ABSTRACT
There is no mistaking Hobbes’s admiration for distinctive individualities. Along with the exquisite intellectual constructs devised by geometers, self-enactment of the kind exemplified by Sidney Godolphin may well have been the form of human making that he treasured most deeply. Unlike numerous other thinkers of this sensibility, Hobbes was never tempted by the view that the bulk of humankind exists for the sake of the gallant, noble or merely uncommon few. He never entertained the idea that the no-more-than temperate, the imprudent or even the vain-glorious (all of whom engage in the making, mismaking and unmaking of their own lives and selves) can justifiably be subordinated to the rule or sacrificed to the needs or wants of those of superior character or accomplishment. The most noble or cultivated of humankind must acknowledge natural equality and must accommodate themselves to arrangements necessary if naturally equal human beings are to keep company with one another. Those capable of enacting a distinctive individuality are to do it within these constraints. (Those who reject this imperative thereby show themselves to be arrogant and vain-glorious rather than noble.) Hobbes’s egalitarianism is manifest in his argument for the right of nature and for a single set of laws of nature to which all human beings should in prudence/morality subscribe. He clearly and rightly thinks this argument consistent with his commitment to individuality. The right of nature and the voluntarist theory of obligation that is one of its corollaries are at once egalitarian and individualistic. Peace and self-preservation are conditions of a diversity of felicities, not ends in themselves. The further laws of nature consist primarily of formal or adverbial considerations that individuals consult and adapt as each of them pursues their felicity as they see it. A society whose members act steadily on Hobbes’s prudence/morality would feature both commonalities or uniformities of kinds associated with egalitarianism and a diversity of ends and purposes, dispositions and temperaments. It was Hobbes’s purpose to theorize the possibility of this combination and perhaps his aspiration to bring into being societies that actually achieve and maintain it. On my reading, Hobbes intended his treatment of commonwealth, sovereign authority and power, and the other most specifically political aspects of his theory to further this project, to serve his dual but complementary egalitarian
and individualistic objectives. This is by no means a usual reading and Hobbes puts difficulties in the way of sustaining it. In arguing for absolute and preferably monarchical government he appears to favor sharply defined hierarchy and strictly imposed uniformity and conformity. He proposes collective political makings by which everyone in a particular territory submits to a single person who thenceforth controls and directs their lives. . . .
