Reading Hobbes Backwards (3)
Positioning the Voice
To comment on Patricia Springborg’s Reading Hobbes Backwards: Leviathan, the Papal Monarchy and Islam, I will begin with a brief gesture of reflexivity. There is no view from nowhere: any critical engagement with intellectual history must state who is speaking and from where. For me, this is both a methodological and an ethical commitment: philosophical interpretations are situated, shaped by the social and historical conditions of both the texts we read and the practices by which we read them. Let me therefore briefly position my own voice, not as an autobiographical indulgence, but as a methodological and ethical premise.
My first sustained engagement with Hobbes dates to 2000, when - during a Maîtrise seminar on the history of materialism focused on Epicureanism - I wrote a short essay, Hobbes, l’expérience et la physique, examining the relationship between his natural philosophy and his scientific method. A year later, the post-9/11 “war on terror,” saturated the public space with debates about war and peace, “just war” theory, pre-emptive violence, and the fragility of multilateral norms. In this atmosphere, Hobbes’s political philosophy, which had long intrigued me, appeared as a particularly compelling interlocutor: a body of thought that, while rooted in the seventeenth century, engages systematically and unflinchingly with the problem of war, not as an aberration to be morally tamed, but as a condition of human societies to be philosophically addressed. This orientation took form in a pre-doctoral dissertation (D.E.A., 2001), Décomposition sociale et politique dans l’œuvre de Thomas Hobbes, followed by my doctoral dissertation (La guerre entre le concept et l’histoire dans l’œuvre de Thomas Hobbes, University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, 2008), later published as Une pensée hétérodoxe de la guerre. De Hobbes à Clausewitz (PUF, 2010). In that work I examined Hobbes’s conception of war by integrating, alongside canonical texts, pamphlets, sermons, and political tracts that reflected the lived social experience of seventeenth-century Europe and England, especially the Thirty Years’ War and the English Civil War, thus positioning Hobbes as a “heterodox” thinker of war: neither moralist nor jurist, but a philosopher seeking to grasp the logic of conflict in rationalist terms. My work on Hobbes, undertaken nearly two decades ago, therefore unfolded at the intersection of philosophy and history.
When Patricia Springborg recalls the ‘Pocockean moment’ and Skinner’s methodological interventions, I can relate to the formative importance those readings have had for many of us. As a young philosophy student at the Sorbonne, I was trained to read “great philosophers” as disembodied voices from a Platonic “heaven of ideas.” In that French curriculum we were not encouraged - quite the contrary, to put it mildly - to read Skinner or to engage the Cambridge School. Against that grain, encountering Skinner’s work opened a breach and an intellectual breathing space, licensing a latent intuition: philosophical arguments are not produced in a vacuum but are situated speech-acts embedded in specific conflicts, institutions, and social systems. This stance does not renounce close analysis; rather, it refuses the paradoxically dehistoricised history of philosophy that treats concepts as free-floating abstractions. Between 2003 and 2004, an EU-funded research fellowship brought me to the Peace Research Institute Oslo (Norway), where my doctoral research on Hobbes encountered more contemporary research on “just war,” “preventive war,” “human security,” and “global terrorism.” Engaging with war and peace studies broadened my horizons but also sharpened my awareness of the limitations in certain readings of Hobbes, particularly in international relations, readings that tended to oversimplify his thought by detaching it from both its historical context and its broader philosophical system. Such tendencies, in my view, reproduce forms of anachronism and further reinforce the need to study Hobbes within his full historical and intellectual milieu.
Because my academic trajectory has moved me away from Hobbesian studies towards sociology, my perspective here is intentionally a half-step aside: I read Patricia Springborg’s book from a historical-sociological standpoint rather than a strictly philosophical one. While I intended to concentrate on Chapter 3 - “Drafts, MSs, Letters, Recollections and Boasts: a Timeline”- the book’s architecture resists piecemeal treatment. Having read it as a whole, I propose to offer a transversal account of its contribution, with Chapter 3 serving as the hinge of my discussion.
