Hobbes in Leviathan, chapter xv, 4, makes the startling claim: “The fool hath said in his heart, ‘there is no such thing as justice,’” paraphrasing Psalm 52:1: “The fool hath said in his heart there is no God.” These are charges of which Hobbes himself could stand accused. His parable of the fool is about the exchange of obedience for protection, the backslider, regime change, and the tyrant; but given that Hobbes was himself likely an oath-breaker, it is also self-reflexive and self-justificatory. For, Hobbes’s fool is not a windbag (follis), or one of the dumb mob, led astray by priests (stultus). He is, in the terminology of Psalm 52, an insipiens, a madman or raving lunatic, whose rebellion against God the King is his own destruction and that of his people. A long iconographic tradition portraying the fool as insipiens, Antichrist, heretical impostor and tyrant king, was at Hobbes’s disposal.
Citations are to Leviathan [1651], with selected variants from the Latin edition of 1668, ed. Edwin Curley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), referencing chapter (small Roman numerals), section, pagination of the Head edition/and of the Curley edition.
2.
Treated in Patricia Springborg, "Hobbes’s Fool the Stultus, Grotius, and the Epicurean Tradition,"Hobbes Studies, 23 (2010): 29-53.
3.
David Gauthier , The Logic of Leviathan: The Moral and Political Theory of Thomas Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969); Gauthier, "Why One Ought to Obey God? Reflections on Hobbes and Locke,"Canadian Journal of Philosophy7, no. 3 (1977): 425-45; Gauthier, "Hobbes: The Laws of Nature,"Pacific Philosophical Quarterly82, no. 3-4 (2001): 258-84; Jean Hampton, Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); and Hampton, "Hobbes and Ethical Naturalism."Ethics6 ( 1992): 333-53.
4.
John Deigh, "Reason and Ethics in Hobbes’s Leviathan,"Journal of the History of Philosophy34, no. 1 (1996): 33-60. See Mark C. Murphy, "Desire and Ethics in Hobbes’s Leviathan: A Response to Professor Deigh,"Journal of the History of Philosophy38, no. 2 (2000): 259-68; Deigh’s"Reply to Mark Murphy,"Journal of the History of Philosophy41, no. 1 (2003) 97-109; and Kinch Hoekstra"s reply to Deigh, "Hobbes on Law, Nature, and Reason,"Journal of the History of Philosophy41, no. 1 (2003): 111-120.
5.
Kinch Hoekstra prefaces "The de facto Turn in Hobbes’s Political Philosophy (DF)," in Leviathan after 350 Years, ed. Tom Sorell and Luc Foisneau (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 34-73, by citing the letter of William Fiennes, Viscount Saye and Sele to Philip Wharton, Baron Wharton, 29 Dec. 1657 (Bodleian MS Carte vol. 80, fol. 749r): "I looke upon them as wethercockes which will turne about with the winde . . . with them thearfore whear thear is might thear is right, it is dominion if it succeed, but rebellion if it miscarry, a good argument for pyrates uppon the sea, & for theeves uppon the high way, fitter for hobbs and Atheists then good men and christians."
6.
Walter Kaiser , "Wisdom of the Fool,"The Dictionary of the History of Ideas, 4 ( New York: Scribner’s, 1973 ), 515-20, to whom I am indebted for this account.
7.
Howard Warrender, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: His Theory of Obligation ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957); A.E. Taylor, "The Ethical Doctrine of Hobbes," in Hobbes Studies, ed. K. C. Brown ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), 35-55; and the works of Gauthier and Hampton above.
8.
Kinch Hoekstra, "Hobbes and the Foole," Political Theory 25, no. 5 (1997): 620-54, at 622-3. See also Peter Hayes, "Hobbes’s Silent Fool: A Response to Hoekstra," Political Theory 27, no. 2 (1999): 225-29; Hoekstra’s response, "Nothing to Declare? Hobbes and the Advocate of Injustice," Political Theory 27 (1999): 230-35; and Rosamond Rhodes, "Hobbes’s Unreasonable Fool," The Southern Journal of Philosophy 30, no. 2 (1992): 93-102.
