Post on 27-Jan-2023
Leviathans old and new: what Collingwood saw in
Hobbes
This is a post-print version of the article and is not for
citation. The published version is available at
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01916599.2014.930235.
R.G. Collingwood presented his major work of political
philosophy, The New Leviathan, as an updated version of
Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan. However, his reasons for
taking Hobbes’s great work as his inspiration have
puzzled and eluded many Collingwood scholars, while
those interested in the reception of Hobbes’s ideas
have largely neglected the New Leviathan. In this essay
I reveal what Collingwood saw in Hobbes’s political
philosophy and show how his reading of Hobbes both
diverges from other prominent interpretations of the
time and invites us to reassess Hobbes’s complex
association with the origins of liberalism. In doing
so, I focus on Collingwood’s science of mind, his
ideas on society and authority, and his dialectical
theory of politics, in each case showing how he
engaged with Hobbes in order to elucidate his own
vision of civilization. That vision is based on the
development of social consciousness, which involves
people coming to understand the body politic as a
joint enterprise whereby they confer authority upon
those who rule.
Keywords: R.G. Collingwood; Thomas Hobbes;
civilization; society; authority; liberalism.
1. Introduction
In the striking final lines of his Autobiography, R.G.
Collingwood vowed that, having spent his whole life
fighting fascism in the dark, he would henceforth ‘fight in
the daylight’.1 Collingwood identified himself as belonging
to a liberal-democratic tradition of politics, which, in
opposition to both fascism and socialism, held that
parliamentary institutions could serve to dissipate rather
than merely mask tensions between societal classes through
open discussion and free speech. Socialists and fascists
agreed that a class war was underway and differed only
regarding whether they supported workers or capitalists,2
but both denied the possibility of conceiving politics as
anything other than the site of conflict between different
classes. The possibility of democratic politics, by
contrast, depended upon the electorate not becoming so
corrupted as to view public questions in terms of the good 1 R.G. Collingwood, An Autobiography (Oxford, 1978), 167.
2 Collingwood, Autobiography, 157–58.
of their particular class, but rather in terms of ‘the good
of the nation as a whole’.3
Collingwood’s Autobiography was published in 1939 and as
war broke out across Europe his intellectual efforts
concentrated on understanding why fascism was proving so
successful and how people had come to lose faith in
civilization. The success of fascism depended on arousing
the emotions of its supporters, whereas, despite the wisdom
of democratic politics, ‘the people who care for it do not
care passionately enough to make it survive’.4
Collingwood’s attempts to restore people’s faith in
civilization culminated in his final work, The New Leviathan,
which was published in 1942 (the year before his death).
His fight against fascism involved updating Thomas Hobbes’s
great work for modern times. In this essay I ask: what did
Collingwood see in Hobbes? In particular, why did
Collingwood think it so instructive to return to a book
long read as a harbinger of despotism to help elucidate a
vision of civilization that could defeat fascism?
3 Collingwood, Autobiography, 155.
4 R.G. Collingwood, ‘Fascism and Nazism’, Philosophy, 58 (1940), 168–76
(172).
There are two reasons why I consider this to be a
question worth asking. The first is that Collingwood’s
reasons for taking Hobbes’s great work as his inspiration
have proved somewhat puzzling and existing studies do not
give a complete or satisfactory answer to the question.5
Given that Collingwood’s political philosophy proceeds from
the claim that Leviathan needs to be updated for modern
times, this is a question that should concern Collingwood
scholars and I endeavour to give a more complete answer to
it here. The second reason for asking the question is to
contribute to scholarship more focused on Hobbes than
5 The only study to consider the relation between Hobbes and
Collingwood in depth is David Boucher, The Social and Political Thought of R.G.
Collingwood (Cambridge, 1989), especially 63–109. I explain how my
approach differs from Boucher’s in the following section.
Collingwood’s reasons for engaging with Hobbes have been more briefly
considered in Peter Nicholson, ‘Collingwood’s New Leviathan Then and
Now’, Collingwood Studies, 1 (1994), 163–80 (164–74); Gary K. Browning,
‘New Leviathans for Old’, Collingwood Studies, 2 (1995), 89–106 (102–104);
G.A.J. Rogers, ‘Collingwood’s New Leviathan’, in Leviathan Between the Wars:
Hobbes’s Impact on Early Twentieth Century Philosophy, edited by Luc Foisneau,
Jean-Christophe Merle and Tom Sorell (Frankfurt am Main, 2005), 141–
54.
Collingwood.6 It is well known that there was a revival of
interest in Hobbes during the first half of the twentieth
century.7 Collingwood was certainly aware of this and
reviewed a proposal of Leo Strauss’s The Political Philosophy of
Hobbes for Clarendon Press in 1935.8 Some of the other most
celebrated political theorists of the time—most notably,
Carl Schmitt and Michael Oakeshott—wrote important works on
Hobbes during the 1930s and 1940s,9 which have received a
6 Of the aforementioned studies, most have been undertaken by scholars
more interested in Collingwood than Hobbes. The one exception is
Rogers, ‘Collingwood’s New Leviathan’. Unlike my approach here, Rogers’s
chapter mainly focuses on charting some of the general philosophical
(dis-)similarities between Collingwood and Hobbes, and is relatively
unconcerned with evaluating why Collingwood engaged with Hobbes.
7 See Michael Oakeshott, ‘Thomas Hobbes’, Scrutiny, 4 (1935), 263–77.
8 Letter from Collingwood to Clarendon Press, 6 June 1935, in James
Connelly, ‘Strauss’s Collingwood’, in The Legacy of Leo Strauss, edited by
Tony Burns and James Connelly (Exeter, 2010), 87–102 (89).
9 See principally Carl Schmitt, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas
Hobbes: Meaning and Failure of a Political Symbol, translated by George Schwab and
Erna Hilfstein (Westport, Conn., 1996); Michael Oakeshott,
‘Introduction to Leviathan’, in his Hobbes on Civil Association (Indianapolis,
2000), 1–79. Oakeshott also wrote a number of important review essays
on Hobbes during the 1930s, three of which were reviews of Strauss’s
great deal of scholarly attention of late.10 Yet
Collingwood’s New Leviathan has passed largely unremembered.
In this essay I show that this neglect is unwarranted as
Collingwood presents us with a strikingly original reading
of Hobbes, which both diverges from other prominent
interpretations being developed around the same time and
invites us to reassess Hobbes’s complex association with
the origins of liberalism.11
book. The most significant is his 1937 piece ‘Dr. Leo Strauss on
Hobbes’, in his Hobbes on Civil Association, 141–58.
10 For book-length studies alone see Gershon Weiler, From Absolutism to
Totalitarianism: Carl Schmitt on Thomas Hobbes (Durango, 1994); Ian Tregenza,
Michael Oakeshott on Hobbes: A Study in the Renewal of Philosophical Ideas (Exeter,
2003); Thomas Hobbes and Carl Schmitt: The Politics of Order and Myth, edited by
Johan Tralau (London, 2013). More specifically, for comparison of
Oakeshott and Schmitt on Hobbes, see Ian Tregenza, ‘Leviathan as Myth:
Michael Oakeshott and Carl Schmitt on Hobbes and the Critique of
Rationalism’, Contemporary Political Theory, 1 (2002), 349–69; Jan-Werner
Müller, ‘Re-imagining Leviathan: Schmitt and Oakeshott on Hobbes and the
problem of political order’, in Thomas Hobbes and Carl Schmitt, 59–78.
