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"Springborg, Patricia"
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CLASSICAL MODELING AND THE CIRCULATION OF CONCEPTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITAIN
In this article the author examines the way in which concepts of citizenship and rights have been transmitted not only by conquest, but also by the imitation of Greek and Roman models. Also, the article discusses the way in which early modern empires, modelling themselves on the classical Roman empire in particular, hring these two elements together. Extensive historiographical work on the reception of European thought in the New World has been produced on both sides of the Atlantic and some important contributions that deal with the impact of the New World encounters in European thought have recently been made. However, the author argues that little work has been done on classical modelling as a vehicle for the transmission of concepts. The long tradition of classical learning, revived in the European Renaissance, made Latin the lingua franca of Europe, and school curricula across Europe ensured that members of the Republic of Letters were exposed to the same texts. This, together with the serviceability of the Roman model as a manual for Empire, ensured the rapid transmission of classical republican and imperial ideas. The author takes England and the British Empire as a case study and provides a variety of examples of classical modelling.
Journal Article
Thomas Hobbes and the Political Economy of Peace
Thomas Hobbes's theory of war is currently being re-examined as part of a re-examination of realism in international relations theory which claims to be Hobbes-based. I am not alone in maintaining that Hobbes was first and foremost a peace theorist, rejecting the usual grounds for war, pretexts based on just war, infringements on property or trade, and thus trespass. But those who examine the three-fold causes of war that Hobbes gives, as \"competition\", \"diffidence\", and \"glory\", have generally not noticed the relation between Hobbes's theory of war and empire. While Hobbes makes remarkably few references to the colonial ventures of Great Britain, for reasons that we will consider, his theory of empire, like his theory of war, is based on classical notions of internal balance and the homeostasis of the body politic along Aristotelian lines. His treatment of the polity as a natural body is consistent with his materialist ontology and he treats war and empire in terms of both \"intestine diseases\" and pathologies that afflict the body politic from without. The upshot is a theory remarkably backward-looking in terms of its emphasis on the health of the body politic and the politics of balance, which forbid \"vain-glorious wars\" and demand that overly-powerful subjects, towns of \"immoderate greatness\" and grandiose enlargements of dominion be excised, like Aristotle's \"big foot\" whose disproportion spoils the proportion of the body as a whole.
Journal Article
Thomas Hobbes and the Political Economy of Peace
Thomas Hobbes’s theory of war is currently being re-examined as part of a re-examination of realism in international relations theory which claims to be Hobbes-based. I am not alone in maintaining that Hobbes was first and foremost a peace theorist, rejecting the usual grounds for war, pretexts based on just war, infringements on property or trade, and thus trespass. But those who examine the three-fold causes of war that Hobbes gives, as “competition”, “diffidence”, and “glory”, have generally not noticed the relation between Hobbes’s theory of war and empire. While Hobbes makes remarkably few references to the colonial ventures of Great Britain, for reasons that we will consider, his theory of empire, like his theory of war, is based on classical notions of internal balance and the homeostasis of the body politic along Aristotelian lines. His treatment of the polity as a natural body is consistent with his materialist ontology and he treats war and empire in terms of both “intestine diseases” and pathologies that afflict the body politic from without. The upshot is a theory remarkably backward-looking in terms of its emphasis on the health of the body politic and the politics of balance, which forbid “vain-glorious wars” and demand that overly-powerful subjects, towns of “immoderate greatness” and grandiose enlargements of dominion be excised, like Aristotle’s “big foot” whose disproportion spoils the proportion of the body as a whole.
Journal Article
HOBBES, DONNE AND THE VIRGINIA COMPANY: TERRA NULLIUS AND 'THE BULIMIA OF DOMINIUM'
This article addresses immediate contexts for Hobbes's theories of war and empire: Anglo-Dutch rivalry over freedom of the seas, and the Virginia Company's mandate to colonize America as 'unclaimed land' (terra nullius). It stakes out new ground: first in maintaining
that both Donne and Hobbes invoked the doctrine of terra nullius, following the Jamestown Massacre of 1622, shortly after it had been formulated by Grotius, and long before it was known by this name; and second, in making the case that Hobbes's 'nasty brutish and short' seems
to refer specifically to the life of Virginian 'savages', rather than being a general description of the natural condition of humankind. Hobbes was present when John Donne preached to the Virginia Company in 1622, invoking terra nullius, and Donne's argument may be read as a
template for Hobbes's 'Bulimia of Dominium'. Like Donne, Hobbes read Jamestown as the empire striking back.
Journal Article
Hobbes's Fool the \Insipiens\, and the Tyrant-King
Hobbes in Leviathan, chapter xv, 4, makes the startling claim: \"The fool hath said in his heart, 'there is no such thing as justice,\"' paraphrasing Psalm 52:1: \"The fool hath said in his heart there is no God.\" These are charges of which Hobbes himself could stand accused. His parable of the fool is about the exchange of obedience for protection, the backslider, regime change, and the tyrant; but given that Hobbes was himself likely an oath-breaker, it is also self-reflexive and self-justificatory. For, Hobbes's fool is not a windbag (follis), or one of the dumb mob, led astray by priests (stultus). He is, in the terminology of Psalm 52, an insipiens, a madman or raving lunatic, whose rebellion against God the King is his own destruction and that of his people. A long iconographic tradition portraying the fool as insipiens, Antichrist, heretical impostor and tyrant king, was at Hobbes's disposal.
Journal Article
The Paradoxical Hobbes: A Critical Response to the Hobbes Symposium, Political Theory , Vol. 36, 2008
Attention has turned from Hobbes the systematic thinker to his inconsistencies, as the essays in the Hobbes symposium published in the recent volume of Political Theory suggest. Deborah Baumgold, in \"The Difficulties of Hobbes Interpretation,\" shifted the focus to \"the history of the book,\" and Hobbes's method of serial composition and peripatetic insertion, as a major source of his inconsistency. Accepting Baumgold's method, the author argues that the manner of composition does not necessarily determine content and that fundamental paradoxes in Hobbes's work have a different provenance, for which there are also contextual answers. Hobbes was a courtier's client, but one committed early to a materialist ontology and epistemology, and these commitments shackled him in treating the immediate political questions with which he was required to deal, leading to systemic paradoxes in his treatment of natural law, liberty, authorization, and consent.
Journal Article
Mary Astell (1666–1731)
This chapter discusses life history of Mary Astell, a feminist thinker, who is famous for her rhetorical questions concerning the enslavement of women, is both typical and atypical of early modern feminists. She is also typical in being involved in women's education. Mary Astell is atypical, however, both in the range of her work and its wide contemporary reception, often extending to several editions, and sometimes the subject of lampooning and plagiarism. From 1703 to 1709, Astell had been engaged as a High Church Tory pamphleteer, producing two pamphlets important in the debate on the occasional conformity of dissenters: A Fair Way with the Dissenters and their Patrons, addressed to Daniel Defoe, and Moderation truly Stated, both of 1704. Astell as an early modern feminist and social commentator risked her reputation to venture something new: a fine sociological sensibility for the social consequences of gentrification accompanying the expansion of market society and increasing disposable income among the middle classes.
Book Chapter
The Paradoxical Hobbes: A Critical Response to the Hobbes Symposium, Political Theory, Vol. 36, 2008/UnParadoxical Hobbes: In Reply to Springborg
Attention has turned from Hobbes the systematic thinker to his inconsistencies, as the essays in the Hobbes symposium published in the recent volume of Political Theory suggest. Deborah Baumgold, in \"The Difficulties of Hobbes Interpretation,\" shifted the focus to \"the history of the book,\" and Hobbes's method of serial composition and peripatetic insertion, as a major source of his inconsistency. Accepting Baumgold's method, the author argues that the manner of composition does not necessarily determine content and that fundamental paradoxes in Hobbes's work have a different provenance, for which there are also contextual answers. Hobbes was a courtier's client, but one committed early to a materialist ontology and epistemology, and these commitments shackled him in treating the immediate political questions with which he was required to deal, leading to systemic paradoxes in his treatment of natural law, liberty, authorization, and consent. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]
Journal Article