Webs of association : the textual construction of a commonwealth in Thomas Hobbe's Leviathan
Date
1992
Authors
Richardson, Brian William
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Abstract
Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan is an extended consideration of the nature of political order. How is a multitude distinct from a unity? To understand Hobbes's answer, it is important to understand what he thought a scientific analysis of the commonwealth should be like. The account must be composed of clearly defined words and deductions. The argument ought to be a clear progression from premise to conclusion. Science must not include metaphors or rhetorical tropes, which are confusing and potentially seditious. However, despite his own ideal, metaphors occur throughout Hobbes's work. For example, the commonwealth is compared to a building, the human mind is likened to a river, and sedition is discussed as a disease.
Many commentators use Hobbes's attack on the use of metaphors to justify ignoring or altering the passages in his work that they label metaphorical. Hobbes's position becomes clear because much of what he writes, well over half the text, is irrelevant to his scientific account. Other commentators acknowledge his metaphors, but do not move beyond claiming that he is a contradictory thinker. Because both positions do not adequately consider Hobbes's epistemology, they overemphasize the place of metaphors in his work.
Knowledge begins with experience, out of which humans construct ideas. People use words as signs for their ideas. Science is primarily concerned with locating general ideas in a hierarchical structure. The more universal the idea, the higher it is located. Within this web, any particular object can be compared to other objects that share some quality. While Hobbes rejects metaphors, he bases scientific knowledge on the associations of ideas.
Hobbes approached the problem of political order by comparing the commonwealth to things such as buildings, machines, human bodies and stage actors. Two dominant patterns that structure Hobbes's associations are, first, a division between physical, animate and symbolic objects and, second, a division between material, final , efficient and formal causality. How the commonwealth is created, how it acts, and how people can act within it are all delineated by the ideas that contribute to the idea of the commonwealth. Therefore, after closely considering Hobbes's epistemology, it is necessary to reject some of the categories that are frequently used to characterize his texts, and to rethink ho e understand the scientific account of the commonwealth that Hobbes constructed.
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UN SDG 16: Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions