Hobbes essay

Evaluating Hobbes (core claim)

Evaluating Hobbes requires balancing immediate political and religious context with wider traditions of political and theological thought

Intellectual history definition

Intellectual history explains what thinkers argued and why those arguments were intelligible in their historical moment

Pure contextualism problem

Pure contextualism reduces Hobbes to a Civil War polemicist and obscures philosophical coherence

Pure traditionalism problem

Pure traditionalism abstracts Hobbes from crisis and ignores the polemical urgency of his arguments

Balanced approach value

Only a balance of context and tradition captures both Hobbes’ intentions and significance

Introduction function

The introduction should frame the question as methodological rather than merely descriptive

Context section purpose

Close attention to context explains why Hobbes wrote with such urgency and extremity

Limits of context section

This section shows why context alone cannot explain Hobbes’ systematic philosophy

Tradition section purpose

Engagement with tradition explains how Hobbes’ arguments were structured and contested

Synthesis sentence

Context explains why Hobbes wrote as he did

Conclusion function

The conclusion reaffirms the necessity of methodological balance in intellectual history

Civil War relevance

Hobbes wrote amid constitutional collapse

Leviathan publication context

Leviathan was published in 1651 after regicide and the declaration of a republic

Central political problem

Hobbes sought to explain how peace and authority could be restored amid competing claims

Diseases of the commonwealth

Hobbes identified private conscience

State of nature purpose

The state of nature functions as a thought experiment explaining the need for undivided authority

Leviathan as intervention

Leviathan was a polemical intervention against Presbyterians

Royalist hostility explanation

Royalists feared Hobbes legitimised de facto regimes and undermined traditional monarchy

Clarendon’s critique

Clarendon accused Hobbes of speculative abstraction and endorsing tyrannical sovereignty

Institution vs acquisition claim

Hobbes argued that sovereignty by conquest and consent confers identical authority

Collapse of Church of England

The abolition of episcopacy created a theological vacuum in the 1640s

Hobbes’ religious aim

Hobbes aimed to close theological dispute to prevent religiously fuelled civil conflict

Fear and religion

Religion arises from human anxiety about the future and unseen causes

Civil religion function

Religion should promote obedience

Clerical power danger

Independent spiritual authority threatens political unity and civil peace

Why context is insufficient

Hobbes’ arguments are systematic and consistent across multiple works

Continuity across works

Hobbes’ views persist from Elements of Law through De Cive to Leviathan

Problem with event reduction

Reducing Hobbes to events mistakes polemical targets for philosophical foundations

State of nature abstraction

The state of nature is a theoretical model not reducible to English history

Euthyphro dilemma relevance

Hobbes intervenes in the debate over whether justice derives from will or intrinsic moral order

Hobbes’ voluntarism

Hobbes grounds justice and law in sovereign will backed by power

Scholastic opposition

Aristotelian thinkers defended a moral order independent of will

Leibniz’s criticism

Leibniz argued Hobbes reduced justice to power and emptied the world of moral economy

Bramhall controversy

Bramhall accused Hobbes of collapsing reason into will in both theology and politics

Meaning of anti-scholasticism

Anti-scholasticism rejected Aristotelian teleology and inherent moral purposes

Hobbes’ intellectual project

Hobbes sought to dismantle scholastic political and moral philosophy

‘War with Aristotle’ thesis

Hobbes’ critics represent the final defence of Aristotelian political theology

Hobbes and atheism

Hobbes was not atheist but radically reinterpreted Christianity

Natural religion definition

Natural religion recognises God through reason and the laws of nature

Scripture in Hobbes

Scripture is historical knowledge made authoritative by the sovereign

Civil control of religion

Public worship must be regulated to secure peace

Departure from mainstream Christianity

Hobbes shifted focus from sin and redemption to fear and obedience

Context explains what

Context explains the urgency and polemical character of Hobbes’ arguments

Tradition explains what

Tradition explains the structure and intelligibility of Hobbes’ ideas

Hobbes as innovator

Hobbes was an innovator working within inherited conceptual frameworks

Intellectual history payoff

Hobbes demonstrates why neither ideas nor context can be studied in isolation