A. P. Martinich, A Hobbes Dictionary (Cambridge, Massachusetts and Oxford UK: Blackwell Publishers, Inc., 1995), xi + 336 pp., Paper, $24.95 (ISBN 063-119262-X). Reviewed by Joseph Filonowicz, Long Island University, Brooklyn Campus

I have very many good things to say about this book and very few critical complaints to make. I had hoped before reading it that it would turn out to be not so much a "dictionary" as an original commentary on Hobbes’s thought, and I was not disappointed. It is a genuine commentary in that Martinich defends many interesting interpretive suggestions about Hobbes’s philosophy, while developing several discernible general theses or themes of his own, among them: 1) Hobbes’s radically democratic account of the origins and authority (but not the exercise) of political sovereignty, 2) Hobbes’s basic decency and humanity and how his jaundiced view of our human nature ought not to lead us to demonize him, 3) His sincerity and seriousness in defending himself against charges of atheism while upholding the real existence of a corporeal God, 4) Some seemingly irremovable logical perplexities in Hobbes’s account of the laws of nature and their role in the sovereign-making covenant, and how these reflect his ambivalence on the question of whether the laws of nature are genuine laws at all. Interestingly and without fanfare Martinich recasts the whole traditional "Taylor thesis" controversy in a new, somewhat more coherent way and suggests (without actually stating) a view of the matter which may turn out to be right-that the dispute is impossible in principle to decide, not merely because Hobbes writes ambiguously about the laws of nature, but because in his thinking about them he was ambivalent, or simply deeply incoherent.

Martinich states that his primary purpose is to explain the key concepts in Hobbes’s thought and "those subsidiary concepts that are important but not well known." His secondary purpose, which is achieved extremely well, is to refer his readers to the crucial discussions of these concepts in Hobbes’s works. The book would be very useful were it to do only this, given the enormity and complexity of Hobbes’s output and the tendency of many scholars to cite only those discussions of (for example) "law of nature" or "covenant" that serve their particular interpretation of some Hobbesian doctrine. For most of his some 140 entries Martinich tries to answer three questions: How did Hobbes use a particular word? Where did he use it? Why did he use it? There is a brief, somewhat peculiar discussion in Martinich’s preface of the differences between dictionaries and encyclopedias: whereas dictionaries are supposed to give the meanings of words, encyclopedias information about things, the two are closely related because most words "are used for saying something about reality." A Hobbes Dictionary is a blend, since it means to say "how Hobbes uses a word to talk about reality." I call this peculiar because I am not sure exactly what its upshot is supposed to be; Martinich doesn’t make any general claims about the precise relations among Hobbes’s terms, traditional understandings of the concepts he centrally employs, and the "new" reality of bodies in motion he purports to be revealing through his philosophy. I suppose if I were Martinich I would have simply skipped the discussion of dictionaries and encyclopedias and called the work a lexicon, explaining that although the work is organized to stick closely to Hobbes’s terminology it does constitute an attempt to give a more-or-less coherent interpretation of his thought as a whole (a difficult job), encompassing his metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of science, language, politics and theology. Martinich interprets creatively whenever the opportunity is presented by apparent contra-dictions in Hobbes, suggesting "reasons for them or ways of eliminating them without trying to force an interpretation on the text," while steering between "being partisan and being uncritical."

