William Reese Company, New Haven Title page of the first edition of ”Leviathan” (1660).“Leviathan” is arguably the most influential work of Western political thought, and one of the most analyzed. Yet the first full Hebrew translation of Thomas’s Hobbes’s work was only published last month. While the first two parts have long been available in translation, the third and fourth parts — in which Hobbes addresses religion and the state — had not appeared in Hebrew.
Of all the universally read works of political philosophy, why has it taken so long to translate all of “Leviathan” into Hebrew? In addition to the significance of the full translation to Hebrew and Israeli scholarship, what more can scholars in the rest of the world learn about “Leviathan,” written in 1660?
- Yoram Hazony, Shalem Center
- Stephen Darwall, Yale professor of philosophy
- Rebecca Goldstein, author of “Betraying Spinoza”
- Fania Oz-Salzberger, historian of ideas
- Menachem Lorberbaum, Tel Aviv University
The Hebrew Side of Hobbes
Yoram Hazony is provost of the Shalem Center, a Jerusalem research institute which is opening Israel’s first liberal arts college. The center is publisher of the new Hebrew edition of “Leviathan.”
The first complete Hebrew-language edition of Thomas Hobbes’ “Leviathan” was published in Israel last month, and instantly became one of the 10 best-selling books in the country.
The new Hebrew edition of “Leviathan.”What makes the new Hobbes translation so interesting to Israelis? The word leviathan in Hobbes’ title is Hebrew, of course. (It’s the name of a great sea creature mentioned in Job 40:25.) And more generally, Hobbes is something of a Hebraizer: Large sections of “Leviathan” are devoted to commentary on the Hebrew Bible, which Hobbes happily invokes while excoriating Christians for “mixing with the Scripture… much of the vain and erroneous philosophy of the Greeks.”
But this “Hebraic” Hobbes is something of a novelty in Israel. Why? Because the earlier incomplete translation of “Leviathan” had quietly dropped anything Hobbes had to say about the Bible. For decades, Israelis read Hobbes without any inkling that he is, in a way, part of their own story.
The Politics of Belief
Stephen Darwall is a professor of philosophy at Yale and an emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan. He is the author, most recently, of “The Second-Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect, and Accountability.”
Thomas Hobbes is our greatest political philosopher. Why greatest? Others philosophized in the service of sounder political ideas, like democracy and human rights, but no one else has had Hobbes’s systematic mastery, rigor and originality.
Recent interpreters have sought to understand Hobbes in his historical context.
Succeeding generations constantly find new things in his works. When, a generation ago, Hobbes’s subtle anticipations of game theory were fully appreciated, his dismal analysis of life in a “state of nature” without political authority as “nasty, brutish and short” could no longer be dismissed as based on a narrow egoism. Without solid assurance of one another’s intentions, even the cooperative have reason to protect themselves in ways that can rationally lead to a “war of all against all,” or, as nuclear theorists were concluding during the same period, to threats of mutually assured destruction.
More recent interpreters, seeking better to understand Hobbes in his historical context of the English Civil War, have come to see how, despite his materialism and social “atomism,” Hobbes was nonetheless vitally concerned with the political consequences of conscientious conduct and religious belief. Despite the ironic, debunking definition of religion in “Leviathan” as “fear of power invisible, feigned by the mind, or imagined from tales publicly allowed,” Hobbes devoted no less than half of the book to religion and its role in a justifiable state.
Defanging the Religious Impulse
Rebecca Goldstein’s last book was “Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity.” A philosopher and novelist, her “36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction” will be published this January.
Hobbes, like other thinkers who helped us find our way to the modern secular state, spent a lot of pages on biblical exegesis. Spinoza did, too. Why did they?
Hobbes wants to reveal religious texts as undermining the legitimacy of religious authorities.
Both were impressed by the enormous destructive capacity of religion. Both saw religion as coming from man’s terror at his own mortality. The question was how to transform the state so as to stabilize the volatile religious impulse that — realists that they were — they knew could not be made to disappear. Both came to the conclusion that religious authorities have every reason to stir up man’s inner demons, the better to increase their own power, and that, therefore, the best way to defang the religious impulse was to place it in the power of the civil authorities.
So Hobbes, discussing, for example, the passage in Genesis (18. 18,19) in which Abraham’s seed is blessed because they follow Abraham’s authority, concludes, “And consequently, in every Common-wealth, they … ought to obey the laws of their own Sovereign in the external acts and professions of Religion.”
Hobbes, like Spinoza, not only wants to wrest the interpretation of religious texts away from religious authorities, but to reveal those texts as undermining the very legitimacy of those authorities.
The Israeli Reader
Fania Oz-Salzberger, a historian of ideas, is the Laurance S. Rockefeller visiting professor for distinguished teaching at Princeton University. She is also a professor at the University of Haifa, and at Monash University in Australia.
For decades, since 1962, Israeli students of philosophy and political science had read Hobbes in Hebrew translation. It was a good edition, albeit incomplete: the Hebrew University Magnes Press was not a rich publishing house, and neither were its customers. Israel in the 1950s and 1960s was full of avid readers, underpaid translators and hard-pressed publishers, who created a magnificent bookshelf of classics and modern masterpieces, nonfiction and children’s books, all in Hebrew translations and in cheap, mostly paperback editions.
To some early Israelis, Hobbes was the pioneering proto-secularist who divorced the state from divine sanction.
It was thus that Magnes’s most experienced philosophy translator, Joseph Ur, was asked to render only Parts 1-2 of Leviathan. The text was pruned not only of some Hebraic quotes and references, but also of other long-winded paragraphs and footnotes.
The political substructure of the work remained largely intact, but “the kingdome of God” and “the kingdome of Darkness” along with the “Christian commonwealth” were left out. What emerged was a thin, universalized Hobbes and a deft, dolphin-sized Leviathan. The book was energetically taught in university halls and high school classes, and enthusiastically read by amateurs, and fiercely discussed over many a dinner table.
Modern Politics in Modern Hebrew
Menachem Lorberbaum, the editor of the new Hebrew translation of “Leviathan,” is chairman of the Graduate School of Philosophy at Tel Aviv University and a founding member of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. He is editor, with Michael Walzer and Noam Zohar, of the Jewish Political Tradition series published by Yale University Press.
“Leviathan” is best known for its foundational articulation of the modern state. The book creates a new discourse of sovereignty, the legitimacy of which is grounded in a covenant between the subjects. “Leviathan” is first to combine a Roman republican conception of commonwealth with a biblical notion of covenant. Together they yield a form of thinking about the polity that is uniquely modern, one in which we identify ourselves as citizens to this very day.
What makes ‘Leviathan’ vital for Israeli readers.
Modern Hebrew has inherited an extremely rich religious texture but its civic language is relatively impoverished. Thomas Hobbes’ attempt to create a new language of politics is a natural point of departure for the attempt to enrich the political discourse of the Hebrew-speaking civil society of the state of Israel.
Hobbes’ profound sensitivity to the theological-political character of the Bible and his grasp of its ongoing relevance to political consciousness make him a perfect counterpart in this dialogue of translation.