The Radical Promise of Thomas Hobbes: The Road not
taken in Liberal Theory
4:2 | © 2000
James R. Martel
James R. Martel, Amherst College.[1]
1.
2.
3.
There is no doubt that Hobbes is a thinker who presents many challenges even to those who finds him enticing.[2] His calls
for absolutism, his seeming disregard for the abuses of power, his gloomy and harsh tone all seem to have earned him his
sobriquet as the "beast of Malmesbury."[3] But it has become increasingly accepted that there is something in Hobbes that
transcends his tone and beckons us to give him a second look. Generally speaking, those who treat Hobbes in this manner find
in his writings a basis for the kind of democratic individualism that is more often attributed to Locke.[4] Thinkers like George
Kateb or Richard Flathman make persuasive cases that a politics rooted in Hobbesian thought can be attractive, ethical and
moral. They argue that a better understanding of him can serve to reinvigorate the spirit and practice of liberalism itself.[5] I
would like to partially align myself with this endeavor but hold myself as being a bit more suspicious of liberalism in general. I
think that attempts to fit Hobbes into the existing rubric of liberalism, however broadly defined, limits our understanding of
him.[6] Instead, I would like to propose rethinking the origins of liberalism itself by looking at Hobbes on his own, as if later
liberalism had never happened.[7]
The difficulty with thinking about Hobbes in terms of liberalism is that we almost inevitably read Hobbes through his later
liberal interpreters. Hobbes becomes for better or worse a kind of "proto-liberal" anticipating the doctrines of later thought.[8]
This is a tempting conclusion to make because Hobbes and later liberals share such an extensive vocabulary. Common terms
such as "sovereignty," "natural law," and "social contract" seem to suggest great continuities.
In order to think about Hobbes afresh, I want to compare Hobbes with that great architect of liberalism, John Locke. In
particular, I want to compare them in terms of how their respective epistemologies and religious views lead to tremendously
different politics. Locke is often portrayed as the "kinder, gentler" Hobbes or someone who thankfully dispatches with Hobbes'
gloom and pessimism altogether. Kirstie McClure, who does not share Flathman's appreciation of Hobbes, suggests as much
when she writes of Locke:
For Hobbes, Hume, and Rousseau, the natural condition of humankind principally referred to its worldly characteristics, or
behavior as observed or inferred by human agents; Locke's account of natural humanity had as its central reference the
created condition of the species. Where they, in other words, emphasized what they found to be the actual or descriptive
characteristics of the species -- its physical passions, worldly desires and material interests -- he began with an image of
humanity as it was divinely constructed within and in relation to a larger created cosmos. [9]
4.
5.
For McClure, Locke's abandonment of Hobbes' harsh manner of accounting everything according to some petty and selfinterested calculation is the source of his morality and what allows Locke to be more than simply a thinker of mere self-interest.
This reading of Locke is also what attracts Richard Ashcraft who insist that Locke's notions of property are not to be read (as
C.B. MacPherson does, linking Locke to Hobbes) as a doctrine of selfishness but rather as a genuine concern for collective
moral principles. Ashcraft tells us that for Locke, a meaningful sense of community is given to us only by the fact that we are all
God's "workmanship;" we do not work for ourselves, but for God. For both Ashcraft and McClure, it is Locke and not Hobbes
who offers us a hope for genuine democracy and community, if only we can come to see the genuine promise in his doctrines.
While I agree with McClure that Locke does impose a more traditionally religious aspect to Hobbes' apparently secular
language, I do not agree that this means that Locke has more progressive promise than Hobbes (or even that Hobbes is
somehow an atheist). Quite the opposite. I think that it is Locke who presents us with a deeply problematic basis on which to
form a political order precisely because of his return to ancient and classical eschatologies. I argue that it is Hobbes, despite
his calculations and gloom, who offers us the best platform on which to base a progressive and democratic subjectivity. I also
argue that Locke, in his religious vision and in his invocation of "natural law" as the basis for the organization of human society,
brings back a doctrine that Hobbes, perhaps better than anyone else of the early moderns, explicitly rejected. Locke revives
the Aristotelian doctrine of natural hierarchies and the necessity of our obedience (both individually and collectively) to higher
laws and external rules. While Locke's system does not call for the kind of greedy selfishness that MacPherson criticizes, it
also does not offer us a collective harmony since it presupposes hierarchy and at the same time depoliticizes relationships,
rendering them "natural" and hence untreatable. A return to Hobbes' epistemology, with its explicit break from Aristotelian
dogmas and with its promotion of a new ethos of personal and collective responsibility, might lead to the kind of progressive
democracy that Lockean liberalism promises but never seems to deliver.[10]
Hobbes and religion
6.
Hobbes' rejection of classical doctrines about nature, power and higher laws marks him as one of the most radical and
important of early modern thinkers. But in rejecting these doctrines is Hobbes also rejecting Christianity (or more accurately its
English Protestant variants) itself? Christianity after all has a strong Aristotelian influence and it too posits the need to conform
to a higher law. And if he does reject Christianity, where does Hobbes get his ethical values (if any) from?
