When you open a classic political text like Hobbes’ Leviathan or Filmer’s Patriarcha, you are not simply reading words on a page. You are encountering an argument that was written for a specific audience, in a specific moment, to solve a specific problem. The meaning of those words is not fixed forever. It shifts depending on the context in which it was written and the context from which you read it. Understanding this dynamic relationship between meanings and contexts is one of the most important skills in studying political thought, because it determines whether you grasp what an author actually argued or merely project your own assumptions onto them.
Table of Contents
- Why meaning depends on context
- Filmer and Hobbes: two routes to political obligation
- Filmer’s argument from divine and paternal authority
- Hobbes’ argument from the social contract
- Facts are dynamic, so interpretations must be revisited
- Scholarship versus politics: the question of a fair process
- Whose meaning counts: the author or the reader?
- The case for authorial intention
- The case for the reader’s horizon
- Unintended consequences and problem-solving
- Bringing it together
Why meaning depends on context
A common mistake when reading classic texts is to treat them as collections of timeless answers to timeless questions. This approach assumes that thinkers across centuries were all addressing the same puzzles, and that we can simply extract their “position” on liberty, justice, or obedience. But political concepts do not float free of history. They are answers to questions that were urgent at a particular time and place.
The historian Quentin Skinner argued forcefully against reading texts in isolation. In his influential 1969 essay “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” he challenged the idea that a text contains its own self-sufficient meaning. Instead, he insisted that to understand what a writer meant, we must recover the political, social, linguistic, and historical context in which the work was produced and received. A text is an intervention in a debate, and you cannot grasp the intervention without knowing the debate.
This is why the same political idea can carry very different meanings across time. The word “democracy” meant something close to mob rule for many ancient writers, yet it functions as a term of approval in modern discourse. Reading either context through the assumptions of the other produces misunderstanding.
Filmer and Hobbes: two routes to political obligation
The clearest way to see how context shapes meaning is to compare two thinkers who wrote during the same turbulent period of seventeenth-century England yet arrived at strikingly different foundations for the same conclusion. Both Robert Filmer and Thomas Hobbes defended strong monarchical authority. Both wanted to explain why subjects were obliged to obey their rulers. But the basis of political obligation each offered was completely different.
Filmer’s argument from divine and paternal authority
Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha, or the Natural Power of Kings defended the divine right of kings by tracing all political authority back to the Biblical patriarchs. Filmer believed that the state was essentially a family, that the first king was a father, and that submission to patriarchal authority was the key to political obligation. On this view, a king’s power was inherited from Adam, whom God had given dominion over the earth. To obey the king was to obey God’s appointed order, so the duty to submit was absolute and grounded in scripture.
Notice what this argument depends on. It only works within a context where Biblical authority, the analogy between father and ruler, and the idea of inherited divine grace are taken seriously. Filmer was writing for an audience that accepted these premises, defending an established order against challenges to royal power.
Hobbes’ argument from the social contract
Thomas Hobbes reached a similar destination by a completely different road. Although he defended strong, even absolute, government, Hobbes rejected the divine right of kings that Filmer championed. For Hobbes, political obligation did not descend from God through Adam. It arose from the consent of rational individuals who, facing the terror of a lawless state of nature, agreed to surrender their freedom to a sovereign in exchange for security.
This was a radically secular foundation. Authority came from below, from a calculated agreement among equals, rather than from above through a sacred lineage. In fact, Filmer himself wrote a critique of Hobbes, and one scholar notes that Filmerian patriarchalism was wholly incompatible with Hobbes’ system, because Hobbes built his case on the natural equality and self-interest of individuals rather than on inherited fatherly power.
The lesson is direct. Two texts can defend the same political outcome, obedience to a powerful ruler, while meaning entirely different things by it. Reading them without their contexts, you might lump them together as “absolutists.” Reading them with their contexts, you see two opposed theories of where authority comes from.
Facts are dynamic, so interpretations must be revisited
If meaning depends on context, and contexts keep changing, then no interpretation can be final. The way we understand a text is shaped by what we know, the questions we find pressing, and the evidence available to us. As scholarship uncovers new facts about an author’s life, their intended audience, or the language they used, earlier readings must be reassessed.
Filmer offers a good example of this reappraisal in action. For a long time he was dismissed as little more than a target for John Locke’s ridicule. Locke famously attacked his writings as “glib nonsense.” Yet twentieth-century scholars came to view Filmer as a significant and interesting figure in his own right, recognising that he was the first English absolutist and that his critiques of contract theory deserved serious attention quite apart from Locke. The text did not change. Our context for reading it did.
