Political Theory Volume 37 Number 5 October 2009 676-688 © 2009 Sage Publications 10.1177/0090591709340140 http://ptx.sagepub.com hosted at http://online.sagepub.com The Paradoxical Hobbes A Critical Response to the Hobbes Symposium, Political Theory, Vol. 36, 2008 Patricia Springborg Free University of Bolzano, Italy 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. Keywords: Hobbes's paradoxes; materialist ontology; politics 1. Hobbes's Inconsistencies and "the History of the Book" For a systematic philosopher Hobbes is the most paradoxical of thinkers, as all three essays in the Hobbes section of the most recent issue of Political Theory (vol. 36, 2008) suggest.1 Most scholars dealing with Hobbes's inconsistencies have a tendency to overcorrect them, in order to make him the systematic thinker he is reputed to be. This they do in two ways. either they tell a developmental story in which Hobbes improves his case, as Lodi Nauta points out in the case of discrepancies in religious doctrine and ecclesiology between Hobbes's Elements of Law, De cive and Leviathan,2 or they choose to winkle out the inconsistencies by means of philosophical analysis.3 Critical Exchange Springborg / Paradoxical Hobbes 677 The latter approach is that followed in the first two essays in this series, which "improve" Hobbes's arguments in the interests of consistency: the first ironing out the wrinkles by means of analytic philosophy; and the second treating a topic that Hobbes in fact did not treat, or treated only obliquely, but which in the opinion of the authors he should have treated in the interests of consistency as established by the canon of Western political philosophy. So Susan Streedhar, in "Defending the Hobbesian Right of Self-Defense," takes seriously the standard position on Hobbes's argument about the right of self-defence, finds it wanting, and suggests ways in which one might want to improve it. Patapan and Sikkenga in the second essay, "Love and the Leviathan: Hobbes's Critique of Platonic eros," proceed rather differently. They take a topic central to the Western canon both then and now, Platonic eros (and they cite allan Bloom), find that it is not one of Hobbes's concerns, and ask why not, establishing a case of commission by omission on Hobbes's part. Deborah Baumgold in the third essay of this series, "The Difficulties of Hobbes Interpretation," takes an altogether different tack, shifting the focus in her clear-sighted way to Hobbes's writing practice of serial composition as a major source of the inconsistencies that the reader encounters. "Hobbes studies," she maintains, "have an amorphous subject because of his practice of serially composing multiple works with overlapping content and arguments."4 aubrey gives a charming account of Hobbes's writing method for Leviathan: "[he] walked much and contemplated, and had in the head of his Staffe a pen and inke-horne, carried always a Note-book in his pocket, and as soon as a notion darted, he presently entred it into his Booke." a methodical man indeed: "[h]e had drawn the Designe of the Booke into Chapters, etc. so he knew whereabouts it would come in."5 It seems likely, as Baumgold notes, that Hobbes picked up this habit from his mentor Bacon whose method, aubrey reports, was to dictate to a secretary while walking.6 Hobbes's paeon to Chatsworth, the country seat of his patrons in Derbyshire where Hobbes mostly resided, in his estate poem, De mirabilibus pecci Carmen, suggests hanging gardens and leafy canopies beloved of philosophers of the garden who would practice philosophy while strolling in nature; and perhaps Hobbes was epicurean enough to have incorporated this practice himself.7 Baumgold's is a fertile approach, bringing to Hobbes studies the "history of the book," which applied in an intelligent and systematic manner demonstrates sources of ambiguity and inconsistency that arise specifically from Hobbes's peculiar writing technique. Such a method is the necessary but not sufficient condition for establishing the source of his paradoxes. 678 Political Theory For, needless to say, Hobbes's manner of composition does not necessarily determine the content of what he has to say and Baumgold's conclusions about his substantive arguments are not unequivocal. I would like to push the contextual argument further to draw rather different conclusions about the substance of Hobbes's arguments, but on the same premises. By accepting Baumgold's hypothesis, and paying attention to the more complete parts of his system and the order in which he developed them, one can see the development of Hobbes's arguments, the ontological bedrock on which they rest, which he developed early, and his struggle to apply this system to the substantive topics on which he was required, or chose, to write. 