Hobbes's Strategy of Convergence

• In Event: Historical Perspectives on the Meanings and Challenges of Pluralism (1355-1752)

Abstract

Thomas Hobbes is not generally read as a theorist of moderation. On most reasonable readings, his political philosophy traffics in extremes. His most famous argument presents readers with a stark choice between a state of war and peace through submission to an absolute state. There is, he is at pains to argue, no middle way.
Yet Hobbes frequently used a rhetoric of moderation that claimed to seek “middle ways”. For instance, he casts the project of “Leviathan” as an attempt to make an argument that passes “unwounded” between the swords of two contending camps: “with those who contend, on one side for too great Liberty, and on the other side for too much Authority.” In “De Cive”’s section on religion, Hobbes writes that he aims to steer a middle course between two “rocks”—between defying “God’s majesty by obeying the commonwealth too strictly” or slipping “into confrontation with the commonwealth in our anxiety not to offend God.” Similar appeals to a “middle way” and to moderation occur throughout Hobbes’s major political works.
These appeals are puzzling for at least two reasons. First, many of Hobbes’s conclusions were not themselves moderate, even by the standards of his time. He also rarely felt the need to moderate his positions in the face of criticism. Instead, critics often prompted him to “tie [the argumentative] knots more tightly.” Second, as an ethical ideal, moderation was tightly connected to an Aristotelian tradition that Hobbes claimed to reject.
What functions is the rhetoric of moderation performing in Hobbes’s work? This paper attempts to answer this question by situating Hobbes in the context of broader political and religious appeals to moderation in early modern England. It will argue that, in many ways, Hobbes’s use of the rhetoric of moderation made him a man of his time. For Hobbes, as for many others in early modern England, this rhetoric served to create not just “middle ways” but also immoral and zealous extremes. The rhetoric of moderation was deeply polemical, and often coercive. It is within this context that Hobbes’s otherwise puzzling invocations of moderation start to make sense.

Author

• Alison McQueen, Stanford University