Repositioning Hobbes
In my reading, Patricia Springborg’s book models a method that anchors philosophical interpretation in history and society. It couples fine-grained philology with a patient reconstruction of Hobbes’s intellectual lineages (in particular the Greek, Arabic, and Latin Aristotelian commentary tradition) while restoring to the centre of argument the social and material realities of authorship, commissioned writing, clientage hierarchies, manuscript and print pathways, library infrastructures, and political censorship (ch. 2; ch. 3). What emerges is a resolutely situated Hobbes, as an active participant in, and acute analyst of, his time, whether the “Tudor Protestant Reformation settlement begun a century earlier” (Ch. 2, p. 81) or the first wave of colonial globalisation. The guiding claim is therefore that Hobbes’s system “did not arise out of interests that were primarily academic” but was designed to “supply the science that James I… seems to have lacked,” namely a theory of peace-keeping in a Europe shattered by sectarian conflict (ch. 4, p. 260). Hobbes, she insists, was “primarily a peace theorist,” and “it was the problem of sectarianism that consumed him” (ch. 6, p. 299). This Hobbes is also embedded in, and strategically navigating, the patronage systems of early modern England: a long-standing client of the Cavendish family whose works were “commissioned by his patrons” and often remained “the property of his patrons” (ch. 3, pp. 118-119). As she puts it starkly, he “could not speak his own voice until the publication of Leviathan” (ch. 4, p. 197), and even then, voice and venue were inflected by the hazards of political exposure.
The book rightly insists on Hobbes’s “political agency” as well as the agency of his patrons “well-connected politically and incentivized by appalling religious wars, to press for a new sovereign political order to achieve peace” (Introduction, p. xx). Chapter 3 thus dismantles the image of an isolated theorist: Hobbes as baronial client, tutor to the future Charles II, intellectual in exile with the Stuart court in Paris, and, even more crucially, an actor implicated in the governance of the Virginia Company. Indeed, for Patricia Springborg, Leviathan’s constitutional analysis of corporations (I.xxii) presupposes and displays his practical knowledge of chartered company governance. For her, this is not arm-chair theorising avant la lettre: Hobbes “speaks from his own experience as ‘a Virginia and Sommer-islands’ company administrator” (Symposium Introduction). Her conclusion is forthright: Leviathan reads not only as a treatise on sovereignty but as a constitutional anatomy of the political economy underwriting maritime empire, the “ungodly trinity of capitalism, colonisation and slavery” (Symposium Introduction). Seen this way, Hobbes is not read “forward as a pre-Enlightenment figure” (ch. 2, p. 79), nor merely as a “harbinger of the post-Westphalian state system” (ch. 2, p. 81), but as an intellectual forged in the crucible of the confessional fractures of post-Reformation Europe and acute analyst, and participant, in the institutional and economic mechanics of colonial empire.
Patricia Springborg convincingly shows that, once authorship is situated, the architecture of the Hobbesian corpus looks different: what pass for “antinomies”, deterministic epistemology versus voluntarist contract, monarchical versus parliamentary sovereignty - register as signatures of serial composition, genre, venue, and audience calibration, fully compatible with an early and remarkably stable tripartite design. This reframing has far-reaching implications: it unsettles readings that treat each work in isolation or as steps in a slow, linear intellectual progression, and it calls into question approaches that abstract Hobbes from the material conditions of his authorship, transmission, and reception. Before turning to that architectural claim, however, it is worth pausing on the originality of the method that allows Patricia Springborg to make it visible.