2. Hobbes the Epicurean Savant Hobbes's disposition to see himself as a "philosopher of the garden," belongs I think to a larger picture and one that already contains seeds of ambiguity over and above those which can be accounted for in terms of his method of writing. Hobbes matches the profile of an early modern epicurean remarkably closely, as I have elsewhere argued.8 Not only is he an atomist, a determinist of sorts, sceptical about the gods, but willing to countenance them for the sake of public order; but he is also positionally situated like the epicurean sage, council to courtiers if not princes, and engaged in crowd control. Hobbes drops all sorts of hints into his writings both to the effect that he is an epicurean in his doctrines, and that he thinks of himself as an epicurean sage in this way. One of the most telling pieces of evidence we have for this view is the remarkable letter written to Hobbes by Samuel Sorbière in January/February 1657,9 about a "sumptuous" dinner that was convened in Paris by "the excellent M. du Bosc," where the topic of conversation was Hobbes's physics. Sorbière addresses Hobbes as the member of an epicurean coterie of like-minded savants and bon vivants, including the Libertins with whom we know Hobbes associated, du Prat and de Martel and La Mothe le Vayer, who were present at the dinner,10 introducing a number of epicurean tropes, including the epicurean laugh.11 Referring to the epicurean doctrine that laughter like philosophy is therapeutic, Sorbière comments: "it is well known that nothing is more conducive to good health, both in body and in mind, than wise laughter and well-tempered mirth in the company of our closest friends."12 after this opening gambit, perhaps designed to take the sting out of the criticisms that follow, Sorbière proceeds to discuss the opinion of his French colleagues on what differentiates Hobbes's physics from that of epicurus: "The main Springborg / Paradoxical Hobbes 679 difference between your philosophy and that of epicurus is on the existence of a vacuum, which you deny, and which you try hard to disprove," he suggests. Hobbes takes the criticism seriously, responding in a letter dated February 1657, by noting that his "argument against the existence of a vacuum was drawn from an experiment," but that: "I did not think that epicurus' theory was absurd, in the sense in which I think he understood the vacuum. For I believe that he called 'vacuum' what Descartes calls 'subtle matter,' and what I call 'extremely pure ethereal substance,' of which no part is an atom, and each part is divisible (as quantity is said to be) into further divisible parts."13 This evidence for Hobbes's reference group corroborates in an indirect way Baumgold's argument in her essay of 2005 that Hobbes and Locke were more political and less metaphysical thinkers than we tend to think, by advancing the argument a further step.14 There is a simple reason for believing this which is that both were secretaries, or courtier's clients, engaged by their masters to write position pieces on current policy. Hobbes's epistles dedicatory are in this respect most revealing, suggesting the political nature of his programme. Hobbes, a "pen for hire," who spent his entire career in the service of the baronial Cavendishes of Derbyshire, was thus occupationally disposed to be as mentally flexible as Laslett's Locke, the Whig pamphleteer who wrote to promote Shaftesbury's causes.15 as baronial secretaries and writers of "policie" they were also predisposed to take the point of view of the governor and not of the governed. This I suggest is the reason why Baumgold, discussing Hobbes's and Locke's theories of social contract, finds that they were still preoccupied with ancient regime questions about resistance, despite a universalist rhetoric, and that Hobbes's concept of "author," for instance, could be seen as no more than a fiction to maintain sitting governments.16 This does not mean that both authors did not have ontological commitments or strive for philosophical integrity. It rather means that their complicated positioning made inconsistency an occupational hazard. even if Baumgold's thesis is generally true, and Hobbes's doctrines, like Locke's, were political rather than metaphysical, Hobbes's ontology and mechanistic psychology seem to have been worked out before his politics took their final form, always with the stated purpose of demonstrating the fundaments of human behaviour necessary for any statesman to understand. although Hobbes's metaphysics are privileged, formed under the early impact of galileo and Mersenne, as we know from his poem and prose Vitas as well as from secondary sources, they fitted well with the