INTRODUCTION
Editions
Hobbes was undoubtedly the greatest English philosopher of his generation, and arguably of all time. It is therefore shocking that there is no scholarly complete edition of his writings. The situation is slowly being rectified by Oxford University Press (the ‘Clarendon Edition’), but so far only two volumes of correspondence, and the English and Latin versions of The Citizen (see below) have been published.
In the meantime, the main source is still William Molesworth, The English Works of Thomas Hobbes, 11 volumes; and Opera Latina, 5 volumes (London, 1839–45). This cannot be described as a scholarly edition, since there is virtually no attempt to indicate variations between different editions of the same work. In general, Molesworth simply reprints the earliest printed version or manuscript that he was able to find, even when the text was obviously problematic (and standards of proof-reading were definitely lower in Hobbes’s time than they are now). Nevertheless, Molesworth’s edition was pretty nearly complete, and (apart from some correspondence), most of the writings which have subsequently come to light are alternative versions of what he had included. Where there are better editions of individual works, I shall mention them at the appropriate place.
16 volumes (plus) is an impressive lifetime achievement, particularly since the only things Hobbes published before he was 50 were two translations from Greek (the Peloponnesian War of Thucidydes, and extracts from Aristotle’s Rhetoric), and a Latin poem on the wonders of the Peak District (or the ‘Devil’s Arse’, as the subtitle has it).
Classification of Hobbes’s writings
Hobbes’s writings may be roughly classified as follows:
1. Philosophical writings (see below).
2. Scientific and mathematical writings. As with all 17th-century writers, there is no hard-and-fast distinction between philosophy in the modern sense, and science. Nevertheless, a number of Hobbes’s writings are exclusively, or almost exclusively, devoted to technical issues in science or mathematics. These cover a treatise on optics (on which Hobbes staked his reputation as a serious practising scientist); some more speculative discussions of issues in physics; and innumerable books and pamphlets arising from his bitter dispute with the maths professors at Oxford over (a) the squaring of the circle (which was highly damaging to Hobbes’s reputation in later life), and over the propriety of using algebraic techniques in geometry.
3. Historical writings. The most famous of these is his Behemoth (written about 1668, published in 1680), which was a history of the Civil War, in which he argued that its principal cause was the failure of the universities and the Church to accept the authority of the Sovereign. He also wrote about the history of law, and the history of Christianity (especially about the punishment of heretics — a punishment which he himself feared for most of his life).
4. Translations. In addition to the early translations already mentioned, in his old age he translated the whole of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey.
5. Correspondence. All previous editions of Hobbes’s correspondence have been superseded by the Clarendon Edition, vols 6–7: Noel Malcolm (ed.) Thomas Hobbes: The Correspondence (Oxford, 1994). Unfortunately, the correspondence contains very little of philosophical interest.
6. Other minor works. These include some autobiographical writings (e.g. an autobiographical Latin poem, written when Hobbes was 84), and various other pieces.
Hobbes’s Philosophical Writings
Hobbes had a long-standing interest in political philosophy, but there is little evidence of his developing any keen interest in metaphysics, epistemology, and science until his visit to France and Switzerland in 1629, as tutor to Gervaise Clifton. The general lines of his philosophical system were pretty clear in his head by around 1640, when he was in self-imposed exile in Paris during the Civil War. At the time, Paris was the intellectual capital of Europe, and Hobbes was on close terms with many of the leading figure of the day, such as Mersenne and Gassendi. The one person he didn’t get on with was Descartes: not so much because of their one big disagreement (over the nature of the soul, and knowledge of God), but because Descartes accused Hobbes of plagiarising his theories of matter and of vision. In fact they probably developed their ideas independently, and both owed more to Galileo than they cared to admit. Hobbes’s problem that he was very slow to get into print with his ideas.
Hobbes dithered for a number of reasons:
1. He couldn’t make his mind up whether his political philosophy was free-standing, or depended on his approach to more general philosophical and scientific issues, which he had not yet written out.
2. He knew that his Royalism, authoritarianism, anti-Catholicism, and anti-Presbyterianism would earn him many political enemies, and that his religious views would be regarded as heretical in most quarters. In fact it was only thanks to powerful protectors that he didn’t end his days in the Tower of London, or on the chopping block.
3. He was torn between a powerful urge to publish his political views (which he believed would put an end to all civil war, if accepted), and to publish his theories of matter and optics (which he believed would put him in the same league as Copernicus, Galileo, and Harvey as far as posterity was concerned).
4. Connected with the above, he dithered as to whether to write in English or Latin. His political writings had a strong English slant (the Civil War; the role of the Church of England; the constitutional relation between England and Scotland; etc.), which suggested English as the appropriate language. But virtually no-one outside Britain could read English, and he had a much higher reputation as a philosopher and scientist on the Continent than back home. This suggested Latin as the appropriate language, since it was still the lingua franca of international scholarship.
5. Finally, the concept of ‘publication’ is not as clear cut as it is now (or at least was until the internet was created). It was common for works to be circulated in manuscript form in multiple copies (which might be deliberately emended, or accidentally corrupted) long before appearing in print, if ever. One such work by Hobbes (the so-called Anti-White) was first printed in 1973.
The outcome was that his philosophical system came out in dribs and drabs over a period of about 20 years — some of it in English, some in Latin, together with translations (mostly be other people) from Latin into English, or English into Latin. It seems that he worked on a number of projects simultaneously, and accumulated a large number of incomplete drafts in different languages, which formed the basis of his actual publications. It is often difficult to tell whether a particular passage was written shortly before the publication date, or 20 years earlier; and whether it was originally written in English or Latin.