9.
The distinction, anticipated in The Elements of Law and De cive, refers to the Biblical claim that only God knows the secret heart of man, which "no human law is intended to oblige": "no human law is intended to oblige the conscience of a man but the actions only. For seeing no man (but God alone) knoweth the heart or conscience of a man, unless it break out into action, either of the tongue, or other part of the body; the law made thereupon would be of none effect, because no man is able to discern, but by the word or other action whether such law be kept or broken." Ferdinand Tönnies edition, of Hobbes, The Elements of the Law Natural and Politic, ed. M. M. Goldsmith (London: Cass, 1969), xxv. 32 (henceforth EL chapter, paragraph); cited in Hoekstra, "Hobbes and the Foole," 625.
10.
Most recently, Lucien Jaume, "Hobbes and the Philosophical Sources of Liberalism," in The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s Leviathan, ed. Patricia Springborg (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2007 ): 199-216.
11.
See Patricia Springborg, "Liberty Exposed: Quentin Skinner’s Hobbes and Republican Liberty,"British Journal for the History of Philosophy18, no. 1 (2010): 139-61.
12.
Hoekstra, "Hobbes and the Foole," 642 n. 10.
13.
De cive: The Latin Version, ed. Howard Warrender (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), v. 5; Hoekstra, "Hobbes and the Foole,"625.
14.
Hoekstra, "Hobbes and the Foole,"629.
15.
Ibid., 623.
16.
Ibid.
17.
Ibid., 624.
18.
Ibid., 622.
19.
Hoekstra, "Hobbes and the Foole," 642 n. 11, citing Ovids Metamorphosis Englished, Mythologized and Represented in Figures, Book 13, line 137. Translated during Sandys’s stormy Atlantic crossing to take up his post in 1623 and completed in Maryland, but published in Oxford in 1626 on his return, it is the first work of English poetry written in the Americas. With a magnificent frontispiece, Sandys also discusses the efficacy of pictorial representations as "hieroglyphics" or numinous signs. On Sandys’s edition of Ovids Metamorphosis Englished, held in the Hardwick Hall library which Hobbes helped to assemble at shelf mark V.2.8, see Patricia Springborg, "Leviathan, Mythic History and National Historiography," in The Historical Imagination in Early Modern Britain, ed. David Harris Sacks and Donald Kelley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 267-97, at 267-8.
20.
A Cohen, ed., The Psalms (New York: Bloch, 1982), 33; Curley in n. 2 to L. xv, 4, 72/90. We do not need to assume that Hobbes knew this, although he may have, given his close ties to John Selden, Orientalist and Hebrew scholar, whose work he often cites.
21.
Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). See also Maurice Goldsmith, "Picturing Hobbes’s Politics: the Illustrations to the Philosophicall Rudiments,"Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes44 (1981): 231-37.
22.
Ahuva Belkin, "Antichrist as the Embodiment of the Insipiens in Thirteenth- century French Psalters," Florilegium 10 (1988-1991): 65-82 at 65-66. The manuscripts comprise the Boulogne manuscript dating from 1200-1225 (Boulogne, Bibliothèque Municipale, Ms. 5. fol. 183r); the Antwerp manuscript dated to 1230-1250 (Antwerp, Musée Plantin, Moretus, Ms lat. 3, fol. 148); the Palermo manuscript dated also to 1230-1250 (Palermo, Biblioteca Nazionale, Ms I.E.4, fol. 183, 123-24); and related British manuscripts from the late thirteenth century.
23.
Belkin 77 n. 32 finds "a salient example of Antichrist as a grotesque human with bristling hair" in the Bibliothèque Municipale Avranches, Ms. 50, fol. 1, dedicated to St. Michael, who is shown "stabbing a prostrate, naked Antichrist with a long spear."
24.
Belkin, "Antichrist," 75 n. 6, notes the convention of portraying cross-legged rulers to denote heretic regents like Pharaoh or Herod, was widespread in Romanesque and Gothic art.
