ABSTRACT
The manuscript exchange between Hobbes and Sir Matthew Hale was between the author of ‘the first comprehensive and reasoned criticism of [the common] laws’ (Holdsworth 1945:500) and the author of a History of the Common Law that is, ‘the first book with any pretense to be a comprehensive account of the growth of English law’ (Gray, in Hale 1971: xi).1 Hobbes’s interlocutor was a great practitioner of the common law, appointed to the Court of Common Pleas in 1654, subsequently holding office as Chief Baron of the Exchequer and Chief Justice of the Court of King’s Bench. Hale was the interlocutor that Hobbes’s Philosopher could have had if Hobbes had not made the exchange between his general science of politics and a historical justification of the common law so complete a victory for the former. The ‘Reflections on Mr Hobbes his Dialogue of the Lawe’ defend the common law as a definite but limited exercise of reason, inseparable from the usages which historically constituted that particular legal conduct. Hale’s response also raises an important possibility: Hobbes was less the positive realist of Koselleck’s thesis than a philosophical fundamentalist promulgating a normative order abstracted from circumstance.
