Thomas Hobbes, political economist: his changing historical fortunes.

• Author: Taylor, Quentin
• Position: PREDECESSORS - Essay

Most of the major political thinkers in the Western tradition have concerned themselves with various aspects of economic life. Plato founded his ideal republic on mankind's material needs, and its social structure is characterized by clearly defined economic arrangements. Aristotle, whose oikonomike is the source of our "economics," not only examined household management, but explored different types of economic activity, along with their political implications. Cicero wrote on the sanctity of property and against schemes of redistribution. Aquinas gave the medieval doctrines of usury and the just price their classic gloss. Machiavelli had little to say about economics, but he did advise the prince to respect his subjects' property, avoid excessive taxation, and practice frugality. Locke wrote a famous chapter on property as well as lesser-known essays on money and interest. Hume penned influential essays on trade and commerce that anticipated Adam Smith's work. Rousseau contributed an article on political economy to the Encyclopedia, and Burke wrote a notable tract on scarcity. Madison and Hamilton, the practical statesmen who authored the bulk of The Federalist, also wrote on finance, taxes, and trade. J. S. Mill wrote a famous treatise on political economy, and Hegel integrated economic life into his dialectical politics. In our own age, renowned political philosophers such as Rawls and Nozick placed economic considerations at the heart of their analyses.

An Ambiguous Legacy

Although few of these thinkers were economic theorists, most contributed something to what is commonly called political economy Locke, Hume, and Mill are perhaps the only political writers of the first rank to make major contributions to economic thought, but all recognized that neither politics nor economics exists in a vacuum. They understood that the science of politics, whether as the statesman's practical concern or as the philosopher's theoretical subject, encompassed economics. Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), whose Leviathan stands among the canonical texts of political thought, shared this understanding, but he occupies a highly ambiguous place in the history of economic thought. At one end of the spectrum, Hobbes is either ignored altogether or mentioned only in passing. Near the middle, he is acknowledged for his indirect influence on subsequent pioneers of political economy, such as William Petty and the French Physiocrats. Near the other end, Hobbes is recognized for initiating a debate over self-interest and public welfare that culminated in Adam Smith's work and the classical economics it initiated. A variant of this reading sees Hobbes as the champion of middle-class values and the herald of bourgeois society. And finally, at this other end of the spectrum, Hobbes is flatly declared "the father of political economy."

What accounts for this wide range of opinion over Hobbes's status as an economic thinker when his legacy as a political thinker is marked largely by consensus? Hobbes was an absolutist who favored monarchy, but the foundations of his absolutism were "liberal" and supplied the materials for the philosophy of individual rights and limited government pioneered by Locke and Jefferson. For this reason, Hobbes is often, if paradoxically, called "the father of classical liberalism." Does his alleged association with classical economics also involve a paradox? What is Hobbes's true place in the history of economic thought?

Although a definitive answer to this question might be welcome, I cannot provide one here. I propose the more modest, preliminary goal of clarification. As we shall see, much of the ambiguity surrounding Hobbes's reputation as an economic thinker involves a failure to distinguish what he actually said about economics from the economic implications of his political philosophy. This ambiguity is also a function of the lack of agreement over the scope of "economics," which as an academic discipline tended to narrow over the course of the twentieth century. Finally, Hobbes's status is complicated by his depiction of human beings as dominated by self-interest, on one hand, and his subordination of economic liberty to political considerations, on the other. The former account may have started the debate that ended in classical economics, but the links in the chain ending in Smith were forged in reaction against Hobbes. Hobbes's subordination of economics to politics may likewise be said to have more in common with mercantilism than with free-market thinking.

In light of these ambiguities, paradoxes, and complications, one might despair of ever clarifying Hobbes's place in the history of economic thought. One thing is clear, however: his significance turns on his alleged contribution to the development of classical economics and his ostensible adumbration of a full-blown market society. In the interest of clarifying his clouded reputation, let us turn to the literature of the past century to trace his fortunes as a political economist.

