for his political thought, and deservedly so. His vision of the world
is strikingly original and still relevant to contemporary politics.
His main concern is the problem of social and political order: how
human beings can live together in peace and avoid the danger and fear
of civil conflict. He poses stark alternatives: we should give our
obedience to an unaccountable sovereign (a person or group empowered
to decide every social and political issue). Otherwise what awaits us
is a 'state of nature' that closely resembles civil war – a situation
of universal insecurity, where all have reason to fear violent death
and where rewarding human cooperation is all but impossible. One
controversy has dominated interpretations of Hobbes. Does he see human
beings as purely self-interested? Several passages support such a
reading, leading some to think that his political conclusions can be
avoided if we adopt a more realistic picture of human nature. However,
most scholars now accept that Hobbes himself had a much more complex
view of human motivation. A major theme below will be why the problems
he poses cannot be avoided simply by taking a less 'selfish' view of
human nature.
1. Introduction
Hobbes is the founding father of modern political philosophy. Directly
or indirectly, he has set the terms of debate about the fundamentals
of political life right into our own times. Few have liked his thesis,
that the problems of political life mean that a society should accept
an unaccountable sovereign as its sole political authority.
Nonetheless, we still live in the world that Hobbes addressed head on:
a world where human authority is something that requires
justification, and is automatically accepted by few; a world where
social and political inequality also appears questionable; and a world
where religious authority faces significant dispute. We can put the
matter in terms of the concern with equality and rights that Hobbes's
thought heralded: we live in a world where all human beings are
supposed to have rights, that is, moral claims that protect their
basic interests. But what or who determines what those rights are? And
who will enforce them? In other words, who will exercise the most
important political powers, when the basic assumption is that we all
share the same entitlements?
We can see Hobbes's importance if we briefly compare him with the most
famous political thinkers before and after him. A century before,
Nicolo Machiavelli had emphasized the harsh realities of power, as
well as recalling ancient Roman experiences of political freedom.
Machiavelli appears as the first modern political thinker, because
like Hobbes he was no longer prepared to talk about politics in terms
set by religious faith (indeed, he was still more offensive than
Hobbes to many orthodox believers), instead, he looked upon politics
as a secular discipline divorced from theology. But unlike Hobbes,
Machiavelli offers us no comprehensive philosophy: we have to
reconstruct his views on the importance and nature of freedom; it
remains uncertain which, if any, principles Machiavelli draws on in
his apparent praise of amoral power politics.
Writing a few years after Hobbes, John Locke had definitely accepted
the terms of debate Hobbes had laid down: how can human beings live
together, when religious or traditional justifications of authority
are no longer effective or persuasive? How is political authority
justified and how far does it extend? In particular, are our political
rulers properly as unlimited in their powers as Hobbes had suggested?
And if they are not, what system of politics will ensure that they do
not overstep the mark, do not trespass on the rights of their
subjects?
So, in assessing Hobbes's political philosophy, our guiding questions
can be: What did Hobbes write that was so important? How was he able
to set out a way of thinking about politics and power that remains
decisive nearly four centuries afterwards? We can get some clues to
this second question if we look at Hobbes's life and times.
2. Life and Times
Hobbes's biography is dominated by the political events in England and
Scotland during his long life. Born in 1588, the year the Spanish
Armada made its ill-fated attempt to invade England, he lived to the
exceptional age of 91, dying in 1679. He was not born to power or
wealth or influence: the son of a disgraced village vicar, he was
lucky that his uncle was wealthy enough to provide for his education
and that his intellectual talents were soon recognized and developed
(through thorough training in the classics of Latin and Greek). Those
intellectual abilities, and his uncle's support, brought him to
university at Oxford. And these in turn – together with a good deal of
common sense and personal maturity – won him a place tutoring the son
of an important noble family, the Cavendishes. This meant that Hobbes
entered circles where the activities of the King, of Members of
Parliament, and of other wealthy landowners were known and discussed,
and indeed influenced. Thus intellectual and practical ability brought
Hobbes to a place close to power – later he would even be math tutor
to the future King Charles II. Although this never made Hobbes
powerful, it meant he was acquainted with and indeed vulnerable to
those who were. As the scene was being set for the Civil Wars of
1642-46 and 1648-51 – wars that would lead to the King being executed
and a republic being declared – Hobbes felt forced to leave the
country for his personal safety, and lived in France from 1640 to
1651. Even after the monarchy had been restored in 1660, Hobbes's
security was not always certain: powerful religious figures, critical
of his writings, made moves in Parliament that apparently led Hobbes
to burn some of his papers for fear of prosecution.
Thus Hobbes lived in a time of upheaval, sharper than any England has
since known. This turmoil had many aspects and causes, political and
religious, military and economic. England stood divided against itself
in several ways. The rich and powerful were divided in their support
for the King, especially concerning the monarch's powers of taxation.
Parliament was similarly divided concerning its own powers vis-à-vis
the King. Society was divided religiously, economically, and by
region. Inequalities in wealth were huge, and the upheavals of the
Civil Wars saw the emergence of astonishingly radical religious and
political sects. (For instance, "the Levellers" called for much
greater equality in terms of wealth and political rights; "the
Diggers," more radical still, fought for the abolition of wage labor.)
Civil war meant that the country became militarily divided. And all
these divisions cut across one another: for example, the army of the
republican challenger, Cromwell, was the main home of the Levellers,
yet Cromwell in turn would act to destroy their power within the
army's ranks. In addition, England's recent union with Scotland was
fragile at best, and was almost destroyed by King Charles I's attempts
to impose consistency in religious practices. We shall see that
Hobbes's greatest fear was social and political chaos – and he had
ample opportunity both to observe it and to suffer its effects.
Although social and political turmoil affected Hobbes's life and
shaped his thought, it never hampered his intellectual development.