In addition to the "entries"-most of which constitute short, interesting essays-Martinich supplies a chronology of Hobbes’s life and works, a chronology of events in English history correlated to Hobbes’s discussion of them in Behemoth, and an annotated bibliography of early and recent editions of Hobbes’s works, of seventeenth-century books relevant to Hobbes’s works, and of twentieth-century works on Hobbes (the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are passed over). There is, finally, a prefatory biography of Hobbes which locates main events of his life in the context of a succinct history of seventeenth-century England through the first decade of the Restoration. Presented as an elegant, eighteen-page essay entitled "Thomas Hobbes in Stuart England," it is actually one of the most useful parts of the book. Finally-I thought after reading it-a clear account, suitable for those who (like me) find their heads swim trying to keep things straight about the Act of Supremacy, the Marian exile, Ship Money, Bishops’ Wars, The Triennial Act, the Star Chamber, the Grand Remonstrance, the Nineteen Propositions, the Pride’s Purge, The Engagement Act, the Rump Parliament assembling and reassembling, and so on. Martinich connects the confusing political events of the period to the doctrines of Leviathan in a way that at long last gave me the sense that I actually understood, at least roughly, the "big picture" of that period in English history.

In order to convey a sense of the style, methodology and utility (especially for teaching) of A Hobbes Dictionary in this brief review, I shall confine my synopsis and commentary to only one of the four themes listed above, namely Martinich’s earnest effort to bring some order, at least, to the problem of understanding Hobbesian laws of nature and their role in his theories of government and ethics. These are best ap-preciated in the context of the entries concerning "law," "laws, division of," "law of nature, fundamental," and "laws of nature."

It is rather hard to give a simple account of the debate, now some sixty years running, between scholars who find inspiration in A.E. Taylor’s famous article, "The Ethical Doctrine of Hobbes"(Philosophy, 1938) and those who reject Taylor’s interpretation in favor of the "orthodox" reading of Hobbes’s ideas regarding the state of nature, its laws, and the sovereign-making formula by which Hobbes’s hypo-thetical would-be citizens manage to escape from it. Perhaps wisely, Martinich does not try to do this explicitly. But since my intent here is not to enter into the debate but rather to show how Martinich throws some light on it, I trust that my oversimplifications in giving here a short summary of the dispute will be overlooked or forgiven.

I. Is there good and evil, right and wrong, in the state of nature? On the orthodox reading, there cannot be. Since every person calls good what pleases her, and since there is as yet no impartial judge to set moral standards by making laws, each person effectively has an unbounded natural right to whatever she believes will enhance her own safety and interest-including others’ bodies.

On the Taylor view, though there cannot be justice and injustice, strictly speaking, since "unjust" means "fact contrary to (positive) law," there is a moral law, the law of nature, which is "immutable and eternal," and fully obligatory "in foro interno"; "what (the laws of nature) forbid, can never be lawful; what they command, can never be unlawful. For pride, ingratitude, breach of contracts (or injury), inhumanity, contumely, will never be lawful, nor the contrary virtues to these ever unlawful, as we take them for dispositions of the mind, that is, as they are considered in the court of conscience, where only they oblige and are laws" (De Cive, III, 29).

II. What is the precise nature of this fundamental law of nature (and of the twenty or so others which allegedly follow from the definition of "law of nature" in conjunction with the description of the wretchedness of the state of nature)?

In De Cive and The Elements of Law Hobbes identifies natural law with reason, right reason or the "dictates of reason," but nowadays attention seems always to gravitate to the definition of law of nature given in Leviathan: 1. a precept or general rule, 2. found out by reason, 3. by which a person is forbidden to do that which would destroy her life directly or indirectly. The orthodox would have it that, since Hobbes consistently equates reason with simple calculation or computation, the "precepts" in question must be prudential, action-guiding propositions, means-ends statements, "certain conclusions, understood by reason, of things to be done and omitted" (given the overriding and universally shared desire for survival). Similarly what the laws of nature proscribe must be "forbidden" in a metaphorical sense. The laws of nature "forbid" the not seeking of peace where it is available in the same figurative sense in which Hobbes says that everyone is "governed" by his own reason. The fundamental law of nature is not a genuine law at all, in either a political or a moral sense; rather it is simply a formalized description of what rational humans will do in order to preserve their lives (seek peace). Its normative force is entirely rational and prudential.

