Abstract
This paper is not in a field to which Imre Lakatos made any published contribution (at least since he came to England). But he was intensely interested in matters political, and he often urged that we should revive our department’s traditional concern with political philosophy. This is an essay in that direction. (I realise, of course, that my two criticisms of Hobbes are small beer in comparison with Popper’s criticism of Plato and Marx. But not everyone in the commonwealth of learning must hope to be a master-demolisher. It is ambition enough to be employed as an underminer of one or two erroneous ideas.) My other justification for contributing this piece to the present volume is that my old friend seemed to enjoy an earlier version of it which I gave as an inaugural lecture. At least, he told me that it had surprised him.
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Notes
Lev. p. 167 & EW iii, p. 108. References to Hobbes’s works follow the pattern used in my Hobbes’s System of Ideas, Hutchinson, London, 1965; second edition 1973. One reviewer of that book complained, with justice, that my criticisms of Hobbes were ‘rather desultory’.I hope to go a little deeper this time.
See, for example, Chomsky, Noam, Language and Mind, Harcourt, Brace & World, New York, 1968, p. 69.
‘Rules, Perception and Intelligibility’, Proceedings of the British Academy, xlviii, London, 1963. Reprinted as Chapter three in Hayek, F. A., Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1967.
Also at this seminar was Mr. Robert Ardrey, whose Territorial Imperative was then in the press. His fund of animal observations opened my eyes to the extent to which animal behaviour suggests the presence of something suspiciously like ‘moral’ instincts, a matter I will touch on in Section 9.
See Ryle, Gilbert, The Concept of Mind, Hutchinson, London, 1949, Chapter II.
“From these instances where action is guided by rules… which the acting person need not explicitly know… we must now turn to the corresponding and no less interesting instances where the organism is able to recognise actions conforming to such rules or patterns without being consciously aware of [them]” (Hayek, F. A., Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, p. 45.)
Lev, p. 107 & EW iii, pp. 195–6.
Whorf, Benjamin Lee, Language, Thought and Reality, (ed. by J. B. Carroll), M.I.T. Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1964, pp. 233f.
See, e.g. Church, Joseph, Language and the Discovery of Reality, Random House, New York, 1961, pp. 64–5, and
Brown, Roger and Bellugi, Ursula, ‘Three Processes in the Child’s Acquisition of Syntax’, Harvard Educational Review 34 (1964), 144.
Sapir, Edward, Language, London 1921, pp. 166f. In the Newspeak of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four “whom had been scrapped as unnecessary” (Penguin edition, p. 244).
Chomsky, Noam, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, M.I.T. Press, Cambridge Mass., 1965, pp, 6, 8;
Chomsky, Noam, Cartesian Linguistics, Harper & Row, New York: 1966, pp. 3f.; Language and Mind, p. 10 and passim.
As was duly noted by H. Vaihinger, in his The Philosophy of ‘As If’ (transl. by C. K. Ogden), Kegan Paul, London, 1924, pp. vii-viii.
De Corp I, ii, 11 & EW i, p. 22.
I, iii, 12 & i, pp. 39–40.
EW vii, p. 81.
What follows is based on the account in Brown, Roger, Words and Things, Free Press, New York 1958, pp. 3f.
R. Carnap, The Logical Syntax of Language, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1937, Part II.
“The language is ‘re-invented’ each time it is learned”, Chomsky, Noam, Language and Mind, p. 75).
See Brown, Roger, Social Psychology, Free Press, New York, 1965, pp. 286f. for a case study of this sort of child-mother co-operation.
These examples are taken from Halliday, M. A. K., ‘Grammar, Society and the Noun’ (An Inaugural Lecture delivered at University College London, 24 November 1966), p. 8.
Collingwood, R. G., The Principles of Art, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1938, p. 227.
See the symposium by Chomsky, Putnam and Goodnam on innate ideas in Synthese 17 (March 1967). Goodman called it “an intrinsically repugnant and incomprehensible theory” (p. 27).