His early position as a tutor gave him the scope to read, write and
publish (a brilliant translation of the Greek writer Thucydides
appeared in 1629), and brought him into contact with notable English
intellectuals such as Francis Bacon. His self-imposed exile in France,
along with his emerging reputation as a scientist and thinker, brought
him into contact with major European intellectual figures of his time,
leading to exchange and controversy with figures such as Descartes,
Mersenne and Gassendi. Intensely disputatious, Hobbes repeatedly
embroiled himself in prolonged arguments with clerics, mathematicians,
scientists and philosophers – sometimes to the cost of his
intellectual reputation. (For instance, he argued repeatedly that it
is possible to "square the circle" – no accident that the phrase is
now proverbial for a problem that cannot be solved!) His writing was
as undaunted by age and ill health as it was by the events of his
times. Though his health slowly failed – from about sixty, he began to
suffer "shaking palsy," probably Parkinson's disease, which steadily
worsened – even in his eighties he continued to dictate his thoughts
to a secretary, and to defend his quarter in various controversies.
Hobbes gained a reputation in many fields. He was known as a scientist
(especially in optics), as a mathematician (especially in geometry),
as a translator of the classics, as a writer on law, as a disputant in
metaphysics and epistemology; not least, he became notorious for his
writings and disputes on religious questions. But it is for his
writings on morality and politics that he has, rightly, been most
remembered. Without these, scholars might remember Hobbes as an
interesting intellectual of the seventeenth century; but few
philosophers would even recognize his name.
What are the writings that earned Hobbes his philosophical fame? The
first was entitled The Elements of Law (1640); this was Hobbes's
attempt to provide arguments supporting the King against his
challengers.De Cive [On the Citizen] (1642) has much in common with
Elements, and offers a clear, concise statement of Hobbes's moral and
political philosophy. His most famous work is Leviathan, a classic of
English prose (1651; a slightly altered Latin edition appeared in
1668). Leviathan expands on the argument of De Cive, mostly in terms
of its huge second half that deals with questions of religion. Other
important works include: De Corpore [On the Body] (1655), which deals
with questions of metaphysics;De Homine [On Man] (1657); and Behemoth
(published 1682, though written rather earlier), in which Hobbes gives
his account of England's Civil Wars. But to understand the essentials
of Hobbes's ideas and system, one can rely on De Cive and Leviathan.
It is also worth noting that, although Leviathan is more famous and
more often read, De Cive actually gives a much more straightforward
account of Hobbes's ideas. Readers whose main interest is in those
ideas may wish to skip the next section and go straight to ethics and
human nature.
3. Two Intellectual Influences
As well as the political background just stressed, two influences are
extremely marked in Hobbes's work. The first is a reaction against
religious authority as it had been known, and especially against the
scholastic philosophy that accepted and defended such authority. The
second is a deep admiration for (and involvement in) the emerging
scientific method, alongside an admiration for a much older
discipline, geometry. Both influences affected how Hobbes expressed
his moral and political ideas. In some areas it's also clear that they
significantly affected the ideas themselves.
Hobbes's contempt for scholastic philosophy is boundless. Leviathan
and other works are littered with references to the "frequency of
insignificant speech" in the speculations of the scholastics, with
their combinations of Christian theology and Aristotelian metaphysics.
Hobbes's reaction, apart from much savage and sparkling sarcasm, is
twofold. In the first place, he makes very strong claims about the
proper relation between religion and politics. He was not (as many
have charged) an atheist, but he was deadly serious in insisting that
theological disputes should be kept out of politics. (He also adopts a
strongly materialist metaphysics, that – as his critics were quick to
charge – makes it difficult to account for God's existence as a
spiritual entity.) For Hobbes, the sovereign should determine the
proper forms of religious worship, and citizens never have duties to
God that override their duty to obey political authority. Second, this
reaction against scholasticism shapes the presentation of Hobbes's own
ideas. He insists that terms be clearly defined and relate to actual
concrete experiences – part of his empiricism. (Many early sections
ofLeviathan read rather like a dictionary.) Commentators debate how
seriously to take Hobbes's stress on the importance of definition, and
whether it embodies a definite philosophical doctrine. What is
certain, and more important from the point of view of his moral and
political thought, is that he tries extremely hard to avoid any
metaphysical categories that don't relate to physical realities
(especially the mechanical realities of matter and motion).
Commentators further disagree whether Hobbes's often mechanical
sounding definitions of human nature and human behavior are actually
important in shaping his moral and political ideas – see Materialism
versus self-knowledge below.
Hobbes's determination to avoid the "insignificant" (that is,
meaningless) speech of the scholastics also overlaps with his
admiration for the emerging physical sciences and for geometry. His
admiration is not so much for the emerging method of experimental
science, but rather for deductive science – science that deduces the
workings of things from basic first principles and from true
definitions of the basic elements. Hobbes therefore approves a
mechanistic view of science and knowledge, one that models itself very
much on the clarity and deductive power exhibited in proofs in
geometry. It is fair to say that this a prioriaccount of science has
found little favor after Hobbes's time. It looks rather like a
dead-end on the way to the modern idea of science based on patient
observation, theory-building and experiment. Nonetheless, it certainly
provided Hobbes with a method that he follows in setting out his ideas
about human nature and politics. As presented in Leviathan,
especially, Hobbes seems to build from first elements of human
perception and reasoning, up to a picture of human motivation and
action, to a deduction of the possible forms of political relations
and their relative desirability. Once more, it can be disputed whether
this method is significant in shaping those ideas, or merely provides
Hobbes with a distinctive way of presenting them.
4. Ethics and Human Nature
Hobbes's moral thought is difficult to disentangle from his politics.
On his view, what we ought to do depends greatly on the situation in
which we find ourselves. Where political authority is lacking (as in
his famous natural condition of mankind), our fundamental right seems
to be to save our skins, by whatever means we think fit. Where
political authority exists, our duty seems to be quite
straightforward: to obey those in power.
But we can usefully separate the ethics from the politics if we follow
Hobbes's own division. For him ethics is concerned with human nature,
while political philosophy deals with what happens when human beings
interact. What, then, is Hobbes's view of human nature?
a. Materialism Versus Self-Knowledge
Reading the opening chapters of Leviathan is a confusing business, and
the reason for this is already apparent in Hobbes's very short
"Introduction." He begins by telling us that the human body is like a
machine, and that political organization ("the commonwealth") is like
an artificial human being. He ends by saying that the truth of his
ideas can be gauged only by self-examination, by looking into our
selves to adjudge our characteristic thoughts and passions, which form
the basis of all men's actions. But what is the relationship between
these two very different claims? For obviously when we look into our
selves we do not see mechanical pushes and pulls. This mystery is
hardly answered by Hobbes's method in the opening chapters, where he
persists in talking about all manner of psychological phenomena – from
emotions to thoughts to whole trains of reasoning – as products of
mechanical interactions. (As to what he will say about successful
political organization, the resemblance between the commonwealth and a
functioning human being is slim indeed. Hobbes's only real point seems
to be that there should be a "head" that decides most of the important
things that the "body" does.)
