De Cive
On the Citizen — Hobbes's mature political philosophy in three parts, predating Leviathan by nine years
Tradition: Early modern political philosophy / materialist naturalism
The state of nature is war; the social contract creates sovereign authority; the duty of religion is consistent with civil peace
De Cive is Hobbes's mature political philosophy in its first published form, predating the better-known Leviathan (1651) by nine years. Across three parts — Liberty (on the natural condition), Dominion (on sovereign authority and forms of government), and Religion (on the consistency of Christian duty with civil obedience) — Hobbes develops his social-contract theory and his materialist account of human motivation. The work was first circulated as a Latin manuscript in 1641 among Mersenne's circle in Paris, published in 1642, and translated into English by Hobbes himself in 1651. Many contemporary readers (Descartes, Mersenne, Gassendi) engaged this work first; Leviathan came later. The two works present substantially the same argument, but De Cive is more compressed and arguably more philosophically systematic.
Author
Editions cited
- De Cive: The English Version (Howard Warrender, Clarendon, 1983)
- On the Citizen (Richard Tuck & Michael Silverthorne, Cambridge, 1998)
School Embodiments
Hobbes's materialist-mechanical view of human motivation is one of the foundational statements of philosophical naturalism in early modern philosophy.
"Of the natural state of mankind, that without civil society there is none who can deny but this state is a state of war." (De Cive I.12)
Hobbesian psychology is mechanical-deterministic; freedom is the absence of external impediment, not the absence of causation. De Cive sets out the position more concisely than Leviathan.
"All voluntary actions are necessary, where the necessary causes precede." (De Cive XV, paraphrasing)
Hobbes is a robust realist about human nature, natural law, and the political order — natural law is real and discoverable by reason.
"The fundamental natural law: peace is to be sought." (De Cive II.2)
Hobbes's political institutions are justified by what they produce: peace, security, commodious living. The pragmatic test for political authority is its effectiveness in preventing the war of all against all.
"The end for which one man gives up and renounces his right is the security of his person." (De Cive II.4)
The sovereign is constructed by covenant; political authority does not exist by nature but by human agreement. This constructivist thread runs through Hobbes's entire political philosophy.
"A multitude of men become one person when they are by one man, or one person, represented." (De Cive V, paraphrasing)
Hobbes's deductive method — define carefully, reason rigorously — and his analysis of language place him among the early modern precursors of the analytic tradition.
"Truth consists in the right ordering of names in our affirmations." (consistent with De Cive's method, more explicitly in Leviathan)
Hobbes's third part on religion is unusually heterodox for the seventeenth century; the subordination of ecclesiastical authority to civil sovereignty was widely contested and has been read by some as a proto-Enlightenment liberal theology.
"The Christian religion does not destroy but establishes the duties of citizens." (De Cive XVIII, paraphrasing)
Mechanist tradition.
Social-contract tradition.
Internal Tensions
De Cive's relation to Leviathan: substantially the same argument, but De Cive omits the elaborate philosophical-anthropological framework of Leviathan I, making it more compressed and arguably more accessible. The work was widely read on the Continent before Leviathan made Hobbes notorious.
I. Time
Time is real; political institutions endure across time and require maintenance. Deterministic in the compatibilist sense.
Attributes
II. Space
Standard post-Galilean substantival space.
Attributes
III. Matter
Bodies in motion; the only real substance. Hobbesian materialism is consistent across De Cive and Leviathan.
Attributes
IV. Observer
The Hobbesian observer is the embodied individual driven by fear of death and desire for power. Active in self-preservation; plural in society; no personal metaphysical agency in the working philosophy.
Attributes
V. Energy
Mechanical motion is the energetic substrate; conservation of quantity of motion is the operative principle.
Attributes
VI. Information
Names rightly ordered are the substantival informational currency. Personal information not conserved across death in any robust sense.
Attributes
Personas with the nearest attribute fingerprint
Historical figures whose own classification on the same six-dimensional grid lands closest to this work's. Computed by attribute-agreement on coordinates both address.
Computed school proximity
The work's attribute fingerprint scored against all schools using the same quiz scorer. Useful as a sanity check on the hand-curated embodiments above.
How De Cive resolves each dilemma
51 resolved positions across 4 dimensions, including 9 distinctive where the majority of schools go the other way · 6 unaligned.
Each dimension is sorted so minority positions come first. Mainstream positions are folded into an expandable list.
Time · 9 dilemmas · 5 distinctive
Persistence, the future, and the direction of becoming.
4 mainstream positions
Matter · 7 dilemmas, all mainstream
Observer · 37 dilemmas · 3 distinctive
Mind, agency, and the knower's relation to the known.