On the Taylor view, the law of nature is a moral law which binds unconditionally in and out of commonwealth. It is a genuine law in the same sense in which political laws are genuine; it is the command of Him who has sovereign power-in this case, God.

III. What is the precise nature of the covenant or contract captured in the formula, "I authorize and give up my right of governing myself to this man or to this assembly of men on this condition that thou (i.e., you all) give up thy right to him and authorize all his actions in like manner"? (How does it work? What motivates individuals to enter into it, and what obligates them to abide by it once they have entered it?)

On the orthodox interpretation-the one, let’s face it, that we all learned in undergraduate philosophy or political science class-what motivates them to enter into the contract is the same as what obliges them to abide by it-rational self-interest (fear and hope). On the Taylor view, they are certainly motivated to enter into it by fear and hope, but to leave it at that is to overlook the fact that they also have an independent moral obligation to covenant together, imposed on them by reason, which God gave them in order that they might know the fundamental law of nature, "that peace be sought after, where it may be found, and where not there to provide ourselves for helps of war" (De Cive, II, 2).

Moreover my obedience to the sovereign, once chosen, is morally demanded of me even where it seems contrary to my interests to obey and safe to disobey. This is because I have authorized the sovereign, "avouched" his actions, and am so "bound by my own act." How have I authorized him? Through the contract with my fellows. And since "to stand to our covenants, or to keep faith, is a thing necessary for the obtaining of peace; it will prove. . . to be a precept of the natural law." Taylor argued that Hobbes’s ethical theory is properly deontic, and "detachable" from his egoistic psychology. Citizens have a duty to authorize, and then to obey, a sovereign, which is wholly independent of their passions. (If Taylor is right to say that Hobbes has an ethical theory that is "detachable" I would classify it as a type of divine law, rather than deontological view; but that is a different matter.)

If my authorization of the sovereign imposes moral as well as prudential obligations on me, on the Taylor view, as authorization itself depends on a moral principle (a natural law), then how does authorization work on the orthodox model, which recognizes no pre-political (nor indeed any) non-prudential obligations? This is a bit of a tough one (as we sensed even as undergraduates). Roughly, our covenant with one another is a deal, in which each of us agrees mutually to stand out of everyone else’s way in our respective attempts to survive and obtain goods. We each get life and (some) liberty in exchange for submission to a lawgiver able to guarantee the peace we need to enjoy these things, by means of his power to "overawe" us all. (As one of my own undergraduate professors, Arthur Jentz, put it, the contract "must involve actual surrender of power, otherwise people would cheat on it.") What keeps us in the contract is the same thing as what moved us to enter into it in the first place-regard to self-interest.

Which interpretation is right? If they can be harmonized, nobody seems yet to have come anywhere close to doing it; if they can’t, then Hobbes must be very radically inconsistent. Both readings face very serious difficulties on their own terms. To name just one on each side: Something seems circular in the Taylor view: I am morally obligated (not just psychologically forced) to obey the sovereign’s commands because I have covenanted with my fellows to do so; I am obligated to honor the covenant because there is a (moral) law of nature obligating me to keep covenants; there is a law of nature obligating me to do so because an (irresistible) sovereign, God, has commanded such a law. But if might ultimately makes right, who needs covenants? Why not just have God command people directly through reason to obey whomever their king is? The Taylor view has Hobbes sounding almost like a defender of divine right and tends to strip him of what we think is his most enduring contribution to European culture, his statement of the social contract theory and its central idea, that sovereignty is legitimate because the people authorize government, create government. It also seems to require that we ignore what he says, in his very first work on the subject of ethics and politics, is his central aim: to "demonstrate by a most evident connection...first the absolute necessity of leagues and contracts, and thence the rudiments both of moral and civil prudence." (The Elements of Law, "The Epistle Dedicatory") The major problem for the orthodox view is simply the many passages from all three of Hobbes’s major works in political philosophy which just don’t jibe with the traditional egoistic interpretation of his account of political and ethical obligation, and the many startling parallels between Hobbes’s reasoning and that of Kant. (E.g., "Although a man should order all his actions so much as belongs to external obedience just as the law commands, but not for the law’s sake, but by reason of some punishment annexed to it, or out of vain glory; yet he is unjust" (De Cive, IV, 21).)