Most commentators now agree with an argument made in the 1960's by the
political philosopher Leo Strauss. Hobbes draws on his notion of a
mechanistic science, that works deductively from first principles, in
setting out his ideas about human nature. Science provides him with a
distinctive method and some memorable metaphors and similes. What it
does not provide – nor could it, given the rudimentary state of
physiology and psychology in Hobbes's day – are any decisive or
substantive ideas about what human nature really is. Those ideas may
have come, as Hobbes also claims, from self-examination. In all
likelihood, they actually derived from his reflection on contemporary
events and his reading of classics of political history such as
Thucydides.
This is not to say that we should ignore Hobbes's ideas on human
nature – far from it. But it does mean we should not be misled by
scientific imagery that stems from an in fact non-existent science
(and also, to some extent, from an unproven and uncertain
metaphysics). The point is important mainly when it comes to a central
interpretative point in Hobbes's work: whether or not he thinks of
human beings as mechanical objects, programmed as it were to pursue
their self-interest. Some have suggested that Hobbes's mechanical
world-view leaves no room for the influence of moral ideas, that he
thinks the only effective influence on our behavior will be incentives
of pleasure and pain. But while it is true that Hobbes sometimes says
things like this, we should be clear that the ideas fit together only
in a metaphorical way. For example, there's no reason why moral ideas
shouldn't "get into" the mechanisms that drive us round (like so many
clock-work dolls perhaps?). Likewise, there's no reason why pursuing
pleasure and pain should work in our self-interest. (What
self-interest is depends on the time-scale we adopt, and how
effectively we might achieve this goal also depends on our insight
into what harms and benefits us). If we want to know what drives human
beings, on Hobbes's view, we must read carefully all he says about
this, as well as what he needs to assume if the rest of his thought is
to make sense. The mechanistic metaphor is something of a red herring
and, in the end, probably less useful than his other starting point
inLeviathan, the Delphic epithet: nosce teipsum, "know thyself."
b. The Poverty of Human Judgment and our Need for Science
There are two major aspects to Hobbes's picture of human nature. As we
have seen, and will explore below, what motivates human beings to act
is extremely important to Hobbes. The other aspect concerns human
powers of judgment and reasoning, about which Hobbes tends to be
extremely skeptical. Like many philosophers before him, Hobbes wants
to present a more solid and certain account of human morality than is
contained in everyday beliefs. Plato had contrasted knowledge with
opinion. Hobbes contrasts science with a whole raft of less reliable
forms of belief – from probable inference based on experience, right
down to "absurdity, to which no living creature is subject but man"
(Leviathan, v.7).
Hobbes has several reasons for thinking that human judgment is
unreliable, and needs to be guided by science. Our judgments tend to
be distorted by self-interest or by the pleasures and pains of the
moment. We may share the same basic passions, but the various things
of the world affect us all very differently; and we are inclined to
use our feelings as measures for others. It becomes dogmatic through
vanity and morality, as with "men vehemently in love with their own
new opinions…and obstinately bent to maintain them, [who give] their
opinions also that reverenced name of conscience" (Leviathan, vii.4).
When we use words which lack any real objects of reference, or are
unclear about the meaning of the words we use, the danger is not only
that our thoughts will be meaningless, but also that we will fall into
violent dispute. (Hobbes has scholastic philosophy in mind, but he
also makes related points about the dangerous effects of faulty
political ideas and ideologies.) We form beliefs about supernatural
entities, fairies and spirits and so on, and fear follows where belief
has gone, further distorting our judgment. Judgment can be swayed this
way and that by rhetoric, that is, by the persuasive and "colored"
speech of others, who can deliberately deceive us and may well have
purposes that go against the common good or indeed our own good. Not
least, much judgment is concerned with what we should do now, that is,
with future events, "the future being but a fiction of the mind"
(Leviathan, iii.7) and therefore not reliably known to us.
For Hobbes, it is only science, "the knowledge of consequences"
(Leviathan, v.17), that offers reliable knowledge of the future and
overcomes the frailties of human judgment. Unfortunately, his picture
of science, based on crudely mechanistic premises and developed
through deductive demonstrations, is not even plausible in the
physical sciences. When it comes to the complexities of human
behavior, Hobbes's model of science is even less satisfactory. He is
certainly an acute and wise commentator of political affairs; we can
praise him for his hard-headedness about the realities of human
conduct, and for his determination to create solid chains of logical
reasoning. Nonetheless, this does not mean that Hobbes was able to
reach a level of "scientific" certainty in his judgments that had been
lacking in all previous reflection on morals and politics.
c. Motivation
The most consequential aspect of Hobbes's account of human nature
centers on his ideas about human motivation, and this topic is
therefore at the heart of many debates about how to understand
Hobbes's philosophy. Many interpreters have presented Hobbesian man as
a self-interested, rationally calculating actor (those ideas have been
important in modern political philosophy and economic thought,
especially in terms of rational choice theories). It is true that some
of the problems that face people like this – rational egoists, as
philosophers call them – are similar to the problems Hobbes wants to
solve in his political philosophy. And it is also very common for
first-time readers of Hobbes to get the impression that he believes
we're all basically selfish.
There are good reasons why earlier interpreters and new readers tend
to think Hobbesian man is purely self-interested. Hobbes likes to make
bold and even shocking claims to get his point across. "I obtained two
absolutely certain postulates of human nature," he says, "one, the
postulate of human greed by which each man insists upon his own
private use of common property; the other, the postulate of natural
reason, by which each man strives to avoid violent death" (De Cive,
Epistle Dedicatory). What could be clearer? – We want all we can get,
and we certainly want to avoid death. There are two problems with
thinking that this is Hobbes's considered view, however. First, quite
simply, it represents a false view of human nature. People do all
sorts of altruistic things that go against their interests. They also
do all sorts of needlessly cruel things that go against self-interest
(think of the self-defeating lengths that revenge can run to). So it
would be uncharitable to interpret Hobbes this way, if we can find a
more plausible account in his work. Second, in any case Hobbes often
relies on a more sophisticated view of human nature. He describes or
even relies on motives that go beyond or against self-interest, such
as pity, a sense of honor or courage, and so on. And he frequently
emphasizes that we find it difficult to judge or appreciate just what
our interests are anyhow. (Some also suggest that Hobbes's views on
the matter shifted away from egoism after De Cive, but the point is
not crucial here.)