11 On which see more generally Lucien Jaume, ‘Hobbes and the
Philosophical Sources of Liberalism’, in The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s
Leviathan, edited by Patricia Springborg (Cambridge, 2007), 199–216.
At this stage a brief note on the scope of my inquiry
might be in order. I am concerned with what Collingwood saw
in Hobbes; that is to say, why Collingwood thought engaging
with Hobbes was important given the purposes of the New
Leviathan. In Collingwood’s terms, I seek to understand that
engagement historically by inquiring into what Collingwood
thought he was doing by updating Leviathan for modern times.12
Importantly, then, I do not make any claims regarding
Hobbes’s influence on Collingwood, as, problems of
identifying influence aside, they are not germane to my
inquiry. Instead, I focus on what Collingwood thought was
worth revising and renewing in Leviathan, irrespective of
the extent to which his own ideas were actually formulated
in light of reading Hobbes.
I begin by assessing some existing answers to the ‘why
Leviathan?’ question and outlining how my answer both
challenges and surpasses these. In the following three
sections I set my own account of what Collingwood saw in
Hobbes out in far more detail. These deal, in turn, with
Collingwood’s science of mind, his ideas on society and
authority, and his dialectical theory of politics. I
12 See Collingwood, Autobiography, 110.
conclude by evaluating what remains of especial interest in
Collingwood’s Hobbes.
2. Why Leviathan?
The preface to the New Leviathan is an obvious place to start
when considering what Collingwood thought needed to be
updated from the original Leviathan. The opening few
paragraphs purport to explain why Collingwood chose to
borrow his title from Hobbes’s great work, yet they
actually prove quite elusive. Collingwood was happy for the
reader to ‘take the title of this book in whichever way he
pleases’, but the closest way to Collingwood’s own thinking
is if Leviathan is read as addressing the whole body of
political science from its first principles.13 Hobbes’s and
Collingwood’s Leviathans both comprise four sections
addressing human nature (Of Man/ Man), political life in
general (Of Common-wealth/ Society), well-ordered political
13 R.G. Collingwood, The New Leviathan or Man, Society, Civilization and Barbarism,
edited by David Boucher (Oxford, 1992), ‘Preface to the First
Edition’, lix–lx. All references to the main body of the New Leviathan
are given by chapter and paragraph numbers.
life (Of a Christian Common-wealth/ Civilization) and ill-
ordered political life (Of the Kingdome of Darknesse/
Barbarism). It is tempting to view this structural symmetry
as one of the principal reasons why Collingwood entitled
his book the New Leviathan and many readers have followed his
invitation by highlighting this feature.14 However, the
salience given to this symmetry is undermined by an earlier
draft of the preface, where Collingwood indicated that
there would be five parts to the New Leviathan, of which the
fifth would be the most important.15 While it is possible
that the increased structural symmetry between the two
Leviathans could have been one reason why Collingwood
14 For representative examples see the reviews of the New Leviathan by
John Laird in Philosophy, 18 (1943), 75–80 (75); and George Catlin in
Political Science Quarterly, 58:3 (1943), 435–36 (435); as well as Louis O.
Mink, Mind, History, and Dialectic: The Philosophy of R.G. Collingwood (Bloomington and
London, 1969), 80–81.
15 R.G. Collingwood, ‘Draft Preface to The New Leviathan’, in his Essays in
Political Philosophy, edited by David Boucher (Oxford, 1989), 224–28 (226–
27). For further discussion of this point see Boucher, Social and Political
Thought, 68–69. Of course, one might read the ‘Review, and Conclusion’
as a fifth part to Leviathan, but there is no evidence Collingwood had
this in mind.
eventually decided to set the New Leviathan out in four
rather than five parts,16 the draft preface reveals that
this cannot have been the original reason why he selected
his title, which he deemed appropriate irrespective of any
such symmetry.
The published preface actually supplies very little
information that can serve to answer the question ‘why
Leviathan?’ Only in a century blighted by war, Collingwood
wrote, is Leviathan becoming appreciated as ‘the world’s
greatest store of political wisdom’, but precisely what
about Hobbes’s masterpiece makes it such remains
unspecified. The question has been addressed in most depth
by David Boucher, who stresses three relevant
considerations. First, Collingwood had long sought to
overcome the one-sidedness of rival intellectualist and
subjectivist positions in moral philosophy, with Plato and
Hobbes representing the most sophisticated versions of
each. Second, Collingwood followed Hobbes in attempting to
ground his ethical and political philosophy in a theory of
human nature. Third, Collingwood viewed both himself and
16 Rogers, ‘Collingwood’s New Leviathan’, 145.
Hobbes as responding to attacks on civilization.17 Boucher
is principally concerned with understanding the place of
Hobbes in Collingwood’s ideas on ethical conduct and to
this end he reads the philosophical relation between the
two in the context of the idealist history of philosophy.18
However, while these considerations and approach certainly
help to explain Collingwood’s general interest in Hobbes,
they do not establish why he presented himself as following
so closely in Hobbes’s footsteps in the New Leviathan itself.
Boucher has been criticised along these lines by Peter
Nicholson,19 but Nicholson goes too far in the other
direction by arguing that there is no significant
philosophical relation between Hobbes and Collingwood.
Nicholson finds the relative neglect of Hegel in the New
Leviathan perplexing and in trying to explain this he reduces
Collingwood’s engagement with Hobbes to nothing more than
war-time polemics: ‘Collingwood deliberately overrates
Hobbes and underrates Hegel because he is writing The New
Leviathan as his contribution to the war effort… and Hobbes
17 Boucher, Social and Political Thought, 67–68.
18 Boucher, Social and Political Thought, especially 71–80.
19 Nicholson, ‘Collingwood’s New Leviathan’, 171–74.
is English… and Hegel is German’.20 Nicholson thus
concludes that ‘the emphasis on Hobbes is misplaced
patriotic exaggeration’.21 At best, Nicholson’s argument
can explain only why Hegel is neglected and not why
Collingwood followed Hobbes, for there are many other
English thinkers Collingwood could have drawn upon and he
need not have presented his work as updating any great work
of political philosophy. Boucher is right to take seriously
the philosophical significance of Collingwood’s chosen
title, but more needs to be said to discern precisely what
in Hobbes’s Leviathan Collingwood thought needed updating for
modern times.