The headache would be merely scholarly but for the fact that most of us are teachers of undergraduates as well; should one stick to the "orthodox undergraduate" reading or risk confusing students hopelessly by going into all of this, unequipped with any clear way out? I’ve tried both ways; the first seems deceptive, the second pointless. I believe Martinich can help, if not by settling the problem then by escorting us through the evidence on both sides in the clearest, most orderly, and fairest way anyone has yet managed. Martinich’s guiding interpretive question in all of this is not "is the Taylor thesis true or false?" but rather, "are the laws of nature genuine laws, or aren’t they?" Here are his main points:

Law is the most important concept in Hobbes. Law is command, not counsel; law expresses something the addressee ought to do because the lawgiver wants it done, not because it will (ostensibly) benefit the addressee. Though Hobbes never makes the distinction, we can distinguish between the form and the content of any law. The form expresses the authority by which the law is commanded; the content expresses what it is that is to be done or not done. ("I, the sovereign, command that. . ." expresses the form of each of his laws.) Any law must be promulgated. This generates a problem, for in De Cive the laws of nature are called "tacit dictates of right reason;" but if they are tacit and not express, then whether they can be genuine laws becomes unclear.

Any law is by definition just; yet Hobbes sometimes says that nothing can be a civil law if it violates a law of nature. Does this leave room for civil disobedience, as it does in Locke? Hobbes seems to reason the other way around, that anything commanded by the sovereign (whoever has "the supreme power, that is to say, the right of making laws") is a civil law and ipso facto not contrary to any law of nature. Laws can properly be called good and bad; a good law is "perspicuous" (well-explained) and necessary for the good of all the people. It is always in the sovereign’s self-interest to make good laws, since he is only as strong as his people. (Hobbes forgets-as many students are quick to realize and argue in their papers-that since the sovereign is in the state of nature, he may well desire his own immediate good at the expense of his long-term best interests.)

Laws differ from covenants, in that although both express the will of the persons who make them, covenants impose obligations on the persons who enter into them while laws impose obligations on those to whom they are addressed. Covenants impose obligations because they are promissory, contractual; laws impose obligations because of a standing obligation to obedience to laws in general. In covenants what is to be done is expressed prior to acquiring the obligation to do it; in law the obligation to obey precedes the specification of what is to be done (the law’s content). Thus the sovereign, not being a party to any covenant, has no obligations to his subjects, whereas his subjects already have an obligation to obey him, since it is he who properly controls the content of the law and gives it its form. In Leviathan Hobbes classifies laws as either (1) natural (the laws of nature) or (2) positive. Positive laws are then divided into two classes, (a) Divine (God’s commands) and (b) human (both distributive and penal). This classification does not always work smoothly (doesn’t God command the laws of nature?), though certainly human laws are always commands of an earthly sovereign.

Hobbes distinguishes between having an obligation and being "held" or "tied" to it. In De Cive it seems that natural laws create obligations, though people in the state of nature are not "held" to them, since they are not genuine laws-that is, commands backed up by overwhelming power to compel obedience. Apparently Hobbes wants to say that the law of nature demanding that we fulfill contractual obligations is "obligatory" in some (quasi-moral? purely rational?) sense while acknowledging that no one in his right mind in that state could ever be expected to be moved to honor it; that can only happen outside the state of nature, where there is a physical power to "hold" each citizen to his or her obligation to fulfill contracts (including covenants). ("Pacto obligamur; lege obligati tenemur.") Martinich reminds us, correctly, I believe, that "moral" obligations as opposed to prudential ones (if there are any) can never, for Hobbes, by themselves move anyone to act on them.