The Methodological-Interpretative Apparatus: Prosopography, Precarity, Surrogacy
What this book brings to the centre is not background colour but an explanatory constraint: authorship is a position within asymmetrical networks. Hence the methodological wager Patricia Springborg formulates: “Much turns on whether I can redeem my claim to verify the accounts of Hobbes and Locke in terms of the internal constraints placed upon them by the powerful patronage systems in which as clients they were situated - a prosopographical exercise concerning asymmetrical systems and the distributions of power they presuppose” (Symposium Introduction). Prosopography here does two things at once. Analytically, it reconstructs the relational matrix, in Hobbes’s case, Cavendish patronage, court circles, company courts, scholarly intermediaries, that governed what could be written, how, and for whom. Evidentially, it generates falsifiability conditions: titles, dedications, ownership, library access, and correspondence become cross-checks on interpretive claims. On this view, apparent contradictions in Hobbes’s oeuvre often register differences of purpose, audience, venue, and risk across commissions rather than deep philosophical vacillation.
Patricia Springborg’s reconstruction makes these constraints concrete. Hobbes appears as a baronial secretary, a long-standing client of the Cavendish family. William Cavendish, Earl of Newcastle, was not merely a patron but a political actor whose interests were tied to the Virginia Company. The internal constraints of such patronage systems, she argues, are critical to interpreting Hobbes’s texts: “works were commissioned over which he had little control as to their titles or even their ownership… [he] could not speak his own voice until the publication of Leviathan” (Ch. 4, p. 197). For instance, she suggests that Hobbes’s 1629 Thucydides may have been orchestrated by Cavendish to flatter James I’s absolutist sensibilities by vilifying Greek democracy, an attempted softening designed to recover royal favour for the Virginia Company (Ch. 4, p. 225). She treats Cavendish networks - political, economic, and intellectual - as both constraints and enabling resources: “well- connected politically” (Introduction, p. xx), yet affording access to libraries and collections (Hardwick Hall, Chatsworth). Against Noel Malcolm’s skepticism and “self-denying ordinance” on “the murky questions of influence, connexions and milieux” (2002), she reads the “Welbeck academy” and kindred formations as patronage architectures with ideological programmes (moderate Anglicanism, anti-
papalism, scientific exchange).
Such embeddedness in knowledge socio-political ecosystems - indeed, concrete laboratories of intellectual production - leaves material traces. The choice of genre (treatise, dedicatory epistle, burlesque), the medium (scribal circulation versus print), and even the language (Latin or English) function as indices of dependence and constraint. The point is not merely that patrons matter; it is that patronage calibrates enunciation - register, venue, and rhetorical risk. The hazards of service to powerful figures shaped not only, for Hobbes, what could be said, but how, when, and to whom.
A second pillar is Patricia Springborg’s concept of political surrogacy. Building on her earlier work (Springborg 2001), she shows how classical humanism and Greco-Roman exempla, under censorship or threat of sanction, served as vehicles for displaced political speech, often in poetic, theatrical, or epic forms (2001, p. 18), “literary form” enabling to disguise “a degree of seditiousness” (p. 26). The attention that she pays to neglected works (Historia Ecclesiastica; De mirabilibus pecci; translations of Thucydides and Homer) is particularly valuable for understanding political surrogacy and the moral-educational programme pursued by Hobbes’s patrons to discipline court culture (Springborg 2001, pp. 25- 26; Appendix, p. 373). In Reading Hobbes Backwards this concept becomes a scalpel for close reading. Hobbes, she argues, “cues his readers by catchwords to his sources wherever he could” (p. 44), inserting signals and clues into high-profile vehicles while masking dependence on traditions, most notably medieval scholasticism, he needed to “downplay.” This sits in productive dialogue, for instance, with political scientist James C. Scott’s distinction between the “public transcript” and the “hidden transcript” of the weak (1990). It also resonates with Quentin Skinner’s analysis of humanist rhetorical practices (1996). This double or sometimes multipled-voicedness, what she calls Hobbes’ “janus-faced” (Ch. 3, p. 195), complicates any straightforward narrative of philosophical development (cf. infra, Rethinking the Hobbesian System: An Early Unity).