To resolve this problem a more explicit focus is
required on what Collingwood saw in Hobbes’s political
philosophy. My emphasis is thus crucially different from
Boucher’s, as it falls less on Collingwood’s account of
ethical conduct and more on his analysis of the nature of
political life and civilization. In this respect,
Collingwood’s draft preface is far more illuminating than
the one he eventually published, as there he described
20 Nicholson, ‘Collingwood’s New Leviathan’, 170.
21 Nicholson, ‘Collingwood’s New Leviathan’, 176.
Leviathan as ‘the first book in which the idea of civilized
society was consciously and systematically expounded’. The
time has come, he continued, to expound the idea of a
civilized society again and, with this in mind, he took the
New Leviathan for his title.22 Collingwood extensively revised
most of his preface before the published version and
ultimately decided to remove this remark. Nonetheless, and
as I hope to show, plenty of evidence remains in the New
Leviathan indicating that what Collingwood saw in Hobbes,
above all else, was a vision of what civilization involves
that needed reviving if barbarism was ever to be defeated.
My focus on the relation between Hobbes’s and
Collingwood’s accounts of political life in general is open
to an initial objection. Boucher observes that, with one
exception, all of Collingwood’s citations of Leviathan are to
its first part and, therefore, it ‘is clear from the
available evidence that Collingwood’s admiration for Hobbes
never extended beyond part I of Leviathan’.23 If this is true
then it would follow that Collingwood was not much
interested in Hobbes’s ideas on political life in general.
22 Collingwood, ‘Draft Preface’, 228.
23 Boucher, Social and Political Thought, 65–66.
However, Boucher’s conclusion is too strong, for at least
two reasons. First, Collingwood cited the introduction to
Leviathan four times,24 but the ideas he there referred to
extend well beyond Hobbes’s account of human nature and
address issues to do with the nature of the commonwealth.
Second, and more importantly, many of Collingwood’s remarks
concerning Hobbes’s impact are unaccompanied by
citations,25 yet these suggest a more wide-ranging
admiration for Hobbes’s political philosophy in general,
and not just for his account of man. One remark in
particular, which provides the point of departure for this
essay, is what Collingwood described as ‘the great
discovery of Hobbes in political science’. That discovery—
greater than any made since Aristotle—is that the sovereign
rules by authority rather than by force and that this
happens because (some of) its subjects have attained social
life and are thus able to confer authority.26
24 Collingwood, New Leviathan, ‘Preface’, lix; 1.88; 12.91; 33.4.
25 Collingwood provided citations only when he quoted Leviathan directly
and not for general ideas he attributed to Hobbes.
26 Collingwood, New Leviathan, 24.48–49.
I have accentuated the differences between Boucher’s
approach and my own not because his analysis is mistaken,
but because it does not fully reveal what Collingwood saw
in Hobbes, or what in Leviathan he thought needed updating.
Indeed, much of my analysis both substantiates and more
closely specifies the third of the general considerations
Boucher highlights for answering the question ‘why
Hobbes?’, that is, that Collingwood saw both himself and
Hobbes as responding to attacks on civilization. Boucher is
also right to stress the importance for both Collingwood
and Hobbes of grounding political philosophy in an account
of human nature, and it is thus worth attending to the
relation between their accounts of man before proceeding to
examine their ideas on political life and civilization in
more detail.
3. Science of Mind
In the opening chapter of the New Leviathan Collingwood
declared that ‘civilization is a thing of the mind, and a
community, too, is a thing of the mind’.27 If we want to
27 Collingwood, New Leviathan, 1.22.
understand his accounts of civilization and community,
then, it helps to begin with his science of mind. For
Collingwood, the distinction between body and mind is not
one between two different parts of man’s nature, but one
between two different ways of studying man. The question of
the relation between mind and body is really a bogus
question. Man is body in so far as the problem of self-
knowledge is approached by the methods of natural science,
whereas man is mind in so far as the problem is addressed
by reflection on human consciousness.28 The science of mind
is concerned with human thought and the sole criterion upon
which its claims can be evaluated is reflection upon one’s
own mind.29 The sciences of body and mind must be kept
distinct because they address different problems and employ
different methods. When we try to use the methods of one to
answer the questions of the other— the fallacy of swapping
horses —we go astray.30
In his insistence that the sciences of mind and body
be kept distinct, Collingwood’s approach might seem to
28 Collingwood, New Leviathan, 2.41–45.
29 Collingwood, New Leviathan, 1.85.
30 Collingwood, New Leviathan, 2.71.
share little with Hobbes’s. In the opening lines of the
introduction to Leviathan, Hobbes described all life in
terms of automata; as nothing ‘but a motion of Limbs’,31
before proceeding to apply his mechanistic approach to the
study of human thought and consciousness in ‘Of Man’. On
Collingwood’s account, however, Hobbes’s political
philosophy is better understood as stemming from a science
of mind than a science of body (a distinction that would
have been foreign to Hobbes). Collingwood turned to the
final lines of Hobbes’s introduction to support his idea
that the science of mind admits of no other demonstration
than reflection on one’s own consciousness; ‘the pains left
another, will onely be to consider, if he also find not the
same in himself’.32
On Collingwood’s terminology, Hobbes’s approach may be
deemed a science of mind due to this emphasis on
introspective knowledge of one’s mind, which could be
31 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, vols. 2 and 3: The English and Latin Texts, edited by
Noel Malcolm (Oxford, 2012), ‘The Introduction’, 16. References to the
main body of Leviathan are given by chapter and paragraph number,
followed by page number in Malcolm’s edition.
32 Collingwood, New Leviathan, 1.88.
divorced from the materialism and mechanistic philosophy
underpinning Leviathan.33 Yet there is another important
respect in which Collingwood’s approach resembled Hobbes’s,
which concerns what makes it a science of mind.34 Hobbes
famously insisted that philosophy must proceed from
unequivocal definitions if it is ever to be scientific.35
For Collingwood, too, words are fit for scientific use only
if their meanings are settled,36 which is why, much like
Hobbes, he attended so closely to settling the correct
33 Leo Strauss had earlier argued that Hobbes’s ‘materialist-
determinist theory’ is not only unnecessary, but actually imperils his
political philosophy, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and Its Genesis,
translated by Elsa M. Sinclair (Oxford, 1936), 168.
34 In the New Leviathan Collingwood did not specify what made an enquiry
scientific, but elsewhere he provided a fairly general definition of
science as ‘a body of systematic or orderly thinking about a
determinate subject-matter’, An Essay on Metaphysics (Oxford, 1940), 4. This
is a more wide-ranging definition of science than Hobbes’s, of course,
but it could encompass Hobbes’s narrower definition.
35 Hobbes, Leviathan, iv.12–13, 56.
36 Collingwood, New Leviathan, 36.17. Here Collingwood contrasted a word
‘having its usage settled’ with it ‘being defined’, but elsewhere he
claimed that ‘without rigid definition there is no science’, New
Leviathan, 22.8.
usage of the key terms of his political philosophy while
inveighing against the proliferation of insignificant
speech.
Collingwood’s appreciation of Hobbes’s approach is
most evident in his discussion of language.37 One of
Hobbes’s great discoveries, which should be remembered
alongside those of Copernicus, Newton and Darwin,38 was
that language is not merely the means of communicating
knowledge between individuals, but is actually necessary
for knowledge to exist in the first place.39 For Hobbes, it
was only through the use of speech that our mental
discourse is improved to the extent that humans may be
distinguished from other animals.40 Although mental
37 Collingwood had earlier criticised Hobbes’s theory of language in
The Principles of Art (Oxford, 1938), 226, but by the New Leviathan he had
revised his own theory bringing it even closer to Hobbes’s. On this
development see Boucher, Social and Political Thought, 139.