7.
The question of whether Hobbes is an atheist has been raging since his own lifetime. Some contemporary scholars have
argued that Hobbes disguised his atheistic doctrines with religious trappings so as to preserve the secular core of his
theory.[11] Certainly there is ample evidence that Hobbes suffered from a reputation as an atheist after Leviathan was made
available in England. After the royal restoration, Hobbes republished Leviathan with some of the offending passages altered or
taken out -- including his perceived defense of independency -- the Puritan doctrine of individual church autonomy.[12]
Perhaps Hobbes felt that he had gone too far in showing his true colors?
8.
Others however argue that Hobbes' religiosity must be accepted as given, that his repeated and extensive commentaries on
Christian faith and doctrine have to be taken seriously.[13] Leviathan (at least the original version of it) is hardly a book written
to appease conflicting political and religious views. Its publication caused a massive outpouring of criticism. It also marks
something of a departure from some of his earlier works such as Elements of Law and even De Cive, which were accepted as
royalist and at least nominally, pro-Anglican texts. Later texts such as Behemoth are, if anything, bolder. And religion is hardly
a side issue for Hobbes -- in both Leviathan and Behemoth, he dedicates a good portion of each book to strictly religious
questions -- not to dismiss religion but to engage with it.
9.
There is also some debate about what kind of Christianity Hobbes actually supported. Nominally, Hobbes was a life-long
Anglican; he was always associated with Anglican royalists, particularly the Cavendish family who were his employers for much
of his life. He is certainly a bitter foe of both Catholicism and Presbyterianism. But some scholars have suggested that Hobbes
is sympathetic to some of the doctrines of Puritanism and other radical religious doctrines of the time. Richard Tuck argues that
Hobbes strongly supported independency, as demonstrated by passages in Leviathan such as "...we are reduced to the
Independency of the Primitive Christians to follow Paul, or Cephas, or Apollos, every man as he liketh best: which...is perhaps
the best.[14] But A.P. Martinich challenges this interpretation, arguing that Hobbes hedges a great deal ("reduced," "perhaps")
and that in his own stated preferences for a state church, he evinces little tolerance for heterodoxy.[15]
10.
Ultimately, I think with Hobbes, the important question to ask is not whether he is religious or not (I think that he is) or
whether he is an Anglican, a closeted Puritan, or something else (a more nuanced question), but rather what the political and
empirical salience of religion is for him. It is in terms of this question that I believe Hobbes shows his true radicalism, not by
denying God's existence, but rather by positing a way of living in a world marked by God's silence. Not unlike observant Jews
who, not knowing where the holy of holies lies, refuse to tread upon any part of the mount of the temple of Solomon, even
while continuing to devoutly worship God along the temple's lower wall, Hobbes, in reconciling himself with the uncertainty of
truth in the modern age, avoids making assumptions about how God wants us to order ourselves when it comes to matters of
secular life.
11.
It is in terms of his political stances that Hobbes can be seen to be allied, however strangely and uncomfortably, with some
of the doctrines of radical Puritan clergymen, Ranters, Quakers, Levellers and Diggers of his day.[16] Like Richard Overton,
Hobbes rejects the separation of the body and the soul as a basis for subjectivity.[17] Like William Walwyn, he rejects a literal
vision of hell and everlasting punishment.[18] Like Gerrard Winstanley, he rejects scripture as a basis for political guidance.[19]
At times, the words of Winstanley could easily be the words of Hobbes such as when the former writes:
While men are gazing up to heaven, imagining after a happiness or fearing a hell after they are dead, their eyes are put out,
that they see not what is their birthrights, and what is to be done by them here on earth while they are living.[20]
12.
Yet for all of this similarity, it is Hobbes who takes these eschatological principles and turns them into a fully developed
political philosophy. While Winstanley does derive a critique of property ownership and other secular matters from his theology,
it is Hobbes who offers a completely thought out political and ethical system based on his own theological insights. As Richard
Flathman argues, it is Hobbes who makes us "[m]akers of [our]selves."[21]
13.
Accordingly, Hobbes practices a radical empiricism which as its grounding premise accepts the loss of absolute truths in the
world. He writes:
No Discourse whatsoever, can End in absolute knowledge of Fact, past, or to come. For, as for the knowledge of Fact, it is
originally, Sense; and ever after, Memory. [22]
14.
Sense, and then memory give the world to us. Accordingly, we never know things absolutely and are thus forced to rely
entirely on our own judgments to make decisions. Hobbes' empiricism will go far beyond what Locke and later empiricists will
profess (with interesting exceptions such as David Hume). Although Locke rejects the concept of innate truths residing in us
from birth, he merely exteriorizes these truths by locating us always within the rubric of a discernible (and hence a priori)
natural law. It is Hobbes who truly gives meaning to the notion of human beings as a tabula rasa. [23]
15.
