Hobbes, the Universities, and the History of Philosophy

R. W. SERJEANTSON

[For publication in The Philosopher in Early Modern Europe, ed. by Conal Condren, Stephen
Gaukroger, and Ian Hunter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 11339]

For some time now scholars have debated why Thomas Hobbes was never made a
Fellow of the Royal Society.1 But no one has ever thought it worth asking why the
University of Oxford never gave him an honorary degree as it awarded Oliver
Cromwell one in May 1649.2 Hobbes had been a student at Magdalene Hall between
1602 and 1608, but thereafter he was one brief attempt at rapprochement aside one
of Oxfords most inveterate enemies, and indeed an enemy of existing universities
altogether.3 In fact, few things he said in Leviathan (1651) aroused more immediate
anger than his closing claim that the book might be profitably taught in the
Universities.4 Hobbess early readers reacted to this statement, as Hobbes himself
later acknowledged,5 with incredulity and disgust.6 Moreover, when members of the

1
See esp. Q. Skinner, 'Thomas Hobbes and the nature of the early Royal Society', Historical journal,
12 (1969), 217-39, revised and extended as Hobbes and the politics of the early Royal Society in
Skinner, Visions of politics, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), III, 324-45; S.
Shapin and S. Schaffer, Leviathan and the air-pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the experimental life
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), esp. p. 139; M. Hunter, Science and society in
Restoration England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 178-79; N. Malcolm, 'Hobbes
and the Royal Society', in Perspectives on Thomas Hobbes, ed. G. A. J. Rogers and A. Ryan (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1988), 43-66; G. A. J. Rogers, 'The intellectual relationship between Hobbes
and Locke a reappraisal', in Locke's enlightenment: aspects of the origin, nature and impact of his
philosophy (Hildesheim: Olms, 1998), 61-77, at 65-70.
2
A. Fraser, Cromwell: our chief of men (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973), p. 318. Hobbes
noted and drew ironic attention to this honour in Behemoth: St Johns College, Oxford, MS 13, fol. 78v.
3
On Hobbess time at Oxford, see N. Malcolm, A summary biography of Hobbes, in Aspects of
Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 1-26, at 3-5.
4
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London, 1651), p. 395.
5
Thomas Hobbes, Six lessons to the professors of the mathematiques (London, 1656), pp. 56-57;
Hobbes, Considerations upon the reputation of Thomas Hobbes (London, 1680), pp. 57-58.

1
English universities were accused of professing Hobbess ideas, as Daniel Scargill
was at Cambridge in 1668, they were liable to find themselves in serious trouble.7
Nonetheless, the universities have a significant place in all of his major
writings. They were a consistent component of his systematic political philosophy
between the Elements of law of 1640 and the Latin Leviathan of 1668. Hobbes
regarded the universities as having a necessary office in a Common-wealth, and held
that it was a duty of the sovereign representative to oversee what they taught.8 Yet he
was also bitterly critical of the political role the universities had played in the civil
wars, and more generally of the Vaine Philosophy he thought they taught. In the
course of articulating this critique, the universities also came to play an increasingly
important role in Hobbess understanding of history: both the history of his own time,
and also of European history since classical antiquity.
Most importantly, perhaps, Hobbess relations with the universities constitute
a central moment in the development of the persona of the new philosopher or
novator in the middle years of the seventeenth century. The Aristotelian philosophy of
the schools had been attacked by Bernardino Telesio (1509-1588) and his followers
Agostino Doni (fl. 1581) and Tommaso Campanella (1568-1639), by Francis Bacon
(1561-26), and from the perspective of Paracelsianism and alchemy. But it was the
generation of Hobbes (1588-1679) and Descartes (1596-1650), above all, that
ultimately succeeded in creating a view of the philosopher that emphasised novelty,
iconclasm, and above all a rejection of the philosophy of the schools. The historical
consequences of this development are hard to emphasise too strongly: it gave rise to
nothing less than what came to be called modern philosophy, which from the
eighteenth century onwards came to be sharply differentiated from what came to be

6
British Library (BL), MS Harley 6942, fol. 132v (Robert Payne to Gilbert Sheldon, 6 May [1651]);
Alexander Ross, Leviathan drawn out with a hook (London, 1653), p. 96; [Seth Ward], Vindiciae
academiarum (Oxford, 1654), p. 52; Seth Ward, In Thomae Hobbii philosophiam exercitatio epistolica
(Oxford, 1656), p. 11; George Lawson, An examination of the political part of Mr. Hobbs, his
Leviathan (London, 1657), pp. 145-46; John Bramhall, The catching of Leviathan (London, 1658), p.
549; Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, A brief view and survey of Leviathan (Oxford, 1676), p. 319.
But see also William Rand to Samuel Hartlib, 18 Jul. 1651 (Sheffield University, Hartlib Papers [CD-
Rom edition], 62/30/3B-4A): I should conceive that man an excellent Councellour in the matter of
education.
7
J. Parkin, 'Hobbism in the later 1660s: Daniel Scargill and Samuel Parker', Historical journal, 42
(1999), 85-108, at pp. 86-96.
8
Hobbes, Leviathan, pp. 4, 179-80.

2
known as scholasticism, which was often associated with the middle ages. The
consequence of this was that, until recently, the philosophy of the sixteenth century
and earlier seventeenth century tended to be disregarded.
Yet it has become increasingly clear that a much richer understanding of the
significance of the philosophy of the novatores can be gained by studying their
relations to the philosophical perspectives of their immediate predecessors. 9 A
number of recent studies of Descartes have brought this out strongly,10 and the same
tendency is also evident in relation to Hobbes. {Brett has explored his relations to the
writings of the Spanish second scholastic.11 Schuhmann emphasized the importance
of a broad Renaissance Aristotelian philosophical culture for understanding Hobbes,
and Schuhmanns student Leijenhorst has explored in some detail how the account of
prima philosophia in Hobbess De corpore can be regarded as being in some sense a
mechanization of contemporary Aristotelian natural philosophy.12} This revisionist
revisionism has had the salutary effect of reminding us that early modern
philosophers were speaking to their contemporaries and not to us, and that the
problems they addressed were those of their own philosophical milieu and not ours.
It is true that these developments have been less evident in the history of
political thought. There are some good reasons for this. The history of political
doctrines is one of the few fields within early modern history in which it does not
immediately make sense to ground ones enquiries in the history of universities,
broadly conceived. The study of politics as a discipline (politica) was not quite so
prominent in the university curricula of early modern Europe as the study of logic or
metaphysics, or moral or natural philosophy. Moreover, the majority of texts that
now tend to be regarded as major contributions to the development of early modern
political ideas were written outside the universities.

9
T. Sorell (ed.), The Rise of Modern Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).
10
See esp. D. Des Chene, Physiologia: Natural philosophy in late Aristotelian and Cartesian thought
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996); R. Ariew, Descartes and the Last Scholastics (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1999).
11
A. S. Brett, Liberty, right and nature: individual rights in later scholastic thought (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997), 205-35.
12
K. Schuhmann, 'Hobbes and renaissance philosophy', in Hobbes oggi, ed. A. Napoli (Milan: Franco
Angeli, 1990), 331-49; C. Leijenhorst, The mechanization of Aristotelianism: the late Aristotelian
setting of Thomas Hobbes natural philosophy (Leiden: Brill, 2002), esp. . 219-22.

3
 For these and other reasons it is evidently not enough simply to re-assimilate
the novatores back into the milieu of the schools. We need to acknowledge the extent
to which they emerged from that philosophical world. But we also need to understand,
as precisely as possible, the personae that they created to escape from the schools.13
This essay is a contribution to this enterprise in the case of Hobbes. In it, I draw
attention to the important place education held in the political thought of the schools
in the period. I explore the increasingly important place of the history of philosophy
in Hobbess thought. And at the heart of my account is an historical interpretation of
chapter XLVI of Leviathan, Hobbess most thoroughgoing attack on the universities
and the vain philosophy they taught.

Hobbess views on the universities developed in a number of important ways

throughout his publications. In certain key respects, however, his underlying position
remained constant, and it is with this consistent position that I wish to begin. From the
Elements of law (1640) to Behemoth (1666-68) and the Latin Leviathan (1668),
Hobbess view of the universities was characterized by a sense of their importance as
places of education, and above all, education in political ideas. It was in the
universities that young men received their political opinions, and the same young men
then transmitted those opinions to the people by their conversation and preaching.
This view is present in the Elements of law.14 It remains in the De cive (1642), in
which Hobbes asserted that anyone who wants to introduce a sound doctrine has to
begin from with the Universities.15 And it was memorably reformulated in the review

13
See also R. Tuck, 'The institutional setting', in D. Garber and M. Ayers (eds.), The Cambridge
history of seventeenth-century philosophy, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998),
vol. I, . 9-32.
14
Hobbes, The elements of law natural & politic, ed. F. Tnnies (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1928), . 145-46.
15
Thomas Hobbes, De cive: the Latin version, ed. H. Warrender (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1983), p. 199: si quis sanam doctrinam introducere voluerit, incipiendum ei est ab Academiis. Trans.
Hobbes, On the citizen, ed. R. Tuck, trans. M. Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1998), 146.

