ABSTRACT
The assertion that Hobbes's political philosophy is 'on' historical', though often made and in some senses correct, is neither economical nor elegant. There are simply too many ways in which a man's thought can be said to be 'historical', and too many ways of negating each one of these statements, for the epithet alone to have any very obvious meaning. Hobbes, as is generally known, declared that you could not ground a philosophy of politics on the study of human experience as recorded in history because, as he put it, 'experience concludeth nothing universally' .1 But this did not prevent his being interested in history; the thought even of his later years can be observed keeping pace with some of the sharpest and most advanced historical perception ofhis time.2 On matters of English tenurial and Parliamentary history, he profited by his friendship with Selden3 and went beyond that great but elusive scholar in some respects. Again, his famous char" acterization of the papacy as 'the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof',4 like his inter" pretation of the Cluniac campaign for clerical celibacy, 5 could
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only have come from a vivid and freely ranging historical imagination. The epithet 'unhistoricae, then, is not immediately justified and needs clarification; and this has been sensibly and acceptably provided by, for instance, M. M. Goldsmith.6 But it should be observed that what has happened illustrates the lack of economy arising from historians' use of the rhetoric of common speech. An appropriate.-seeming term occurs to someone and is used; it wins enough acceptance to become part of the conven.- tional wisdom. But in conventional use it is discovered to bear too many possible meanings to be uniformly applicable to the evidence, and the community of historians is saddled with the necessity of discovering the sense or senses in which it can be used so as to mean something. 7 Professor Goldsmith has shown that there are indeed ways in which Hobbes's thinking may accurately be termed 'unhistorical', but the very success with which he does so inevitably if unintentionally carries the implication that he has vindicated the original adoption of the term and its use by his predecessors; and the way in which it has come into use remains uneconomical and has involved an excessive deployment of what Hobbes himself memorably termed 'insignificant speech'.8