Using his earlier distinction Martinich makes the first of what I find to be at least three plausible and very interesting interpretive suggestions: that reason supplies the content of the laws of nature, which then become genuine laws, capable of actually motivating, when someone in authority and with power commands people to obey them. If to violate the laws of nature is only metaphorically forbidden, by reason, it would seem that they cannot be genuine laws, so what is the point of calling them laws? But if in the state of nature they are "laws" only in respect of their content, then (and leaving God out of it, for now) we may say that although people in the state of nature can through reason fully appreciate the "point," as it were, of the laws of nature, the sovereign must stilll be established before they can "really" be laws; he must give them their form by commanding and enforcing them. (But then I would say it must be something other than the mere "content" of the law of nature requiring individuals to (e.g.) lay down the right to all things to the extent that others are willing to do the same-namely fear-which explains how they can actually be moved to lay down their weapons.) Next, taking "God" seriously, Hobbes does say that only when the dictates of right reason are considered as the word of God are they "properly called laws," and that God promulgates the laws of nature through reason. This would explain (in a way congenial to the Taylor view) why Hobbes says of the laws of nature considered as "dictates of reason" that "men use to call (them) by the name of laws, but improperly, for they are but conclusions or theorems concerning what conduces to the conservation and defense of themselves" (italics added). If Hobbes meant to hold that the laws of nature are not properly laws, but instead merely theorems of prudential reason (orthodox view), then why should he call them laws himself and then blame others for confusing self-defense theorems ("convenient articles of peace") with laws? He must have regarded them as theorems and as laws. Martinich thinks that sometime between the appearance of the revised De Cive in 1647 and the writing of Leviathan in 1650-51 Hobbes came fully to realize that the laws of nature could never be genuine laws unless someone, namely God, commanded them. We are again pulled back to the "precept or general rule" which "forbids" passage. And here is Martinich’s second interesting suggestion: that "precept or general rule" needn’t be taken simply to mean either "prudential maxims" (orthodox view) or "laws or commands of God" (Taylor view). Rather, "precept" may mean any action-guiding proposition. Laws and prudential maxims would then be two types of precept. Since Hobbes uses "precept or general rule" to refer jointly to the right of nature (preserve yourself) and the law of nature (seek peace), perhaps the fundamental right of nature is a precept, the fundamental law of nature a rule. The law of nature expresses what is "forbidden" (by God?), the right of nature expresses what humans are compelled to do by their instinct for survival. I find this appealing since I’ve always been astonished that a few scholars would argue that even the "right to another’s body" in the state of nature should be conceived as a moral right. Martinich’s reading entails (though I’m not sure he realizes this) that Hobbes’s concept of "right of nature," at least, is not a moral notion at all.

After judiciously admitting that "it is impossible to settle once and for all how Hobbes wants ‘forbidden’ to be taken here," Martinich offers a third suggestion, which is that "Hobbes is simply ambivalent."

Hobbes had, I would suggest, both a conservative and an innovative streak that he could not reconcile. As a conservative, who favored an absolute mon-archy and top-down government in general, Hobbes believed the traditional view that God is the author of the laws of nature who so arranged the world that people who disobeyed them would eventually be severely punished. On the other hand, as an innovative, modernist thinker, he saw that human beings had to take care of themselves and could not depend upon God to arrange their daily affairs. Thus, he did not want to recognize any law other than laws that human beings made. He wanted the state of nature to be as unpleasant and lawless as possible; and thus he was sometimes led to deny that the laws of nature are genuine laws. What I am offering is a conjecture; scholars are thoroughly divided in their interpretation of Hobbes on this point (187).