The third plank is “precarious knowledge” (Martin Mulsow 2002), which she mobilises to characterise Hobbes’s position (Introduction, p. xxiii; Ch. 4, p. 198), compelled to “own or disown heterodox views, depending on his precariousness” (Ch. 4, pp. 203, 208). Because scholasticism was seen to underwrite papal monarchy, Hobbes “was particularly keen to hide his indebtedness to medieval scholasticism” (Ch. 1, pp. 6-7; Ch. 3, p. 118); he “downplayed his sources” (Ch. 3, p. 118), “intentionally threw a smokescreen over his sources” (Ch. 1, p. 1), and “at the last minute” named his masterwork Leviathan to deflect attention from incendiary theses on incorporation and the corpus mysticum (Ch. 1, p. 73). Under such conditions, how Hobbes “speaks” - genre, language, titling, serial composition - appears as a repertoire of risk-management: satire and burlesque as vehicles for political surrogacy affording plausible deniability (Ch. 4, p. 208); catchwords that cue informed readers to concealed sources; Latin poetic verse (e.g., the Historia Ecclesiastica) for perilous terrain; re-use and reframing of earlier materials for new regimes; and the studied obscuration of scholastic debts precisely because those debts could be weaponised against him.
These three lenses - prosopography, surrogacy/code, precarity - are mutually reinforcing. Prosopography identifies the constraints (who can say what, to whom, with what liability). Precarity may explain the strategies (why one would speak obliquely, relocate arguments across languages or genres, manuscripts or printed publications, or scatter components of a system across serial publications). Surrogacy/code specifies the vehicles through which politically charged claims travel under censorship. Hobbes’s system was inserted, opportunistically, “wherever and whenever he could” (Introduction, p. xii), into “whatever high-profile vehicles… conspicuous epistles dedicatory, his vitas, and scribal publications like political briefs…” (Ch. 4, p. 198). Together they amount to an interpretive protocol: before positing inconsistency, ask (i) whose commission is in view; (ii) what venue and medium are being used (scribal/print; Latin/English); (iii) what risks the patronage environment imposes; and (iv) whether catchwords, allusions, or generic displacements are doing covert work. When this protocol is applied, many of the familiar “antinomies” look less like doctrinal reversals than like signatures of serial composition and audience calibration compatible with an early and remarkably stable tripartite design.
What is distinctive in Patricia Springborg’s move is that she roots codedness in the social economy of patronage. Against purely rhetorical accounts (Skinner’s humanist illocution, for instance), her book shows that the form of coding is set by the structure of dependency. Code is not an ornament; it is a survival technology in hierarchical information orders. Hence her insistence on prosopography: once we reconstruct who owed what to whom, who controlled access to presses and libraries, and who bore which risks at which moments, we can predict when the public transcript will thicken with orthodoxy and where the hidden transcript will surface, catchwords, exempla, and genre shifts marking the seam. Methodologically, this triangulation also disciplines interpretation: it guards scholars against “over-coding” by tying hypotheses about hidden meaning to (i) audience segmentation (patron vs. censors vs. learned circles), (ii) paratext and circulation (dedications, licences, scribal vs. print), and (iii) contemporaneous sanction-risk (heresy, sedition, libel). On these criteria, her reading of Hobbes’s political surrogacy is not just plausible; it is testable.
Rethinking the Hobbesian System: An Early Unity
Once authorship is situated, the architecture of the Hobbesian corpus looks different. What pass for “antinomies” register for Patricia Springborg less as doctrinal reversals than as signatures of serial composition, genre, venue, and audience calibration. On this view, variation across works traces the purposes and risks of distinct commissions rather than a slow, linear evolution of Hobbes’s convictions.
Patricia Springborg’s central claim is indeed that the tripartite structure of Hobbes’s philosophy (Body, Man, Citizen) was formulated very early, “probably earlier than is generally credited,” and remained remarkably stable (Ch. 3, p. 119; Ch. 4, p. 256; Ch. 6, p. 339). She ties this early unity to an optical “epiphany” in the 1630s - the insight into the phenomenal status of sensible qualities “which do not inhere in the objects, but rather in our conception of them” (Ch. 3, pp. 127, 129-130). From that platform, the parts of the system were not invented and abandoned in turn; they were iterated. The Civil War, on this reconstruction, was not an interruption but an opportunity for Hobbes “to advertise the wider application of his scientific system” (Ch. 3, p. 129) to urgent political questions (Ch. 3, p. 133).
