The Oxford Handbook of Hobbes consists of twenty-six original chapters by prominent philosophers, historians, political scientists, and literary scholars. The volume is as varied in subject matter as it is in academic approach. Although best known for his political philosophy, Thomas Hobbes was a man of broad intellectual interests and had published works of history, mathematics, and natural science before his political masterwork Leviathan. Reflecting his variegated interests, the handbook is divided into five parts directed at different areas of Hobbes’s thought.
The first, “Logic and Natural Philosophy,” includes chapters that locate Hobbes in the context of seventeenth-century natural philosophy (Daniel Garber and Douglas M. Jesseph), and others that examine and evaluate his contributions to specific fields of research, such as optics (Franco Giudice), mathematics (Katherine Dunlop), and logic (Stewart Duncan, Martine Pécharman). Part 2, “Human Nature and Moral Philosophy,” contains essays on familiar Hobbesian concepts, such as the state of nature (Ioanni Evrigenis) and natural law (Sharon Lloyd), as well as less studied topics such as Hobbes on the family (Nancy Hirschmann). Part 3, on political philosophy, is the longest, featuring seven essays, and includes both contextual historical essays (Quentin Skinner and Johann Somerville, for example) and more analytically oriented chapters (A. M. Martinich, Arash Abizadeh). The fourth section, on religion in Hobbes, contains four essays on different aspects of Hobbes’s thought, related to religion. These include his theology or lack thereof (Agostino Lupoli), Christianity and civil religion (Sarah Mortimer), and his ecclesiastical history (Jeffrey Collins). The final section, “History, Poetry, and Paradox,” is something of a catchall. It covers different literary forms and devices, how Hobbes’s understood them, and how he deployed them in his own writing. For example, the first essay, a standout entry by Kinch Hoekstra, argues that Hobbes’s translation of Thucydides’s The Peloponnesian Wars is best understood as a political response to debates over England’s foreign-policy vis-à-vis Spain in the 1620s. The second, by Tomasž Mastnak, interprets Hobbes’s Behemoth, a history of the English Civil War, as a philosophical (rather than purely historical or political) intervention supporting the idea of politics as a science of just and unjust.
The quality of the essays is very high across the board. Certainly, the volume manages “to advance the study of Hobbes’s thought” (1) on several fronts. One minor qualification to this is that some of the essays cover similar ground as the authors’ previous works (e.g., Skinner and Lloyd). The enormous variety in approaches and in subject matter also means that the volume does not aspire to any sort of comprehensive treatment of Hobbes’s thought. Who, then, is this book for? The chapters are too focused for the handbook to serve as a suitable introduction to Hobbes or as a reference text. Even reading all seven chapters of part 3 would not provide the reader with a satisfactory overview of Hobbes’s political philosophy, or even of the key debates in the secondary literature. Instead, it provides seven independent contributions to that literature, and to that extent, most of the essays would work just as well as journal articles as they do as book chapters. Thus, while it is easy to see why scholars might be interested in any individual contribution in this volume, it is hard to understand who might want them packaged together in a single volume for purchase, or even to carry home from the library stacks. This is not to criticize the enterprise of this handbook; any occasion for excellent scholarship is a worthy one. I would suggest, however, that the editorial choices behind the handbook are better suited to its online edition, where scholars can consult individual chapters according to their research interests, than to the nearly 700 pages of its hard copy.