Indeed they are! In fact, believers in the basic soundness of the orthodox view (like me) will probably have it that, despite his ambivalence, Hobbes’s deepest urges clearly lay in the modernist direction. His first priority, as stated in The Elements of Law, was to reduce the science of politics "to the rules and infallibility of reason," to which end there is "no way, but first to put such principles down for a foundation, as passion not mistrusting, may not seek to displace; and afterward to build thereon the truth of cases in the law of nature (which hitherto have been built in the air) by degrees, till the whole be inexpungible" ("The Epistle Dedicatory," italics added). In other words, first deduce the articles of peace and show that people are obligated by sheer prudence to follow them; then worry about whether or not they are appropriately called laws. For "us," the Lawgiver God of Leviathan seems to be mostly a deus ex machina brought down as the logical capstone needed to keep whole Hobbes’s essential idea of law-as-command. Martinich’s evidence and suggestions notwithstanding, I can’t help but think that Hobbes’s overall argument points firmly in the direction of replacing the Christian God with His mortal counterpart, the sovereign, and restricting the proper sense of "law" to the political sphere by abandoning the idea that the so-called laws of nature are, or need to be, laws at all (as opposed to prudential policies for modern-thinking humans). But that is just my view. Still I am grateful to Martinich for showing me far more clearly than I saw before just what interpretive issues my sticking to this view involves me in, and why a little more open-mindedness and humility all around might be a good thing as we enter the seventh decade of this controversy (which remains surprisingly interesting).

I said that I had a few critical complaints to make about this book but on reflection can think of only two worth mentioning. One is that Martinich seems a bit less even-handed concerning Hobbes’s "theology" than he is regarding the Taylor business; he assumes without much positive argument that his subject had genuine religious scruples and sincerely believed that God is real and is a body. Though he mentions a few reasons given by "some scholars" for questioning whether Hobbes’s arguments concerning God were "sincerely presented," Martinich seems to dismiss them rather too perfunctorily. His entry on "God" actually seems weaker (less convincing) than nearly all of the others. I think he could have performed a valuable service by laying out the arguments on both sides in greater detail and by taking seriously the view that Hobbes was not merely ambivalent or eccentric when it came to God, but deliberately laced his political treatises with bits and pieces of what finally adds up to a scathing reductio ad absurdum of the whole of Christian theology, and was in fact an atheist. My other criticism is that Martinich "softens" Hobbes at too many places where it is not really necessary to do so, by the use of qualifiers, modals and passive-voice constructions. For example, he says that for Hobbes "human desires often tend to be. . .self-centered," that "it is virtually impossible for there to be a conflict between human and divine law," that covenants with God can only be made "through his earthly representative, usually a sovereign," that in the state of nature "actual behavior need not be in apparent conformity to" the laws of nature, that a covenant is a contract in which one or both parties "is to perform her part of the bargain" and so on (italics added). I am honestly unable to understand why Martinich does this; it detracts from Hobbes’s logical and literary boldness, gratuitously tarnishing the Sage of Malmesbury’s famous "broadsword" and matching "steel cap."

• Letter from the Editors
• Articles
  • Compromising Standards, Jonathan E. Adler
  • Three Courses in Philosophy of Religion, Michael Martin
  • Values Analysis: An Experiment in Interdisciplinary Ethics, Charles Ess
  • Pre-college Philosophy Teaching as a Career Option, David Martens and Hugh Taft-Morales
  • A Syllabus for a Course on Virtue, Beth Singer
  • Ze, Zer, Mer, Richard E. Creel
• Book Reviews
  • A Hobbes Dictionary, Reviewed by Joseph Filonowicz
  • Political Justice,  Reviewed by William L. McBrid
  • Classics of Modern Political Theory: Machiavelli to Mill, Reviewed by Ramon M. Lemos
  • Dictionary of Philosophy and Religion, Eastern and Western Thought, Reviewed by Jerome Gellman
  • The Nationalism Reader, Reviewed by August Viglione
  • Leibniz and the Rational Order of Nature, Reviewed by Ursula Niklas
• List of Books Received
• News and Notes
• Addresses of Contributors