CONCEPT OF MAN IN POLITICAL THEORY 39 to the whole. If the second, then it marks the beginning of the celebrated liberal mythology of individualism. Hobbes had introduced a number of motifs into political theory which were to have significant, though unintended consequences. The relation between his theory and assumptions of liberalism is a continuing wonder. Because, interpreted in different ways, he can provide both the premises of liberalism, and its first critique. Like his contemporaries, Hobbes too regarded geometry as the perfect science.4 His ambition was to set up a similar, purely deductive structure on the basis of simple and self-evident postulates. Men, he thought, would have to accept his conclusions, since all one had to do to confirm them was to look inside himself. It may be said that this is somewhat different from a geometric proof. But he had a ready answer: That was all that was possible in social science "for this kind of doctrine admitted no other demonstration." Hobbes staked everything on his concept of man. Of course he took recourse to the current mythology of social contract. Though Hobbes describes his men in a state of nature, it is transparently a logical, not a historical condition.6 What he described was not what he believed man was at any point of real time, when there was still no state. Rather it depicted what men were "naturally", intrinsically, minus the coordinating mechanisms of state and society. So his formulations about the state of nature do not form statements like "this is what man was when the state was not yet invented." It implied rather a different statement like "this is how men would have behaved, if we assume for the moment that there is no state'9. By this device Hobbes throws the "nature" of bourgeois man into a "pure" state. This man was somewhat less than attractive: competitive, grasping, unscrupulous, distinctly reminiscent of Machiavelli's prince, but made general. Features that were strictly reserved for the elite were now turned into attributes of all men. It seems curious why Hobbes depicted bourgeois men this way, though he did not disapprove of bourgeois society. Hobbes symbolized the bourgeois intellectualism of the rising period—abrasive, critical, materialist and believing in the rule of radical doubt. Hobbes mirrored all featurs of early combative rationalism. Probably because he did not think historically he rendered eternal the bourgeois characteristics he saw in men around him. The opening section of Leviathan is perhaps the most striking and most consistent exposition of a mechanical materialist view of man.6 Spencer was to try something similar later on, but