Some scholars have argued that Thomas Hobbes is a political advisor, but they ignore the debate on proper counsellors held in England in the seventeenth century. He claims that Parliament is inappropriate for the people’s representative whose role is to counsel the king, rebutting the parliamentarian idea that Parliament is the king’s best counsellor. Earl of Clarendon and John Bramhall criticise Hobbes for such a ‘misunderstanding’ of the English constitution, labelling Hobbes as a philosopher who only studies science. They show that Hobbes is divorced from the traditional idea of politics in which the nobility and experiential knowledge are crucial, to demonstrate that he is unsuitable for a counsellor. Hobbes nevertheless demonstrates in Leviathan that experiential knowledge provided by counsellors is useful and even necessary. He argues that counsellors support the administration of the commonwealth directly managed by the sovereign, which suggests that there is room for practical wisdom as well as prudence in Hobbes’s idea of politics. He is a new type of counsellor who not only presents politics as science but also propose that diverse actors should assist the sovereign. He recognises the limit of rigid science in practice and makes a practical proposition.