38 Collingwood, New Leviathan, 6.54.
39 The centrality of language to Hobbes’s philosophy has been
comprehensively explored by Philip Pettit, Made with Words: Hobbes on
Language, Mind and Politics (Princeton, NJ, 2008), but the work includes no
mention of Collingwood.
40 Hobbes, Leviathan, iii.11, 46.
discourse is prior to speech, we are able to remember the
conceptions we have of things and recall them to our minds
only by naming them.41 Collingwood went even further than
Hobbes by arguing that we originally become conscious of
our first-order feelings by naming them. For example, we
notice that we are cold by naming our feeling as ‘cold’;
the feeling is preconscious until we name it and this very
act of naming brings it to our consciousness.42 Where
Collingwood directly followed Hobbes, however, concerns not
how feelings are given to our consciousness but rather how
we are able to order and regulate our thoughts by naming
and numbering them. Our ability to reason presupposes the
use of language and not vice versa. We become capable of
reasoning only once we have acquired speech because
reasoning involves the ordering of thoughts and to register
and recall our thoughts we must first give them names.
Collingwood thus recognised, quite rightly, that for Hobbes
language is ‘the precondition and foundation of knowledge,
so far as knowledge is scientific’.43
41 Hobbes, Leviathan, iv.3, 50.
42 Collingwood, New Leviathan, 6.2–28.
43 Collingwood, New Leviathan, 6.4–53.
While Collingwood’s science of mind adopted a general
approach resembling Hobbes’s, he nonetheless disagreed with
many of the particulars of Hobbes’s account of man. Most
notably, he criticised Hobbes’s rationalistic account of
the passions (along with Spinoza’s) for trying to give
reasons to explain our fear and anger.44 For Collingwood,
contra Hobbes, our fear precedes our understanding of why we
are afraid. A man frightened of a bull begins by being
frightened and only if he is capable of reflecting on why
he is afraid (which is unlikely in such circumstances)
works out that the something that is frightening him is the
bull.45 Hobbes had failed to distinguish satisfactorily
between different levels of consciousness, a failing which
elsewhere led him to confuse appetite with desire.46
Appetite, on Collingwood’s account, pertains to a lower
level of consciousness than desire; it is a ‘blind’
condition of mere wanting, without knowing what one wants
or even that one wants anything definite.47 Desire, by
44 Collingwood, New Leviathan, 10.21–23, 10.4–42.
45 Collingwood, New Leviathan, 10.25.
46 Collingwood, New Leviathan, 11.42.
47 Collingwood, New Leviathan, 7.5.
contrast, involves coming to know what you want through a
form of propositional thinking such that you want one thing
rather than another, or want one of many different
options.48 Collingwood’s criticisms of Hobbes on these
points need not detain us here,49 since they do not bear
greatly upon Collingwood’s and Hobbes’s accounts of the
nature of political life, which is the focus of this essay.
There is, however, one issue in their respective accounts
of human nature that does merit further examination: their
contrasting positions on free will.
The reason why civilization and political life must be
studied by the science of mind is because they are things
of the mind; they are objects of human thought, not bodies
to be studied by the natural sciences. A society, on
Collingwood’s account, is a community where the members
share social consciousness, or will.50 It comes into
existence when persons ‘join together of their own free
48 Collingwood, New Leviathan, 11.22–23.
49 For more detailed analysis see Boucher, Social and Political Thought,
especially 123–30.
50 Collingwood, New Leviathan, 20.2.
will in joint action’.51 The possibility of society thus
presupposes that we have free will. Given that Hobbes
notoriously dismissed the idea of free will as an absurdity
of speech,52 it is worth stressing that Collingwood’s
political philosophy presupposes a rival account of the
will. Indeed, Collingwood had as little time for those who
reject free will as Hobbes did for those who admit it.
Freedom, according to Collingwood, is ‘a first-order object
of consciousness to every man whose mental development has
reached the ability to choose’. Whenever we choose between
alternatives we are conscious of being free. This freedom
is immediately given to consciousness and debates about
whether or not it is to be trusted are futile, since they
involve the fallacy of misplaced argument,53 that is, the
‘fallacy of arguing about any object immediately given to
consciousness’.54 There is no basis upon which the
existence of anything immediately given to consciousness
51 Collingwood, New Leviathan, 19.51; see also 20.61.
52 Hobbes, Leviathan, v.5, 68.
53 Collingwood, New Leviathan, 13.18.
54 Collingwood, New Leviathan, 4.73.
can be refuted because the science of mind can appeal only
to reflection upon one’s own consciousness, or mind.
For Collingwood, freedom of will (like any freedom)
has both a positive and negative dimension.55 Positively,
it is the ‘freedom to choose; freedom to exercise a will’.
Negatively, it is ‘freedom from desire; not the condition of
having no desires, but the condition of not being at their
mercy’.56 This idea of free will is closely bound up with
the notion that we become free by conquering our
passions,57 which requires a certain level of intellectual
maturity.58 For someone who has attained this level of
maturity, the consciousness of being free, or self-respect,
is more valuable than happiness. The idea that we are
capable of conquering our passions is, of course, far
removed from Hobbes’s account of human nature. Without
55 See Collingwood, New Leviathan, 13.23: ‘If anyone uses the word
‘freedom’ to me I expect him to answer the questions: ‘Freedom to do
what?’ ‘Freedom from what?’ Not to parade the answers around all the
time, because that would be boring; but to have them up his sleeve if
they are wanted.’
56 Collingwood, New Leviathan, 13.25.
57 Collingwood, New Leviathan, 13.48.
58 Collingwood, New Leviathan, 13.57.
entering into the debate concerning how best to
characterise the place of the passions in determining our
will,59 it suffices to say that, for Hobbes, how our will
is determined has no bearing upon our freedom or whether we
should be considered authors of the actions that proceed
from our will.60
Hobbes’s and Collingwood’s contrasting positions on
free will have important implications for their social
contract theories. For Hobbes, contracts entered into from
fear of violent death are just as binding and legitimate as
any other,61 which is crucial as fear explains why
individuals covenant to generate the commonwealth
(irrespective of whether it is generated by acquisition or
institution).62 Collingwood, by contrast, distinguished
59 With a nod to Hume, this debate is usually couched in terms of the
relation between reason and the passions. For critical discussion see
Adrian Blau, ‘Reason, Deliberation, and the Passions’ in The Oxford
Handbook of Hobbes, edited by A.P. Martinich and Kinch Hoekstra (Oxford,
forthcoming).
60 Hence Hobbes’s famous argument that fear and liberty are
consistent, Leviathan, xxi.3, 326.