4
and conclusion of the English Leviathan (1651), in which Hobbes emphasized his
point with a striking metaphor. For seeing, he wrote ,

the Universities are the Fountains of Civill, and Morall Doctrine, from whence the Preachers, and the
Gentry, drawing such water as they find, use to sprinkle the same (both from the Pulpit, and in their
Conversation) upon the People, there ought certainly to be great care taken, to have it pure, both from
the Venime of Heathen Politicians, and from the Incantation of Deceiving Spirits.16

Hobbes is quite consciously using an established metaphor of the fountain for the
universities purpose.17 He is also drawing on the appropriation of this language in
order to urge reform: the Grand Remonstrance of 1641 had spoken of Parliaments
intention to purge the fountains of learning, the two Universities, that the streams
flowing from them may be clear and pure.18 The metaphor of the fountain in its turn
probably alludes to the motto of the University of Cambridge: hinc lucem et pocula
sacra (From here [flows] light and sacred draughts) strikingly iconographically
represented on a title-page of 1660.19
Hobbess emphasis on the universities as the most effective means of teaching
civil doctrine stems from his more general conviction of human educability. In the
Elements of law, Hobbes spoke of the young men entering the universities as having
minds yet as white paper, capable of any instruction. In Leviathan, similarly, he
spoke of the Common-peoples minds as being like clean paper, fit to receive
whatsoever by Publique Authority shall be imprinted in them. Hobbes gives a formal
explanation for his emphasis on human educability in the account of human nature in
De homine (1658), the second part of his tripartite treatment of the elements of
philosophy. Here he ascribes the various sources of human ingenia (wits, defined as
the tendencies of men to certain things), to temperament, custom, experience, good

16
Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 395. Compare Hobbes, De cive, pp. 198-99.
17
V. Morgan and C. Brooke, A history of the University of Cambridge, vol. II: 1546-1750 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2004), . 108-10.
18
Constitutional documents of the puritan revolution 1625-1660, ed. S. R. Gardiner (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1906), p. 230. See further C. Webster, The great instauration: science, medicine and
reform 1626-1660 (London: Duckworth, 1975), p. 115.
19
Jeremy Taylor, Ductor dubitantium (London, 1660).

5
fortune, self-regard, and authorities.20 Of the last of these authorities Hobbes
curtly noted that if they are good, the wits of youths are formed well; if corrupt, then
corruptly, whether they are Magistrates, or Fathers, or any others of those whom they
hear praised by the people for their wisdom.21 From which it follows, Hobbes
continues, that fathers, magistrates and tutors had better both impart good precepts
and provide a good example in following them; and that the books which are read be
healthful, chaste and useful.22
A further explanation for Hobbess insistence on the educational importance
of the universities arises from their legal status as public foundations. Unlike the first
education that parents provided privately for their children,23 the education that
universities provided to their charges was licensed and authorized by the
commonwealth itself by means of privileges, exemptions and laws specific to them
as a number of contemporary political writers pointed out.24 As we might expect,
Hobbes took this public aspect of the universities extremely seriously. Moreover,
when he speaks as he does in chapter XXIX of Leviathan of seditious books being
publikely read, he means that they are lectured upon in the schools.25
At a more general level, Hobbess conviction about the importance of the
universities is also related to his emphasis on the political importance of opinion. In
his later writings in particular, Hobbes increasingly stressed a view more commonly
associated in the history of political thought with David Hume: that political power
follows opinion.26 Since (in Hobbess view) the common people derived their
opinions from preachers and the gentry, and since the preachers and the gentry learnt

20
Hobbes, Elements of law, p. 146. Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 176. Hobbes, De homine (London, 1658), p.
72.
21
Hobbes, De homine, p. 74: Ab his si boni, Ingenia adolescentum formantur bona; prava si pravi,
sive Magistri ii sint, sive Patres, sive alii quicunque quos vulgo a sapientia laudari audiunt; nam
laudatos reverentur & dignos existimant quos imitentur.
22
Hobbes, De homine, p. 75: Secundo, quam, quos lecturi sunt libros, sunt sani, casti, & utiles.
23
As Hobbes noted in Leviathan, p. 178.
24
Sir Thomas Smith, De republica Anglorum [printed 1583], ed. M. Dewar (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1982), p. 87; Pierre Gregoire, De republica, 2 vols. (Lyon, 1609), vol. II, p. 72, col. 1;
Christoph Scheibler, Philosophiae compendiosa (Oxford, 1639), pp. 108-9.
25
Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 171.
26
See David Hume, Essays, ed. E. F. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1985), esp. pp. 32, 51.

6
their opinions in the universities, what the universities taught was of fundamental
importance.27

II

Hobbess consistent emphasis on the public function of the universities as the places
where the blank paper of the ruling classes minds was imprinted with civil doctrine
had an important consequence for his political philosophy. In all his major political
works, Hobbes asserts that a concern for university education is a formal duty or
office of the sovereign. Hobbes first made this point in the Elements of law. It is
repeated in De cive, where Hobbes writes: I hold therefore that it is a duty of
sovereigns to have the true Elements of civil doctrine written and to order that it be
taught in all the Universities in the commonwealth. It is emphasized again in the
English Leviathan.28
When considered in context of the formal political treatises of late
Renaissance Europe, Hobbess concern with the politics of education is entirely
conventional. Leviathan is not often considered in the context of the systematic or
encyclopaedic political philosophy that was largely generated by the schools in the
period. Indeed, this is a body of literature that Anglophone historians tend to
disparage when they consider it at all.29 But although not in terms of its doctrines,
then perhaps in terms of its structure and comprehensive scope, Leviathan may be
regarded as at one withthe ambitions of the encyclopaedic accounts of politics
produced by authors such as Pierre Gregoire, Lambert Daneau, Bartholomew

27
See also G. M. Vaughan, Behemoth teaches Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes on political education
(Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2002), p. 38.
28
Hobbes, Elements, p. 146. Hobbes, De cive, p. 199: Officii igitur summorum imperantium esse
arbitror, Elementa vera doctrinae civilis conscribi facere, & imperare ut in omnibus civitatis Academiis
doceantur (translation from Hobbes, On the citizen, pp. 146-47). Hobbes, Leviathan, pp. 180-81 (see
also p. 4).
29
See e.g. R. Tuck, Philosophy and government 1572-1651 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1993), p. 158. But see H. Dreitzel, Protestantischer Aristotelismus und absoluter Staat: die "Politica"
des Henning Arnisaeus (ca 1575-1636) (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1970), esp. . 411-14; H. Dreitzel,
'Althusius in der Geschichte des Fderalismus', in Politische Begriffe und historisches Umfeld in der
Politica methodice digesta des Johannes Althusius, ed. E. Bonfatti, G. Duso and M. Scattola
(Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2002), . 49-112, at . 51-52;Robert von Friedeburgs chapter in this volume.

7
Keckermann, and Johannes Althusius. More generally, in stressing the responsibility
of the magistrate to the schools, Hobbes was simply endorsing a well-developed
aspect of late Renaissance political philosophy.30 Several of these authors and their
followers went so far as to regard scholastics (scholastica) as a subalternate
discipline to politics.31 One consequence of this can be seen inJohn Prideauxstreatise
on the Lineamenta politica,a work treating education as one of the seven parts of
politics, alongside topics such as the best form of a commonwealth, laws, magistrates,
the status of subjects, and commerce.32
There was a wide variety of ways, though, in which the relationship between
the schools and the commonwealth was considered in late Renaissance civil
philosophy. A few authors of the period, such as Justus Lipsius still followed the
earlier Renaissance tendency of treating politics in terms of the virtues and the
encouragement of education a princely one.3334 By extension, for a prince to suppress
the schools was as the English philosopher John Case argued a mark of tyranny.
Such was the behaviour of Julian the Apostate, or of the Turks in Hungary, not of a
virtuous Christian monarch.35
For most late Renaissance writers on politics, however, care for education was
rather more than a virtue: it was, as Hobbes also thought, a duty. Hence Jean Bodin
described the bringing up of youth as lune des principale charges dune
Republique, albeit one that was unduly neglected.36 The Huguenot Lambert Daneau ,
asserted that the magistrate ought always to have the greatest care for the proper and
pious education of his citizens children.37 Similarly, for the widely read Reformed
philosopher, Bartholomew Keckermann, the education of his subjects was a formal

