Appeals to Experience in Hobbes’ Science of Politics *

This chapter examines the role of experience in Thomas Hobbes’ science of politics. Although Hobbes claims for his own formulation of civil philosophy a kind of definitiveness and certainty that only geometry has among the sciences, and although both geometry and civil philosophy are supposed to be the products of reason, where reason excludes experience (sense and memory), the necessity of establishing and submitting to the commonwealth is open to a certain sort of confirmation from experience. This is not because Hobbes concedes cognitive authority to sense and memory after all, but because civil philosophy has a rhetorical purpose that a certain kind of appeal to experience helps to achieve.