61 Hobbes, Leviathan, xiv.27, 212.
62 Hobbes, Leviathan, xx.2, 306.
between ‘moral force’ and ‘physical force’, a distinction
premised on free will, which Hobbes would have deemed
absurd.63 To yield to fear is not an act of free will, for
Collingwood, as it is simply to yield to physical force.64
The contract that instigates society on his account, then,
unlike Hobbes’s, must be made by intellectually mature
adults in control of their passions. Collingwood did not
set his account of free will out directly against Hobbes,
although the idea that Hobbes had an unsatisfactory account
of the will would surely have been familiar to him.65 What
is important to note for present purposes, however, is
63 Collingwood, New Leviathan, 20.5. Hobbes ridiculed Bishop John
Bramhall on similar grounds for thinking that our will could be
determined morally as opposed to physically: ‘what it is to determine
a thing morally, no man living understands’. See Thomas Hobbes, The
Questions Concerning Liberty, Necessity, and Chance, in The English Works of Thomas
Hobbes of Malmesbury, edied by William Molesworth, 10 vols (London,
1841), V, 188.
64 Collingwood, New Leviathan, 20.59, 29.66.
65 In 1937 Michael Oakeshott famously wrote: ‘In short, I think it is
an exaggeration to speak of Hobbes as “the founder of modern political
philosophy.” A writer so completely devoid of a satisfactory
philosophy of volition lacks something vital to modern political
thought.’ See Oakeshott, ‘Strauss on Hobbes’, 158.
simply that the theory of society and authority Collingwood
developed presupposes a strikingly different account of the
will to that found in Hobbes. It is to that theory I now
turn.
4. Society and Authority
Collingwood’s political philosophy involved a reworking of
social contract theory, central to which are the ideas of
society and authority. In examining these ideas we can
begin to ascertain a clearer idea of exactly what about
Leviathan Collingwood thought needed to be updated for modern
times. On his account, society is a form of community where
persons share social consciousness and will. People become
(and remain) members of society by an act of their own free
will whereby they take upon themselves ‘a share in a joint
enterprise’.66 Precisely how their will to enter society is
communicated need not be specified in advance, as long as
it is done in such a way that their decision is clear to
others, which could seemingly be as simple as assuming the
66 Collingwood, New Leviathan, 2.20–22.
obligation to pursue the common aim of the society.67
Social consciousness requires that all members of society
understand themselves as participating in a joint
enterprise with the other members and this consciousness
can exist only among mentally mature adults, who both know
themselves to be free and recognise the other members of
society as free.68 Freedom of will is a necessary
precondition of being able to rule (either oneself or
society) and society is ‘a self-ruling community’, which is to
say that it is ruled by the joint will of all its
members.69
For Collingwood, a joint will is one upon which all
the members of society agree, but it would be naïve to
suppose that every decision that needs to be taken could
involve the agreement of every member. It is to this
problem that his notion of authority provides an answer.
Every member of society can agree to confer authority upon
a specific party to do certain things or make certain
decisions. Authority is thus ‘a relation between a society and a part
67 Collingwood, New Leviathan, 2.63–65.
68 Collingwood, New Leviathan, 20.23.
69 Collingwood, New Leviathan, 20.36, 20.42.
of that society to which the society assigns the executions of a part of its joint
enterprise’. When the part of society to which the authority
has been conferred employs force to execute its part of the
joint agreement, this is done ‘according to the free will
of every member of society’. In this way, society as a
whole continues to rule itself even if it sometimes appears
to be ruled by only a part of society.70 The importance of
authority, then, is that it originates in joint will and
not in physical force; its force—deriving from the free
will of every member of society—is instead a ‘moral
force’.71
A little later in the New Leviathan, Collingwood
declared that Hobbes’s great discovery in political science
was that the sovereign or state ‘does not rule by force at
all, but it still rules; it rules by authority’.72
Collingwood provided no citation here, but it is tempting
to read this as referring to Hobbes’s theory of personhood
and authorisation, which shares much in common with
Collingwood’s account of authority. For Hobbes, the
70 Collingwood, New Leviathan, 20.45–48.
71 Collingwood, New Leviathan, 20.5.
72 Collingwood, New Leviathan, 24.48–49.
authority of an artificial person stems from every
individual authorising that person to act on his behalf.
Every individual owns all of the actions of the artificial
person for which ‘they gave him commission to Act’.73 When
generating a commonwealth, every individual authorises the
sovereign to act in all ‘those things which concerne the
Common Peace and Safetie’, and the actions of the sovereign
are thus performed according to the will of every member of
the commonwealth.74 On Collingwood’s terminology,
individuals generating a commonwealth should be understood
as participating in a joint enterprise and the purpose they
pursue through their joint will is their common peace and
safety.75 For Hobbes, these were goals that should never be
73 Hobbes, Leviathan, xvi.14, 250.
74 Hobbes, Leviathan, xvii.13, 260. It has been argued that
Collingwood’s idea of authority shares very little with Hobbes’s,
since Hobbes’s commonwealth rests ‘on a dichotomy of wills’; see
Nicholson, ‘Collingwood’s New Leviathan’, 168. While it is important not
to overstate the resemblances between Hobbes’s and Collingwood’s
accounts, Nicholson displays no awareness of Hobbes’s theory of
authorisation.
75 Collingwood read Hobbes’s account of the commonwealth as an
‘aritficall Man’ in terms of ‘joint social will’, New Leviathan, 33.41.
undervalued and the implications of which were far-
reaching.76 Indeed, Collingwood thought that it was chiefly
Hobbes who was responsible for implanting in us the hope
that there could be ‘protection and defence’ against
oppression, persecution and war; a hope that has now ‘sunk
into our common consciousness’.77
Although Collingwood’s account of authority resembles
Hobbes’s, and coheres well with what he wrote about Hobbes
elsewhere in the New Leviathan, it is important to note that
he did not refer to Hobbes at any point while explicating
his ideas on authority. To understand fully his acclaim for
Hobbes’s great discovery in political science, then, it
needs to be further situated in relation to his ideas about
the nature of the body politic. More specifically, it needs
to be related to the modern idea of the body politic that
Hobbes helped to uncover, according to which the body
politic is regarded ‘as a non-social community in process
of turning into a society’.78
76 See in particular chapter XXX of Leviathan where Hobbes detailed what
it is entailed by ‘the procuration of the safety of the people’, xxx.1, 520.
77 Collingwood, New Leviathan, 12.93.
78 Collingwood, New Leviathan, 24.13.
For Collingwood, a body politic and a society are not
one and the same thing. There are non-social communities as
well as social communities, and non-social communities
comprise individuals who do not yet have the intellectual
maturity or mental strength required to attain social
consciousness. Members of a non-social community are ruled
by force and not by their own free will.79 As free will is
a matter of degree, society is possible only between agents
who have the strength of will that their joint enterprise
demands.80 Most obviously, children are ruled by force
until they are mentally mature enough to join society. When
members of a non-social community attain social
consciousness they become members of society, but existing
societies always contain some non-social parts.