30
See also J. P. Sommerville, Thomas Hobbes: political ideas in historical context (Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1992), p. 86.
31
J. H. Alsted, Encyclopaedia, 2 vols. (Herborn, 1630), p. 1505.
32
John Prideaux, Hypomnemata (Oxford, [?1650]), pp. 335-73, pp. 336, 356-61.
33
See further Q. Skinner, The foundations of modern political thought (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1978), vol. I,. 234-36, 254; Tuck, Philosophy and government, p. 55.
34
Justus Lipsius, Sixe bookes of politickes or civil doctrine, trans. William Jones (London, 1594), p. 40.
35
John Case, Sphaera civitatis (Oxford, 1588), p. 498. Cf. Aristotle, Politics, V. ix, and also Johann
Himmel, Idea boni gymnasii (Speyer, 1614), p. 1; Vindiciae contra tyrannos [1579], trans. W. Walker
(London, 1648), p. 107.
36
Jean Bodin, Les six livres de la rpublique (Lyon, 1579), p. 590. See further Bodin, Oratio de
instituenda in repub. juventute (Tolouse, 1559).
37
Lambert Danaeu, Politices Christianae libri septem ([s. l.], 1596), p. 129: maximam semper esse
debere optimi magistratus curam de pueris civibus suis recte, pieque educandis.

8
responsibility of the prince, and something that he ought to keep directly under his
own eye.38
All these authors drew, explicitly or implicitly, on the fundamentally humanist
assumption that education plays a vital role in making good citizens. This point was
made by numerous authors writing in the century before Hobbes, and was fully shared
by him.39 It was made particularly strongly by Jacques Simanca, whose popular De
republica(1569) is a cento of quotations from classical, medieval and Renaissance
authors on a comprehensive range of political topics. Like numerous other late
Renaissance authors, the list of authorities that Simanca cites in support of his
contention about the importance of education to the commonwealth is headed by book
VIII of Aristotles Politics, followed by Platos Republic and Laws, Plutarchs Life of
the Spartan founder Lycurgus, book I of Quintilians Institutio oratoriae, and the
epistles of the imperial moralist Seneca, who had said that education forms the
morals of the citizen.40
These authors often argued that the schools were not only useful but also
actually necessary to a well-ordered commonwealth. For John Case, schools were
necessary because they give rise to amity and order in the commonwealth. The French
author Pierre Gregoire whose book De republica (1596) seems to have been one of
the most widely read political works in the earlier seventeenth century after Bodins
followed Clement of Alexandria in asserting the necessity of schools to the
commonwealth.41 The Calvinist political theorist Johannes Althusius wrote at length
on this theme in his Politica of 1603, arguing that if we wish to have good leaders,
governors, and ministers in the Commonwealth and in the Church, it is necessary that
we guard the schools in which such people are moulded.42 As Gregoire noted, the

38
Keckermann, Systema disciplinae politicae, pp. 190-92.
39
See e.g. Himmel, Idea, p. 1; Jacobus Gadebuschius, Aurea discendi triga (Magdeburg, 1623), sig.
B3r; Prideaux, Hypomnemata, p. 356.
40
Jacobus Simanca, De republica recte institutenda, conservanda & amplificanda libri IX (Cologne,
1609), p. 587: educatio more facit. On Hobbess view of the cento as a form of learned madness, see
Q. Skinner, Reason and rhetoric in the philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1996), p. 267.
41
Simanca, De republica, pp. 587, 594. Case, Sphaera civitatis, p. 498. Gregoire, De republica, vol. II,
p. 71
42
Althusius, De utilitate, necessitate et antiquitate scholarum admonitio panegyrica, in Politica, p.
983: Si igitur in Rep. & Ecclesia bonos duces, gubernatores & ministros cupimus, necesse est, ut
scholas, in quib. Tales informantur, conservemus. On Althusius, see further H. Dreitzel,

9
consequences of failing to do so could be serious, since it was from education that
prosperity or subversion (or at least great corruption) can appear in a
commonwealth.43
For all these reasons, a number of early seventeenth century writers on the role
of the universities in the commonwealth set out what such schools required.44 One
important condition was a suitable, permanent and healthy location.45 (As Robert
Burton suggested in the Anatomy of melancholy (1621-51), some special pleading had
to be made in this respect for the University of Cambridge.46) No less important were
the privileges and immunities proper to ancien rgime corporations, whether granted
by the Pope (for Catholic authors) or the local prince, as well as the laws specifically
pertaining to the schools.47 Pious and well-affected teachers and professors were
naturally often also listed as a desideratum. Finally, not the least important
consideration was that universities be properly funded.48 These views are again quite
consistent with the ones Hobbes expresses in the Elements of law, De cive, and
Leviathan. Even Hobbess fierce early Restoration critic William Lucy sarcastically
acknowledged that, despite his criticisms of the universities, Hobbes did not want to
see an utter extirpation of the schools, and that he did reserve a room and office for
them in the Commonwealth.49
But while late Renaissance political theorists tended to agree about the value
of schools and universities to the commonwealth, they showed no such agreement

Monarchiebegriffe in der Frstengesellschaft, 2 vols. (Cologne: Bhlau, 1991), vol. II,. 531-32, 1024-
25.
43
Gregoire, De republica, vol. II, p. 70: salus, vel subversio aut saltem corruptio major, oriri potest in
republica.
44
For the points below, see especially Gregoire, De republica, lib. XVIII; Althusius, Politica, pp. 586-
87; Alsted, Politica, in his Encyclopaedia, p. 1417; Scheibler, Philosophiae compendiosa, pp. 108-9.
See also Himmel, Idea, esp. p. 5.
45
Keckermann, Systema disciplinae politicae, p. 195.
46
Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy [1632], ed. T. C. Faulkner, et al., 6 vols. (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1989-2000), vol. I, p. 236.
47
Gregoire, De republica, vol. II, p. 72; Lawson, Examination, pp. 76-77. See further W. Frijhoff,
'What is an early modern university? The conflict between Leiden and Amsterdam in 1631', in
European universities in the age of Reformation and Counter Reformation, ed. H. Robinson-
Hammerstein (Dublin: Four Courts, 1998), pp. 149-68, at p. 160.
48
Bodin, Six Bookes, p. 645; Althusius, Politica, p. 184; Keckermann, Systema, p. 194-95; George
Lawson, Politica sacra et civilis [1660], ed. C. Condren (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1992), p. 247.
49
William Lucy, Observations, censures and confutations of notorious errours in Mr. Hobbes his
Leviathan (London, 1663), p. 7; Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 4.

10
over the question of who should have governance of such academies. For Hobbes, as
we have seen, oversight of the universities is one of the duties of the sovereign. In
holding this view he was not alone and John Prideaux was explicit: the power to
found and dissolve academies or schools as one of the prerogatives of majesty.50
There was, however, a notable tendency among certain Calvinist writers on
politics to give a different account of where the authority over the schools should
reside. These authors, usually presbyterians and following the lead of Johannes
Althusius above all, argued that the right of schooling belonged not to the civil, but to
the ecclesiastical magistrate.51 According to Althusius, the justification for founding
public schools was first and foremost a religious one. The schools provide for the
conserving of true religion and the passing of it on to later generations; moreover,
they are the custodians of the keys of science and doctrine, by which the resolution of
all doubt is sought and the way of salvation is disclosed.52 Althusius view was rather
influential.53 In particular, it made its way into the Giessen professor Christoph
Scheiblers Philosophia compendiosa (1628) a book that seems to have been one of
the principal textbooks for the undergraduate arts course in 1630s Oxford.54 As we
shall see, this presbyterian claim for the schools independence from the sovereign
forms a crucial but in Leviathan also a covert target for Hobbes.

III

Let me now turn, then, from considering the aspects of Hobbess treatment of the
universities that remained constant throughout his works to those that changed
significantly over the thirty years from 1640 to 1670. We have already seen that

50
Prideaux, Hypomnemata, p. 339.
51
See further H. Dreitzel, Absolutismus und stndische Verfassung in Deutschland (Mainz: Zabern,
1992), pp. 26-28.
52
Althusius, Politica, p. 184 (trans. F. S. Carney (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1995), p. 76).
53
Samuel Rutherfords Lex, rex (London, 1644). See also R. von Friedeburg, 'Widerstandsrecht,
Notwehr und die Reprsentation des Gemeinwesens in der Politica des Althusius (1614) und in der
schottischen Althusius-Rezeption, 1638-1669', in Politische Begriffe und historisches Umfeld, . 291-
314 (esp. pp. 295-96).
54
See Scheibler, Philosophia compendiosa, p. 108 (Oxford editions in 1628 and 1639). See also Letters
and papers of the Verney family down to the end of the year 1639, ed. J. Bruce (London: Camden
Society, 1853), p. 154.