25.
Belkin, "Antichrist," 72 and 77, n. 28, citing Ernest T. DeWald, The Illustrations of the Utrecht Psalter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1932); M. R. James, The Canterbury Psalter (London: P. Lund, Humphries & Co., 1935); and H. Omont, Psautier illustré du XIIIe siècle (Paris: Berthaud frères 1906). See also Ahuva Belkin, "The Antichrist Legend in the Utrecht Psalter," Rivista di Storia e Letteratura Religiosa 23, no. 2 (1987): 279-88.
26.
Belkin, "Antichrist," 68. Belkin, 77 n. 33, compares "the disfigured face, wide mouth and protruding teeth" of Antichrist in Add. 15253 with the features of the devilish-looking falling angels in the Arsenal Psalter (Ms. 1186, fol. 9).
27.
L. xxi, 5, 108/138. The Gallic Hercules, mentioned by Diodorus Siculus, and the Syrian rhetor Lucian, was a primitive giant clad only in a bearskin, wielding club and quiver, "drag[ging] after him a great crowd of men tethered by their ears to his tongue." See Lucian, "Heracles" in Works, ed. A M. Harmon (Loeb edition, London: Heinemann, 1913) 1.63; and Patricia Springborg, "Hobbes’s Biblical Beasts," section 4, "Leviathan and the Gallic Hercules," 363-69.
28.
For the Pope as anti-Leviathan see Hobbes, Historia Ecclesiastica, including text, translation, introduction, commentary and notes, ed. Patricia Springborg, Patricia Stablein, and Paul Wilson (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2008) (henceforth Hist. Eccl., citing first pages and then lines): 494-95, lines 1530-35; 572-77, lines 2185-97, and Springborg’s Introduction, chapter 4.4.1, 127-39.
29.
Edmund Curley, editorial notes to Leviathan, xv, 4, 72/90 n. 3.
30.
Oxford Latin Dictionary, 3 vols ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968-1980).
31.
Biblical citations are to the King James Bible unless otherwise noted.
De cive Preface Dedicatory; Hoekstra, "Hobbes and the Foole,"632.
34.
See Springborg, "Leviathan, Mythic History and National Historiography."
35.
Jeffrey Collins , The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), and Patricia Springborg, "The Duck/Rabbit Hobbes: Review of Jeffrey Collins, The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes,"British Journal for the History of Philosophy14, no. 4 (2006): 765-71.
36.
De cive Preface Dedicatory; Hoekstra, "Hobbes and the Foole,"632.
37.
Springborg, Introduction to Hobbes, Historia Ecclesiastica , chapter 3.2 "Hobbes and Scargill,"118-26.
38.
Hobbes in the preparation of the Latin Leviathan of 1668 deleted many of the references to English politics of his day in favour of more general principles for a Continental audience. The high level of variants of this sort between the English and Latin Leviathans in chapter xv are indicative of how much the argument in the earlier work is directed against contemporaries, parliamentarians, jurists, and preachers, who legitimized the regicide of Charles I.
39.
Hobbes is referring to Coke’s The First Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England (London, 1629), folio 16. See Curley 91n.
40.
Hoekstra, "Hobbes and the Foole,"632.
41.
As reiterated in Behemoth, or The Long Parliament, ed. Ferdinand Tönnies (London, 1889, facsimile edition, Stephen Holmes, ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 39. On Hobbes’s "science of the just and unjust," see Patricia Springborg, "Behemoth and Hobbes’s ‘Science of Just and Unjust’," Filozofski vestnik24, no. 2 (2003): 267-89, special issue on Hobbes’s Behemoth, ed. Tomaz Mastnak; reprinted in Hobbes’s Behemoth: Religion and Democracy, ed. Tomaz Mastnak (Exeter: Academic Imprint, 2009), 148-69.
42.