Lorenz, Konrad, Evolution and Modification of Behaviour, Chicago University Press, 1965, p. 13.
Hume, Treatise Bk. II, Pt. I, Sect. X (Selby-Bigge edition p. 311). For Nelson Goodman, see his Fact, Fiction and Forecast, Athlone Press, London, 1954, pp. 44f.
Lev, p. 24 & EW iii, p. 41.
Standard Edition, Hogarth Press, London, Vol. XXI, pp. 123f.
Social Psychology, p. 19.
Wynne-Edwards, V. C, Animal Dispersion in Relation to Social Behaviour, Edinburgh, Oliver & Boyd, 1962.
I am relying on Wynne-Edwards’s account, ibid., pp. 389–390.
He later became Director of the London School of Economics.
On this large subject see Robert Ardrey’s readable and scholarly The Territorial Imperative, Atheneum, New York, 1966.
Ibid., p. 131.
On Aggression, Methuen, London, 1966, pp. 110–111.
Quoted in Robert Ardrey, ibid., p. 284.
Hayek, F. A., Law, Legislation and Liberty, Vol. 1: Rules and Order, Chicago University Press, 1973, p. 79.
Most of these papers have been assembled in Krimerman, Leonard I. (ed.), The Nature and Scope of Social Science: A Critical Anthology, Appleton-Century-Crofts, New York, 1969, pp. 457–472, 603–611, 621–624
Most of these papers have been assembled in Krimerman, Leonard I. (ed.), The Nature and Scope of Social Science: A Critical Anthology, and also in O’Neill, John, (ed.), Modes of Individualism and Collectivism, Heinemann, London, 1973, pp. 143–184.
As I called it (Brit. Jour. Phil. Science 8 (1957), 106).
So far as I know, this term was invented by Ludwig von Mises. See his Epistemological Problems of Economics (transl. by George Reisman) D. Van Nostrand, New York, 1960, pp. 40f.
Menger, Carl, Problems of Economics and Sociology ed. by L. Schneider and transl. by F. J. Nock; University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1963, p. 152; italics in the original.
In other words he rejected what Popper calls a ‘conspiracy-theory” for money. See Popper, K. R., The Open Society and its Enemies, Chapter 14.
Ibid., p. 154, italics in the original.
So far as I know Hobbes only once mentions the existence of women in the state of nature (De Cive ix, 1–6 & EW ii, pp. 115–8). He makes several references to Amazons.
“A young salticid spider which… approaches a female must neither mistake another species for his own, nor must he perform the signalling of his specific courtship dance in any other way than the one to which his female responds; otherwise, he would be eaten by her immediately. He has no opportunity in his short life to gain any information about what a female of his species looks like, nor what movements he must perform to inhibit her feeding reactions and to stimulate her specific mating responses.” (Konrad Lorenz, Evolution and Modification of Behavior, p. 25.)
The World as Will and Idea (transl. Haldane & Kemp), Vol. I, p. 420.
Hutcheson, Francis, A System of Moral Philosophy, London, 1755, Vol. I, p. 91.
Kedourie, Elie, Nationalism, Hutchinson, London, 1960, p. 9.
Thus Marcuse, who advocates liberation through “thought in contradiction”a and condemns logic as an instrument of domination,b constantly equates liberal democracy with totalitarian authoritarianism. He has also declared that “The democratic abolition of thought… is brought about in the ‘higher learning’”,c that “the prevailing mode of freedom is servitude”,d that “the realm of the irrational becomes the home of the really rational”,e etc. See Herbert Marcuse, Negations, Allen Lane, London, 1968, pp. xx and xiii for passages flagged, respectively, by a and c, and his One Dimensional Man, Sphere Books, London, 1968, pp. 105, 80, 194 for, respectively, passages flagged by b, d, and e.
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Watkins, J.W.N. (1976). The Human Condition: Two Criticisms of Hobbes. In: Cohen, R.S., Feyerabend, P.K., Wartofsky, M.W. (eds) Essays in Memory of Imre Lakatos. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 39. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-1451-9_38
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