Volume 8, Number 9 · May 18, 1967
Hobbes in One Piece
By Anthony Quinton
Hobbes's System of Ideas
by J.W.N. Watkins
Hutchinson, 192 pp., 15s.
Hobbes's Science of Politics
by M.M. Goldsmith
Columbia, 274 pp., $7.50
Hobbes Studies
edited by Keith C. Brown
Blackwell, 300 pp., 37s.6d.
The ideas of Hobbes have never ceased to be a source of annoyance since their first bold and pugnacious presentation to the world in 1640. But even those most offended by Hobbes's bleak account of human nature and of the most a reasonable man will hope for must admit his utility. No leading article of the more reflective sort about the current political life of Africa is complete without a reference to his state of nature, the war of all against all. Hobbesian man, in whom vainglorious illusions about himself are kept in check only by the influence of fear, is an indispensable type of anti-hero. So there is one achievement that cannot be denied to Hobbes: he has provided, in language of incomparable force and directness, a full account of one extreme possible view about the human condition. Those who would insist that it is nothing like the whole truth must at least accept it as a magnificent incarnation of an eternally recurrent form of error, and must admit that in some times and places it looks disconcertingly like the truth.
Review, 3641 words
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