Law and Self-Preservation in Leviathan

Quentin Skinner’s principle that a philosopher’s contemporaries have a privileged perspective on his doctrine is tested. This chapter shows that Hobbes’s contemporaries misinterpreted him on many important issues. The examples used to disconfirm Skinner’s principle have to be ones that have strong textual support and are not currently interpreted by scholars today as being ironic, skeptical, or misleading. Thomas Hobbes’s views about self-preservation and law satisfy the criteria. Contrary to the view of his contemporaries, self-preservation is a desire, a physiological condition, not a law or command. The concept of self-preservation is an important part of the definition of “law of nature.” But the definition is no more a law of nature than the definition of an elephant is an elephant. The content of the laws of nature are deduced from the definition of “a law of nature.”