preoccupations of his patrons, in particular Charles Cavendish, the new scientist 680 Political Theory with whom Hobbes collaborated in the study of optics. and in the case of Locke there is also a nice, if relatively unexplored, fit between his metaphysics and those of his patron, Shaftesbury. For Hobbes and Locke their doctrines of sensationalist psychology, allowing for "black box" conditioning, played into policy, whether fortuitously or not. Not only is his "black box" sensationalist psychology one of the most consistent elements in Hobbes philosophy from the Elements on, but it was one of the most publicly commented upon in his day. So Willliam Davenant, later the Poet Laureate, in the dedicatory Preface to his long celebratory poem Gondibert, declared his indebtedness to the philosopher for his psychological theory, provoking from Hobbes his lengthy Answer to Davenant, which is the closest he comes to aesthetics.17 Davenant's indebtedness to Hobbes does not stop there, his New Way of Moralitie of 1658 is a programme of crowd control based on the manipulation of the senses by means of heroic poetry for the elite, music and masques for the masses, as Jacob and Raylor, who published it for the first time under the rubric "Opera and Obedience," have demonstrated.18 Not only was Hobbes the architect of the philosophical edifice on which this policy for the implementation of the state cult by means of images was constructed, but he also contributed to the scientific theory in the form of optics, that could validate it. "There is no news at court but of maskes," Hobbes reported in 1633/4, writing to the earl of Newcastle from London.19 Domiciled at Chatsworth in the days when Ben Jonson was also a Cavendish client, Hobbes had taken a personal interest in music and masques, and probably also the spectacular theatricals devised by Inigo Jones, among the vehicles to employ imagery in the service of crowd control that he specifies in his answer to Davenant's Preface to Gondibert. 3. Systemic Paradoxes in Hobbes's Theory Despite the fortuitous fit between Hobbes's metaphysics and the type of philosophical underpinning that the policies he was engaged in advocating would have required, there are deep inconsistencies in Hobbes's doctrine that cannot be explained, either in terms of his method of writing as serial composition and peripatetic annotation, or his situation as "pen for hire." These to my mind fall into two classes: the first, deliberate and subversive paradoxes; and the second, unavoidable systemic paradoxes. To take the first, some of Hobbes's paradoxes are deliberate provocations, for paradox is one of the ways he chose to demonstrate absurdity. Hobbes used the reductio ad Springborg / Paradoxical Hobbes 681 absurdum as a rhetorical strategy, of which there is no more exquisite example than his audacious credo of disbelief given in different versions of his commentary on the Nicene Creed in the Historical Narration on Heresy, the 1688 appendix to the Latin Leviathan and long Latin poem, the Historia Ecclesiastica.20 The focus of absurdity rests on the treatment of that verse of the Nicene Creed postulating god's creation of the world out of nothing,21 a notion that as Hobbes makes explicit in the 1688 appendix, confronts the opinion of scientists, and especially epicureans, that "nothing comes from nothing," as well as his own commitment to the eternity of matter.22 each one of the provisions of the Nicene Creed, and especially the verses concerning god "being made flesh" and "born of the Virgin Mary,"23 belong on Hobbes's reading to a tissue of absurdities based on the fundamental nonsense of the hypostasis, the notion that the Trinity of three different persons of god could be of the same (homoousion), and not just like, (homoiousion) substance.24 What make this particular reductio so sweet, as a contemporary noted, was that Hobbes delivered his explosive doctrines with "demureness, solemnity, quotation of Scripture, and appeals to conscience and church history."25 Jonathan Parkin in his excellent Taming the Leviathan has noted that "Hobbes's texts are littered with such undetermined puzzles, which frequently indicate a complete and paradoxical inversion of traditional structures of authority, as his critics were quick to point out," and which Parkin demonstrates from contemporary sources.26 "The experience of reading Hobbes," Parkin notes, "was therefore a strange combination of recognition of the familiar coupled with occasional shock and surprise at the realization that the argument delivered potentially heterodox results."27 Parkin sees Hobbes's paradoxes as a rhetorical strategy, a "stealthy approach" whereby, despite heterodox conclusions, "his orthodox premises could mislead readers