Hobbes and Individualism

Abstract That Hobbes was one of the begetters of modern individualism is widely asserted. Quite what it was that he thus begat is equally widely disputed. Herc I try to show that Hobbes espoused a consistent (though not in all respects persuasive) form of individualism in intellectual, moral, and political matters. I draw on two earlier essays of mine, though I do so in order to advance beyond them, not to rest on them.’ One problem is gestured at by my title: what kind of an individualist was Hobbes? Was he the ‘economic’ individualist and booster for capitalism that C. B. Macpherson described? Was he perhaps less a ‘market-oriented’ individualist than the advocate of the self-centred but self-abnegating bourgeois moral style depicted in Leo Strauss’s famous account, or of the ‘privatized’ individualism described in Sheldon Wolin’s Politics and Vision? I suggest at the end of this essay that Hobbes’s individualism was moral and intellectual, not economic, a doctrine of moral and intellectual autonomy- in essence, the individualism of the ‘modern’ character described in Michael Oakeshott’s essay On Human Conduct.