Political theory tries to understand a specific type
of community called a body politic. The question of whether
a body politic is a social or non-social community has been
answered in different ways throughout history. Ancient
thinkers understood the body politic as a social community
comprising self-ruling citizens united together in pursuit
79 Collingwood, New Leviathan, 20.56.
80 Collingwood, New Leviathan, 20.62.
of a common enterprise. But the citizens of the ancient
polity did not include women, children, slaves or
foreigners, none of whom were deemed to have attained
social consciousness.81 By the Middle Ages the body politic
was thought to be a non-social community. Instead of people
understanding it as ‘a community of free and adult men
collectively managing their own affairs; they had come to
think of it more as a collection of human animals’.82 This
understanding of the body politic began to break down with
Machiavelli.
But it was Hobbes, according to Collingwood, who
inaugurated modern politics by realising that the body
politic is both a society of citizens, and a non-social
community ruled by force. He understood that it is always
moving between these two points and that this movement
‘constitutes the life of the body politic’.83 This claim is
central to uncovering what Collingwood saw in Hobbes. It is
thus worth attending to each of its two key components in
turn: first, that a body politic always contains both
81 Collingwood, New Leviathan, 24.13–2.
82 Collingwood, New Leviathan, 24.32.
83 Collingwood, New Leviathan, 24.51.
social and non-social elements; and, second (considered in
the following section), that the movement between them
constitutes the life of the body politic.
On Collingwood’s account, Hobbes recognised that a
body politic always contains non-social elements. The claim
that the sovereign rules by authority rather than by force
should not be read so as to preclude the use of force in
the body politic altogether. Rule by force will always
remain necessary because the body politic always contains
non-social elements. But when the sovereign rules by force
he does so with the authority of the social element of the
body politic. For Collingwood, rule by authority involves
individuals obeying the commands of a body with authority
because ‘they have agreed that it shall be obeyed’. In
obeying, each man ‘is doing what he has decided to do with
the authorization of his fellow members’, and he does so
because ‘he is a man whose decisions stand firm’.84
Crucially, the prospects of reward and punishment have no
place in such a man’s decisions, for these are tools
appropriate only for ruling non-social communities.85 In so
84 Collingwood, New Leviathan, 21.71.
85 Collingwood, New Leviathan, 21.74.
far as Hobbes’s theory involves subjects obeying the
sovereign because they have committed themselves to the
joint enterprise of pursuing common peace and safety, the
sovereign rules by what Collingwood calls authority. This
is how the social element of the body politic is ruled. In
so far as Hobbes’s theory involves subjects obeying the
sovereign due to either the fear of the consequences of
disobedience (i.e. punishment and war) or the expected
benefits of obedience (i.e. the conveniences of life
associated with peace), the sovereign rules by what
Collingwood calls force. This is how the non-social
elements of the body politic are ruled.
Collingwood thought that both types of rule are
indispensable but that, in seeing the possibility of rule
by authority and not just rule by force, Hobbes had
discovered the most important idea in political science
since Aristotle. Yet Hobbes’s insight extends further
still, for he also realised that the life of the body
politic is the movement from being ruled by force to being
ruled by authority. The world of politics, on this vision,
‘is a dialectical world in which non-social communities
(communities of men in what Hobbes called the state of nature)
turn into societies’.86
5. Dialectical Politics
Collingwood’s notion of dialectics is based on a
distinction from Plato’s Meno between eristical and
dialectical discussion. Eristical discussion is
characterised by you trying to prove that you are right and
that your interlocutor is wrong. Dialectical discussion, by
contrast, is characterised by trying to reach agreement
with your interlocutor by showing how your own view is one
with which your interlocutor really agrees, or that you
really agree with your interlocutor’s view, even if you had
not originally realised this.87 This dialectical method can
help us to understand the world in so far as changes in the
world take place between two ‘contradictories’.
Contradictories are positions between which some agreement
can potentially be found, whereas ‘contraries’ are
positions where the prevalence of one involves the
86 Collingwood, New Leviathan, 24.71.
87 Collingwood, New Leviathan, 24.57–59.
destruction of the other. Collingwood explained this idea
with the example of mixing paint. If you are mixing a pot
of black paint with some white paint then the movement is
one between two contradictories (black and white), with the
paint always turning into a paler and paler grey.88 To
extend his example, if black and white were instead
contraries then it would not be possible to mix them
together such that elements of each remain.
One of Hobbes’s greatest insights, according to
Collingwood, was to recognise that ‘a body politic is a dialectical
thing… in which at any given time there is a negative
element, an element of non-sociality which is going to
disappear… and a positive element, an element of
sociality’.89 The transition from the state of nature to
society—a process Collingwood thought never complete—takes
the form of a dialectic between the social and non-social
elements of the body politic. This dialectic, between
society and nature, is at the heart of what Collingwood
called the classical politics, where society ‘consists in
agreement between mentally adult persons for the purposes
88 Collingwood, New Leviathan, 24.64.
89 Collingwood, New Leviathan, 24.68.
of joint action’ and nature means ‘the rest’.90 The
classical politics was created by Hobbes,91 and its purpose
was announced in his claim that the essential function of
social life is the making of the ‘artificiall Man’; the
‘artificiall Man’ being ‘only Hobbes’s vivid name for the
joint social will’.92
Here we find one of the most explicit statements of
what I take Collingwood to have seen in Hobbes’s Leviathan
that needed updating for modern times, that is, the project
of trying to develop joint social will, or social
consciousness, so that the body politic moves from non-
sociality towards sociality. The classical politics worked
out by Hobbes was restated by Locke and Rousseau,93 but
Hobbes always remained ‘by far the toughest and most
resourceful, as well as the most original’ of these
thinkers. This is because he saw, more clearly than anyone
else, that in some respects people always remain in the
90 Collingwood, New Leviathan, 32.22.
91 Collingwood, New Leviathan, 32.8.
92 Collingwood, New Leviathan, 33.4–41.
93 Collingwood, New Leviathan, 31.2.
state of nature.94 Some people may never emerge from it at
all and, at best, the state of nature is only ever
suspended with the possibility of returning to it always
remaining. Hobbes was well aware that the movement from
sociality to non-sociality could go both ways and those of
us ‘who no longer believe in a law of progress find it
delightful, after wading back through the bog of
nineteenth-century wish-fulfilment fantasies, that Hobbes
did not believe in it either’.95
Although Collingwood lavished much praise on Hobbes,
he was ultimately critical of Hobbes’s account of the
dialectic of politics because he thought Hobbes had an
inadequate theory of the non-social community. Indeed, this
was the great failing of the classical politics in
general.96 To see why Collingwood thought this more needs
to be said about how the dialectic of politics could
94 In support of this point, Collingwood invoked Hobbes’s examples of
savage peoples and the relation between sovereign states in the
international order, New Leviathan, 2.51–55.
