The Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes, 2 vols.

Clark, Paul A.

Hobbes, Thomas. Edited by Noel Malcolm. The Clarendon Edition of the Works of Thomas Hobbes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. 2 vols. lxxv + 1008 pp. $78.00-- This is the first complete collection of the correspondence of Hobbes and as such fills an important gap in the published writing of the man who is probably the most important political philosopher of the modern age. Noel Malcolm has done an admirable job of assembling and annotating the correspondence. The work contains complete critical apparatus including a detailed index (which is imperative in a work of this sort), an extensive bibliography, and a biographical register providing a short description of each of Hobbes's correspondents. Each entry is printed in the original language as well as in English translation. While this pushes the edition over into two volumes, it is certainly well justified in making the work useful for professional philosophers as well as accessible to students. The letters are transcribed as precisely as possible, including margin notes and interliniations. The editor also shows good judgement in excluding certain treatises which appear in epistolary form but which have previously appeared in print.

It is unfortunate that the number of surviving letters to and from Hobbes is quite small. Hobbes himself apparently burned the majority of his correspondence in the mid 1660s because he feared that he might be prosecuted on a charge of heresy and his papers seized as evidence. As a result, most of the philosophically interesting letters have been lost forever. Only 211 letters are known to have survived, of these 97 were composed by Hobbes himself; the rest are either to Hobbes or are addressed as having been written on his behalf.

While the loss of so many letters makes the correspondence unhelpful in resolving many of the most important dilemmas in Hobbes's writings, nonetheless there are significant clues to be found in his correspondence with regard to his personal life and the political climate in which he wrote. For example, critics have often questioned the apparent contradiction between Hobbes's moral writings which seem to deny all of the traditional virtues, while the same works begin with a dedication praising his patron for those very same virtues. In the first surviving letter from Hobbes we learn that his dedication to his translation of Thucydides was composed in accordance with the wishes of his patron and sent to his patron "to correct or alter as shall seem necessary" (p. 6). In other words, the dedications seem to have been more a result of the political climate than an accurate summation of Hobbes's catalogue of virtues.

The surviving letters do not reveal as much about Hobbes's personal life as one might hope, nevertheless, they do provide a glimpse of Hobbes which is quite different from his short autobiography. Many people are familiar with his famous line from his Vita in which he writes of his birth during the time of the Spanish armada that "fear and I were born twins." In his Vita Hobbes portrays himself as a very mild mannered scholar, yet his correspondence reveals Hobbes as a very proud man, quite concerned with his reputation. A good number of the letters are concerned with Hobbes's long controversy in attempting to square the circle, and show his zeal to prove himself right as well as his contempt for his critics. These disputes show that despite his claim to humility and his support for equality Hobbes was, in fact, something of an elitist. This helps to explain Hobbes's peculiar statement in Leviathan 13 in which he writes that all men are equal except those few who possess science. Scholars will find the correspondence an important tool for understanding the life and works of Thomas Hobbes