Volume 43, Number 6 · April 4, 1996
Bringing Back a New Hobbes
By Quentin Skinner
The Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes
edited by Noel Malcolm
Oxford University Press, Volume 1, 511. Volume 2, 497 pp., Volume 1, $78.00. Volume 2, $78.00
Three Discourses: A Critical Modern Edition of Newly Identified Work of the Young Hobbes
by Thomas Hobbes, edited by Noel B Reynolds, edited by Arlene W Saxonhouse
University of Chicago Press, 181 pp., $27.50
Thomas Hobbes's reputation as one of the leading figures in the history of European philosophy chiefly rests nowadays on a single work, his Leviathan of 1651. It is hardly surprising that Leviathan continues to attract so much attention. As Michael Oakeshott once memorably remarked, it is 'the greatest, perhaps the sole, masterpiece of political philosophy written in the English language.' It would be misleading, however, to think of Hobbes as someone exclusively or even primarily concerned with the theory of politics. By the time of his death, in 1679, at the age of nearly ninety-two, he had published over twenty books on a remarkable variety of themes, ranging from optics, physics, and mathematics to history, theology, and the theory of literature. He also translated a string of major classical texts, beginning in the 1620s with Thucydides' History and ending in the 1670s with a complete rendering of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey into English verse. If we wish to take the measure of his achievement, we not only need to consider the full extent of these intellectual activities; we also need to ask how far he may have thought of them as aspects of some larger whole.
Review, 4534 words
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