The Evolution of Concept of Liberty in Political Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes

Abstract

The article is devoted to the evolution of the concept of liberty in the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679). The article shows the relation between the historical and ideological contexts of the appearance of the doctrine of the «Leviathan”. In particular, author connects the events of the English civil war, the ideological context of that time with the philosophy of Hobbes. A special emphasis is put on the evolution of argumentation of parliament proponents under the influence of Aristotelian philosophy perception, which created the ideological basis for the naturalistic and secular view on political life of the modernity, which came into being as a result of reconciliation of Aristotelian view on self-sufficient civil life with Augustinian concern about otherworldly life. Thee author considers Hobbes’s philosophy through the lens of the methodology of Cambridge school of intellectual history, which discovered ideological disputes and argumentation of Hobbes’s contemporaries. Philosophy of freedom in this context becomes the sticking point between Hobbes’s understanding of liberty as absence of external obstacles for motion and his ideological adversaries, who were influenced by the neo-roman concept of liberty. The author shows how the context was reflected in Hobbes’s doctrine of liberty, which was a response to the republican ideas of the Italian Renaissance, which brought a new theory of neo-roman liberty into the England of the XVII century, the central thesis of which was based on the idea that liberty within civil society is undermined by the simple presence of arbitrary will. The ideological dispute of Hobbes and his opponents formed basic elements of contemporary liberal vision of politics, the core of which directly relies on the doctrine of liberty which was initially formulated by Hobbes.