This early unity makes sense of the textual record when read backwards from Leviathan. Springborg argues that even the political part predates the war: The Elements of Law (1640) already contains “most of the content” later developed in De Cive and Leviathan, with Leviathan Part IV the principal novelty (Ch. 3, pp. 148, 158; Ch. 4, p. 228). Apparent discontinuities are thus better explained by what she calls Hobbes’s “characteristic opportunism in outing parts of his system… whenever he could” (Introduction, p. xxvii), adapting iterations for different audiences “to support the régime du jour” (Baumgold 2017: x). Mapped onto concrete commissions, the pattern clarifies. The Elements of Law (1640) was crafted to brief the Short Parliament on Ship Money, which called for a calibrated voluntarism appropriate to a constituency dispute. De Cive (1642), prepared for the Prince of Wales, pursued an entirely different end: probing the limits of absolute power and the advantages of a Roman civil- law frame. Leviathan (1651), as others have argued and Patricia Springborg endorses, belongs to a moment of engagement with the Commonwealth on religious toleration. Read this way, the differences between Elements, De Cive, and Leviathan are functional, not philosophical: the political uses of a stable architecture under different commissions and risks.
Form and medium amplify the effect. Hobbes operated “at the nexus of the transition from scribal publication to print” (Ch. 2, pp. 89, 118, 196). Scribal circulation within patronage circles afforded elite targeting and some insulation from censorship; print exposed arguments to wider - and riskier - publics. The result, she notes, is for scholars a “confusing amalgam of overlapping texts” (Ch. 4, p. 202): iterative manuscripts, revised printings, and unauthorised editions (e.g., Behemoth) (Introduction, p. xvi; Ch. 4, p. 199; Ch. 5, p. 292). Far from signaling instability, this material entanglement reveals a constrained strategy of serial composition that enabled Hobbes - sometimes within narrow and shifting margins of manoeuvre - to perfect, reposition, and reframe parts of a single design across venues, languages, and moments.
Taken together, these claims have clear interpretive payoffs. The familiar tensions Quentin Skinner highlights between a deterministic psychology and a voluntarist contract, or the supposed march from Elements to Leviathan, cease to be diagnostic of theoretical inconsistency. They read, instead, as context-specific redeployments of an already-formed system - the same backbone rearticulated under different commissions, audiences, and media. On Patricia Springborg’s account, the unity comes first; the variation is the trace of use.
Conclusion: “Reading Backwards”, and Sideways
Patricia Springborg’s book compels us to recalibrate how we read Hobbes. Its central wager is not that “context” decorates interpretation, but that authorship itself is a position that can constrain - and enable - what can be said, how, when, and to whom. Methodologically, the study is a model of integrated contextualisation: prosopography, patronage/clientage analysis, material bibliography, and close reading are made to work together. The result is a strikingly concrete picture of Hobbes’s political agency and strategic authorship, an author whose works were “commissioned by his patrons,” and who nonetheless managed to thread elements of a unified philosophical system through genres, languages, and venues.
A chief virtue of this approach is to show that, once authorship is situated, the architecture of the Hobbesian corpus looks different. What often passes for “antinomies” registers less as doctrinal reversal than as the signature of serial composition, venue, and audience calibration, fully compatible with an early and remarkably stable tripartite design (Body, Man, Citizen). This is a powerful corrective, offered by Patricia Springborg, to readings that abstract Hobbes from the material conditions under which his texts were produced, transmitted, and received.
