CRISIS AND PROJECT

What are the terms of Hobbes's political philosophy? In order to understand it, we should first resituate it within the more general framework of his philosophy. The elaboration thereof is situated at the meeting point of a project and a crisis. The project was considerable and, in certain aspects, comparable to those of several of his great contemporaries. Hobbes intended, in fact, to take up a rational reconstruction of the whole of human knowledge so as to introduce order, certainty and truth into it. This rational reconstruction supposed a double approach. The first was analytic; it aimed to achieve, by the application of a resolutive method, the most universal concepts and most general terms, beyond which all human knowledge could not go back. The second was synthetic; it aimed, by the application of a compositive method, to find where to progressively produce, according to a rigorous deduction, all the knowledge which man could attain. Differently from Descartes, whose ambition was also to reach deductive knowledge of all the things that man can know, Hobbes's own special features stemmed, on the one hand, from this, that linguistic concerns again find a prominent place and, on the other hand, from the fact that he intended to reintroduce politics within the field of philosophy. The crisis was of an order other than the project, but just as considerable as it. It concerned the beginning of the English Civil War, the history of which Hobbes himself came to write later in a work titled Behemoth. The first lines of this work sufficiently emphasise the importance that this crisis had for philosophy: