| This study explores early nominalist themes in Thomas Hobbes and George Lawson as they argued over the construction of political order through words and covenants. Medieval nominalism asserted that God created order by His power, reason, will, and words, expressed in fiats and covenants. Hobbes transferred elements of this divine process to man's creation of social, political, and even scientific orders, believing that God had essentially given only one command as He left men to create reality, that it be peaceful.;George Lawson, an Anglican-Puritan pastor, was, like Hobbes, alarmed by England's civil war and wrote an extensive treatise on ecclesiastical and civil government, Politica sacra et civilis. Lawson challenged Hobbes in his Examination of the Political Part of Mr. Hobbs his Leviathan , defending a more conventional development of Reformational political theology also rooted in medieval nominalism. (government was legitimated by divine words, natural and revealed, and by custom as it reflected the will of the community over time. Thus God and time provided substantive information to guide the construction of legitimate social and political orders. As ultimate sovereign, God had informed men of their duties and relationships to Himself and each other, which ecclesiastical and civil governments were to uphold by relatively limited procedural means. Scholars who know Lawson's work have described him as a precursor to John Locke.;Hobbes, on the other hand, challenged the existence of any divinely created pre-political order that men could know, and instead emphasized man's desperate need to construct order out of social chaos. Thus the dispute between Lawson and Hobbes originated in their pre-political visions as they addressed questions regarding how the convergence of God, man, and history defines values, laws, and rights. These issues retain currency in today's theorizing on the "social construction" of fundamental human identity and political order. This study, therefore, attempts to shed light on the genesis of early modern liberalism by comparing two forms of nominalism that continue to compete for influence in liberal societies: the original biblical one represented by George Lawson, and an essentially secular form articulated by Thomas Hobbes. |