The upshot is that Hobbes does not think that we are basically or
reliably selfish; and he does not think we are fundamentally or
reliably rational in our ideas about what is in our interests. He is
rarely surprised to find human beings doing things that go against
self-interest: we will cut off our noses to spite our faces, we will
torture others for their eternal salvation, we will charge to our
deaths for love of country. In fact, a lot of the problems that befall
human beings, according to Hobbes, result from their being too
littleconcerned with self-interest. Too often, he thinks, we are too
much concerned with what others think of us, or inflamed by religious
doctrine, or carried away by others' inflammatory words. This weakness
as regards our self-interest has even led some to think that Hobbes is
advocating a theory known as ethical egoism. This is to claim that
Hobbes bases morality upon self-interest, claiming that we ought to do
what it is most in our interest to do. But we shall see that this
would over-simplify the conclusions that Hobbes draws from his account
of human nature.
d. Political Philosophy
This is Hobbes's picture of man. We are needy and vulnerable. We are
easily led astray in our attempts to know the world around us. Our
capacity to reason is as fragile as our capacity to know; it relies
upon language and is prone to error and undue influence. When we act,
we may do so selfishly or impulsively or in ignorance, on the basis of
faulty reasoning or bad theology or others' emotive speech.
What is the political fate of this rather pathetic sounding creature –
that is, of us? Unsurprisingly, Hobbes thinks little happiness can be
expected of our lives together. The best we can hope for is peaceful
life under an authoritarian-sounding sovereign. The worst, on Hobbes's
account, is what he calls the "natural condition of mankind," a state
of violence, insecurity and constant threat. In outline, Hobbes's
argument is that the alternative to government is a situation no one
could reasonably wish for, and that any attempt to make government
accountable to the people must undermine it, so threatening the
situation of non-government that we must all wish to avoid. Our only
reasonable option, therefore, is a "sovereign" authority that is
totally unaccountable to its subjects. Let us deal with the "natural
condition" of non-government, also called the "state of nature," first
of all.
5. The Natural Condition of Mankind
The state of nature is "natural" in one specific sense only. For
Hobbes political authority is artificial: in the "natural" condition
human beings lack government, which is an authority created by men.
What is Hobbes's reasoning here? He claims that the only authority
that naturally exists among human beings is that of a mother over her
child, because the child is so very much weaker than the mother (and
indebted to her for its survival). Among adult human beings this is
invariably not the case. Hobbes concedes an obvious objection,
admitting that some of us are much stronger than others. And although
he's very sarcastic about the idea that some are wiser than others, he
doesn't have much difficulty with the idea that some are fools and
others are dangerously cunning. Nonetheless, it's almost invariably
true that every human being is capable of killing any other. Even the
strongest must sleep; even the weakest might persuade others to help
him kill another. (Leviathan, xiii.1-2) Because adults are "equal" in
this capacity to threaten one another's lives, Hobbes claims there is
no natural source of authority to order their lives together. (He is
strongly opposing arguments that established monarchs have a natural
or God-given right to rule over us.)
Thus, as long as human beings have not successfully arranged some form
of government, they live in Hobbes's state of nature. Such a condition
might occur at the "beginning of time" (see Hobbes's comments on Cain
and Abel, Leviathan, xiii.11, Latin version only), or in "primitive"
societies (Hobbes thought the American Indians lived in such a
condition). But the real point for Hobbes is that a state of nature
could just as well occur in seventeenth century England, should the
King's authority be successfully undermined. It could occur tomorrow
in every modern society, for example, if the police and army suddenly
refused to do their jobs on behalf of government. Unless some
effective authority stepped into the King's place (or the place of
army and police and government), Hobbes argues the result is doomed to
be deeply awful, nothing less than a state of war.
Why should peaceful cooperation be impossible without an overarching
authority? Hobbes provides a series of powerful arguments that suggest
it is extremely unlikely that human beings will live in security and
peaceful cooperation without government. (Anarchism, the thesis that
we should live without government, of course disputes these
arguments.) His most basic argument is threefold. (Leviathan,
xiii.3-9) (i) He thinks we will compete, violently compete, to secure
the basic necessities of life and perhaps to make other material
gains. (ii) He argues that we will challenge others and fight out of
fear ("diffidence"), so as to ensure our personal safety. (iii) And he
believes that we will seek reputation ("glory"), both for its own sake
and for its protective effects (for example, so that others will be
afraid to challenge us).
This is a more difficult argument than it might seem. Hobbes does not
suppose that we are all selfish, that we are all cowards, or that we
are all desperately concerned with how others see us. Two points,
though. First, he does think that some of us are selfish, some of us
cowardly, and some of us "vainglorious" (perhaps some people are of
all of these!). Moreover, many of these people will be prepared to use
violence to attain their ends – especially if there's no government or
police to stop them. In this Hobbes is surely correct. Second, in some
situations it makes good sense, at least in the short term, to use
violence and to behave selfishly, fearfully or vaingloriously. If our
lives seem to be at stake, after all, we're unlikely to have many
scruples about stealing a loaf of bread; if we perceive someone as a
deadly threat, we may well want to attack first, while his guard is
down; if we think that there are lots of potential attackers out
there, it's going to make perfect sense to get a reputation as someone
who shouldn't be messed with. In Hobbes's words, "the wickedness of
bad men also compels good men to have recourse, for their own
protection, to the virtues of war, which are violence and fraud." (De
Cive, Epistle Dedicatory) As well as being more complex than first
appears, Hobbes's argument becomes very difficult to refute.