Hobbes’s basic project was to write a Latin work in three volumes (each volume called a ‘section’), with the title The Elements of Philosophy. The Sections were to be:
1. On Body. This work would start with first philosophy or metaphysics (substance, knowledge, language, logic, scientific method, etc.), and move on to outlines of the main branches of science, including animal physiology, sense perception, and emotion).
2. On the Human Being. This would describe the nature of human beings as distinct from other animals, but only in so far as they are individuals, and not as living in society. In particular, it would describe the beliefs and motivations which need to be sublimated in order for humans to live together peacefully and co-operatively in a civil society.
3. On the Citizen. This would describe the basic principles on which civil society must be organised so as to avoid collapse through civil war. In a nutshell, there must be a single sovereign power (preferably a king, but it could be a committee or an assembly), which has absolutely the last word on the law of the land, and on religious observance.
1. There is a manuscript dating to the 1630s, which gives an account of something like Hobbes’s theory of perception and related matters. It is generally known as the Short Tract, and it is printed as Appendix 1 to F. Tönnies (ed.), The Elements of Law: Natural and Politic (London, 1889). Scholarly opinion is divided as to whether it was actually written by Hobbes, and I think not.
2. Probably the earliest extant work with any substantial philosophical content is what is generally known as The First Draft of the Optics, which Hobbes was probably stimulated into writing by the publication of Descartes’ Dioptrics in 1637. Hobbes omitted most of the more philosophical material from the Treatise on Optics which he published in 1644. Extracts from it have been published as Appendix 2 to Tönnies’ work above; and the complete text is printed in F. Alessio (ed.), "Tractatus Opticus: prima edizione integrale", in Rivista critica di storia della filosofia 18 (1963), 147–188.
3. In 1640, Hobbes circulated a manuscript in two parts, written in English, with the title The Elements of Law. In effect, it is a summary version of Sections 2 and 3 of The Elements of Philosophy. Without Hobbes’s permission, it was printed (very inaccurately) in two volumes, in 1650 and 1651 (or 1649 and 1650), with the titles Human Nature (Part I, chapters 1–13), and De corpore politico (‘The Body Politic,’ consisting of the rest of Part I, and Part II.). Molesworth (EW IV) based his edition on the printed versions, and a more correct version was first published by Tönnies (above, para. 1).
Go to The Elements of Law (complete,
as in Tönnies)
Go to The Elements of Law (selections
translated into modern English)
4. 1641 saw the publication of the first of Hobbes’s philosophical writings to appear in print (when he was already 53). This was his Objections to Descartes’ Meditations.
Go to The Objections to Descartes’ Meditations
5. In 1642, Hobbes published a Latin version of Section 3 of The Elements of Philosophy as De Cive — with apologies for not yet having completed Section 1 or Section 2, although he had already done a lot of work on them.
6. The Optical Treatise was published by Mersenne in 1644. In the same year, Mersenne published his own work on mechanics, with the title Ballistic, and (oddly) devoted a few pages of the Preface to a summary of Hobbes’s philosophy, almost certainly written by Hobbes himself. Both were in Latin.
Go to the Optical Treatise
Go to the Preface to Mersenne’s Ballistic
7. Starting in 1642, Hobbes wrote his lengthiest work to date, which was a detailed criticism, in Latin, of Thomas White’s De Mundo (‘On the World’). In practice, Hobbes’ used it as a peg on which to hang his own ideas. Since he was tied by the structure and content of White’s work, the order of exposition is pretty bizarre. Much of the material was derived from drafts of other works Hobbes had already written, or itself served as a draft for later works. Consequently, it doesn’t add very much to our understanding of Hobbes’s philosophy. Although it presumably circulated in manuscript, Hobbes never published it as such. It was first published by Jean Jacquot and Harold Jones as Critique du De Mundo de Thomas White (Paris, Vrin, 1973), and Jones translated it into English as Thomas White’s De Mundo Examined (Bradford University Press, 1976). Scholars usually refer to it as the ‘Anti-White’. I have not included any extracts here.
8. After the outbreak of the Civil War in 1642, Hobbes set aside work on the Elements of Philosophy as such, and conceived instead a single-volume work, which would start with a very brief summary of his metaphysics (in effect, On Body without the scientific material); then continue with a fuller summary of On the Human Being; and the bulk of the work would be an expanded version of On the Citizen. He almost certainly started it in Latin; but then decided that the English market was more important than the Continental one, and switched to English. It was published in 1651, with the rather contentious title Leviathan.
9. The publication of Leviathan caused a considerable stir, and Hobbes spent much of the rest of his long life defending its doctrines. One issue in particular was the freedom of the will, which Hobbes appeared to deny. He wrote a defence of his views against criticisms by Bishop Bramhall, which was published (without Hobbes’s permission) as Of Liberty and Necessity in 1654. This led to a string of books and pamphlets from both sides, none of which I have included here.
10. In the meantime, Hobbes had returned to his original project of The Elements of Philosophy, and he published Section 1: On Body in 1655. In the following year, there appeared an anonymous but authorised English translation, with some amendments made by Hobbes himself.
11. Hobbes finally completed The Elements of Philosophy with the publication of the Latin On the Human Being in 1658.
12. Hobbes wanted his Leviathan to be available to an overseas readership, and also to be able to correct a number of errors. He therefore produced a Latin version, partly from his original Latin, and partly by translating or adapting the English parts. It was published in 1668, and it is this version that I have used here.
13. I have also included a few extracts from other writings not mentioned above; in particular, the Decameron Physiologicum, or Ten Dialogues of Natural Philosophy of 1678.
Go to the Ten Dialogues of Natural Philosophy