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Democracy and Scientific Method in Thomas Hobbes Duquesne University Duquesne Scholarship Collection Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2014 The A rP iori Nature of the Political: Democracy and Scientific ethoM d in Thomas Hobbes Patrick Craig Follow this and additional works at: https://dsc.duq.edu/etd Recommended Citation Craig, P. (2014). The A rP iori Nature of the Political: Democracy and Scientific eM thod in Thomas Hobbes (Doctoral dissertation, Duquesne University). Retrieved from https://dsc.duq.edu/etd/438 This Immediate Access is brought to you for free and open access by Duquesne Scholarship Collection. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Duquesne Scholarship Collection. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE A PRIORI NATURE OF THE POLITICAL: DEMOCRACY AND SCIENTIFIC METHOD IN THOMAS HOBBES A Dissertation Submitted to the McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts Duquesne University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy By Patrick Craig December 2014 Copyright by Patrick Craig 2014 THE A PRIORI NATURE OF THE POLITICAL: DEMOCRACY AND SCIENTIFIC METHOD IN THOMAS HOBBES By Patrick Craig Approved October 3, 2014 ________________________________ ________________________________ Daniel Selcer Fred Evans Associate Professor of Philosophy Professor of Philosophy (Committee Chair) (Committee Member) ________________________________ ________________________________ James Swindal Douglas Jesseph Professor of Philosophy Professor of Philosophy (Committee Member) (Committee Member) ________________________________ ________________________________ James Swindal Ronald Polansky Dean, McAnulty College and Graduate Chair, Department of Philosophy School of Liberal Arts Professor of Philosophy Professor of Philosophy iii ABSTRACT THE A PRIORI NATURE OF THE POLITICAL: DEMOCRACY AND SCIENTIFIC METHOD IN THOMAS HOBBES By Patrick Craig December 2014 Dissertation supervised by Daniel Selcer My dissertation provides a treatment of Hobbes’s politics in light of his conception of scientific method. The scholarship devoted to these two components of Hobbes’s thought, that is his account of scientific method and his political philosophy, have largely existed in isolation from one another. Reading his politics through the lens of his account of scientific method, I bring two bodies of research on Hobbes together, and in so doing, offer a unique account of his political philosophy. When Hobbes’s political philosophy is approached in the way I suggest, what one finds is not a simple defense of authoritarian absolutism, but instead a much more progressive political theory, one that is structured around the democratic power of “the people” as a constitutive political force. iv DEDICATION For My Parents v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………...iv Dedication…………………………………………………………………………………v Introduction…………………………………………….…………………………….…..vii Chapter 1: Historical Context of Hobbesian Methodology…………………………….…1 Chapter 2: Hobbes’s Scientific Method………………………………………………….38 Chapter 3: The Contents of Hobbes’s Politics…………………………………………...90 Chapter 4: The Power of the State……………………………………………………...159 Chapter 5: The Democratic Multitude………………………………………………….201 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………...244 Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………….253 vi INTRODUCTION Thomas Hobbes is best known for his political philosophy. The story he provides of the origin of commonwealths is as well known, is as familiar, as its author. Hobbes argues that individuals initially find themselves in a state of nature, or war of all against all, where “the life of man [is] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” (Lev., EW 3, 113). If they are to secure peace, these individuals must contract with one another to create a sovereign power. One of the central features of Hobbes’s politics is his claim that sovereign power must be absolute. Readers of Hobbes often find in his political philosophy a defense of unchecked absolutism, an enemy of democracy, and a stalwart opponent of any and all forms of political resistance. Hobbes’s politics are typically taken to defend a strict authoritarianism. In what follows I argue that this traditional portrait of Hobbes’s political thought is fundamentally mistaken and that it stands in urgent need of reappraisal. To be fair, part of the responsibility for this reception may fall on Hobbes’s own shoulders. As Edwin Curley has pointed out in the Introduction to his edition of Leviathan, Hobbes’s penchant for the quotable often comes at the expense of serious and sustained engagement with his work.1 The vicissitudes of the reception of Hobbes’s political science can largely be mapped according to the ways in