Underlying this most basic argument is an important consideration
about insecurity. As we shall see Hobbes places great weight on
contracts (thus some interpreters see Hobbes as heralding a market
society dominated by contractual exchanges). In particular, he often
speaks of "covenants," by which he means a contract where one party
performs his part of the bargain later than the other. In the state of
nature such agreements aren't going to work. Only the weakest will
have good reason to perform the second part of a covenant, and then
only if the stronger party is standing over them. Yet a huge amount of
human cooperation relies on trust, that others will return their part
of the bargain over time. A similar point can be made about property,
most of which we can't carry about with us and watch over. This means
we must rely on others respecting our possessions over extended
periods of time. If we can't do this, then many of the achievements of
human society that involve putting hard work into land (farming,
building) or material objects (the crafts, or modern industrial
production, still unknown in Hobbes's time) will be near impossible.
One can reasonably object to such points: Surely there are basic
duties to reciprocate fairly and to behave in a trustworthy manner?
Even if there's no government providing a framework of law, judgment
and punishment, don't most people have a reasonable sense of what is
right and wrong, which will prevent the sort of contract-breaking and
generalized insecurity that Hobbes is concerned with? Indeed,
shouldn't our basic sense of morality prevent much of the greed,
pre-emptive attack and reputation-seeking that Hobbes stressed in the
first place? This is the crunch point of Hobbes's argument, and it is
here (if anywhere) that one can accuse Hobbes of "pessimism." He makes
two claims. The first concerns our duties in the state of nature (that
is, the so-called "right of nature"). The second follows from this,
and is less often noticed: it concerns the danger posed by our
different and variable judgments of what is right and wrong.
On Hobbes's view the right of nature is quite simple to define.
Naturally speaking – that is, outside of civil society – we have a
right to do whatever we think will ensure our self-preservation. The
worst that can happen to us is violent death at the hands of others.
If we have any rights at all, if (as we might put it) nature has given
us any rights whatsoever, then the first is surely this: the right to
prevent violent death befalling us. But Hobbes says more than this,
and it is this point that makes his argument so powerful. We do not
just have a right to ensure our self-preservation: we each have a
right to judge what will ensure our self-preservation. And this is
where Hobbes's picture of man becomes important. Hobbes has given us
good reasons to think that human beings rarely judge wisely. Yet in
the state of nature no one is in a position to successfully define
what is good judgment. If I judge that killing you is a sensible or
even necessary move to safeguard my life, then – in Hobbes's state of
nature – I have a right to kill you. Others might judge the matter
differently, of course. Almost certainly you'll have quite a different
view of things (perhaps you were just stretching your arms, not
raising a musket to shoot me). Because we're all insecure, because
trust is more-or-less absent, there's little chance of our sorting out
misunderstandings peacefully, nor can we rely on some (trusted) third
party to decide whose judgment is right. We all have to be judges in
our own causes, and the stakes are very high indeed: life or death.
For this reason Hobbes makes very bold claims that sound totally
amoral. "To this war of every man against every man," he says, "this
also is consequent [i.e., it follows]: that nothing can be unjust. The
notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice have no place [in
the state of nature]." (Leviathan, xiii.13) He further argues that in
the state of nature we each have a right to all things, "even to one
another's body' (Leviathan, xiv.4). Hobbes is dramatizing his point,
but the core is defensible. If I judge that I need such and such – an
object, another person's labor, another person's death – to ensure my
continued existence, then in the state of nature, there is no agreed
authority to decide whether I'm right or wrong. New readers of Hobbes
often suppose that the state of nature would be a much nicer place, if
only he were to picture human beings with some basic moral ideas. But
this is naïve: unless people share the same moral ideas, not just at
the level of general principles but also at the level of individual
judgment, then the challenge he poses remains unsolved: human beings
who lack some shared authority are almost certain to fall into
dangerous and deadly conflict.
There are different ways of interpreting Hobbes's view of the absence
of moral constraints in the state of nature. Some think that Hobbes is
imagining human beings who have no idea of social interaction and
therefore no ideas about right and wrong. In this case, the natural
condition would be a purely theoretical construction, and would
demonstrate what both government and society do for human beings. (A
famous statement about the state of nature in De Cive (viii.1) might
support this interpretation: "looking at men as if they had just
emerged from the earth like mushrooms and grown up without any
obligation to each other…") Another, complementary view reads Hobbes
as a psychological egoist, so that – in the state of nature as
elsewhere – he is merely describing the interaction of selfish and
amoral human beings.
Others suppose that Hobbes has a much more complex picture of human
motivation, so that there is no reason to think moral ideas are absent
in the state of nature. In particular, it's historically reasonable to
think that Hobbes invariably has civil war in mind, when he describes
our "natural condition." If we think of civil war, we need to imagine
people who've lived together and indeed still do live together –
huddled together in fear in their houses, banded together as armies or
guerrillas or groups of looters. The problem here isn't a lack of
moral ideas – far from it – rather that moral ideas and judgments
differ enormously. This means (for example) that two people who are
fighting tooth and nail over a cow or a gun can both think they're
perfectly entitled to the object and both think they're perfectly
right to kill the other – a point Hobbes makes explicitly and often.
It also enables us to see that many Hobbesian conflicts are about
religious ideas or political ideals (as well as self-preservation and
so on) – as in the British Civil War raging while Hobbes wrote
Leviathan, and in the many violent sectarian conflicts throughout the
world today.
In the end, though, whatever account of the state of nature and its
(a) morality we attribute to Hobbes, we must remember that it is meant
to function as a powerful and decisive threat: if we do not heed
Hobbes's teachings and fail to respect existing political authority,
then the natural condition and its horrors of war await us.
a. The Laws of Nature and the Social Contract
Hobbes thinks the state of nature is something we ought to avoid, at
any cost except our own self-preservation (this being our "right of
nature," as we saw above). But what sort of "ought" is this? There are
two basic ways of interpreting Hobbes here. It might be a counsel of
prudence: avoid the state of nature, if you're concerned to avoid
violent death. In this case Hobbes's advice only applies to us (i) if
we agree that violent death is what we should fear most and should
therefore avoid; and (ii) if we agree with Hobbes that only an
unaccountable sovereign stands between human beings and the state of
nature. This line of thought fits well with an egoistic reading of
Hobbes, but we'll see that it faces serious problems.
The other way of interpreting Hobbes is not without problems either.
This takes Hobbes to be saying that we ought, morally speaking, to
avoid the state of nature. We have a duty to do what we can to avoid
this situation arising, and a duty to end it, if at all possible.
