ABSTRACT
It was no good relying on experience to teach people how to behave peaceably and preserve this order, for on Hobbes 's assumptions about experience, each individual's experiences would generate conflicting estimates of good, bad, right and wrong, and it was such conflicting valuations that started contention and eventually war (cf. L, ch. 15, E III 146). In order to agree about what was right and wrong people had to gain detachment from their own particular case, and even from the particular circumstances of their commonwealth. That meant using reasoning to uncover facts any political order would depend upon, facts about human nature and in particular the passions. Understanding how these worked was supposed to be preliminary to understanding the causes of the breakdown of order and of pre-political hostility. But it took reasoning to make accessible the connections between disorder and the passions: experience was not enough.2