11
Hobbes regarded the Instruction of the people as depending wholly, on the right
teaching of Youth in the Universities.55 But according to him, the role of the
universities in educating the subjects of commonwealths had generally been malign,
and they specifically helped to sow the seeds of rebellion in England. It is for this
reason that he increasingly associated them with the causes of rebellion and those
things that Weaken a Common-wealth.56
The universities, in Hobbess view, had been guilty of encouraging false and
seditious notions about conscience, law, property, and tyranny, all of which presented
significant dangers to the rightful sovereign power. Thus in the chapter of the
Elements of law on the preservation of the commonwealth, the opinions that Hobbes
declares to dispose men to rebellion are said to have proceeded from private and
public teaching, and their teachers are said to have received them from grounds and
principles, which they have learned in the Universities. In the corresponding chapter
of De cive, Hobbes likewise asserts that the political errors tending to sedition have
crept into the minds of uneducated people partly from the pulpits of popular
preachers and partly from conversation with the gentry. Both groups, he claims,
imbibed these errors from those who taught them in their young days at the
Universities.57 This kind of criticism may have encouraged Hobbes to think that the
people who hold sway in the universities (he does not specify which ones) might try
to hinder the publication of the second edition of De cive, which came out nonetheless
at Amsterdam in early 1647.58 It is in Leviathan that universities are attacked on the
broadest range of fronts, yet the central charge remains: From Aristotles Civill
Philosophy, Hobbes asserts, men educated in the schools have learned, to call all
manner of Common-wealths but the Popular, (such as was at that time in the state of
Athens,) Tyranny.59

55
Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 180.
56
Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 167. See also Hobbes, Elements of law, part II, ch. ix; Hobbes, De cive, ch. XII.
57
Thomas Hobbes, Elements of law, p. 138. Hobbes, De cive, p. 199: & in animos horum a doctoribus
adolescentiae suae in Academiis publicis (trans. from Hobbes, On the Citizen, p. 146).
58
Thomas Hobbes, Correspondence, ed. N. Malcolm, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), vol. I,
pp. 126/127: ij qui dominantur in Academijs.
59
Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 377; see also p. 111 and ch. XXIX, and compare also Hobbes, De homine, p.
75. See further M. Dzelzainis, 'Milton's classical republicanism', in Milton and republicanism, ed. D.
Armitage, A. Himy and Q. Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 3-24, esp. pp.

12
 The English Leviathan thus has a special place in this account of Hobbess
relations to the universities, since it was in this book that he first unleashed the full
force of his criticisms upon them. The universities, and the philosophy and theology
that they teach, are subjected to several passing attacks throughout Leviathan, but it is
in the penultimate chapter of the book that Hobbes turns to consider them
systematically. Chapter XLVI of Leviathan, which has no counterpart in De cive,60
belongs to the fourth part of the book, notoriously entitled Of the Kingdome of
Darknesse; and the darkness specifically treated in this chapter is the obscurity that
arises from VAIN PHILOSOPHY, and FABULOUS TRADITIONS.
Hobbes begins this chapter by giving a definition of philosophy that is in form
Aristotelian: the knowledge of the effects of causes and the causes of effects; but he
insists, polemically, upon a restriction to efficient (rather than formal, material or
final) causation. More strikingly, Hobbes then turns to offer an account of the origins
and history of philosophy. Hobbess deep and well-formed interest in history has
attracted increasing attention from scholars.61 Less has been said, however, about
Hobbess no less well-developed interest in the history of philosophy.62
Hobbess brief account of the history of philosophy at the beginning of chapter
XLVI is, like Thomas Stanleys much larger contemporary account and also like most
other histories of philosophy at the time, doxographical.63 That is, it follows the lead
of ancient historians of philosophy such as Diogenes Laertius in tracing philosophy
not through the history of its ideas, but through its principal protagonists and the
schools that followed them. Hobbess explanation for the origins of the subject is in
content conventional, but in import satirical. At the beginning of the Metaphysics
(982b11-28), Aristotle had argued that philosophy is not pursued for its utility, and

3-15; Q. Skinner, 'Hobbes and the proper signification of liberty', in Visions of politics, vol. III, pp.
209-37, esp. p. 227.
60
See further K. Schuhmann, 'Leviathan and De cive', in Leviathan after 350 years, ed. T. Sorell and L.
Foisneau (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 13-31, esp. p. 27.
61
See esp. W. R. Lund, 'The use and abuse of the past: Hobbes on the study of history', Hobbes
Studies, 5 (1992), 3-22; L. Borot, 'History in Hobbes's thought', in The Cambridge companion to
Hobbes, ed. T. Sorell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 305-28; Hobbes and
history, ed. G. A. J. Rogers and T. Sorell (London: Routledge, 2000).
62
But see T. Sorell, 'Hobbes's uses of the history of philosophy', in Hobbes and history, . 82-96.
63
Thomas Stanley, The history of philosophy, 3 vols. (London, 1655-60). See further L. Malusa, 'The
first general histories of philosophy in England and the Low Countries', in Models of the history of
philosophy: from its origins in the Renaissance to the 'historia philosophica', ed. G. Santinello et al.
(Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1993), . 161-370, esp. p. 174.

13
had invoked in proof the first philosophers, who only began to pursue it once the
necessaries and eases of life had been obtained. Hobbes similarly asserts that Leasure
is the mother of Philosophy; and since Common-wealth is the mother of Peace,
and Leasure, philosophy first arose in great and flourishing Cities.64 It was only
after the Greek cities, and above all Athens, had grown great enough to support a
wealthy class of men that had no employment that philosophers like Plato and
Aristotle emerged. It is in having nothing else to do, too, that Hobbes finds the origin
of the schools, since schola in Greek signifieth leasure, and the disputations in
which these philosophers engaged were called Diatribae, that is to say, Passing of
the time. Hobbess joke becomes increasingly pointed as he tells us that the different
schools of philosophy took their names from the places in which their masters taught,
as if we should denominate men from More-fields, from Pauls Church, and from the
Exchange, because they meet there often, to prate and loyter.65
Having baited his trap, Hobbes now springs it. Without any warning or
preamble he turns to ask bluntly: But what has been the Utility of those Schools?
what Science is there at this day acquired by their Readings and Disputings?66
According to Hobbes, the Greek schools neglected geometry, taught a natural
philosophy that was rather a Dream than a Science, and inculcated specious and
dangerous doctrines in moral and political philosophy.67
It is after this brief and defamatory history of the schools that Hobbes turns,
without further warning, to give a formal definition of a university: a Joyning
together, and an Incorporation under one Government of many Publique Schools, in
one and the same Town or City. His account has taken him down to his own time,
and was about to land him in some very hot water. The universities of Christendom,
according to Hobbes, are irredeemably tainted by roman catholicism. The principall
Schools of the early modern Universities were ordained for the three Professions,
that is to say, of the Romane religion, of the Romane law, and of the Art of

64
On this point see also S. J. Pigney, 'Seventeenth-century accounts of philosophy's past: Theophilus
Gale and his continental precursors' (unpublished Ph.D. diss., University of London, 1999), p. 53.
65
Hobbes, Leviathan, . 368-69.
66
On the scoffing significance of the figure of percontatio here, see Skinner, Reason and rhetoric, pp.
417-18.
67
Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 369.

14
Medicine. And for the study of Philosophy, he continues with a notorious jibe, it
hath no otherwise place then as a handmaid to the Romane Religion: And since the
Authority of Aristotle is onely current there, that study is not properly Philosophy,
(the nature whereof dependeth not on Authors,) but Aristotelity.68 The remainder of
chapter XLVI consists of an polemical assault on the putative errors of the Aristotelian
schools across all the philosophical disciplines. In the light of all this execration, we
should not be surprised to find one of Hobbess earliest critics, Alexander Ross,
writing in 1653 that:

In his forty-sixth chapter he spurnes at all learning except his own, and
that with such a magisterial spirit, and so supercilious scorn, as if
Aristotle, Plato, Zeno, the Peripateticks, Academicks, Stoicks,
Colledges, Schooles, Universities, Synagogues, and all the wise men of
Europe, Asia, and Affrick hitherto, were scarce worthy to carry his
books.69

IV

We need to remind ourselves of the structure and development of Hobbess argument

in chapter XLVI if we are properly to understand the nature of the attack he is making
.70 We might simply note, of course, that Hobbes is having a pointed joke at the
expense of philosophers by accusing them of having too much time on their hands,
and leveling the rather more serious charge at the English universities made by
others besides Hobbes that they had failed to purge themselves sufficiently of their
Popish origins.71
We should certainly not lose sight here of how far Hobbes has the roman
catholic universities in general, and perhaps the University of Paris in particular in his

68
Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 370.
69
Ross, Leviathan drawn out with a hook, p. 81.
70
Cf. J. G. A. Pocock, 'Time, history and eschatology in the thought of Thomas Hobbes', in Politics,
language and time (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), pp. 148-201, at p. 200.
71
See also Sorell, 'Hobbes's uses of the history of philosophy', p. 89.

