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POLITICS 212(TH) WESTERN POLITICAL
PHILOSOPHY |
Department
of Politics Willamette
University |
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Historiography and Hobbes
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Author
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Text
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Context
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Whig
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Timid yet
well-traveled and worldly individual who combined classical realism of Thucydides
with confidence in modern science and geometry to make sense of political
system. |
The rare Whig
reader sees in this text a sincere interest in protecting individual rights, to
self-preservation and against self-incrimination (93, 98, 152, 206, 214),
achieving a balance between too much liberty and authority (3),and stressing
that politics exists for the common good (231, 237f). However, most regard Leviathan as a
statement of absolutist (preferably monarchic,131) loyalist politics
extending extensive control over domestic policy, legal issues, economic
issues, and foreign policy and even religious and cultural life to an
undivided authority structure (and hence one without checks and balances or
constitutional limits) (127, 128, 225, 228). |
Horrors of
English Civil Wars in which brother fought brother etc. Civil War or Puritan Revolution was struggle between
Parliament (representing emerging sense of nation-state), and the monarchy, to
defend traditional private rights and toleration against arbitrary power of
monarch and Stuart church. (eg. S.R. Gardiner) |
Marxist
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Author
Born relatively
poor. After receiving best education
uncle’s money could buy, his principal occupation was as tutor and secretary
to aristocratic Cavendish family, Earls of Devonshire. |
Text
Leviathan is a
transitional text, reflecting aristocratic and mercantilist values (10,107)
that politics creates property and manages transactions (228, 174) otoh and
the new capitalist mentality of commodifying everything by market value
(105), including labor power (63, 171) on the other. Text does offer security of possessions and
productivity as motive to leave NC (87), endorses manufacturing (171) and
explicitlyseparateswisdom from both wealth and nobility (131, 242) and poor working
masterless men (128, 239). |
Context
Civil War was a
class war, a bourgeois revolution that relied upon Puritanism because it
rationalized their values, at the expense of the landed aristocracy and the
established church. It thus reflects the transition
from feudalism to capitalism, i.e. the growing predominance of urban
mercantile and manufacturing economies and post-guild social relations over
rural and landed economies and relations. (Christopher
Hill) |
Feminist
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Author
Life-long
bachelor not known for strong affections towards women or men for that
matter. |
Text
Hobbes makes some
interesting observations about the initial primacy of the mother and maternal
sources of power (139-40) but before long he is erasing thereby conceiving of
human beings sprung from the earth as mushrooms, assuming paternal authority
of father, and the social covenant as between individuals (qua heads of
households thereby subsuming wife, children, even servants) (162-3, 235, 353,
384, 470). |
Context
Among the more
striking forms of political activism unleashed during the English civil wars
was the role of rallying and marching women, together with political
pamphlets by women. There were in
addition several prominent female religious radicals or prophetesses. Larger process of social contract as sexual
constract,precursor to ‘fraternity.’ |
Post-Modern
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Author
Consumed by fear
and wrestled deeply with skepticism of Descartes and problems of radical
centrifugal subjectivism. |
Text
Text eschews the
grand metaphysical narratives of Plato and Aristotle and Christianity in which
the world is taken to be subject to natural purposes, functions, or telos
or divine providence. Instead it
presents a world of matter in ceaseless motion. Man is part of world of matter and self emerges as a plurality
of inner impulses (62, 70) that are wild within and madness to others (52,
55) unless regulated by convergence of power/knowledge in the form of
Leviathan as the great definer, and Leviathan as textbook or dictionary. |
Context
Re-naissance of
classical themes and preoccupations sponsors repudiation of grand Christian
and Aristotelian narratives but their replacement by new myths of reason,
science, geometry (145) and the world-creating, world-naming individual self. Reformation undermines religious authority
in favor of individual conscience. |
Useful sites:
See Theories relating to the English Civil War
http://encyclopedia.laborlawtalk.com/English%20Revolution
also
review of a book on
historiography and English Revolution
http://www.hull.ac.uk/Hull/EL_Web/renforum/v1no2/davis.htm
on historiography
and Renaissance
http://www.open2.net/renaissance2/what/what.html