into a positive evaluation of his ideas."28 David Berman refers to Hobbes's approach more bluntly as "theological lying,"29 arguing that deists who "say they believe in a future life," but whose statements "constitute a subversion" of that belief, are indulging in more than simply irony, and are rather practising "the art of theological lying."30 Curley puts it more mildly, attributing to Hobbes a particular form of irony which he calls "suggestion by disavowal." By "this rhetorical device a writer presents a series of considerations which might reasonably lead his reader to draw a certain conclusion, but then denies that that conclusion follows."31 While not as strong a charge as "theological lying," Curley's accusation is to the same effect. Hobbes, who was a much more radical religious thinker than it was prudent to appear in public, was engaged in a deliberate strategy of subversion. The 682 Political Theory paradoxes of his religious doctrine fall into this category, leading one to conclude that, whether or not Hobbes was an atheist, he was at least comfortable among the epicureans, prepared to accept established religion as a sop for the masses, but unwilling to commit themselves further.32 There is a second class of paradox, in cases that I will now discuss, yet more fundamental to Hobbes's doctrine, but about which we can be less sure-are these deliberate provocations, or are they systemic inconsistencies? One of the most fundamental concerns the status of Hobbes's doctrine of natural law, or natural rights. For instance, in Leviathan chapters 14 and 15 Hobbes engages in natural law discourse, only finally to suggest that natural laws as such have no obligatory force. Obligation can derive only from the word of god, but the word of god requires sovereign authorization, as we know from book two of Leviathan. Therefore natural law, like the word of god, obliges only by the power of the magistrate.33 This paradox was not lost on Hobbes's commentators, including Bishop Bramhall, causing him to expostulate: "god help us! Into what times are we fallen! When the immutable laws of god and nature are made to depend upon the mutable laws of mortal men; just as if one should go about to control the sun by the authority of the clock."34 It was a paradox that Hobbes's notorious supporter Daniel Scargill lived out in person when he declared himself before the Cambridge tribunal indicting him to be a Hobbist, professing no belief but what the sovereign had commanded.35 This bald statement of erastianism was received as a version of the liar paradox, inviting disbelief in anything the utterer spoke. It was a disbelief that was transferred to Hobbes himself, for whose erastianism we have examples independent of Scargill, and it was for this audacity that the papacy and Presbyterian synods decreed international prohibitions against his books. Jonathan Parkin takes Hobbes's paradoxical treatment of natural law as a case of his "stealthy approach," or disguised heterodoxy, whereby "Hobbes deliberately formulated his theory in terms of a series of paradoxes, in which conventional premises were realigned to suggest startling or unexpected conclusions."36 But I wonder. If Hobbes was intent on exposing natural law as a hoax, then his whole system built on the natural laws of reason and natural right begins to look like a house of cards. This is not impossible, and the growing impatience of Hobbes's contemporaries with his theories, as Parkin relates, might register this suspicion. Certain systemic paradoxes lie at the heart of Hobbes's doctrine. a paradox sets the very agenda of Leviathan, for instance, written to resolve the contest between "those that contend, on one side for too great Liberty, and on the other side for too much authority."37 How does Hobbes deal with it? Springborg / Paradoxical Hobbes 683 He cuts a swathe through it by applying the reductio ad absurdum both to liberty and consent. In this way he succeeds in outflanking Nedham and proponents of popular sovereignty by a much more radical account of the role of consent-for which of course there is no ontological basis-by reducing liberty as commonly understood to vanishing point in the trivial notion of freedom of bodily movement.38 Hobbes treats the liberty of subjects as an oxymoron, in fact, once again a typical reductio. For, how can the servitude of subjects be reconciled with the notion that they have freely consented to the obligations that negate their liberty, whether by contract or conquest?39 and how does he reconcile this consensual servitude with the claim that "artificiall chains" have no force "from their own nature" against our liberty, and work only by penalties?40 Hobbes borrows Bodin's words in formulating his answer, the power of the sovereign over subjects is the power "to keep them all in awe,"41 but without feeling obliged to explain to us how awe translates into institutionalized power. Hobbes does give an implicit answer, of course, in the thought experiment that brings about the social contract. But for thought experiments there is no provision in his sensationalist psychology, and the notion of enlightened self-interest faces the perennial question, "who will educate the educator?" How can the social learning take place that would allow people conditioned to the war of all against all to calculate their long-term interests and then wager everything on the bet that others will do the same? Other paradoxes follow, lying so deep in Hobbes's philosophy as to be equally intractable. Chief among them is the paradox that a thinker who subscribes to the doctrine of sensationalist psychology and "black box" conditioning should set such store by "will," to the point of postulating the solution to exit from the state of nature as the condition of "the war of all against all," in terms of a thought experiment which individuals are collectively capable of undertaking, by thinking through their enlightened self-interest and then consensually willing it. This paradox lies at the heart of Hobbes's theory of liberty, to which Quentin Skinner has dedicated so many of his works, and was flagged by Hobbes as early as his debate with Bramhall, conducted in 1645, but published only ten years later.42 Hobbes's central doctrine of authorization is susceptible to the same sort of criticism, as a type of reductio ad absurdum. Subjects are authors by covenant of the sovereign's action-this once again presupposes an entity, the collective will, for which there is no ontological basis. In Leviathan, chapters 16 and 17 on authorization and representation, Hobbes argues that a multitude covenants to authorize an "artificiall" person, whose actions they "author." authoring and representing entail that when "a person's words and 684 Political Theory actions are considered as representing the words and actions of another, then he is a Feigned or artificiall person."43 But what kind of status does this entity have? Hobbes's idea of "unity" is not behavioural or literal, but tropological, or by analogy, "by Fiction." It is by virtue of a "Persona Ficta,"44 that is to say a "fictitious person," another oxymoron, another reductio, that this unity is created. For, "a Multitude of men, are made One Person, when they are by one man, or one Person, Represented."45 Hobbes insists however that this union, analogical to the unity of the Trinity perhaps, constitutes "a reall Unitie of them all, in one and the same Person, made by Covenant of every man and every man."46 But is it a "reall Unitie" or is it a unity "by Fiction"?-Hobbes cannot have it both ways. Strictly speaking, Hobbes concedes, just as he did in the case of the Trinity, it is by fiction, for "it is the Unity of the Representer, not the Unity of the Represented, that maketh the Person One," and "Unity cannot be otherwise understood in Multitude."47 So, after so much huffing and puffing there is no "reall Unitie" created by contract at all. What could Hobbes possibly have had in mind? Was this another reductio ad absurdum to make the whole argument for representation, which Hobbes had purloined from parliamentarians like Henry Parker, William Bridge, and Philip Hunton, and the Puritan divines on whom they depended, Paul Bayne, Richard Sibbes, William Perkins, and Thomas goodman, look absurd?48 But what an enormously costly strategy to place it as the foundation stone of his theory of social contract, authorization and consent! Clearly not all of these paradoxes are subversive in Parkin's sense, as deliberate attempts to undermine orthodoxy by building heterodox arguments on orthodox premises. Nor are they all deliberate applications of the reductio ad absurdum to make fools of people, usually targeted persons, one of Hobbes's frequent ploys. The most fundamental paradoxes are endemic to his system, as contemporaries came to realize. They were in part circumstantially occasioned, and I rather think that Hobbes was caught by his desire to resolve the political problems for which he was personally engaged, and sometimes commissioned, and the constraints of his physics and metaphysics, to which he had early committed himself. This is a conclusion that Baumgold's analysis in terms of those sections of the Elements which are most complete, foreshadowing his mature system, and those that are less complete, would support. It does mean, however, that we must invert the hypothesis of Baumgold's earlier essay, "Hobbes's and Locke's Contract Theories: Political not Metaphysical." The order is rather the