Abstract
The greatest English political theorist and philosopher, Hobbes was born at Malmesbury and died at Hardwick, the seat of the Earl of Devonshire, who had been Hobbes’s patron for many years. After attending Magdalen Hall, Oxford (BA 1608), Hobbes entered the Devonshire household as tutor to the son, and made several trips to the Continent, on one of which (in 1636) he conversed with Galileo, whose resolutive-compositive method Hobbes took over, and whose laws of motion he later carried over and applied to the motions, internal and external, of men. In 1640, fearing that his earliest work would offend the Long Parliament, he went into voluntary exile in Paris, where for a time (1646–8) he tutored the future Charles II in mathematics. He returned to England in 1651 and from then on lived as inconspicuously as he could.
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This chapter was originally published in The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics, 1st edition, 1987. Edited by John Eatwell, Murray Milgate and Peter Newman
The greatest English political theorist and philosopher, Hobbes was born at Malmesbury and died at Hardwick, the seat of the Earl of Devonshire, who had been Hobbes’s patron for many years. After attending Magdalen Hall, Oxford (BA 1608), Hobbes entered the Devonshire household as tutor to the son, and made several trips to the Continent, on one of which (in 1636) he conversed with Galileo, whose resolutive-compositive method Hobbes took over, and whose laws of motion he later carried over and applied to the motions, internal and external, of men. In 1640, fearing that his earliest work would offend the Long Parliament, he went into voluntary exile in Paris, where for a time (1646–8) he tutored the future Charles II in mathematics. He returned to England in 1651 and from then on lived as inconspicuously as he could.
Economic insights are to be found in his three main works of political theory, The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic (1640); De Cive (1642), translated (by Hobbes) as Philosophical Rudiments Concerning Government and Society (1651); Leviathan (1651); and in his history of the Long Parliament and the Civil War, Behemoth (1682). Hobbes’s great work was his political science, of which his economic ideas seem to be only an incidental part. Yet we may notice that his political edifice rested on economic assumptions, in that his model of society was the atomistic bourgeois market society whose seismic rise in England in his own time he had certainly noticed. However, he did not attempt anything along the lines of the classical political economy of the 18th century, or even of the political arithmetic of his own century: he offered neither a general theory of exchange value nor a theory of distribution, that is, of the determinants of rent, interest, profits and wages, nor even a theory of the balance of trade or of foreign exchange. But he did set down a few general economic principles. One is a supply and demand theory of exchange value, as in: ‘The value of all things contracted for, is measured by the Appetite of the Contractors’ (Leviathan, ch. 15, p. 208) and in his more striking statement
The Value or WORTH of a man, is as of all other things, his Price; that is to say, so much as would be given for the use of his Power: and therefore is not absolute; but a thing dependent on the need and judgement of another … And as in other things, so in men, not the seller, but the buyer determines the Price … (ibid., ch. 10, pp. 151–2).
The two statements are consistent only on the assumption of an endemic surplus of wage-labourers, an assumption which Hobbes did explicitly make. The able-bodied poor, who were expected to increase indefinitely,
are to be forced to work: and to avoyed the excuse of not finding employment, there ought to be such Lawes, as may encourage all manner of Arts; as Navigation, Agriculture, Fishing, and all manner of Manifacture that requires labour. The multitude of poor, and yet strong people still encreasing, they are to be transplanted into Countries not sufficiently inhabited: where neverthelesse, they are not to exterminate those they find there; but constrain them to inhabit closer together, and not range a great deal of ground, to snatch what they find; but to court each little Plot with art and labour, to give them their sustenance in due season (Leviathan, ch. 30, p. 387; cf. Behemoth, p. 126).
Another general proposition is that ‘a mans Labour also, is a commodity exchangeable for benefit, as well as any other thing’ (Leviathan, ch. 24, p. 295).
More important than such general principles are his many policy recommendations to the Sovereign, all of which are designed to increase the wealth of the nation by promoting the accumulation of capital by private enterprisers seeking their own enrichment. Typical are his recommendations about taxation. Taxes are justified only because they provide the income which enables the sovereign power to maintain the conditions for private enterprise: ‘the Impositions that are layd on the People by the Soveraign Power, are nothing else but the Wages, due to them that hold the publique Sword, to defend private men in the exercise of severall Trades, and Callings’ (ibid., ch. 30, p. 386). Taxes on wealth are bad, for they discourage accumulation. The best taxes are those on consumption, which discourage ‘the luxurious waste of private men’ (p. 387). Hobbes’s recommendations to the Sovereign all follow from his most general rule, as set out in the opening paragraph of chapter 30:
The office of the Soveraign, (be it a Monarch, or an Assembly,) consisteth in the end, for which he was trusted with the Soveraign Power, namely the procuration of the safety of the people … But by Safety here, is not meant a bare Preservation but also all other Contentments of life, which every man by lawfull Industry, without danger, or hurt to the Common-wealth, shall acquire to himself (p. 376).
Most important of all was his insistence that the sovereign was above the law and could not be limited by any of the traditional rights of leasehold or copyhold tenants, or by any traditional limits on market transactions, or traditional protections of the poor: ‘it belongeth to the Common-wealth, (that is to say, to the Soveraign), to appoint in what manner, all kinds of contract between Subjects, (as buying, selling, exchanging, borrowing, lending, letting, and taking to hire), are to bee made; and by what words and signes they shall be understood for valid’ (ibid., ch. 24, p. 299).
In short, the job of the state was to clear the way for capitalism. It is evident that Hobbes’s doctrine was particularly appropriate to the period of primary capital accumulation. It is scarcely too much to say that it was his perception of the needs of such a period which determined the main lines of his political theory. What was needed was a sovereign powerful enough to override all the protections of the common law, and, to justify such a power, a new, untraditional basis for political obligation. That is what Hobbes’s doctrine provided. In effect, it is the legitimation of the early capitalist state.
Selected Works
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1650. Elements of law natural and politic, ed. F. Tonnies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1928.
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1651. Philosophic rudiments concerning government and society. Published as De cive or the citizen, ed. S.P. Lamprecht. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1949.
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1651. Leviathan, ed. C.B. Macpherson. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968.
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1682. Behemoth; or the long parliament, ed. F. Tonnies. London: Simpkin, Marshall & Co., 1889.
References
Macpherson, C.B. 1983. Hobbes’s political economy. Philosophical Forum 14 (3–4).
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Macpherson, C.B. (1987). Hobbes, Thomas (1588–1679). In: The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95121-5_1012-1
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