Patricia Springborg

Mary Astell (1666–1731), Critic of Locke

In the now considerable literature reevaluating the reception of Lockes Two Treatises , no mention has been made of perhaps his first systematic critic, the commissioned Tory political pamphleteer, Mary Astell. Contemporaneous with Charles Leslie, who is usually credited with the honor, Astell had diagnosed Lockes political argument by 1705 and perhaps as early as 1700. Why has her contribution remained unacknowledged for so long? It is argued here that for too long commentators have been looking for the wrong person in the wrong place. Astell correctly saw that Lockes political philosophy was inextricable from his psychological and theological systems, addressing all three in works that were political, theological and homiletic. But why Locke, and why in 1700–1705? Did Astell already know the authorship of the Two Treatises , only officially established in 1704 with the publication of the codicil to Lockes will?

Hobbes's Biblical Beasts Leviathan and Behemoth

Beyond the actual works of nature a poet may now go; but beyond the conceived possibility of nature, never. I can allow a Geographer to make in the Sea, a Fish or a Ship, which by the scale of his map would be two or three hundred mile long, and think it done for ornament, because it is done without the precincts of his undertaking; but when he paints an Elephant so, I presently apprehend it as ignorance and a plain confession of Terra incognita. Hobbess Answer to Sir William Davenants Dedicatory Preface to Gondibert, 1651, 81.

LEVIATHAN, THE CHRISTIAN COMMONWEALTH INCORPORATED

IT is the purpose of this essay to examine certain aspects of Hobbes’s theory of authority with reference to the concept of the corporation-that peculiar legal entity derived from Roman Law to which seventeenth-century jurists appealed in the attempt to establish sovereignty as a notion of legal jurisdiction. The problem of authority, as Hobbes formulates it in the Leviathan, involves a distinction between the reasons which motivate men to institutionalize a political system and the sanctions which provide for its maintenance once in existence. Hobbes accounts for the incentives to contract in terms of Reason (the Laws of Natural Reason as they are manifest in the dictates of conscience) and religion (Christian precepts set out in the Scriptures). He accounts for the sanctions in terms of a theory of obligation which centres on the notion of incorporation.’ Leviathan was conceived as a Christian Commonwealth and Hobbes concerned himself not only with political, but also with ecclesiastical authority, perhaps the most divisive political issue of his day. Leviathan’s sovereign, on the model of the Tudor ‘Godly Prince’, exercised both civil and ecclesiastical powers, thus uniting the two heads of the eagle, as Rousseau was later to remark.2 The dual role of the King was justified by Hobbes, as it had been by Tudor apologists, in terms of a theory of corporation. Hobbes departed from the new orthodoxy of the established church, however, when he extended the concept of persons to provide an account of the relation of the three persons of God in the Trinity and a periodization of Christian history in terms of their representation in three successive epochs. Hobbes laid explicit claim to being the first to see the significance of the state as a type of corporation, a claim all the more extraordinary for the fact that the development of the theory of ‘the king’s two bodies’ is considered to be one of the singular achievements of medieval thought, and was indeed the language in terms of which Royal Supremacy had been defended. Hobbes would almost certainly have been familiar with the Act in Restraint of Appeals, the classic English statement, but he nevertheless claims in the Elements that: . . . a corporation being declared to be one person in law, yet the same hath not been taken notice of in the body of acommonwealth or city, nor have any of those innumerable writers of politics, observed any such uni0n.j

Hobbes's Challenge to Descartes, Bramhall and Boyle: A Corporeal God

This paper brings new work to bear on the perennial question about Hobbess atheism to show that as a debate about scepticism it is falsely framed. Hobbes, like fellow members of the Mersenne circle, Descartes and Gassendi, was no sceptic, but rather concerned to rescue physics and metaphysics from radical scepticism by exploring corporealism. In his early letter of November 1640, Hobbes had issued a provocative challenge to Descartes to abandon metaphysical dualism and subscribe to a ‘corporeal God’; a provocation to which the Frenchman angrily responded, but was perhaps importantly influenced. Hobbess minimal realism was consonant with atheism, to which Descartes felt he was being forced. Moreover, Hobbes was unrelenting in his battle against Cartesian dualism, for which he saw Robert Boyles experimental science as a surrogate.

Republicanism, Freedom from Domination, and the Cambridge Contextual Historians

Philip Pettit, in Republicanism: a Theory of Freedom and Government (1997), draws on the historiography of classical republicanism developed by the Cambridge Contextual Historians, John Pocock and Quentin Skinner, to set up a programme for the recovery of the Roman Republican notion of freedom, as freedom from domination. But it is my purpose to show that classical republicanism, as a theory of institutional complexity and balanced government, could not, and did not, lay exclusive claim to freedom from domination as a defining value. Positive freedom was a concept ubiquitous in Roman Law and promulgated in Natural Law as a universal human right. And it was just the ubiquitousness of this right to freedom, honoured more often in the breach than the observance, which prompted the scorn of early modern proto-feminists like Mary Astell and her contemporary, Judith Drake. The division of society into public and private spheres, which liberalism entrenched, precisely allowed democrats in the public sphere full rein as tyrants in the domestic sphere of the family, as these women were perspicacious enough to observe. When republicanism is defined in exclusively normative terms the rich institutional contextualism drops away, leaving no room for the issues it was designed to address: the problematic relation between values and institutions that lies at the heart of individual freedoms.

Hobbes’s Fool the Insipiens, and the Tyrant-King

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.

Liberty Exposed: Quentin Skinner's Hobbes and Republican Liberty

Quentin Skinner in Hobbes and Republican Liberty, the culmination of a series of excellent essays and books, takes as his subject Hobbes’s concept of freedom, tracing its development as a series of responses to prevailing positions that both incorporates them and trumps them. Skinner’s dedication to investigating Hobbes’s rhetorical strategies has born some unusual fruit. Not only do we see the enormous problems that Hobbes set himself by proceeding as he did, but Skinner’s careful analysis allows us to chart Hobbes’s ingenuity as he tried to steer a path between the Charybdis of determinism and the Scylla of voluntarism – not very successfully, as we shall see. The upshot is a theory of individual freedom and civil liberty to challenge the classical republican tradition.

Early history of the state — West and east

Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, vol. 1, A History of Power from the Beginning to A.D. 1760, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1986, pp.549. UK £12.95 (paper). John A. Hall, Powers and Liberties: The Causes and Consequences of the Rise of the West, London, Penguin Books, 1986, pp.272.

Pandora and Hatshepsut: Ancient Archtypes in the iconography of kingship

14.95 (paper).

The Primacy of the Political: Rahe and the Myth of the Polis

Greek myths contain iconographic material relating to the legitimacy, power and succession problems of early kingship. They may even represent the relics of kingly liturgies recited at coronations and New Year festivals. This essay analyses Hesiods Pandora, her presentation and regalia, as an icon of queenly power reflecting the important power of women in the Egyptian royal cult and the great exponent of that role, Queen Hatshepsut. Pandoras veil, crown, name and ‘box’ or ‘jar’ recall both the moment of apotheosis of Egyptian queens and the emblems of the Egyptian royal priestesses who tended the divinity of kings. They also recall the astral and solar imagery of the great goddesses of Mesopotamia, Anath, Ishtar and Astarte—as well as Hesiods Europa—queenly figures of great power.