Hobbes often makes his view clear, that we have such moral
obligations. But then two difficult questions arise: Why these
obligations? And why are theyobligatory?
Hobbes frames the issues in terms of an older vocabulary, using the
idea of natural law that many ancient and medieval philosophers had
relied on. Like them, he thinks that human reason can discern some
eternal principles to govern our conduct. These principles are
independent of (though also complementary to) whatever moral
instruction we might get from God or religion. In other words, they
are laws given by nature rather than revealed by God. But Hobbes makes
radical changes to the content of these so-called laws of nature. In
particular, he doesn't think that natural law provides any scope
whatsoever to criticize or disobey the actual laws made by a
government. He thus disagrees with those Protestants who thought that
religious conscience might sanction disobedience of "immoral" laws,
and with Catholics who thought that the commandments of the Pope have
primacy over those of national political authorities.
Although he sets out nineteen laws of nature, it is the first two that
are politically crucial. A third, that stresses the important of
keeping to contracts we have entered into, is important in Hobbes's
moral justifications of obedience to the sovereign. (The remaining
sixteen can be quite simply encapsulated in the formula, "do as you
would be done by." While the details are important for scholars of
Hobbes, they do not affect the overall theory and will be ignored
here.)
The first law reads as follows:
Every man ought to endeavor peace, as far as he has hope of
obtaining it, and when he cannot obtain it, that he may seek and use
all helps and advantages of war. (Leviathan, xiv.4)
This repeats the points we have already seen about our "right of
nature," so long as peace does not appear to be a realistic prospect.
The second law of nature is more complicated:
That a man be willing, when others are so too, as far-forth as for
peace and defense of himself he shall think it necessary, to lay down
this right to all things, and be contented with so much liberty
against other men, as he would allow other men against himself.
(Leviathan, xiv.5)
What Hobbes tries to tackle here is the transition from the state of
nature to civil society. But how he does this is misleading and has
generated much confusion and disagreement. The way that Hobbes
describes this second law of nature makes it look as if we should all
put down our weapons, give up (much of) our "right of nature," and
jointly authorize a sovereign who will tell us what is permitted and
punish us if we don't obey. But the problem is obvious. If the state
of nature is anything like as bad as Hobbes has argued, then there's
just no way people could ever make an agreement like this or put it
into practice.
At the end of Leviathan, Hobbes seems to concede this point, saying
"there is scarce a commonwealth in the world whose beginnings can in
conscience be justified" ("Review and Conclusion," 8). That is:
governments have invariably been foisted upon people by force and
fraud, not by collective agreement. But Hobbes means to defend every
existing government that is powerful enough to secure peace among its
subjects – not just a mythical government that's been created by a
peaceful contract out of a state of nature. His basic claim is that we
should behave as if we had voluntarily entered into such a contract
with everyone else in our society – everyone else, that is, except the
sovereign authority.
In Hobbes's myth of the social contract, everyone except the person or
group who will wield sovereign power lays down their "right to all
things." They agree to limit drastically their right of nature,
retaining only a right to defend their lives in case of immediate
threat. (How limited this right of nature becomes in civil society has
caused much dispute, because deciding what is an immediate threat is a
question of judgment. It certainly permits us to fight back if the
sovereign tries to kill us. But what if the sovereign conscripts us as
soldiers? What if the sovereign looks weak and we doubt whether he can
continue to secure peace…?) The sovereign, however, retains his (or
her, or their) right of nature, which we have seen is effectively a
right to all things – to decide what everyone else should do, to
decide the rules of property, to judge disputes and so on. Hobbes
concedes that there are moral limits on what sovereigns should do (God
might call a sovereign to account). However, since in any case of
dispute the sovereign is the only rightful judge – on this earth, that
is – those moral limits make no practical difference. In every moral
and political matter, the decisive question for Hobbes is always: who
is to judge? As we have seen, in the state of nature, each of us is
judge in our own cause, part of the reason why Hobbes thinks it is
inevitably a state of war. Once civil society exists, the only
rightful judge is the sovereign.
b. Why Should we Obey the Sovereign?
If we had all made a voluntary contract, a mutual promise, then it
might seem half-way plausible to think we have an obligation to obey
the sovereign (although even this requires the claim that promising is
a moral value that overrides all others). If we have been conquered
or, more fortunately, have simply been born into a society with an
established political authority, this seems quite improbable. Hobbes
has to make three steps here, all of which have seemed weak to many of
his readers. First of all, he insists that promises made under threat
of violence are nonetheless freely made, and just as binding as any
others. Second, he has to put great weight on the moral value of
promise keeping, which hardly fits with the absence of duties in the
state of nature. Third, he has to give a story of how those of us born
and raised in a political society have made some sort of implied
promise to each other to obey, or at least, he has to show that we are
bound (either morally or out of self-interest) to behave as if we had
made such a promise.
In the first place, Hobbes draws on his mechanistic picture of the
world, to suggest that threats of force do not deprive us of liberty.
Liberty, he says, is freedom of motion, and I am free to move
whichever way I wish, unless I am literally enchained. If I yield to
threats of violence, that is my choice, for physically I could have
done otherwise. If I obey the sovereign for fear of punishment or in
fear of the state of nature, then that is equally my choice. Such
obedience then comes, for Hobbes, to constitute a promise that I will
continue to obey.
Second, promises carry a huge moral weight for Hobbes, as they do in
all social contract theories. The question, however, is why we should
think they are so important. Why should my (coerced) promise oblige
me, given the wrong you committed in threatening me and demanding my
valuables? Hobbes has no good answer to this question (but see below,
on egoistic interpretations of Hobbes's thinking here). His theory
suggests that (in the state of nature) you could do me no wrong, as
the right of nature dictates that we all have a right to all things.
Likewise, promises do not oblige in the state of nature, inasmuch as
they go against our right of nature. In civil society, the sovereign's
laws dictate what is right and wrong; if your threat was wrongful,
then my promise will not bind me. But as the sovereign is outside of
the original contract, he sets the terms for everyone else: so his
threats create obligations.
As this suggests, Hobbesian promises are strangely fragile.
