Abstract
Aubrey reports that Hobbes’s ‘contemplation was much more than his reading. He was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men, he should have known no more than other men.’ (Brief Lives, 157). Although Skinner is probably correct in not taking Hobbes’s boasting too seriously, nevertheless the fact remains that Hobbes attached importance not so much to his erudition, but rather to the independence of his thought. Whereas, for example, Bacon in the Essays openly relies on the wisdom of past masters to support his views, nowhere in his works Hobbes follows this practice. His interpretation of human psychology is presented as the result of first-hand observation and of independent reflection, unaffected by the received wisdom of mankind. This approach makes the search for the sources of Hobbesian glory extremely difficult and never conclusive.
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Notes
Thomas Hobbes, The Collected Works of Thomas Hobbes, edited by William Molesworth, Vol. VI, (London: John Bohn, 1840), The Art of Rhetoric, pp. 419–510.
Michael Oakeshott, Hobbes on Civil Association. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1937), 59–60.
Tom Sorell, Hobbes. (London: Routledge, 1986), 34–7.
Arrigo Pacchi, ‘Hobbes and the Passions’, Topoi, 6 (1987) 111–119, p. 115.
Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier. (London: Dent, 1994).
C.B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism. Hobbes to Locke. (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 105.
Francis Bacon, The Essays. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 217;
Leo Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes. Its Basis and Its Genesis. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), 35.
Among many others it is worth mentioning the contribution by Richard Schlatter (‘Thomas Hobbes and Thucydides’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 6 (1945) 350–362),
C.W. Brown (‘Thucydides, Hobbes, and the Derivation of Anarchy’, History of Political Thought, 8 (1987) 33–62),
G. Klosko and D. Rice (‘Thucydides’ and Hobbes’s State of Nature’, History of Political Thought, 6 (1985) 405–409),
Miriam Reik (The Golden Lands of Thomas Hobbes. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1977)),
Clifford Orwin (‘Stasis and Plague: Thucydides on the Dissolution of Society’, Journal of Politics, 50 (1988) 831–847),
Peter R. Pouncey (The Necessities of War. A Study of Thucydidean Pessimism. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980)),
Arnold A. Rogow (Thomas Hobbes. Radical in the Service of Reaction. (New York: Norton, 1986)),
and more recently Quentin Skinner (Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)).
For a comparative analysis of Sparta and Athens, see Leo Strauss, The City and Man. (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1964).
On this, see Richard Schlatter, ‘Introduction’, in R. Schlatter (ed.), Hobbes’s Thucydides, (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1975), pp. xi–xxviii.
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© 2000 Gabriella Slomp
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Slomp, G. (2000). Glory: Parallels and Intersections. In: Thomas Hobbes and the Political Philosophy of Glory. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780333984437_5
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