This book examines the central aspiration of Hobbes's civil philosophy, the aspiration to convert the study of moral and political theory into a scientific discipline. Hobbes emphasises in all his treatises on the nature of the state that his fundamental purpose is to construct a scientia civilis or civil science. He first speaks in these terms in The Elements of Law in 1640, announcing in his opening epistle that he has discovered the true and only foundations for a science of justice and policy. He makes a similar claim at the start of De Cive in 1642, reiterating that he has demonstrated from self-evident arguments the contents of our civil duties, and adding in his preface to the revised edition of 1647 that he has proved as clearly as possible the true principles of a science of justice. The Leviathan of 1651 reaffirms that he has ‘sufficiently or probably proved’ the full range of the theorems relating to ‘the Science of Naturall Justice’, while the revised Latin edition of 1668 declares once more that moral philosophy, properly understood, amounts to a scientia of virtue and vice.

By the time Hobbes began his formal education in the 1590s, the humanists of Tudor England had already put into widespread currency a distinctive way of thinking about the idea of a civil science. One of my main concerns in part I of this book is to analyse this aspect of Renaissance social thought.