Journal of the History of Philosophy

A. P. Martinich has been perhaps the most prolific and influential contributor to a general understanding of Hobbes over the last three decades, producing a much-admired Hobbes biography, a volume introducing Hobbes's entire philosophical system, another placing it in historical context, an excellent student edition of Leviathan, a magnificent Oxford handbook of Hobbes (edited with Kinch Hoekstra), a monograph presenting Martinich's highly original interpretation of Hobbes's political philosophy, and more than a score of papers engaging controversial aspects of Hobbes interpretation or historical interpretation generally. Martinich's landmark The Two Gods of Leviathan: Religion and Politics in Hobbes's Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) was one of two monographs published that year that argued for taking seriously Hobbes's intense engagement with questions of religious doctrine and practice, which had expanded across each successive version of Hobbes's political philosophy and his later works. Those books forced reconsideration of the narrow rational-choice interpretations dominant in the mid-1980s. Both works argued that Hobbes sought to show the compatibility of a properly interpreted Christianity with civil obedience to an absolute sovereign, although the other deemed doing so necessary to Hobbes's political project for the purely sociological reason that "transcendent" religious interests may motivate rebellion that the state's coercive threats cannot deter, a position agnostic about Hobbes's personal religious orientation. Martinich argued that Hobbes was a sincere believer who was also trying to demonstrate the compatibility of Christianity with the modern science of Copernicus and Galileo, and, most controversially, that the normative force of the laws of nature at the heart of Hobbes's political theory came [End Page 695] from having been commanded by God. Martinich's arguments ignited critical attacks from interpreters seeking to preserve the status quo of a fully secular Hobbesian political theory. Some argued that Hobbes was an atheist who treated religion only in order surreptitiously to discredit it. The present volume, Hobbes's Political Philosophy: Interpretation and Interpretations, provides Martinich's forceful response to that and other critiques of his central theses.

Kudos to Oxford University Press, and its philosophy editor Peter Ohlin, for issuing this collection of mostly previously published pieces, when other first-rate presses are marketshy of such projects, because this volume adds up to very much more than the sum of its parts. Reading these essays together makes it impossible not to appreciate Martinich's deep reservoir of evidence, based on his truly staggering command of Biblical exegesis and the history of religion, of the political and religious context of Hobbes's England, and of the history of philosophy. It also reveals how Martinich's expertise in the philosophy of language shapes both his own original theory of interpretation and his devastating critiques of the interpretive theories and strategies of his critics. His application of philosophical analysis brings welcome clarity to debates that have sometimes faltered on the fuzziness of the contending positions.

To illustrate, chapter 5 assesses Quentin Skinner's theory of historical interpretation as presented in a well-known paper claiming that the only way to understand what an author meant (that is, was doing) in writing a text is to understand the author's context, which involves privileging the author's contemporaries' understanding of what the author meant. Martinich distinguishes four senses of "mean" or meaning: literal, communicative (Gricean nonnatural meaning), intentional, and significance (importance for someone), explaining what objects each takes, and which entail the truth of their objects. His close reading reveals that because Skinner systematically conflates communicative-meaning with intentionmeaning with significance-meaning, Skinner's theory is left without any cogent defense. Historians, Martinich notes, are typically concerned to uncover significance-meaning; and although Skinner mistakenly tries to do this by uncovering communicative intentions, his theory commits him to looking in the wrong place. By privileging the understandings of contemporary commentators, Skinner puts "Hobbes at the mercy of second- and thirdrate minds and bigots" (113) and introduces circularity (understanding...