reverse. Hobbes's first principles were not political but metaphysical, and the early commitments he had made in terms of his Springborg / Paradoxical Hobbes 685 ontology and epistemology gave him no space to solve the political problems with which he was confronted and, as a courtier's client, was charged with resolving. Struggle though he might through his successive works to establish consistency, he was ultimately forced to import concepts like "will," "author," "contract," and impute processes, like ratiocination and deliberation, for which his metaphysics made no room. Notes 1. See Susan Streedhar, "Defending the Hobbesian Right of Self-Defense," Political Theory 36 (2008): 781-802; Haig Patapan and Jeffrey Sikkenga, "Love and the Leviathan: Hobbes's Critique of Platonic eros," Political Theory 36 (2008): 803-26; and Deborah Baumgold, "The Difficulties of Hobbes Interpretation," Political Theory 36 (2008): 827-55. 2. Lodi Nauta, "Hobbes on Religion and the Church between the elements of Law and Leviathan: a Dramatic Change of Direction?," Journal of the History of Ideas 63 (2002): 577, cited in Baumgold, "Difficulties of Hobbes Interpretation," 831. 3. Baumgold, "Difficulties of Hobbes Interpretation," 831, citing Kinch Hoekstra, "The De Facto Turn in Hobbes's Political Philosophy," in Leviathan After 350 Years, ed. Tom Sorell and Luc Foisneau (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2004), 71-72. 4. Baumgold, "Difficulties of Hobbes Interpretation," 828. 5. Ibid., 828, citing Aubrey's Brief Lives, ed. Oliver Lawson Dick (ann arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962), 151. 6. Ibid., 851n21, citing Aubrey's Brief Lives, 150. 7. See Thomas Hobbes, De Mirabilibus Pecci, Carmen Thomae Hobbes ("the Peake"). AD NOBILISSIMVM DOMINVM GVILIELMVM COMITEM DEVONIAE (n.d., n.STC 13537, 1636). also see Patricia Springborg, "Thomas Hobbes's estate Poem, De Miribilbus Pecci Carmen" (presentation, Propriété et Pouvoir dans la pensée politique moderne, Centre Hobbes, Sorbonne, January 9, 1999). 8. For Hobbes's epicureanism in the context of his religious doctrine, see Patricia Springborg, "Hobbes's Theory of Civil Religion," in Pluralismo e religione civile, ed. gianni Paganini and edoardo Tortarolo (Milan, Italy: Bruno Mondatori, 2003), 61-98; and Springborg, "Hobbes and epicurean Religion," in Der Garten und die Moderne: Epikureische Moral und Politik vom Humanismus bis zur Aufklarung, ed. gianni Paganini and edoardo Tortarolo (Stuttgart, germany: Rommann-holzboog Verlag, 2004), 161-214. 9. Hobbes to Sorbière, February 1657, in Thomas Hobbes, The Correspondence, ed. Noel Malcolm, 2 vols., Clarendon edition of the Works of Hobbes, vols. 6 and 7 (Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1994), vol. 1, 444-45. 10. Malcolm, Hobbes, Correspondence, 435, notes, "François de La Mothe le Vayer (158817672), a scholar and littérateur, was a protégé of Richelieu in the 1630s and was appointed tutor to the duc d'Orléans (1649) and to Louis XIV (1652). a friend of Mersenne, he was the author of numerous works, strongly influenced by classical and Montaignian scepticism." 11. Jean Salem, Tel un dieu parmi les hommes: l'ethique d'Epicurus (Paris: Vrin, 1989), 167-72, comments at length on epicurus' injunction to his disciple "to laugh while philosophizing" (Vatican Sentence 41). The "epicurean laugh" was both provocative and seditious, a "deliberate polemical strategy" to mock the stupidity of the common herd, on the one hand, and to counter the gravity and arrogance of the Platonist philosopher, on the other. In a section 686 Political Theory on the "epicurean laugh and the critique of language," Salem, Tel un dieu parmi, 172-74, notes the self-mockery of the epicureans, their deflationary critique of language, and their nominalism. Cicero's refusal to define words empty of sense ("voce inani sonare," De fin. 2.14.48), and his deflationary definition of good as what benefits us and bad as what harms us (Tusc. Disp., 5.26.73), was typical, as it was also typical of Hobbes. 12. Note how Sorbière nicely captures the epicurean ethos, a hygienic notion of happiness promoted by the sage and his circle, who venerate friendship and the fellowship of an elite and disdain the stupidity of the masses. Jean Salem, Tel un dieu parmi, 140-41, notes that if the Stoics enlarged the polis to the level of the oikoumene, the epicureans narrowed it to a circle of friends. Numenius of apamea, a second century Neoplatonist, had declared that "the harmony of the epicureans among themselves resembled that which reigned in a true republic, without the least sedition, animated by the spirit of a single will." Salem, Tel un dieu parmi, 133, citing Numenius Fragments, fr. 24. 