Jendrysik, “Land or Sea Beast”
MPSA 2004
13
dissolving the state, he is right on his own terms).
83
Conclusion: The Limits of Hobbesian History and Theory
In a telling way Behemoth represents the limits of the Hobbes’s political imagination. He
cannot accept or envision an England without a king, Lords and Commons. He can envision an
expanded royal power, but that is about all. An example of this is his discussion of how
Parliaments could be summoned without a king.
A. Why not like a phoenix? Cannot a Parliament at the day of their expiration
send out writs for a new one?
B. Do you think they would not rather summon themselves anew; and save the
labour of coming again to Westminster, sit still where they were? Or if they
summon the country to make new elections, and then dissolve themselves, by
what authority shall the people meet in their county courts, there being no
supreme authority standing.
84
One is inclined to hope that Hobbes is either being either willfully naïve or is straining at the
gnat of procedure to avoid swallowing the camel of democracy. But it might be that he, for all
his genius, cannot escape his times. In this he was not alone. In the 1650’s the English people
signally failed to escape the grasp of older political forms.
As in Leviathan so in Behemoth the solutions to civil and religious disorder are the same.
Behemoth is merely the replaying of events of the English Civil War to match the theory created
in Leviathan. In both works the virtues of the subject and sovereign are the same and the king
retains his authority as sole religious arbiter.
85
Almost twenty years (1651-1668) of experience
and history have changed nothing for Hobbes. His theory remains the only correct means of
guaranteeing order.
All his causes of the war and defeat, however, whether mentioned in this list or
elsewhere in Behemoth, can be summed up in one: the failure of all manner of
men, Royalist and ostensibly loyal as well as seditious, to observe that strict
subordination to the King the necessity of which is expounded by Hobbes most
forcefully in Leviathan.
86
In effect Hobbes declares in Behemoth as he did in Leviathan that beyond mere personal self-
defense, the subject has no right to resist the sovereign. As Charles Tarlton notes “there were, on
Hobbes’s strict view, no rights, freedoms, or liberties worth either mentioning or having
everyday significance, except those derived from the sovereign’s commands.”
87
All claims of
83
See for example Hobbes’s discussion of the “Nineteen Propositions” in Behemoth, 105-108. Hobbes also
notes that the people “have long ago put the supreme power of the nation into the hands of their king, for them and
their heirs” Behemoth, 152. Thus any attempt to change the government or limit the power of the king violates the
original contract.
84
Behemoth, 182.
85
Behemoth, 44-46 and Leviathan, XXXII, 259. Also see Eldon J. Eisenach, “Hobbes on Church, State and
Religion,” in Thomas Hobbes: Critical Assessments, Volume IV: Religion, ed. Preston King (London: Routledge,
1993), 292
86
MacGillivray, “Thomas Hobbes’s History,” 188.
87
Tarlton, “Despotical Doctrine of Hobbes, Part II,” 70.
Convention