95 Collingwood, New Leviathan, 32.41–44.
96 Collingwood, New Leviathan, 33.18.
overcome conflict. There are two possibilities for
resolving conflicts:
They may be dealt with dialectically: that is by a
process leading from non-agreement to agreement;
or they may be dealt with eristically, that is, by
hardening non-agreement into disagreement and
settling that disagreement by a victory of one
party over the other.97
The difference between non-agreement and disagreement is
crucial. The process leading to agreement can commence only
from non-agreement and not from disagreement. Non-agreement
and agreement are contradictories, whereas disagreement and
agreement are contraries, and dialectic takes place only
between contradictories.98 The eristical approach of
hardening non-agreement into disagreement is to make war,
and war ‘is a state of mind’; it consists not in the actual
employment of military force but in the belief that
conflicts can be settled only by one party giving way and
97 Collingwood, New Leviathan, 29.61.
98 Collingwood, New Leviathan, 29.52.
the other triumphing.99 In light of this distinction, it
might seem that Hobbes’s political philosophy actually
precludes the possibility of dialectical politics, for
Hobbes famously characterised the state of nature as a
state of war and set up a stark contrast between war and
peace. For Collingwood, there can be no dialectic between
war and peace because they are contraries, not
contradictories.100 Hobbes went astray by equating the state
of nature with the state of war and it was precisely this
error that needed to be corrected for dialectical politics
to prevail.
The distinction between non-agreement and
disagreement, as Collingwood was well aware, is completely
foreign to Hobbes’s way of thinking. It might seem that to
characterise Hobbes’s state of nature merely as one of non-
99 Collingwood, New Leviathan, 29.62–63. This passage has striking
echoes of Hobbes’s claim that war ‘consisteth not in Battel onely, or
the act of fighting, but in a tract of time, wherein the Will to
contend by Battell is sufficiently known’ (Leviathan, xiii.8, 192),
which Collingwood quoted later in the New Leviathan, 32.64. There is no
evidence indicating that Collingwood had Hobbes in mind when defining
war, but they both thought of war as a state of mind.
100 Collingwood, New Leviathan, 30.96.
agreement is to underestimate the severity of the
situation. Yet from Collingwood’s perspective the
possibility of dialectical politics—a possibility opened up
by Hobbes—presupposes that individuals in the state of
nature could be brought into agreement, for only then could
they ever move from the state of nature to society. In
other words, the possibility of individuals coming to agree
on anything, such as being ruled in common by an absolute
sovereign, presupposes that the state of nature is not
characterised by war and disagreement, but only by non-
sociality and non-agreement.
Collingwood was clear that Hobbes’s state of nature
should be understood as a ‘non-social’ state.101 Hobbes’s
error, however, was in defining the state of nature
negatively as merely the absence of peace or sociality.
This was perfectly consistent with his theory, but it
prevented him for drawing any distinction between the state
of nature and the state of war. However, if one thinks of
political life dynamically, as a dialectical process, then
one should think of the state of nature dynamically too and
see both the positive and negative elements in it. To see
101 Collingwood, New Leviathan, 30.6.
the positive element in the state of nature is to see the
possibility of non-agreement turning into agreement; it is
to see that non-agreement and disagreement—or non-sociality
and war—are not one and the same. To this extent, John
Locke was right to argue against Hobbes that the state of
nature is not a state of war.102
Collingwood maintained that none of the classical
thinkers had developed an adequate account of the state of
nature that captured its positive and dynamic elements. The
reason why this is a problem is that if the life of the
body politic is a dialectical thing, which moves between
non-sociality and sociality, then it is important to have a
theory of how the non-social elements of the body politic
can become socialised. This is central to understanding
politics because the ‘life of politics is the life of
political education’, by which Collingwood meant that it is
the life of socialising the non-social elements of the body
politic. This is something that Rousseau appreciated more
than any of the other classical thinkers,103 although to say
that none had an adequate theory of the non-social
102 Collingwood, New Leviathan, 32.65–67.
103 Collingwood, New Leviathan, 32.34.
community is certainly not to say that they completely
neglected the importance of political education.104
For Collingwood, dialectical politics was at the heart
of well-ordered political life and underpinned his idea of
civilization. ‘Being civilized’, he claimed, ‘means living, so far as
possible, dialectically, that is, in constant endeavour to convert
every occasion of non-agreement into an occasion of
agreement’.105 Civilization and community are things of the
mind and the ideal of civility could only ever be
approximated to the extent that members of a community come
to understand politics dialectically. The dialectic of
society ‘operates consciously’ and ‘works only because the
people in whom it works intend that it should work’.106
104 For helpful discussion see Geoffrey M. Vaughan, Behemoth Teaches
Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes on Political Education (Lanham, 2002); Teresa M. Bejan,
‘Hobbes on Education’, Oxford Review of Education, 36 (2010), 607–26.
Indeed, Collingwood, much like Hobbes, thought that the corruption of
English minds by the middle of the century in which he wrote was
chiefly down to what was being taught in the universities; for example
see his Autobiography, 167.
105 Collingwood, New Leviathan, 39.15.
106 Collingwood, New Leviathan, 29.35.
By viewing the body politic as a dialectical thing and
placing this idea at the heart of the classical politics he
inaugurated, Hobbes had set out a vision of civilization
that was under grave threat when Collingwood was writing
the New Leviathan (much as it had been when Hobbes was
writing the old Leviathan). That threat, as Collingwood saw
it, was less the military force behind fascism, and more
the fact that it represented an eristical form of politics
winning out against a dialectical form. Fascism could only
triumph if people ceased to understand politics as a
dialectical thing. Indeed, it is telling that Collingwood
presented the threat to civilization at the time so starkly
in terms of whether people understood politics as
dialectical or eristical. France was defeated by Germany in
1940 because in France the ‘dialectic of political life had
never been well understood’. The defeat was ‘not a strictly
military defeat but a defeat in the realm of political
ideas’. Similarly, the prospect of England continuing to
resist Germany ‘depends not on strictly military issues but
on whether the English retain the mental vigour to hold on
to the lesson that political life is essentially
dialectical’.107 Collingwood feared that people in England
did not really know what they were fighting for and that
the politicians in power were unwilling to tell them. By
updating Hobbes’s great work, Collingwood hoped to show
them that the idea of civilization for which they were
fighting depended upon people understanding politics
dialectically.
6. Collingwood’s Hobbes
The main purpose of this essay has been to elucidate what
Collingwood saw in Hobbes. In doing so, I have sketched out
some ideas central to Collingwood’s political philosophy,
but I have not given a full account of those ideas. I have
said only enough about them as is necessary to satisfy my
limited objective.108 Nonetheless, I hope to have conveyed
the significance of Hobbes’s ideas for the vision of
civilization that Collingwood sought to defend, even if I
have done little more than outline what that vision
107 Collingwood, New Leviathan, 27.63–64.
108 Cf. Collingwood, New Leviathan, 31.61–68, 31.84.
entails. I opened this essay by quoting the final lines of
Collingwood’s Autobiography, where he vowed to fight fascism
‘in the daylight’. The purpose of the New Leviathan was to
shed light not so much on what people were fighting against
(for that was well known), but rather on precisely what it
meant to be fighting for civilization. To fight for
civilization people must understand politics dialectically.
To understand politics dialectically people must develop
social consciousness. To develop social consciousness
people must understand the body politic as a joint
enterprise whereby they confer authority on those who rule.
The last three sentences summarise one of the central
arguments of the New Leviathan. They also, I submit,
summarise precisely what Collingwood saw in Hobbes’s
Leviathan.
