In this chapter Kinch Hoekstra analyses the particular understanding of time and history characteristic of ‘politic history’, identified by scholars as a distinctive genre in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England, where it flourished as a historiographical version of ‘reason of state’. At its heart, Hoekstra argues, was an epistemic question: whether it is possible to derive political lessons from empirical, historical truths. Influenced by Italian discussions of how political knowledge could be drawn from historical experience, politic historians looked in particular to Machiavelli and Guicciardini. It was Philip Sidney, in his Defence of Poetry, who posed the epistemic question most sharply, and Francis Bacon who offered the fullest response. In turn, Hoekstra suggests, a Guicciardinian and Baconian conception of the value of history informs Hobbes’ preface to his translation of Thucydides, whom he famously characterised as ‘the most politique historiographer that ever writ’. Hoekstra ends by rejecting the scholarly consensus that Hobbes’ turn to ‘civil science’ marked his repudiation of a historical politics.

This chapter introduces the most significant aspects of Thucydidean interpretation in the Renaissance and Reformation. It outlines key developments in the accessibility of the text (through knowledge of Greek and through translation into Latin and other European languages). It also analyses a number of key responses to the work. These include the group centred around Philipp Melanchthon, who saw Thucydides as a source of both rhetorical and moral lessons; Calvinist readings, which enlisted Thucydides to rebut Machiavelli’s views on statecraft; Grotius, who appealed to Thucydides in formulating his theory of Just War; and Thomas Hobbes’ influential translation of the text.

Thomas Hobbes claims that he set political philosophy on its proper footing for the first time in On the Citizen. We examine the opening argument (1.1-1.2), in which Hobbes seeks to remove and replace the longstanding Aristotelian foundation, that human beings are political animals. Hobbes associates this idea with the view that human society is made possible by “mutual love” and a desire for association for its own sake. We argue that Hobbes is particularly targeting the Nicomachean Ethics on philia (friendship or love) and its role in the polis. One might nonetheless doubt that Hobbes’s arguments were at all successful. Although Hobbes certainly takes pleasure in portraying Aristotle’s views in a maximally absurd light, we show that Hobbes’s argument is more sophisticated than it first appears, and that it brings out genuine difficulties for Aristotle’s view. Finally, we consider Hobbes’s revisitation of the idea of “political animals” in a later section of On the Citizen. What emerges from this discussion is that Hobbes’s disagreement with Aristotle does not only – perhaps, not primarily – concern the nature of human motivation, but rather the essence of politics. The idea of a naturally political animal turns out to be an oxymoron.

It is natural to reflect on human nature and the nature of political society by speculating about how humans were or would be outside of such society. In writing the first part of his Leviathan, 'Of Man', and looking forward to the second, 'Of Commonwealth', Hobbes includes a chapter 'Of the Natural Condition of Mankind, As Concerning Their Felicity, and Misery'. He famously determines that in such a condition there is much misery, and precious little felicity. The first part of Leviathan is devoted to the question of human nature, and although there are scattered references to people's reactions to one another, it is not until chapter xiii that Hobbes systematically reflects on how the human beings he has been describing would interact. Although it is generally regarded as the starting point of his political theory, Hobbes places his account of the natural condition (along with his analyses of the law of nature and personation, both of which have some place in the natural condition) squarely in his theory of man. This is brought out by Hobbes’s reference in Leviathan to ‘the natural condition of mankind’ rather than ‘the state of nature’.

In Foundations, Quentin Skinner presented a powerful interpretation of the origins of the modern Western understanding of popular sovereignty. With his customary clarity and erudition, Skinner began with the rise of government by the popolo in northern Italy early in the last millennium, and went on to show how the conception of popular sovereignty evolved via scores of thinkers: Bartolus, Marsilius and Gerson in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, for example; Goodman, Salamonius and Hotman in the sixteenth. Skinner's study of the development of the theory of popular sovereignty culminated with its articulation by Buchanan and Mariana in the later sixteenth century, which was ‘available to be used by all parties in the coming constitutional struggles of the seventeenth century’. In subsequent work, Skinner has shown in detail how elements of this theory of popular sovereignty were used in those struggles: not only by republicans, Levellers and moderate constitutionalists, but also by Thomas Hobbes, who opposed all of these groups.

Popular Hobbes

In contrasting Hobbes with some of his contemporaries, Skinner has made much of Hobbes's sardonic characterisation of them as ‘democratical gentlemen’. A number of scholars have none the less claimed that Hobbes's own writings form the foundation of the modern theory of political democracy. The label of ‘democratical gentlemen’ is deliberately paradoxical, suggesting the untenability of a position that can be summed up by a contradiction in terms. Such incompatibility also inheres, I shall argue, in the position of the democratical Hobbesians.

That position incorporates and extends two commonplace claims.