15
sights here. Many of Hobbess targets in chapters XLVI and XLVII of Leviathan are
specifically and unambiguously roman catholic. Hobbes criticizes, for instance, the
philosophical justification for denying of Marriage to the clergy; he gives the
example of a Christian who may not preach to the unconverted until he has received
Orders from Rome; and his first example of errors derived from tradition includes
all the Histories of Apparitions, and Ghosts, alledged by the Doctors of the Romane
Church, to make good their Doctrines.72
It may be appropriate to associate Hobbess critique of the doctrines taught in
the roman catholic universities with the university of Paris in particular. Paris was
where Hobbes had mostly been living since he had been the first of all that fled
England in 1640.73 The university of Paris was much more thoroughly committed to
Aristotelianism in metaphysics and in natural philosophy than were the universities of
Oxford and Cambridge by 1651.74 It was in Paris in 1624 that the Faculty of Theology
had formerly censured opponents of Aristotelian philosophy, in part in response to
Pierre Gassendis Exercitationes paradoxicae adversus Aristoteleos which had come
out anonymously that same year.75 Indeed, Hobbess own attack on Aristotelianism
may be regarded as owing something to his friend Gassendis book: Gassendi
preceded Hobbes in describing Aristotelian natural philosophy as a dream
(insomnium) and in criticizing the schools for neglecting geometry. Similarly, where
Hobbes had complained that the schools brought philosophy in religion, Gassendi had
previously made the parallel criticism that the schools have erred in deriving abstruse
questions in philosophy from theology.76 The first position that the Parisian
theologians had upheld in their censure of 1624 was one that Hobbes specifically
attacks in Leviathan: the metaphysical doctrine of materia prima.77 Moreover, it was
the University of Paris that had encouraged attacks such as Gabriel Cossarts oration

72
Hobbes Leviathan, pp. 376, 378, 379.
73
Hobbes, Considerations, p. 6.
74
See further M. Feingold, 'Aristotle and the English universities in the seventeenth century: a
reevaluation', in European universities in the age of Reformation and Counter Reformation, . 135-48,
esp. p. 141; Morgan and Brooke, History of the University of Cambridge, vol. II, pp. 514-15.
75
B. Rochot, 'Introduction', to Pierre Gassendi, Dissertations en forme de paradoxes contre les
Aristolciens, ed. and trans. Rochot (Paris: Vrin, 1959), . vii-xv, at p. viii.
76
Pierre Gassendi, Exercitationes paradoxicae adversus Aristoteleos (Amsterdam, 1649), pp. 13, 10,
16.
77
See Jean de Launoy, De varia Aristotelis in academica parisiensi fortuna (Paris, 1653), pp. 125, 128.

16
against the new philosophy in 1650, in which he argued that novelty of doctrine was
the quickest means to destroy commonwealths.78 The irony that the University of
Paris had thus become more, rather than less committed to Aristotle since its founding
was not lost on the theologian Jean de Launoy, who drew attention to it in his book
De varia Aristotelis in Academia parisiensis fortuna (1653).79 Moreover, Hobbes
would go on explicitly to attack the University of Paris for condemning Luthers
attack on School-theology in the Questions Concerning Liberty, Necessity and
Chance (1656).80
It would be a mistake, however, to imagine that Hobbes is only or simply
attacking roman catholicism here.81 In fact, we will not understand the force of
Hobbess attack if we restrict our interpretation simply to Hobbess own writings.82 If
we wish to understand the historical import of Hobbess attack we need to ask this
question: where else had Hobbess contemporaries treated the topic of the history and
purpose of the schools?
The answer, perhaps unsurprisingly, lies with the schools themselves. The
universities, academies and gymnasia of early modern Europe generated a flourishing
literature on the history and uses of the schools.83 One genre in particular comes very
close to what Hobbes is doing in chapter XLVI of Leviathan. This was the oration in
praise of the schools, commonly pronounced by a rector or professor at a
commencement ceremony or at the beginning of the academic year. The genre of the
inaugural oration is principally associated with the universities and academies of the
Low Countries and the Protestant German-speaking lands, which tended to be rather
more forward about printing academic-related material than did the English
universities. Nonetheless, English examples of the genre by Samuel Fell and John
Prideaux are also extant. Moreover, German specimens of the genre were also

78
Gabriel Cossart, Adversus novitatem doctrinae oratio (Paris, 1650), p. 1.
79
Launoy, De varia Aristotelis fortuna, p. 139. See further A. C. Kors, Atheism in France, 1650-
1729 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990-), vol. I, p. 229.
80
Thomas Hobbes, The questions concerning liberty, necessity, and chance (London, 1656), p. 48. See
further Leijenhorst, Mechanization of Aristotelianism, p. 31.
81
Contrast H. W. Schneider, 'Thomas Hobbes from Behemoth to Leviathan', in Hobbes's 'Science of
Natural Justice', ed. C. Walton and P. J. Johnson (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), . 219-22, at p.
222; F. Lessay, 'Hobbes's protestantism', in Leviathan after 350 years, pp. 265-94, at p. 267.
82
Compare Sorell, 'Hobbes's uses of the history of philosophy', . 87-89.
83
See further Martin Lipen, Bibliotheca realis philosophica, 2 vols. (Frankfurt am Main, 1682), vol. II,
pp. 1367-68.

17
reprinted in England in the first half of the seventeenth century, such as the one by
Philip Pareus.84
These orations are in the genus demonstrativum; that is to say, they employ the
rhetoric of praise and blame.85 They came to praise the schools, as Hobbes came to
blame them. Earlier seventeenth century examples of these orations often follow a
rather stereotyped arrangement. It was an arrangement that had been formalized by an
author we have already encountered: the Calvinist political theorist Johannes
Althusius. At the end of his widely-read Politica (1603), Althusius published as an
appendix a panegyric praising the antiquity, utility, and necessity of the schools.86
This oration, which in good Calvinist fashion emphasises the role of the schools in
helping to restore fallen humanity, served as an implicit or explicit model for a
number of later authors, including Johann Himmel in his Idea boni gymnasii (1614),
Johann Heinrich Alsted in his Encyclopaedia (1630), and Theodore Schrevelius in his
suggestively titled Diatribae scholasticae (1643).87
As Hobbes does in chapter XLVI of Leviathan, these orations commonly begin
by discussing the question of the antiquity of the schools of learning.88 Several writers
trace this history back beyond the Greeks to the schools of the Jews in the Old
Testament. Hobbes too does this in Leviathan, although he is perhaps at slightly
greater pains than his sources to point out that the Jewish schools did not teach

84
Samuel Fell, Primitiae, sive oratio habita Oxonia in schola theologica (Oxford, 1627); John
Prideaux, Orationes novem inaugurales (Oxford, 1626); Philip Pareus, Oratio panegyrica pro musis
Hanovicis instaurandis (London, 1641).
85
On the rhetorical genera, see further Skinner, Reason and rhetoric, . 41-45, 373.
86
This oration is not reprinted in either the abridged Latin edition of C. J. Friedrich (Cambridge, Mass.,
1932) or in the further abridged English translation by F. S. Carney (London, 1965). On the oration see
further G. A. Benrath, 'Johannes Althusius an der Hohen Schule in Herborn', in Politische Theorie des
Johannes Althusius, ed. K.-W. Dahm, W. Krawietz and D. Wyduckel (Berlin: Duncker & Humbolt,
1988), pp. 99-107, and H. Dreitzel, 'Politische Philosophie', in Die Philosophie des 17. Jahrhunderts,
ed. H. Holzhey et al., 4 vols. (Basle: Schwabe, 2001), vol. IV, . 607-748, at p. 629; and Robert von
Friedeburgs chapter in this volume
87
Himmel, Idea, p. 2. Alsted, Encyclopaedia, pp. 1505, 1544. Theodorus Schrevelius, Diatribae
scholasticae sive orationes (Leiden, 1643), p. 15 (antiquity), p. 24 (necessity) and p. 26 (utility of the
schools). On Alsted as a follower of Althusius see H. Hotson, 'The conservative face of contractual
theory: the monarchomach servants of the court of Nassau-Dillenburg', in Politische Begriffe und
historisches Umfeld, pp. 251-89, at p. 255 and n. 18.
88
Petrus Kirstenius, Oratio de origine, successione, propagatione et perfectione scholarum, in
Johannes Scholtzius and Petrus Kirstenius, Orationes duae introductoriae in gymnasio
Wratislaviensium (Breslau, 1650), esp. sigs. E3r-F2r; Georgius Stampelius, Historia scholastica
(Lubeck, 1616); Alsted, Encyclopaedia, p. 1525. Althusius Oratio treats the utilitas and necessitas of
the schools (pp. 970-85) before turning to their antiquitas (pp. 985-1003). See also Lawson, Politica, p.
247; Rudolphus Hospinianus, De templis (Zrich, 1603), pp. 413-35.