This is why the regular reappraisal of values and interpretations is not a sign of failure in the study of political thought. It is the discipline working as it should. An interpretation that is never questioned has stopped being scholarship and become dogma.
Scholarship versus politics: the question of a fair process
This raises an important distinction. If interpretations are always open to revision and shaped by the reader’s concerns, what stops the study of texts from collapsing into pure opinion, where everyone simply reads their own preferences into the great thinkers? The answer lies in the difference between scholarship and politics, a distinction sharpened by the sociologist Max Weber.
In his lecture “Science as a Vocation,” Weber argued that the scholar’s task is bound by a duty to the truth, even when that truth is inconvenient. He warned teachers against using their authority to indoctrinate or preach their personal political views, insisting instead that they help students clarify issues logically. Weber framed scholarship and politics as two distinct vocations, each “lived for” in its own way but governed by different rules.
The key difference is the fairness of the process by which truth is pursued. A scholar must distinguish between empirical knowledge and value judgments, and must be willing to confront facts that are uncomfortable for their own ideals. The political actor, by contrast, is committed to advancing a cause and persuading others to adopt it. Both are legitimate activities, but they answer to different standards.
Applied to reading texts, this means a fair interpretation must follow the evidence wherever it leads, test rival readings against the historical record, and remain open to being proven wrong. An interpretation that simply recruits a thinker into your political camp, ignoring evidence that complicates the picture, has crossed from scholarship into politics. The goal of interpretation is not to win an argument but to understand, through a process that others could examine and challenge.
Whose meaning counts: the author or the reader?
We have seen that context matters, but there are two contexts at play in any act of reading. There is the context in which the author wrote, and there is the context in which the reader receives the text. Both shape the meaning that emerges, and the tension between them sits at the heart of interpretation.
The case for authorial intention
One school holds that the meaning of a text is what its author intended to communicate. To understand Leviathan properly, you must recover what Hobbes was trying to say to his contemporaries. The literary theorist E. D. Hirsch defended a version of this position, arguing that authorial meaning is fixed and determinate, and that good interpretation tries to reconstruct it. The Cambridge School associated with Skinner takes a related view, insisting that meaning is tied to what an author could plausibly have intended given the conventions and debates of their time.
The case for the reader’s horizon
Against this, the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer argued that meaning is never simply the author’s possession. In his hermeneutics, understanding emerges from the encounter between the text and the interpreter, each bringing their own historical situation, or “horizon,” to the meeting. For Gadamer, the meaning of a text always goes beyond its author, because every new reader engages it from a different time and set of concerns. Interpretation is a dialogue, not a recovery of a fixed original.
In practice, both contexts matter. Authorial intention anchors interpretation and protects against arbitrary readings, while the reader’s context is what allows old texts to remain relevant to new problems. Even Gadamer’s defenders acknowledge that careful study of the author’s situation keeps the interpreter’s own assumptions in check. The two approaches need not be enemies.
Unintended consequences and problem-solving
This interplay explains two features of reading classic texts that students often find puzzling. First, authors produce unintended consequences. A thinker may mean one thing, yet later generations draw conclusions the author never foresaw. Locke wrote his attack on Filmer to refute a specific theory of inherited authority, but his arguments about consent and the right to resist went on to shape democratic revolutions far beyond anything he was addressing. The meaning of his text expanded as new readers put it to work.
Second, reading is itself a form of problem-solving. We return to old texts because they help us think through present difficulties. We ask Hobbes about the foundations of state power, or Filmer about the relationship between family and authority, because their arguments illuminate questions we still face. The reader’s context supplies the problem; the author’s text supplies a resource for thinking about it. Meaning lives in this ongoing exchange between past and present.
Bringing it together
The relationship between meanings and contexts is dynamic in every direction. The meaning of a text depends on the context in which it was written, as the contrast between Filmer’s scriptural patriarchalism and Hobbes’ secular contract makes vivid. It also depends on the context from which it is read, which is why interpretations must be revisited as facts and concerns change. The discipline that holds this all together is a commitment to a fair process of finding truth, the standard that separates scholarship from politics. And the richest reading attends to both the author’s intention and the reader’s horizon, recognising that texts produce consequences their authors never planned and answer problems their authors never knew.
What do you think? When you read a classic political text, should you give more weight to recovering what the author originally meant, or to what the text can teach us about our own situation? And where would you draw the line between interpreting a thinker fairly and simply recruiting them to support a position you already hold?
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