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Spinoza on Philosophy, Religion and Politics

as prideful. Krom’s attempt to reduce everything to pride is least convincing when it comes to his discussion of charity and ‘charitable obedience’. Why should we think that ‘love of God’ must be motivated by something that violates the ninth law of nature? While some who obey do so out of love for God rather than fear of the earthly punishment of the sovereign, it is not clear why we need to cash this out in terms of pride. I suspect that Krom is gesturing toward a more general point: the need for motivations that go beyond narrow self-interest (self-preservation and commodious living). At a couple of points later in the book, Krom offers a much more general characterization of pride. For example, he says ‘Pride is a general condition in which one pursues the satisfaction of certain passions despite the fact that doing so runs contrary to one’s own interest’ (166). But this is not how Krom defines pride originally, and it is certainly notHobbes’s understanding of the term. More argument is needed to show that charity, generosity and loving obedience to God can be linked to a conception of pride that is true to our everyday understanding, and to Hobbes’s own understanding of the concept. While Krom’s case for the claim that ‘Hobbes’s rational commonwealth depends on irrational motivations’ is compelling, it is less clear that those irrational motivations are all reducible to pride. Yet while Krom’s conclusions may not ultimately be convincing, his discussion of the irrational in the Hobbesian state nevertheless makes for a valuable contribution to a growing literature on Hobbes’s political psychology.