18
philosophy, but law.89 The authors of these orations then commonly turn to praise the
necessity of the schools, sometimes noting as Alsted does that knowledge of the
arts and sciences is what separates social men from isolated beasts.90 But if these
orations agree in regarding the schools as necessary, they are even more emphatic
about their usefulness (utilitas).91 The schools are said to be useful because of the
benefits that each of the disciplines they teach bring to human life. Indeed, to make
this point, authors often ran through each of the disciplines taught in the schools
from grammar, logic and rhetoric, through moral and natural philosophy, to medicine,
law and divinity praising the profit that each of them brings.92 We are also told by
these authors that the schools are useful because of the political function that we have
already heard about. They are there to send forth learned, wise, excellent, and erudite
men for the ministry of the Church and the governance of the commonwealth.93 For
Calvinist authors such as Alsted and Althusius, the schools were above all useful in
that they provided remedies for the intellectual defects that humans had acquired by
the Fall.94 One retiring Rector even allowed himself to develop the happy thought that
life in the university was comparable to that in paradise.95 But the comparison with
heaven was also matched by the invocation of hell. According to Althusius, the loss of
the schools would lead to atheism, Epicureanism, and the kingdom of darkness.96
I trust that by this account the nature of Hobbess attack in this chapter of
Leviathan has come into sharper focus. Where it had been conventional to praise the
antiquity of the schools, he does so although he ascribes their origin not to God, but
to wealth and leisure. But where, by contrast, it had been conventional to praise the
necessity of the schools, Hobbes suggests that they have only encouraged sedition,

89
Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 369. On the history of Jewish schools see also Thomas Goodwin, Moses and
Aaron, 5th edn (London, 1634), pp. 81-83.
90
Alsted, Encyclopaedia, p. 1544.
91
See esp. Schrevelius, Diatribae scholasticae, p. 26.
92
See Gregoire, De republica, vol. II, pp. 43-70; Althusius, Oratio, pp. 971-75.
93
Althusius, Oratio, p. 979: Ex scholis homines docti, sapientes, excellentes & eruditi sumuntur ad
ministerium Ecclesiae & ad Reip. Gubernationem.
94
Althusius, Oratio, pp. 970-1. On the implications of this point, see H. Hotson, Johann Heinrich
Alsted 1588-1638: between Renaissance, Reformation, and universal reform (Oxford, 2000), pp. 66-73.
95
Johannes Scholtzius, Oratio de allegorica comparatione Paradysi et scholarum, in Scholtzius and
Kirstenius, Orationes duae, sigs A4v-C4r, esp. sig. C2r.
96
Althusius, Oratio, p. 985: ... atheismus, epicureismus, & regnum tenebrarum

19
and fatally confused philosophy and theology.97 And where, above all, it had been
conventional to praise the usefulness of the schools to the commonwealth, Hobbes
asks simply what their utility has been, and asserts that their learning has been
ignorant, captious, absurd, and unprofitable. Finally, where it had been conventional
to suggest that without the schools society would lapse into the kingdom of darkness,
Hobbes suggests that they have already been instrumental in bringing it to pass.
I short, I believe that we should regard chapter XLVI of Leviathan as a
deliberately parodic inversion of many conventional sentiments about value of the
schools in general, and in particular about their antiquity and utility. In fact, I find the
structural similarities to be so close that I think we must conclude that Hobbes had the
presbyterian Althusius or one of his imitators, such as Schrevelius, directly in his
sights .

The ambiguous religious politics of Hobbess attack on the universities, which

confused both his contemporary and some of his more modern readers was therefore
clearly deliberately studied. Hobbess parody of a cherished genre of the protestant
schools helps make clearer that they were included in his ostensible critique of the
roman catholic ones. For the Aristotelians of the so-called second Reformation
there was no inherent conflict between philosophy and theology.98 Moreover, this
message had been thoroughly well-received in pre-civil war Oxford, where a number
of their writings were reprinted. Among these writings were Christoph Scheiblers
defence of the use of philosophy in theology, edited by Thomas Barlow in 1637,99 and
the Scottish loyalist Robert Barons Philosophia theologia ancillans (1621), which

97
Compare N. Jolley, 'The relation between theology and philosophy', in Cambridge history of
seventeenth-century philosophy, vol. I, . 363-92, at . 366.
98
H. Schilling, 'The second Reformation: problems and issues', in Religion, political culture and the
emergence of early modern society: essays in German and Dutch history (Leiden: Brill, 1992), pp.
247-301, esp. pp. 276, 297-99. See also Bartholomew Keckermann, 'De pugna philosophiae et
theologiae', in Opera omnia, 2 vols. (Geneva, 1614), vol. I, cols. 68-74.
99
Christoph Scheibler, De usu philosophiae in theologia, & praetensa ejus ad theologiam
contrarietate, prefacing his Metaphysica (Oxford, 1637), pp. 1-21.

20
was reprinted at Oxford in 1641.100 When Hobbes accused roman catholic universities
of treating philosophy as the handmaid of religion he also expected his readers to
recall Protestant assertions to exactly the same effect. His suggestion that the
universities pursued philosophy simply as an ancillary pursuit to religion was an
attack on a subordinate and in Hobbess view seditious conception of philosophy
common to universities on both sides of the confessional divide.
Hobbess use of the present tense in Leviathan his claim that philosophy
hath no place then as a handmaid to roman religion particularly provoked his
antagonists at Oxford in the 1650s. It is well known that one of the earlier responses
to Leviathan came in the course of Seth Wards Vindiciae academiarum (1654), a
book principally directed against John Webster, but with appendices taking on both
William Dell the anti-scholastic army chaplain who had found himself within the
gates as Master of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge and also Hobbes.101 This
book helped to draw Hobbes in the 1650s into a quarrel its recent historian has
justly called it a war with both Ward, the Savilian Professor of Astronomy, and with
Wards colleague John Wallis, Savilian Professor of Astronomy.102 Ward found
Hobbess suggestion that the philosophy pursued in the English universities was
somehow ancillary to roman catholicism so Barbarous an Assertion that nothing but
the reverence owing to the already old mans Grey Haires restrained Ward from
speaking bluntly of him. In his response the Six lessons to the professors of the
mathematiques (1656) Hobbes claimed, with a rather contrived pique, that the
present tense was simply a printers error or a slip of the pen: no one could believe
that after fifty years being acquainted with what was publicquely profest and
practised in Oxford and Cambridge, I knew not what Religion they were of. This
retraction in turn provoked Seth Ward into one of more laboured jokes in the
burlesque appendix to his In Thomae Hobbii philosophiam exercitatio epistolica

100
Robert Baron, Philosophia theologia ancillans (St Andrews, 1621; repr. Oxford 1641, 1658), esp.
pp. 320-23 on the value of all the parts of philosophy to theology.
101
On Wards Vindiciae, see A. G. Debus, Science and education in the seventeenth century: the
Webster-Ward debate (London: Macdonald, 1970), . 33-56; J. Twigg, The University of Cambridge
and the English Revolution (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1990), . 206-33.
102
D. M. Jesseph, Squaring the circle: the war between Hobbes and Wallis (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1999), esp. pp. 293-339. See also P. Beeley and C. J. Scriba, eds, The correspondence
of John Wallis (1616-1703), vol. vol. I: 1641-1659 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 148,
187, 539.

