Hobbes and “A Discourse of Laws”: The Perils of Wordprint Analysis
John C. Fortier · The Review of Politics · 1997
John Hilton, Noel Reynolds, and Arlene Saxonhouse have employed statistical authorship analysis to claim that Hobbes authored three anonymously published works. But the authors of the study were not aware of close textual parallels between one discourse and a recently discovered work of Francis Bacon which argue against this attribution and call attention to deficiencies in the method of proof. Compounding this difficulty, they could not determine the stylistic pattern of Bacon, who is a candidate for authorship of the three discourses. It can be concluded that the authorship of at least one of the discourses is still a mystery, and that while the science of statistical wordprint analysis has advanced significantly over the past thirty years, it still has limitations which must be taken into account in any authorship study.