At the same time, a note of balance is in order. The patronage lens is indispensable; yet we should keep in view the resilience of Hobbes’s conceptual architecture, its capacity to exceed any one commission or constituency. Patricia Springborg herself grants as much when she stresses the early unity and iterative refinement of the system. The strength of her book is precisely that it holds these two truths together: dependence without reduction, context without conceptual dissolution. The upshot is an interpretive discipline: before positing inconsistency, ask whose commission is in view, which medium and language are in play, what risks the patronage environment imposes, and whether catchwords, allusions, or generic displacements are doing covert work. This discipline bears on a broader historiography. The Cambridge School’s emphasis on linguistic context (Skinner) and republican paradigms (Pocock) has been formative; Springborg does not reject it so much as extend it laterally. Political language is not only embedded in discourses; it is embedded in social systems of knowledge production, hierarchical, precarious, and subject to sanction. Hence her triad of interpretive levers: prosopography (who owes what to whom), political surrogacy (how ideas travel under censorship), and precarious knowledge (why authors code, displace, and retitle under risk). Hobbes emerges, in her own apt image, as “Janus- faced” (Ch. 3, p. 195): looking back to scholastic and commentary traditions (Greek, Arabic, Latin) which he strategically obscured, and forward to an empirical, calculation-based civil science designed to keep the peace in a Europe shattered by confessional war (Ch. 6, pp. 299, 327, 339). Read this way, “reading Hobbes backwards” means, in practice, also reading him sideways: through networks, commissions, archives, and the material pathways of texts. It also has substantive consequences for how we place Hobbes in the history of early colonial capitalism. For scholars trained, as I was in early 2000s France, in dehistoricised canons, the book’s provocative intervention is salutary. Patricia Springborg refuses the teleology that reads Hobbes “forward” into the Enlightenment or the post-Westphalian state (Ch. 2, pp. 79, 81). She instead demands a symmetry of interpretive charity: “we moderns have a tin ear when it comes to thinkers past and the political events in which they operated, denying them the sophistication and aspirations to political influence weclaim for ourselves” (Introduction, p. xxiv). Taking that demand seriously means acknowledging thatideas have social lives; that a philosophical voice is inseparable from the social body that sustains and constrains it; and that responsible interpretation requires not only philology but an ethics of situated reading.
For me, the value of her work lies precisely in this: a history of philosophy that treats authors as social actors, whose conceptual innovations were articulated in dialogue with, and sometimes in service to, the political agendas of their patrons. It brings Hobbes’s “political agency” into focus without collapsing it into his political theory; it restores the risks and resources of patronage to the meaning-conditions of the text; and it invites us to read not just “at” Hobbes’s sentences but “through” the circuits by which they were commissioned, copied, licensed, printed, and received. It also invites a rethinking of Hobbes’s place in the intellectual history of colonial capitalism, a dimension often neglected in the canon. In doing so, it brings Hobbes closer to the kind of history of philosophy I have long sought to read, to be taught, and eventually to practice: one that resists the false choice between conceptual rigour and historical embeddedness, and that recognises that every voice, including Hobbes’s, and our own, speaks from somewhere.
Reading Hobbes Backwards, in short, is both a substantive reinterpretation and a methodological programme. It challenges presentist comforts, insists on testable claims about networks and media, and shows that once patronage, purpose, and risk are taken seriously, many of the field’s old binaries - determinism/voluntarism, scholasticism/modernity, rhetoric/science - are less diagnostic of inconsistency than traces of an author negotiating, with considerable mêtis, the hazards of an uneven information order.
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References
Baumgold, Deborah. 2017. Three-Text Edition of Thomas Hobbes’s Political Theory: The Elements of Law, De Cive and Leviathan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Malcolm, Noel. 2002. Aspects of Hobbes. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mulsow, Martin. 2012. Prekäres Wissen: Eine andere Ideengeschichte der Frühen Neuzeit. Berlin: Suhrkamp.
Skinner, Quentin. 1996. Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Scott, James C. 1990. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. Yale: Yale University Press.
Springborg, Patricia. 2001. ‘Classical Translation and Political Surrogacy: English Renaissance Classical Translations and Imitations as Politically Coded Texts’. Finnish Yearbook of Political Thought, 5: 11-33.