which his texts have entered into the selective memory of his readers. Our collective memory of Hobbes’s politics is formed out of this selective process. In many instances, though certainly not all, our collective memory consists of not much more than mere sound-bites of his thought, mere “Hobbisms.” That Hobbes’s works are eminently quotable, however, in no way excuses a careful consideration of his 1 Edwin Curley, Introduction to Leviathan (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1994), viii. vii texts and what they have to offer. It is my contention that when one proceeds beyond these so-called sound bites of his political philosophy, and ventures into the logic of his arguments, one discovers a political thinker who offers not only a unique account of what political science is, but also a political philosophy that clashes with our most cherished notions of what Hobbes’s politics aims to defend. A closer look uncovers Hobbes’s thought to be, perhaps surprisingly, an extended defense of the democratic nature of the political. Hobbes believed his theory of the political to be successful because it was informed by a determinate scientific method, and it was this feature, he felt, that set his political theory apart from others. In the first chapter, I provide some of the background to Hobbes’s scientific methodology. While an exhaustive inventory of scientific methods prior to, and during, Hobbes’s time lay far beyond the scope of this project, I do nonetheless try to pinpoint some significant moments in the trajectory of the history of scientific method, moments which are significant to the extent that they prove instructive. What they provide is a sense of both the methods that Hobbes is reacting against, and those that he appropriates to his own ends. I provide an overview of Aristotle’s method, as found in the Posterior Analytics, and point to some of its defects when it comes to providing the scientific knower with epistemological certainty. I then trace the way in which Aristotelian method becomes reconfigured in the works of the sixteenth century Paduan Aristotelian, Jacopo Zabarella. Zabarella transforms Aristotle’s method, introducing important methodological terminology that will become central to Hobbes’s own conception of method—analysis and synthesis. viii There is much debate as to the relationship between Zabarella’s and Hobbes’s method. I argue that irrespective of any direct or indirect influence, an understanding of Zabarella’s method helps us understand what Hobbes is trying to do with his own. I then discuss how, from the late medieval through the renaissance periods, and into the early modern period, one witnesses a fundamental shift in the ways that thinkers understand the certainty afforded by scientia. What arises is what I call a constructive conception of certainty, one that views certainty to be found there where the knower makes the object being investigated. As I explain, this constructive conception of certainty is put to use by many influential thinkers of the period, from Descartes to Galileo, from Bacon to Vico. It is precisely this conception of certainty, I contend, that Hobbes employs in his account of political science. In the second chapter I turn my attention to Hobbes’s methodology. Focusing for the most part on what he has to say about scientific method in De Corpore, I address how Hobbes understands method to function in the sciences and how this informs his understanding of the sciences themselves. Hobbes’s method is comprised of two methods, the analytic method and the synthetic method. The former proceeds from some phenomenon (or effect) and attempts to discover its causes. The latter begins with the causes of a phenomenon (or effect) and shows how it is that the causes bring about or generate the effect. I discuss how Hobbes views the causes of a phenomenon as the parts of the thing’s nature, which is to say, as constitutive or genetic elements of its being. Conversely, he understands the phenomenon to be constructed out of these parts of its nature. I go on to show how this conception of method influences the way the various sciences relate to one another. I argue that Hobbes ultimately divides the sciences into ix natural sciences, on the one hand, and artificial sciences, on the other, owing to the constructive conception of certainty I mentioned above. Where natural sciences study things already made by nature, the artificial sciences study things that are the result of human artifice, that is, that are the direct result of humans making those things. Where the natural sciences have their basis in geometry, the most rudimentary of the natural sciences, as it studies the basic properties of bodies as such, the artificial sciences alone consist of political science.
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