Hobbes and the Economists

As the social sciences were being established on a professional basis in the late nineteenth century, Hobbes received a modest entry in the first edition of Palgrave's Dictionary of Political Economy (Montague 1896). Acknowledging that Hobbes's writings are not "strictly ... economical," the author does find some of his economic observations "very sensible" and even "ingenious," if not always "practical" (315, 316). There is no mention, however, of Hobbes as a preceptor of classical economics or bourgeois society. Indeed, the author minimizes Hobbes's contribution to economic thought and ascribes the origins of his politics to religious controversy.

Even this faint praise was denied Hobbes in A History of Political Economy (1888), where he receives but a few nebulous sentences. Although some "occasional traits" of the "new tendencies" are discernible in Hobbes's thinking, John Ingram argues, he was a philosopher, not a political economist. And yet he credits Hobbes with having given "a powerful impulse towards the demolition of the existing social order, which was destined to have momentous consequences in the economic no less than in the strictly political department of things" ([1888] 1967, 48, 49). He does not, however, link Hobbes to the fruition of these "tendencies" in the next century. Strange that such a "powerful impulse" should never be noticed again!

That "philosophy" and "political economy" are not mutually exclusive was illustrated a few years later in a volume that assigned Hobbes an entire chapter and recognized his seminal place in the history of economic thought. True, Hobbes did not cordon off economics as a distinct branch of civil philosophy, but his focus on self-interest and material concerns "has prepared us for the view of economics as a separate study" (Bonar [1893] 1991, 81). Moreover, Hobbes's interest in money, exchange, trade, and taxes suggests that "economical inquiry was beginning to include nearly all the points now embraced by modern economics" (84). Indeed, when viewed retrospectively, the English philosopher "furnish[ed] directly or indirectly many of the premises of what has been called the classical school of modern economics" (85).

On the basis of James Bonar's fin de siecle report, we might expect to find Hobbes afforded an honored place in twentieth-century accounts of economic theory, in particular those tracing the origins of the classical school. In one such study, Predecessors of Adam Smith (Johnson 1937), the author harks back to such obscurities as Maylnes, Misselden, and Mun, but Hobbes is nowhere to be found. In another, Before Adam Smith (Hutchinson 1988), the author begins after Hobbes, with Sir William Petty, who had been Hobbes's research assistant for a short time. Hobbes, however, is recognized for having "broached, in passing, some fundamental ideas which were subsequently to wield a profound influence in English political economy, and perhaps most importantly on Adam Smith" (24). Yet the nature of these "ideas" is reduced to a single sentence from Hobbes's De Cive: "There are two things necessary for the enriching of subjects, labor and thrift." If, as the author avers, this sentence "summarize[s] The Wealth of Nations ... better than any other" (24), then why begin with William Petty instead of with Hobbes? A third such survey, Economic Thought before Adam Smith, begins with the Greeks, but dispenses with Hobbes in a few sentences as the mere transmitter of Baconian science to Petty (Rothbard [1995] 2006, 297).

In some surveys, Hobbes has fared worse, usually not receiving even a single mention (see Robbins 1998; Roncaglia 2006; Vaggi and Groenewegen 2006). Even in Joseph Schumpeter's magisterial History of Economic Analysis, Hobbes is afforded only a mere note in which no connection is made to the development of classical economics (1955, 116-17). He fares little better in studies that focus on capitalism's ideological foundations. In Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England, Joyce Appleby notes that the economic pamphleteers "laid the footings for the construction of a new social reality" by drawing on Hobbes's construction of self-interest, but, unlike Hobbes, they embraced the market, as opposed to the state, as the preferable instrument for regulation (1980, 190, 191). In The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph, Albert Hirschman likewise hints at Hobbes's importance as an agent in the "astounding transformation of the moral and ideological scene," but he denies that Hobbes's "[d]enunciation of the heroic ideal was ... associated with the advocacy of a new bourgeois order" ([1977] 1997, 11-12). In Hirschman's celebrated account, Hobbes's voice is but one among many, and he is never directly linked to the Physiocrats or to Smith, much less identified as the distant progenitor of classical economics.

Milton Myers...