21
(1656): punning on the Latin word tempus (both time and tense), Ward exclaimed:
as if the whole controversy were not about tempus. O Tempora! o Mores!103
The provocation that Hobbes received from Ward and Wallis provoked him, in
the Six lessons, into making explicit the implications of his argument that philosophy
had been corrupted by theology in all spheres of human knowledge. The suggestion
that he made was one that in Protestant Europe in the seventeenth century was still
scarcely thinkable: that university education should cease to be in the hands of the
clergy. How would you have exclaimed, he wrote,

if instead of recommending my Leviathan to be taught in the Universities, I

had recommended the erecting of a New and Lay-University, wherein Lay-
men should have the reading of Physiques, Mathematicks, Morall Philosophy,
and Politicks, as the Clergy now have the sole teaching of Divinity?104

The dangerous force of this suggestion is indicated by the fact that after the founding
of the Royal Society early in the Restoration, one of the principal charges the
fledgling and somewhat insecure institution felt it necessary to rebut was that it
offered a threat to the functions and privileges of the universities.105
Yet it would be wrong to imagine that the intemperate nature of the Six lessons
may give the impression that Hobbes had burnt his last boat with the universities. In
fact it preceded a bid on his part, concerted by his young Oxford correspondent Henry
Stubbe, to gain the favour of a number of people in a position of authority at
Oxford.106 Hobbes sent a copy of the English translation of De corpore (including the
Six lessons) to Bodleys Librarian, Thomas Barlow, with a conciliatory letter.107 He
also cooked up with Stubbe a plan to praise Oxford in a way that would reflect well

103
[Ward], Vindiciae academiarum, p. 58. Hobbes, Six lessons, p. 61. Ward, Exercitatio epistolica, p.
358: quasi de Tempore non foret, omnis controversia, o Tempora! o Mores!
104
Hobbes, Six lessons, p. 60.
105
Thomas Sprat, The history of the Royal-Society of London (London, 1667), pp. 323-29. For the
charge, see Anthony Wood, 'Henry Stubbe', in Athenae Oxonienses, ed. P. Bliss, 4 vols. (London: J.
Rivington, 1813-20), vol. III, col. 1071.
106
See also J. R. Jacob, Henry Stubbe, radical Protestantism and the early Enlightenment (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 22.
107
Hobbes, Correspondence, vol. I, pp. 420-22.

22
upon its Vice-Chancellor.108 This was Cromwells ecclesiastical right-hand man, the
Independent John Owen, whose attempts to reform the University were running into
increasing difficulties at the time.109 In this piece of praise, published in Markes of the
absurd geometry of John Wallis (1657), Hobbes went so far as to call Oxford and
Cambridge, the greatest and Noblest means of advancing learning of all kinds.110
Hobbess rather unexpected praise of Oxford here can be seen as part of a
longer-term campaign to encourage the claims of independency over those of
presbyterianism. It seems possible that Hobbes might have genuinely regarded
England in the middle years of the 1650s as actually responding to his call for the
subordination of ecclesiastical to civil power. Hobbes had ended Leviathan with a
remarkable praise of Independency as perhaps the best form of church
government,111 and now Oxford was in the hands of Englands most prominent
Independent, John Owen. Moreover, Owen was known to act with Cromwells
authority, and was regarded by Stubbe as being hostile to Wallis (and also indifferent
to Seth Ward).112 The controversy over the two Commissions set up in 1654 for the
Approbation of Godly Ministers (the Triers) and the Ejection of Scandalous
Ministers (Ejectors) which Hobbes clearly alludes to in the Six lessons as a
Competition between the Ecclesiasticall and the Civill power that hath manifestly
enough appeared very lately had been resolved in favour of the Commonwealths
right to control the clergy and against the claims of classical presbyterianism.113 Yet it
was in this context that Wallis had published his claim that ministers of the Gospel
had been enjoined to their office by Christ and not by the civil power.114 It was this
claim that provoked Hobbess first absolutely explicit attack on presbyterian or, as

108
Hobbes, Correspondence, vol. I, p. 384; N. Malcolm, Biographical Register, in Hobbes,
Correspondence, vol. II, p. 900.
109
B. Worden, 'Cromwellian Oxford', in The history of the University of Oxford, vol. IV: Seventeenth-
century Oxford, ed. N. Tyacke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 733-72, at pp. 744-46.
110
Thomas Hobbes, Markes of the absurd geometry, rural language, Scottish church-politicks, and
barbarismes of John Wallis (London, 1657), p. 19.
111
Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 385. On Hobbess sympathy for independency see J. R. Collins, 'Christian
ecclesiology and the composition of Leviathan: a newly discovered letter to Thomas Hobbes',
Historical journal, 43 (2000), 217-31, at pp. 227-28. J. P. Sommerville 'Hobbes and independency',
Rivista di storia della filosofia, 56 (2004), 155-173, disagrees.
112
Hobbes, Correspondence, vol. I, p. 384.
113
Hobbes, Six lessons, p. 60. J. R. Collins, 'The Church Settlement of Oliver Cromwell', History, 87
(2002),. 18-40.
114
John Wallis, Mens sobria serio commendata (Oxford, 1657), p. 136.

23
he put it, Scottish church politics. To be sure, a deliberately thinly-veiled warning
about the presbyterian claim to have a Power distinct from that of the Civill State
had ended the final chapter of Leviathan,115 but in comparison with the vehement
assault leveled against presbyterians in Behemoth,116 his comments in Leviathan are in
fact strikingly cautious. Presbyterianism is mentioned explicitly on only four
occasions in the printed Leviathan, in each case rather guardedly and with only the
last notice being directly related to England.117 This is one explanation for why the
attack on presbyterian histories of the schools that has been identified here should
have been pursued indirectly, through parody.
Yet as Henry Stubbe reported to Hobbes, it was presbyterian antipathy
towards him that prevented anyone in Oxford acknowledging his overtures.118 Owen,
too, was perhaps rather less well disposed towards Hobbes than Stubbe would have
liked Hobbes to think, and he continued to work together with Wallis in the
University.119 After this missed step Hobbes would increasingly yoke presbyterianism
with the classical republican doctrines of the democratical gentlemen when he
attacked the seditious doctrines taught in the universities.

VI

For if Hobbess attitude to the English universities thawed briefly in 1656-57, a deep
and bitter frost set in with the Restoration. At several points in his later writings,
Hobbes sharpened and developed his charge that the universities had been
fundamentally to blame for the civil wars in England. Moreover, he continued
believed if anything with increased conviction that they posed a serious threat to
peace in the commonwealth.

115
Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 387.
116
On which see A. P. Martinich, 'Presbyterians in Behemoth', Filozofski vestnik, 24 (2003), 121-38,
who wishes to argue that Hobbes account is wrong.
117
Hobbes, Leviathan, pp. 335, 341, 382, 385. There is a further reference to English presbyterians in
the scribal copy that Hobbes presented to Charles II: Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. R. Tuck, rev. edn
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 127 n. 1.
118
Hobbes, Correspondence, vol. I, p. 449.
119
J. Rampelt, Distinctions of reason and reasonable distinctions: the academic life of John Wallis
(unpublished Ph.D. diss., University of Cambridge, 2005), pp. 179-85.

24
 Hence Hobbes used the opportunity presented by the translation of Leviathan
into Latin in 1668 to make his attack on the universities more explicit. Where, for
instance, he asks in his modified account of sovereign duty in chapter XXX, did the
seditious preachers who incited the people against Charles I obtain their authority?
From the universities.120 He also sharpens his account of the essential function of the
universities as formers of opinion. This point appears at the very end of the new
conclusion he wrote for the final chapter of the Latin version. The democratic ink,
he wrote there, must be erased by preaching, writing and disputing. I cannot conceive
that that can be done in any other way than through the Universities.121
Nonetheless, it was in the dialogic history of the civil wars that Hobbes
entitled Behemoth that his assault on the universities reached its most vehement
heights and caused him to depart most strikingly from the chronicle by James Heath
that formed his source.122 The end of the first dialogue of Behemoth, in fact,
constitutes a sustained assault on the role of the universities. Hobbes asserts there that
the coar of Rebellion, as you haue seen by this, and read of other Rebellions, are the
Uniuersities.123 (It is worth emphasising the scope of Hobbess attack here: he does
not just have England in mind. We are possibly intended to think as well of the Low
Countries, and the founding of the University of Leiden in particular as a means of
furthering the aims of Dutch Revolt.124) Even this, however, is not Hobbess strongest
charge: for that, he resorted to an epic simile: The Uniuersities haue been to this
Nation, as the woodden horse to the Troians.125 Why have they been so dangerous?
Again we encounter a development in Hobbess account, but by now not an
unexpected one. The presbyterian clergy are now for the first time explicitly joined to
the democratical gentleman as the joint instigators of the civil wars. Both had their
opinions formed in the schools.

120
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, in Opera philosophica, quae latine scripsit, omnia, 2 vols.
(Amsterdam, 1668) (henceforth cited as Latin Leviathan), vol. II, p. 161. Compare Hobbes,
Leviathan, p. 180.
121
Hobbes, Latin Leviathan, p. 327: Itaque atramentum illud Democraticum, praedicando, scribendo,
disputando eluendum est. Id qui aliter fieri possit, nisi ab Universitatibus, non intelligo.
122
P. Seaward, 'Chief of the ways of God: form and meaning in the Behemoth of Thomas Hobbes',
Filozofski vestnik, 24 (2003), 169-88, at pp. 174, 183, 188.
123
St Johns MS 13, fol. 28r.
124
J. I. Israel, The Dutch republic: its rise, greatness and fall, 1477-1806 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1995), p. 569.
125
St Johns MS 13, fol. 19v.