Implausibly binding so long as a sovereign exists to adjudicate and
enforce them, they lose all power should things revert to a state of
nature. Relatedly, they seem to contain not one jot of loyalty. To be
logically consistent, Hobbes needs to be politically implausible. Now
there are passages where Hobbes sacrifices consistency for
plausibility, arguing we have a duty to fight for our (former)
sovereign even in the midst of civil war. Nonetheless the logic of his
theory suggests that, as soon as government starts to weaken and
disorder sets in, our duty of obedience lapses. That is, when the
sovereign power needs our support, because it is no longer able to
coerce us, there is no effective judge or enforcer of covenants, so
that such promises no longer override our right of nature. This turns
common sense on its head. Surely a powerful government can afford to
be challenged, for instance by civil disobedience or conscientious
objection? But when civil conflict and the state of nature threaten,
in other words when government is failing, then we might reasonably
think that political unity is as morally important as Hobbes always
suggests. A similar question of loyalty also comes up when the
sovereign power has been usurped – when Cromwell has supplanted the
King, when a foreign invader has ousted our government. Right from the
start, Hobbes's critics saw that his theory makes turncoats into moral
heroes: our allegiance belongs to whoever happens to be holding the
gun(s). Perversely, the only crime the makers of a coup can commit is
to fail.
Why does this problem come about? To overcome the fact that his
contract is a fiction, Hobbes is driven to construct a "sort of"
promise out of the fact of our subjugation to whatever political
authority exists. He stays wedded to the idea that obedience can only
find a moral basis in a "voluntary" promise, because only this seems
to justify the almost unlimited obedience and renunciation of
individual judgment he's determined to prove. It is no surprise that
Hobbes's arguments creak at every point: nothing could bear the weight
of justifying such an overriding duty.
All the difficulties in finding a reliable moral obligation to obey
might tempt us back to the idea that Hobbes is some sort of egoist.
However, the difficulties with this tack are even greater. There are
two sorts of egoism commentators have attributed to Hobbes:
psychological and ethical. The first theory says that human beings
always act egoistically, the second that they ought to act
egoistically. Either view might support this simple idea: we should
obey the sovereign, because his political authority is what keeps us
from the evils of the natural condition. But the basic problem with
such egoistic interpretations, from the point of view of Hobbes's
system of politics, is shown when we think about cases where
selfishness seems to conflict with the commands of the sovereign – for
example, where illegal conduct will benefit us or keep us from danger.
For a psychologically egoist agent, such behavior will be
irresistible; for an ethically egoist agent, it will be morally
obligatory. Now, providing the sovereign is sufficiently powerful and
well-informed, he can prevent many such cases arising by threatening
and enforcing punishments of those who disobey. Effective threats of
punishment mean that obedience is in our self-interest. But such
threats will not be effective when we think our disobedience can go
undetected. After Orwell's 1984we can imagine a state that is so
powerful that no reasonable person would ever think disobedience could
pay. But for Hobbes, such a powerful sovereign was not even
conceivable: he would have had to assume that there'd be many
situations where people could reasonably hope to "get away with it."
(Likewise, under non-totalitarian, liberal politics, there are many
situations where illegal behavior is very unlikely to be detected or
punished.) So, still thinking of egoistic agents, the more people do
get away with it, the more reason others have to think they can do the
same. Thus the problem of disobedience threatens to "snowball,"
undermining the sovereign and plunging selfish agents back into the
chaos of the state of nature.
In other words, sovereignty as Hobbes imagined it, and liberal
political authority as we know it, can only function where people feel
some additional motivation apart from pure self-interest. Moreover,
there is strong evidence that Hobbes was well aware of this. Part of
Hobbes's interest in religion (a topic that occupies half of
Leviathan) lies in its power to shape human conduct. Sometimes this
does seem to work through self-interest, as in crude threats of
damnation and hell-fire. But Hobbes's main interest lies in the
educative power of religion, and indeed of political authority.
Religious practices, the doctrines taught in the universities (!), the
beliefs and habits inculcated by the institutions of government and
society: how these can encourage and secure respect for law and
authority seem to be even more important to Hobbes's political
solutions than his theoretical social contract or shaky appeals to
simple self-interest.
What are we to conclude, then, given the difficulties in finding a
reliable moral or selfish justification for obedience? In the end, for
Hobbes, everything rides on the value of peace. Hobbes wants to say
both that civil order is in our "enlightened" self-interest, and that
it is of overwhelming moral value. Life is never going to be perfect
for us, and life under the sovereign is the best we can do.
Recognizing this aspect ofeveryone's self-interest should lead us to
recognize the moral value of supporting whatever authority we happen
to live under. For Hobbes, this moral value is so great – and the
alternatives so stark – that it should override every threat to our
self-interest except the imminent danger of death. The million-dollar
question is then: is a life of obedience to the sovereign really the
best human beings can hope for?
c. Life Under the Sovereign
Hobbes has definite ideas about the proper nature, scope and exercise
of sovereignty. Much that he says is cogent, and much of it can reduce
the worries we might have about living under this drastically
authoritarian sounding regime. Many commentators have stressed, for
example, the importance Hobbes places upon the rule of law. His claim
that much of our freedom, in civil society, "depends on the silence of
the laws" is often quoted (Leviathan, xxi.18). In addition, Hobbes
makes many points that are obviously aimed at contemporary debates
about the rights of King and Parliament – especially about the
sovereign's rights as regards taxation and the seizure of property,
and about the proper relation between religion and politics. Some of
these points continue to be relevant, others are obviously
anachronistic: evidently Hobbes could not have imagined the modern
state, with its vast bureaucracies, massive welfare provision and
complicated interfaces with society. Nor could he have foreseen how
incredibly powerful the state might become, meaning that "sovereigns"
such as Hitler or Stalin might starve, brutalize and kill their
subjects, to such an extent that the state of nature looks clearly
preferable.
However, the problem with all of Hobbes's notions about sovereignty is
that – on his account – it is not Hobbes the philosopher, nor we the
citizens, who decide what counts as the proper nature, scope or
exercise of sovereignty. He faces a systematic problem: justifying any
limits or constraints on the sovereign involves making judgments about
moral or practical requirements. But one of his greatest insights,
still little recognized by many moral philosophers, is that any right
or entitlement is only practically meaningful when combined with a
concrete judgment as to what it dictates in some given case. Hobbes's
own failure, however understandable, to foresee the growth of
government and its powers only supports this thought: that the proper
nature, scope or exercise of sovereignty is a matter of complex
judgment. Alone among the people who comprise Hobbes's commonwealth,
it is the sovereign who judges what form he should appear in, how far
he should reach into the lives of his subjects, and how he should
exercise his powers.
