Политическое образование и просвещение по Томасу Гоббсу

Логос. 2020. Т. 30. № 6. С. 97–144.

Dmitriev T.

Thomas Hobbes was among the first political thinkers of modernity, who, relying on his analysis of the Civil War in England, arrived to the conclusion that the sovereign power should implement through its representatives a special educational policy for the nobility and lower classes, designed to inspire in them allegiance to the state. Among the main lines of this policy, Hobbes saw the supervision over the institutions of knowledge by sovereign power in order to prevent them from spreading through society the opinions that are contrary to the authority of the sovereign. An equally important aspect of Hobbes's educational policy is the control of secular sovereignty over ecclesiastical institutions to ensure their loyalty to the sovereign. Hobbes lays a special emphasis in this policy to English universities. In his historical treatise Behemoth, or the Long Parliament Hobbes puts the lion's share of the blame for the English Civil War on the universities, which, in his words, “have been to this nation, as the wooden horse was for the Trojans”. That is why the new sovereign power, which won the Civil War, had to start creating conditions for civil peace with the reform of universities, which were “the coar of rebellion”. Hobbes considered it absolutely necessary to lay as the foundation of this reform the political doctrine of the secular sovereign’s unlimited power described by him in detail in Leviathan. According to Hobbes, such an educational policy was absolutely essential for the education of citizens loyal to the sovereign power for the sake of civil peace preservation in England.

Keywords: political education, политическое образование, history of political thought, политика и религия, politics and religion, История политической философии, classical republicanism, civil war in England, классическое республиканство, гражданская война в Англии