From Humanism to Hobbes by Skinner Quentin

Author:Skinner, Quentin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2017-12-22T05:00:00+00:00

IV

The parliamentarian theory of popular sovereignty instantly came under violent attack. The clerical defenders of divine right surged forward to repudiate every premise of the parliamentarian case. Gryffith Williams, bishop of Ossory, was one of the first in the field with his Vindiciae Regum, a counterblast to Parker and Goodwin published in February 1643. No power, Williams replies, can ever arise from the body of the people. God is ‘the immediate Author of the Regall power’, so that ‘the power and authority of Kings is originally and primarily (as S. Paul saith) the ordinance of God’.120 Furthermore, this ordination grants absolute authority to the present king, so that no one can ever resist him ‘without apparent sacriledge against God.’121 If we ask about the relationship between the king and Parliament in this scheme of things, Williams is careful to allow that Parliament is of course ‘the representative body of all his Kingdom.’122 But because it is merely a body of subjects, it can never be anything more than a consultative assembly, and cannot exercise any binding powers. ‘As the King hath a power to call, so he hath a power to dissolve all Parliaments; and having a power of dissolving it when he will, he must needs have a power of denying what he pleaseth.’123

Soon afterwards the Levellers launched a strongly contrasting but scarcely less withering attack. Richard Overton in his Appeale of July 1647 treats it as the merest hypocrisy to suggest that the existing Parliament constitutes anything like a recognisable image or representation of the body and hence the will of the people. The fundamental will and desire of the people is that their security and liberty should be preserved. But the two Houses have transformed themselves into ‘so many traytors to the safety and weale of the people.’124 They ‘cannot be the Representers of the Free-men of England’, for ‘such as are the representers of Free-men, must be substantial and reall Actors for freedome and liberty.’125 It follows that the current conduct of Parliament lacks any legitimacy. The two Houses have ‘devested and degraded themselves from their betrusted authority of the people, and become no longer their representory Deputies, or Trustees, except tyranny and oppression be the very substance and end of their Trust.’126

Among the opponents of the parliamentarian writers, no one engaged with their arguments more tenaciously, nor reacted to them with more implacable hostility, than Hobbes in Leviathan. Before considering his response, however, it is important to note that it was not until Leviathan that he concerned himself with the propagandists whom he was later to stigmatise in Behemoth as the ‘Democraticall Gentlemen’.127 Almost all their works were published after Hobbes circulated The Elements of Law in 1640, and even after the appearance of De Cive at the beginning of 1642. By contrast, it would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that Hobbes’s entire theory of representative government in Leviathan takes the form of a critical commentary on the parliamentarian arguments I have so far anatomised.

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