Jendrysik, “Land or Sea Beast”
MPSA 2004
3
MacGillivray noted over thirty years ago, “Thomas Hobbes’s history of the English Civil War,
Behemoth or the Long Parliament, is open to the reproach that it tells us more about Hobbes than
about the Civil War.”
9
Richard Ashcraft claims that “in Behemoth, Hobbes set out to do more
than record the events of the civil war… it is evident that Hobbes’ concern is with the causes of
the war… with science rather than history.”
10
Or to put it another way “in Behemoth Hobbes has
applied to actual political events the conclusions of his political philosophy.”
11
In both
Leviathan and Behemoth Hobbes subordinates history to theory. This subordination can create
difficulties in interpreting Hobbes’s true views on the Civil War and the Restoration.
While disagreeing with the above assessment William Lund notes “given his well known
doubts about the epistemological status of history Behemoth or the Long Parliament is often
treated as little more than a procrustean effort at forcing complex history events into the bed of
abstract theory he had developed earlier.”
12
He claims that Behemoth can best be examined as “a
‘narration’ rather than a ‘disputation,’ and that [Hobbes] is less interested in abstract analysis
than in a historical study linking men’s beliefs, interests and errors of omission and commission
into the full ‘concourse’ of material ‘discontents’ and ideological errors that had moved
Englishmen to ‘sedition.’
13
We must then ask whether Hobbes succeeds in this goal.
In order to understand these works as history, we must recognize at the outset that
Hobbes draws a clear, if somewhat specious, distinction between events or narrative and his
theory of revolution. This allows him to take an approach to the events of the English Revolution
which is highly selective and not always true to the actual historical record. He is quite simply,
spinning history and putting it into the service of his own brand of political theory. As Robert
Kraynak notes “Hobbes’s account of the English Civil War in Behemoth is truly distinctive and
cannot be fitted into the mold of other histories or political philosophies.”
14
But there is more here than theory; there is also polemic. Hobbes clearly has a great many
targets for critique in Leviathan. He assaults these targets again in Behemoth. As Glenn Burgess
notes, “the controlling intention behind the writing, or at least the conception, of Leviathan, was
probably to contribute to the Royalist cause by systematically destroying the intellectual
foundations of the positions espoused by Charles I’s opponents.
15
These opponents include
religious “enthusiasts” (like the Independents and sectarians, such as the Quakers), institutional
religions such as the Catholic Church and the Presbyterians (since they provided, by their very
existence, an alternative power opposed to the sovereign), the universities (or “Schoolmen”),
Parliamentarians, monopolists, courtiers and more. Determining his primary goal and how it
effects his conclusions about the groups noted above becomes a critical means to a coherent
reading of this work. Sharon Lloyd suggests that Hobbes saw the roots of disorder in the
competition of “transcendent interests” with material interests; or between the demands of
religious belief and civil government. She notes that an analysis of Leviathan couched in terms
of payoffs, of rational analysis of the consequences of action, or views that claimed that the fear
of death was the central human motivation, missed the critical point. Lloyd notes that Hobbes
9
MacGillivray, “Thomas Hobbes’s History,” 179.
10
Richard Ashcraft “Ideology and Class in Hobbes’s Political Theory.” I should note that Behemoth is
sometimes subtitled: “a history of the causes of the civil wars of England.”
11
MacGillivray, “Thomas Hobbes’s History,” 183.
12
Lund, “Hobbes on Opinion,” 51.
13
Lund, “Hobbes on Opinion,” 68.
14
Robert P. Kraynak, History and Modernity in the Thought of Thomas Hobbes (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1990), 40.
15
Glenn Burgess “Contexts for the Writing and Publication of Hobbes’s Leviathan.” History of Political
Thought Vol. 11, No. 4 (Winter 1990): 677.
Convention