I have sought to show precisely what Collingwood
thought needed updating from Hobbes’s Leviathan for modern
times. This is one piece in the puzzle of understanding
both the New Leviathan and Collingwood’s political philosophy
more generally. But my aim has also been to show why the
existing neglect of Collingwood’s engagement with Hobbes
among Hobbes scholars—especially those interested in his
twentieth-century reception history—is unwarranted, and it
is thus worth concluding by adumbrating some of its most
original and insightful aspects.
Much as Collingwood thought that civilization and
community were things of the mind, so too Hobbes understood
the commonwealth as a thing of the mind. This is by no
means an uncontentious claim and one that I cannot defend
fully here, but the guiding idea is that for peace to be
secured Hobbes thought that people needed to understand the
commonwealth, and their relation with it, in a certain way.
The purpose of Leviathan was to help bring about this
collective consciousness.109 This idea is perhaps more
famously associated with Michael Oakeshott, who gestured
towards it soon after the publication of the New Leviathan
when he remarked that we ‘are apt to think of a
109 I defend this line of interpretation in my ‘The Body Politic “is a
fictitious body”: Hobbes on Imagination and Fiction”, Hobbes Studies, 27
(2014), forthcoming. More generally, it is very effectively brought
out by Tim Stanton, ‘Hobbes’s Redefinition of the Commonwealth’, in
Causation and Modern Philosophy, edited by Keith Allen and Tom Stoneham (New
York and London, 2010) , 104–22; idem., ‘Hobbes and Schmitt’, History of
European Ideas, 37 (2011), 160–67.
civilization as something solid and external, but at bottom
it is a collective dream’.110 Oakeshott’s intriguing remarks
on Leviathan are somewhat elusive (in part because of their
brevity), but the importance of understanding civilization
as a thing of the mind comes out far more clearly in
Collingwood’s engagement with Hobbes, since it is
orientated around the idea of developing social
consciousness.
None of this is to say that the type of social
consciousness Hobbes and Collingwood sought to advance was
in each case the same. For Collingwood, it certainly
involved a lot more than understanding the mutual relation
between protection and obedience, for example (the idea at
the heart of Carl Schmitt’s 1930s writings on Hobbes).111
But part of Hobbes’s argument, at least in Leviathan, was
that people needed to understand themselves as authors of
the commonwealth,112 and to this extent the relation between110 Oakeshott, ‘Leviathan: a myth’, in Hobbes on Civil Association, 159–63
(159).
111 Hobbes, Leviathan, ‘A Review, and Conclusion’, 1141. Cf. Carl
Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, translated by George Schwab (Chicago
and London, 2007), 52; idem., Leviathan in the State Theory of Hobbes, 72, 83.
112 Hobbes, Leviathan, xvii.13, 260.
the two is closer. Collingwood’s account of authority and
society may well be described as a version of social
contract theory. As Boucher has observed, however, it is
neither a contract that takes place at some determinate
point in time nor a hypothetical contract; instead, ‘the
contract is a continuing and continuous process’.113 What
Boucher says of Collingwood may equally be said of Hobbes;
what is crucial is that people come to understand
themselves as authorising the sovereign and such
authorisation is reducible to neither a historical event
nor a merely hypothetical contract.114 Precisely how much of
this Collingwood saw in Hobbes would be difficult to
establish. However, Collingwood certainly thought that
Hobbes’s great discovery in political science was to
realise that the sovereign rules by authority and not just
by force, and Collingwood’s own ideas on authority involve
people coming to understand themselves as partaking in a 113 David Boucher, ‘Editor’s Introduction’, to Collingwood, The New
Leviathan, xiii–lxi (xlii).
114 For criticism of hypothetical readings of Hobbes’s contract theory
and gestures towards a better way of understanding it see Glen Newey,
Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Hobbes and Leviathan (London and New York,
2008), 146–47.
joint enterprise in a way that both shares much with and
draws upon Hobbes’s theory.
Collingwood read Hobbes’s account of the artificial
person of the commonwealth in terms of joint social will.
For Hobbes, as Collingwood saw very clearly, the common
purpose around which a joint will could be formed was
protection and defence, or common peace and safety. Hobbes
was quite willing to describe peace as the ‘End’ for which
the commonwealth is generated,115 and Collingwood too
thought that peace is the unique ‘end’ of political life.116
Collingwood’s Hobbes, then, is one who presents us with a
vision of the social community, or commonwealth, as a joint
enterprise directed to the one common goal at the heart of
political life: peace. Collingwood’s Hobbes is also one who
plays an important role in the development of liberalism,
albeit for reasons quite different to those suggested by
Collingwood’s contemporaries. The association of Hobbes
with the origins of liberalism was usually due to his
115 For example see Hobbes, Leviathan, xv.29, 236; xviii.8, 270;
xviii.13, 276; xviii.16, 278; xxi.10, 336.
116 R.G. Collingwood, ‘Political Action’, in Essays in Political Philosophy,
92–109 (108).
having prioritised rights over duties,117 or the
individualistic basis of his political philosophy.118
Collingwood’s Hobbes, by contrast, saw that the body
politic is a dialectical thing and in so doing inaugurated
the classical politics, and it is precisely ‘the
dialectical solution to all political problems’ that
Collingwood took to be the ‘one essential of liberalism’.119
This is not to say that Collingwood viewed Hobbes as a
liberal, but simply that he thought liberalism presupposes
an understanding of politics as a dialectical process set
forth by Hobbes.
Hobbes is often viewed as someone who lowered the bar
for politics, not least because of the popular caricature
of his political philosophy as one of mediating conflict
between selfish individuals. Yet Collingwood presents us
with a strikingly different vision of Hobbes. The idea of
politics as a site of conflict between factions was one
that Collingwood thought doomed the possibility of
117 Strauss, Political Philosophy of Hobbes, 181–82.
118 Oakeshott, ‘Thomas Hobbes’, 272.
119 R.G. Collingwood, ‘Modern Politics’, in Essays in Political Philosophy,
177–86 ( 177).
democratic, civilized politics. That way leads fascism and
socialism. Somewhat ironically, Collingwood thought that
the prospects for democracy in the twentieth century
involved returning to and updating the thought of someone
who took great pleasure in writing against the
‘Democraticall Gentlemen’ of the seventeenth century.120 But
at the onset of the Second World War, Collingwood saw in
the Leviathan of old the hope of reviving the idea at the
heart of his vision of democratic politics: that the body
politic is a dialectical thing and the possibility that the
state can rule by authority, not just force.
Acknowledgements
A draft of this paper was presented at the European Hobbes
Society meeting at King’s College London in February 2014.
I am very grateful for the insightful comments I received
there. For particularly helpful advice and criticism I
would especially like to thank Teresa Bejan, Adrian Blau,
Alan Cromartie, Christopher Fear, Johan Olsthoorn, Luciano
Venezia and the anonymous referees.
120 For example see Thomas Hobbes, Behemoth, or The Long Parliament, edited
by Paul Seaward (Oxford, 2010), 158.