On Hobbes’s Epicureanism in general see Arrigo Pacchi’s pioneering "Hobbes e l’epicureismo," Rivista Critica di Storia della Filosophia, 33 (1975): 54-71; Gianni Paganini "Hobbes, Gassendi and the Tradition of Political Epicureanism," Hobbes Studies 14 (2001): 3-24, reprinted in Der Garten und die Moderne. Epikureische Moral und Politik vom Humanismus bis zur Aufklärung (Stuttgart, Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Rommann-holzboog, Verlag, 2004), 113-37; and Patricia Springborg, "Hobbes and Epicurean Religion," in Der Garten und die Moderne, 161-214.
43.
Pierre Gassendi, Animadversiones (Paris, 1649), vol. 2, 302a, noted by Gianni Paganini in "Hobbes, Gassendi et le De Cive," in Materia Actuosa: Antiquité, Âge Classique, Lumières; Mélanges en ‘honneur d’Olivier Bloch, ed. Miguel Benitez, Antony McKenna, Gianni Paganini, and Jean Salem (Paris: Vrin, 2000), 183-206, at 188-89.
44.
Delphine Thivet , "Thomas Hobbes: A Philosopher of War or Peace?"British Journal for the History of Philosophy16, no. 4 (2008): 701-21.
45.
The unnamed author, I suggest, is Justus Lipsius (1547-1606), the Belgian philosopher whose work On Constancy may have been atonement for his own infamous inconstancy-having converted from Catholicism to Calvinism and then to Lutheranism in order to take University posts. Lipsius, who made explicit reference to the "mortal god," is an author whom Hobbes elsewhere cites, but for the Stoic definition of "fate." See Hobbes, Liberty, Necessity and Chance (EW V, 245), noted by Gianni Paganini, "Alle Origini del ‘Mortal God’: Hobbes, Lipsius e il Corpus Hermeticum," Rivista di Storia della Filosofia, vol. 61 (2006), 509-32, at 524.
46.
Hobbes, Eight Bookes of the Peloponnesian Warre Written by Thvcydides the Sonne of Olorvs Interpreted with Faith and Diligence Immediately out of the Greeke [London, 1629], ed. David Grene (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), bk. 3, 82, 204-5.
47.
After Leviathan, Hobbes was in a perpetually confessional mode, and all seven of his works on heresy, generated out of the atheism charges that the parliament was prepared to lay against him in 1666-1667, share an element of special pleading: the Historia Ecclesiastica (c. 1660-1674); Hobbes’s Response to Bramhall’s "The Catching of Leviathan" (1666-1667); the Chatsworth MS on Heresy of 1673; his Historical Narration Concerning Heresy of 1668; De Haeresi, the Appendix to the Latin Leviathan of the same year; the Dialogue Concerning the Common Laws, written after 1668, the document on heresy relating to the Scargill affair of 1669, now lost; and Behemoth, written between 1668 and 1670.
48.
Francis Rous, Anthony Ascham, John Dury, and Marchamont Nedham, were among the "Engagement theorists" who argued for compounding with the Commonwealth, as Hoekstra notes (DF, 49), citing Quentin Skinner, "Conquest and Consent: Thomas Hobbes and the Engagement Controversy," in The Interregnum: the Quest for Settlement 1646-60, ed. G. E. Aylmer (London: Macmillan, 1972), republished in a revised version in Visions of Politics, vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 287-307. See also John Wallace, "The Engagement Controversy 1649-52: An Annotated List of Pamphlets," Bullletin of the New York Public Library 68, no. 6 (1964).
49.
Noted in Skinner, "Conquest and Consent," Visions of Politics, 3, 306n.
50.
As Skinner notes, "Conquest and Consent," 287n., the act of "‘engag[ing]’ with the new government was to accept the oath of ‘engagement’ to its authority."
51.
See Springborg, "Hobbes’s Fool the Stultus."
52.
Livy (5.47), and Plutarch in his life of Camillus, both tell the story of the Capitoline geese, but Hobbes’s most likely source is Florus’ epitome of Roman history, given that Chatsworth MS DI, a dictation book used by Hobbes for his Cavendish charges, contains passages from book 1 of Florus, including this story (Hoekstra DF, 48n.).