It should be added that the one part of his system that Hobbes
concedes not to be proven with certainty is just this question: who or
what should constitute the sovereign power. It was natural for Hobbes
to think of a King, or indeed a Queen (he was born under Elizabeth I).
But he was certainly very familiar with ancient forms of government,
including aristocracy (government by an elite) and democracy
(government by the citizens, who formed a relatively small group
within the total population). Hobbes was also aware that an assembly
such as Parliament could constitute a sovereign body. All have
advantages and disadvantages, he argues. But the unity that comes
about from having a single person at the apex, together with fixed
rules of succession that pre-empt dispute about who this person should
be, makes monarchy Hobbes's preferred option.
In fact, if we want to crack open Hobbes's sovereign, to be able to
lay down concrete ideas about its nature and limits, we must begin
with the question of judgment. For Hobbes, dividing capacities to
judge between different bodies is tantamount to letting the state of
nature straight back in. "For what is it to divide the power of a
commonwealth, but to dissolve it; for powers divided mutually destroy
each other." (Leviathan, xxix.12; cf De Cive, xii.5) Beyond the
example of England in the 1640s, Hobbes hardly bothers to argue the
point, although it is crucial to his entire theory. Always in his mind
is the Civil War that arose when Parliament claimed the right to judge
rules of taxation, and thereby prevented the King from ruling and
making war as he saw fit, and when churches and religious sects
claimed prerogatives that went against the King's decisions.
Especially given modern experiences of the division of powers,
however, it's easy to see that these examples are extreme and
atypical. We might recall the American constitution, where powers of
legislation, execution and case-by-case judgment are separated (to
Congress, President and the judiciary respectively) and
counter-balance one another. Each of these bodies is responsible for
judging different questions. There are often, of course, boundary
disputes, as to whether legislative, executive or judicial powers
should apply to a given issue, and no one body is empowered to settle
this crucial question of judgment. Equally obviously, however, such
disputes have not led to a state of nature (well, at least if we think
of the US after the Civil War). For Hobbes it is simply axiomatic that
disputation as to who should judge important social and political
issues spells the end of the commonwealth. For us, it is equally
obvious that only a few extreme forms of dispute have this very
dangerous power. Dividing the powers that are important to government
need not leave a society more open to those dangerous conflicts.
Indeed, many would now argue that political compromises which provide
different groups and bodies with independent space to judge certain
social or political issues can be crucial for preventing disputes from
escalating into violent conflict or civil war.
6. Conclusion
What happens, then, if we do not follow Hobbes in his arguments that
judgment must, by necessity or by social contract or both, be the sole
province of the sovereign? If we are optimists about the power of
human judgment, and about the extent of moral consensus among human
beings, we have a straightforward route to the concerns of modern
liberalism. Our attention will not be on the question of social and
political order, rather on how to maximize liberty, how to define
social justice, how to draw the limits of government power, and how to
realize democratic ideals. We will probably interpret Hobbes as a
psychological egoist, and think that the problems of political order
that obsessed him were the product of an unrealistic view of human
nature, or unfortunate historical circumstances, or both. In this
case, I suggest, we might as well not have read Hobbes at all.
If we are less optimistic about human judgment in morals and politics,
however, we should not doubt that Hobbes's problems remain our
problems. But hindsight shows grave limitations to his solutions.
Theoretically, Hobbes fails to prove that we have an almost unlimited
obligation to obey the sovereign. His arguments that sovereignty – the
power to judge moral and political matters, and enforce those
judgments – cannot be divided are not only weak; they are simply
refuted by the (relatively) successful distribution of powers in
modern liberal societies. Not least, the horrific crimes of twentieth
century dictatorships show beyond doubt that judgment about right and
wrong cannot be a question only for our political leaders.
If Hobbes's problems are real and his solutions only partly
convincing, where will we go? It might reasonably be thought that this
is the central question of modern political thought. We will have no
doubt that peaceful coexistence is one of the greatest goods of human
life, something worth many inconveniences, sacrifices and compromises.
We will see that there is moral force behind the laws and requirements
of the state, simply because human beings do indeed need authority and
systems of enforcement if they are to cooperate peacefully. But we can
hardly accept that, because human judgment is weak and faulty, that
there can be only one judge of these matters – precisely because that
judge might turn out to be very faulty indeed. Our concern will be how
we can effectively divide power between government and people, while
still ensuring that important questions of moral and political
judgment are peacefully adjudicated. We will be concerned with the
standards and institutions that provide for compromise between many
different and conflicting judgments. And all the time, we will
remember Hobbes's reminder that human life is never without
inconvenience and troubles, that we must live with a certain amount of
bad, to prevent the worst: fear of violence, and violent death.
7. References and Further Reading
* Edwards, Alistair (2002) "Hobbes" in Interpreting Modern
Political Philosophy: From Machiavelli to Marx, eds. A Edwards and J
Townshend (Palgrave Macmillan, Houndmills)
o A very helpful overview of key interpretative debates
about Hobbes in the twentieth century.
* Hill, Christopher (1961/1980) The Century of Revolution,
1603-1714, second ed (Routledge, London)
o The classic work on the history and repercussions of
England's civil war.
* Hobbes, Thomas (1998 [1642]) On the Citizen, ed & trans Richard
Tuck and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge)
o The best translation of Hobbes's most straightforward book,De Cive.
* Hobbes, Thomas (1994 [1651/1668]) Leviathan, ed Edwin Curley
(Hackett, Indianapolis)
o The best edition of Hobbes's magnum opus, including
extensive additional material and many important variations (ignored
by all other editions) between the English text and later Latin
edition.
* Sorrell, Tom (1986) Hobbes (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London)
o A concise and well-judged account of Hobbes's life and works.
* Sorrell, Tom, ed (1996) The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes
(Cambridge University Press, Cambridge)
o An excellent set of essays on all aspects of Hobbes's
intellectual endeavors.
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