The Quest for a Moral Compass by Kenan Malik

Author:Kenan Malik [Malik, Kenan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-61219-404-2
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2014-09-01T16:00:00+00:00

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In 1629 Thomas Hobbes published a translation of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. Born in Athens in 460 BCE, the year that the first Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta broke out, Thucydides had spent much of his life contemplating the nature of war and the role of human nature in war. His account of the conflict between Athens and Sparta is of ten seen as the first ‘scientific history’ and the first work of political realism. The moral of Thucydides’ tale was the political corrosiveness of democracy. Athens had fallen thanks to the moral laxity of the Athenian masses. It was not the only lesson that Hobbes absorbed from the Greek historian. Thucydides had adopted a materialist view of history and of human nature. Most importantly, he had built a theory of morality from a vision of humans as they had existed in the state of nature. Moral laws and powerful rulers were, Thucydides insisted, necessary to keep in check the natural impulses of humans to dominate each other, impulses that ensured that life in the original state of nature was brutal and chaotic. This was to be Hobbes’ starting point in the work that was to confer upon him philosophical immortality – Leviathan.

Hobbes was born in 1588, the year of the Spanish Armada. The son of a disreputable village vicar, he studied at Oxford thanks to the benevolence of a rich uncle. He eventually became tutor to William Cavendish, the soon-to-be second Earl of Devonshire, and an immensely wealthy man. It was a post that Hobbes held for the rest of his life and that furnished him with the time and space to read, think and write.

Hobbes’ work, like that of Descartes, was shaped by the unprecedented upheaval, political and religious, military and economic, of his time. England stood divided against itself. The nation found itself on the verge of a market economy, with many people making great fortunes, and others losing everything. The first land enclosures were driving tenant farmers off their plots and privatizing common land, creating hardship and famine. Accompanying the economic turmoil was political turmoil, and growing class conflict as the interests of the monarchy, the nobility, a nascent bourgeoisie and the rural poor came increasingly to clash. The struggle for power culminated in the English Civil Wars, which began in 1642 and did not finally finish till 1651, and in the midst of which Charles I was executed in 1649. A staunch Royalist, Hobbes fled to Paris in 1640, and there he remained for a decade. By the time of his exile he had become the most famous of English philosophers and he was, for a while, tutor to the future Charles II, who had also been forced to flee to the French capital.

Hobbes’ stature was such that, even before leaving England, he was one of a handful of philosophers to whom Descartes turned to comment upon his 1641 work, Meditations on First Philosophy, which expanded upon the metaphysical system he had

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