25
 The most immediate consequence of the hardening of Hobbess views was
that he became increasingly explicit about calling for university reform. Despite their
deep complicity in rebellion, the universities were still not to be wholly rejected. As
he added to the Latin Leviathan, before everything else they must be reformed.126
This was a note he struck repeatedly in Behemoth, asserting that the universities are
not to be cast away, but to be better disciplind. In fact, he went on, We neuer shall
have a lasting peace till the Universities themselues be reformed. The
consequences of failing to carry through this reform would be dire; so dire, that
Hobbes only alludes to them by the means highly unusual for him of a direct
quotation from the classics: unless the Preachers teach the people better, and our
Universities teach the those Preachers better, then perhaps mighty Achilles will again
be sent to Troy.127
As well as hardening his criticism of the role of the universities in the civil
wars, Hobbes now also develops his long-term historical critique of the schools. The
account of the origin and progress of the schools of philosophy in chapter LXVI of the
Latin Leviathan is almost entirely rewritten, and it emerges with a notably different
character from the English version.128 In the first place, Hobbes largely excises the
allusions to a specifically English context. The jokes about the men who gather
together in Moorfields or the Exchange, to prate, and loiter, disappear. The jibe
about Aristotelity is located in some unspecified past rather than the present. The
deliberately contrived confusion which had proved so contentious between the
roman catholic and the protestant universities in respect of their use of philosophy as
the handmaid of theology is also altered. The explanation for this phenomenon is
given a much more historical emphasis, and the University of Paris is this time
specifically mentioned. In fact, Hobbess account of the development of the schools,
and their transformation into universities under (according to him) Charlemagne, is
given a greater historical specificity, and far more attention to the relationship

126
Hobbes, Latin Leviathan, p. 161: Ante omnia ergo illae reformandae sunt.
127
St Johns MS 13, fol. 28r. ibid., fol. 28v; see also fol. 27r. Hobbes, Latin Leviathan, p. 323: nisi
autem Praedicatores populum, & Vniversitates nostrae Praedicatores ipsos melius doceant, forte Iterum
ad Trojam magnus mittetur Achilles (Virgil, Eclogae, IV. 36). Hobbes justifies having neglected the
Ornament of quoting in Leviathan, pp. 394-95.
128
See further Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. E. Curley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), . 453 n. 1, 468 n. 1.

26
between philosophy and theology in the early Christian church. All these
developments are paralleled in a new history of the Popes design in setting vp
Vniuersities that Hobbes also gives in the first dialogue of Behemoth.129
How should we explain Hobbess shift in emphasis? One answer may lie in
his reading of Johann Clvers Historiarum totius mundi epitome (Epitome of all
world histories), which similarly ascribes the founding of the first university
(academia) in Paris to Charlemagne.130 Another may involve Hobbess response to
his most dangerous encounter with a newly revived ecclesiastical authority in the
Restoration. In 1662 it was rumoured that some Bishops in the newly restored Church
of England might try, as John Aubrey put it, to have the good old gentleman burnt
for a heretique; and in 1666 the Commons convened a committee to investigate
Leviathan.131 Hobbess response to these threats was to pursue some extensive
research into the history and legal status of heresy both in England and more
generally.132 The fruits of this reading made their way into the Historia
ecclesiastica. 133 They also appeared in the newly-added Appendix to the Latin
Leviathan,134 and in the late Dialogue between a philosopher and a student of the
common laws of England (dateable to the period after the Scargill affair in 1669).135
One of the central points in these works is that heresy from its Greek origins
signifies singularity of Doctrine, or Opinion contrary to the Doctrine of another Man,
or Men, and consequently, that the positions of the philosophical schools that arose
in support of the doctrines of Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras and Zeno were, in effect,

129
Latin Leviathan, pp. 314-19. St Johns MS 13, fols. 20r (the quotation is an addition in Hobbess
own hand to James Wheldons scribal copy).
130
Johann Clver, Historiarum totius mundi epitome, 6th edn (Leiden, 1657), p. 413; see more
generally P. Springborg, 'Hobbes and Cluverius', Historical journal, 39 (1996), 1075-78. But see also
Herman Conring, De antiquitatibus academicis dissertationes sex (Helmstedt, 1651), pp. 44, 74-75.
131
John Aubrey, Brief lives, chiefly of contemporaries, ed. A. Clark (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1898),
vol. I, p. 339.
132
See further P. Milton, 'Hobbes, heresy, and lord Arlington', History of political thought, 14 (1993),
516-21, esp. pp. 521-24, 541-45.
133
Thomas Hobbes, Historia ecclesiastica, carmine elegiaco concinnata (London, 1688).
134
Latin Leviathan, p. 346-59.
135
A. Cromartie, General introduction, to Thomas Hobbes, A dialogue between a philosopher and a
student, of the Common Laws of England, ed. A. Cromartie and Questions relative to hereditary right,
ed Q. Skinner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), pp. xiii-lxv (at pp. xiv, lviii, lxii-lxv).

27
heresies.136 A perhaps unintended consequence of this historical research was that
Hobbes felt obliged to develop his initially schematic and parodic account of the
history of the schools and their transformation into universities, into a more
thoroughgoing argument about the history of the corruption of theology by
philosophy (and vice-versa).

VII

Hobbess quarrel with the schools is, as I have suggested, an interesting and perhaps
even an important episode in British but also in European intellectual history. The
1651 Leviathan is, as Robert Payne reported Hobbess description of it, Politiques in
English,137 and was explicitly intended for anEnglish audience.138 Yet it is no doubt
appropriate that in a chapter that fearlessly takes on the entire philosophical culture of
the European universities Hobbes should have been engaging covertly with a body of
literature, and a political theory asserting the schools vital role in the commonwealth,
which was not itself English. Yet as we have seen, it was a view that had proved
attractive in the pre-civil war English universities, and particularly in Oxford. The
intellectual culture of the universities in the first half of the seventeenth century was
still international (and Latinate) in nature.
Yet the second implication precisely concerns the changing place of the
schools in the intellectual and political life of the period more generally. Hobbess
quarrel with the universities was a notable contribution to the death-knell that began
to be sounded across Europe from the middle years of the seventeenth century for the
unity of the university curriculum in general, and for the fruitful association of
philosophy and theology in particular. This conception of unity and association was
beginning to come under serious threat in these decades, fatally undermined by a

136
Hobbes, Dialogue, pp. 92-93; Hobbes, Latin Leviathan, pp. 346-37. See further P. Springborg,
'Hobbes, heresy and the Historia ecclesiastica', Journal of the history of ideas (1994), 553-71, esp. p.
558.
137
BL, MS Harley 6942, fol. 128v (Robert Payne to Gilbert Sheldon, 13 May [1650]).
138
See Q. Skinner, 'Introduction: Hobbess career in philosophy', in Visions of politics, vol. III, pp. 1-
37, at p. 19.

28
combination of factors.139 These factors include: the growing prevalence of the
vernaculars, and the consequent increasing insularity of European intellectual
cultures; the economic and social depredations of the Thirty Years War; the
catastrophic decline in the confidence and reach of the learned book trade that centred
around the annual Frankfurt book fair;140 and finally and perhaps most importantly,
the emergence of a range of institutions that competed with the universities.141 These
theseincluded Jesuit Colleges in the Catholic world; non-degree granting Academies
in Protestant states?/; and the widespread emergence of anti-scholastic learned
societies for the promotion of natural, literary, and historical knowledge.142 These
institutions, which were new and lay universities in their way, presented challenges to
the existing European universities that they often failed to meet . Neither Hobbes
himself nor the persona he had created was welcome in suchplaces. But his attacks on
the schools would come to be a powerful temptation for future philosophers to ignore
their place in the history of European knowledge in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries.

139
See further M. Feingold, 'The humanities', in The history of the University of Oxford, vol. IV, pp.
211-357, esp. pp. 218-42; R. W. Serjeantson, 'Introduction', to Meric Casaubon, Generall learning: a
seventeenth-century treatise on the formation of the general scholar (Cambridge: RTM, 1999), pp. 1-
65.
140
I. Maclean, 'The market for scholarly books and conceptions of genre in Europe, 1570-1630', in Die
Renaissance im Blick der Nationen Europas, ed. G. Kauffmann (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1991), . 17-
31.
141
P. F. Grendler, 'The universities of the Renaissance and Reformation', Renaissance quarterly, 57
(2004), 1-42, esp. pp. 23-28.
142
R. Hahn, 'The age of academies', in Solomon's house revisited: the organization and
institutionalization of science, ed. Tore Frngsmyr (Canton, Mass.: Science History Publications,
1990), . 3-13.

29