13. Hobbes to Sorbière, February 1657, Hobbes, Correspondence, 444-45, trans. Malcolm. 14. Deborah Baumgold, "Hobbes's and Locke's Contract Theories: Political not Metaphysical," Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 8, no. 3 (2005): 289-308. 15. Ibid., 305n18. For a contemporary opinion of Locke as political not metaphysical, see Mary astell, whose views are treated by Patricia Springborg in "Mary astell (1666-1731), Critic of Locke," American Political Science Review 89, no. 3 (1995): 621-33; and Springborg, Mary Astell, Theorist of Freedom from Domination (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 16. Baumgold, "Hobbes's and Locke's Contract Theories," 295. 17. Hobbes to Sorbière, February 1657, Hobbes, Correspondence, 444-45, trans. Malcolm. 18. Sir William Davenant, A Proposition for Advancement of Morality, by a New Way of Entertainment of the People (London: 1653-54). Published as the appendix to James R. Jacob and Timothy Raylor, "Opera and Obedience: Thomas Hobbes and a Proposition for advancement of Morality by Sir William Davenant," Seventeenth Century 6 (1991): 241-49. Hobbes's project of heroic poetry for the elite, music and masques for the masses, is the subject of Patricia Springborg's "Leviathan, Mythic History and National Historiography," in The Historical Imagination in Early Modern Britain, ed. David Harris Sacks and Donald Kelley (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 267-97. 19. Hobbes to the earl of Newcastle, January 26, 1633/4, calendared in H.M.C. Thirteenth Report, appendix, Part 1: The Manuscripts of His Grace the Duke of Portland, preserved at Welbeck Abbey, vol. 2, 1893, 124. 20. For An Historical Narration Concerning Heresy (1668), see Hobbes EW IV, 387-408. For his 1668 appendix to the Latin Leviathan, see the excellent translation by george Wright, "Thomas Hobbes: 1668 appendix to Leviathan," Interpretation 18, no. 3 (1991): 324-413. See also Hobbes, Historia Ecclesiastica, including text, translation, introduction, commentary and notes, ed. Patricia Springborg, Patricia Stablein and Paul Wilson, (Paris, Honore Champion, 2008). Citations to the Historia Ecclesiastica are to this critical edition. 21. Hobbes, in the Historia Ecclesiastica, lines 651-62, notes of the Church Fathers at the Council of Nicaea, They made a heretic out of anyone who would say the world was eternal; and anyone who denies it was the work of the eternal. 22. The principle that "nothing is produced from nothing," deemed heretical by the Nicene Creed, is in fact one of the basic axioms of atomism to which Hobbes subscribes and which Springborg / Paradoxical Hobbes 687 Diogenes Laertius first attributed to Democritus. See Diogenes Laertius, 2.60, and Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, tr. W. H. D. Rouse, commentary by M. F. Smith (London: Heinemann, 1975), Loeb ed. 1.2.146: There is nothing more true than the twin propositions that "nothing is produced from nothing" and "nothing is reduced to nothing," but that the absolute quantum or sum total of matter remains unchanged, without increase or diminution. 23. Hobbes, Historia Ecclesiastica, lines 653-64. also see the 1688 appendix to the Latin Leviathan (trans. Wright), §12, 351. 24. The term homoousion, "one substance," was used by the Council of Nicaea, a.d. 325, to define the doctrine of the Trinity, as opposed to the term homoiousion, "like substance," favoured by the arians. See Hobbes's Historia Ecclesiastica, line 674 and notes. 25. J. eachard, Some Opinions of Mr. Hobbs Considered in a Second Dialogue between Philautus and Timothy (1673), sig. a5r-v, cited in Jon Parkin, Taming the Leviathan: The Reception of the Political and Religious Ideas of Thomas Hobbes in England 1640-1700 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 15. 26. Parkin, Taming the Leviathan, 14-15. 27. Ibid., 15. 28. Ibid., 15. 29. On "theological lying," see David Berman, "Deism, Immortality, and the art of Theological Lying," in Deism, Masonry and the Enlightenment, ed. J. Leo Lemay (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1987), 61-78; David Berman, "Disclaimers as Offence Mechanisms in Charles Blount and John Toland," in Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment, ed. M. Hunter and D. Wootton (Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1992), 255-72. also see Springborg, "Hobbes epicurean Religion," sec. 6, and the Springborg introduction to Hobbes's Historia Ecclesiastica, chap. 6.3, "Hobbes and Theological Lying," 224-34. 30. Berman, "Deism, Immortality," 62, 76, 31. e. Curley, "Calvin and Hobbes, or Hobbes as an Orthodox Christian," Journal of the History of Philosophy 34 (1996): 261-62. 32. See Patricia Springborg, "Hobbes the atheist and his Deist Reception" (paper, Università degli Studi di Milano, October 3–5, 2007 [proceedings forthcoming]). 