Idealist, could view the rationalist ideas of Hobbes as valuable.