33. Parkin, Taming the Leviathan, 14. 34. John Bramhall, "The Works of the Most Reverend Father in god, John Bramhall, D.D., sometime Lord archbishop of armagh, Primate and Metropolitan of all Ireland," 5 vols., ed. J. H. Parker (Oxford: 1842-45), vol. 4, 544, cited by Parkin, Taming the Leviathan, 15. 35. See the Recantation of Daniel Scargill (Cambridge, UK: 1669); the accounts given of the affair by Samuel Minz, The Hunting of Leviathan: Seventeenth-century Reactions to the Materialism and Moral Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 50-52; the more substantial accounts of J. axtell, "The Mechanics of Opposition: Restoration Cambridge v. Daniel Scargill," Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 38 (1965): 102-11; and the excellent account given by Jon Parkin, "Hobbism in the Later 1660s: Daniel Scargill and Samuel Parker," Historical Journal 42, no. 1 (1999): 85-108. 36. Parkin, Taming the Leviathan, 14. 37. Hobbes, epistle Dedicatory to Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 3, cited by Quentin Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 208. 688 Political Theory 38. Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty, 204. 39. Ibid., 204. 40. Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 14, 93 and chap. 21, 147, cited by Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty, 170. 41. Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 17, 192; cf. Jean Bodin, Six Bookes of the Republique 1606 ed., 6.4, 706, cited by Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty, 192. 42. See Quentin Skinner, "The Idea of Negative Liberty: Philosophical and Historical Perspectives," in Philosophy in History, ed. Richard Rorty, J. B. Schneewind, and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 193-221; "The Paradoxes of Political Liberty," in The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, vol. 7, ed. Sterling M. McMurrin (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986); "Thomas Hobbes and the Proper Signification of Liberty," Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 40 (1990): 121-51; "Machiavelli's Discorsi and the Pre-humanist Origins of Republican Ideas," in Machiavelli and Republicanism, ed. gisela Bock, Quentin Skinner, and Maurizio Viroli (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990); "The Republican Ideal of Political Liberty," in Machiavelli and Republicanism, ed. gisela Bock, Quentin Skinner, and Maurizio Viroli (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Hobbes and Republican Liberty (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 43. Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 16, 111; Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty, 187. 44. Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 16, 113; Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty, 188. 45. Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 16, 114; Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty, 188. 46. Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 21, 120; Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty, 188. 47. Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 16, 114; Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty, 188. 48. See Quentin Skinner, "Hobbes on Persons, authors and Representatives," in The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes's Leviathan, ed. Patricia Springborg (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 157-80. also see Skinner, "Hobbes on Representation," European Journal of Philosophy 13 (2005): 155-84. Patricia Springborg formerly held a chair in political theory at the University of Sydney, australia, but is now professor ordinario in the School of economics of the Free University of Bolzano, Italy. a member of the australian academy of the Social Sciences, she has been a stipendiary fellow at Institutes for advanced Study in Washington, Berlin, Oxford, and Uppsala and was the recipient of a John D. and Catherine T. Macarthur award in International Peace and Security, taken up at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. She is the author of The Problem of Human Needs and the Critique of Civilization (1981), Royal Persons (1990), Western Republicanism and the Oriental Prince (1992), Mary Astell: Theorist of Freedom from Domination (2005), and three editions of Mary astell's writings (1996, 1997, 2002). She is also the editor of the Cambridge Companion to Hobbes's Leviathan (2007) and coeditor of the first english translation and critical edition of Hobbes's long Latin poem, Historia Eccesiastica (2008). She has written a number of articles on Hobbes and is now writing a book titled The Paradoxical Hobbes.