For Hobbes, without the possibility of absolute truth, no church and no scripture can authoritatively serve as the basis of
political life. Hobbes' political opposition to a scriptural basis for social organization stems from his empirical convictions; with
scripture available to infinite interpretations, there will be an infinite number of people all claiming that they have the correct
answer, producing "a diversity of opinion, and consequently..., disputation, breach of charity, disobedience, and at last
rebellion."[24] For Hobbes, the English Civil war can be directly blamed on such competing scriptural interpretations.
16.
When scripture is invested with the sort of sovereignty claims that one would expect might to appreciate, Hobbes balks. He
bases his strong criticism of the Roman Catholic church, for example on the fact that it insisted on an infallible and, at the time
secular, political power. [25] He doesn't like Presbyterianism much better and for similar reasons. In Leviathan, he writes:
[T]here is on Earth, no such universall Church as all Christians are bound to obey; because there is no power on Earth, to
which all other Common-wealths are subject... And therefore a Church ... is the same thing with a Civil Common-wealth,
consisting of Christian men; and is called a Civill State, for that of the subjects of it are Men; and a Church, for that the subjects
thereof are Christians.... It is true, that the bodies of the faithfull, after the Resurrection shall be not only Spirituall but Eternall:
but in this life they are grosse, and corruptible[26] (my emphasis).
17.
For Hobbes, because we are "grosse and corruptible," we must accept our status as earth bound creatures and give up on
presuming what God has in store for us. Religious issues can never be fully resolved and must be subsumed to a distinctly
secular government. Supporting Anglican doctrine, Hobbes held that the civil sovereign should be the head of the church "or
else there must need follow Faction, and Civil war."[27] But this stems from a political preference on Hobbes' part rather than
some explicitly religious conviction. Richard Tuck interprets, Hobbes' "A Review and Conclusion" at the end of Leviathan as a
kind of apologia for his appearance to be "backing" Cromwell's republic and the Independent church. Whomever is sovereign,
Hobbes seems to be arguing, let their religious views be supreme for the sake of the peace.[28]
18.
Yet it would be premature to argue that just because Hobbes appears to be indifferent to which church predominates in a
state, that he is also indifferent to religion itself. For Hobbes, religious peace has more value than simply preserving the social
order -- particularly since he does not seem to be overwhelmingly troubled by which particular social order might triumph, be it
Anglican or Independent.[29] Hobbes makes the case that within the framework of the calm provided by a state church, each
person can and must come to their own beliefs. If we are all killing one another over minor doctrinal issues, such a process
cannot take place.
19.
The degree to which Hobbes carves out a space for individual belief is crucial. In Leviathan, Hobbes asks what relationship
we should have to the "Positive Laws of God." [30] His answer is a healthy skepticism. Even during periods of miracles and
revelations, when it might seem that God's law is apparent to one and all, Hobbes questions whether God himself is doing the
revealing. The presence of miracles are no real proof in themselves since "that which is marvellous to one, may not be so to
another." And anyway "sanctity may be feigned."[31] For Hobbes, all obedience to secular interpretations of divine law is
limited to external actions. He resists the idea that people must not only obey but also believe church and state authorities. He
writes that in the case of church law we are:
not bound to believe it: for men's beliefe and interiour cogitations, are not subject to the commands, but only to the operation of
God, ordinary or extraordinary.[32]
20.
That Hobbes seems to be allowing for exactly the sort of heterodoxy in the minds of parishioners that he condemns so
vigorously in public may seem surprising at first, but it should point us towards a fact that Hobbes' (and our own) attention to
sovereign power tends to obscure; the inner life for Hobbes is not an irrelevancy but a zone of possibility. Despite the obvious
threat that it poses to his much vaunted security and peace, Hobbes insists on preserving the subject's inner autonomy.[33]
Since all doctrines will inevitably be disputed, it is best that at least only one doctrine be externally imposed. It is much worse
for Hobbes when a cacophony of differences unravels the public consensus and fills us with contention, eliminating our abilities
to judge and think for ourselves.
21.
And maybe, it might occur to the reader that this internal belief, while a nice gesture to individuality, amounts to little when
the political system remains exactly as it would if people had not only to obey but also to believe. But, as I will argue in more
detail below, I see Hobbes as a thinker with a developmental agenda. Therefore, one must not assume that this vision of a
unitary church in public and heterodoxy in private serves as a vision of a permanent political arrangement when it comes to
matters of faith for Hobbes. Rather, it serves as an embryonic space within which a genuine public discourse can evolve,
beginning (but only beginning) with the untrammeled private thoughts of individual members.
Hobbes and nature
22.
If Hobbes denies the political salience of religious orthodoxy, what then of his notions about natural law? Norberto Bobbio
argues that Hobbes is one of the originators of the theory of natural law in its modern incarnation.[34] Here too as with his
stated religious convictions, it might seem that Hobbes holds to the importance of higher and external laws after all. But we
have to be careful not to read more into Hobbes notion of nature than he tells us himself. One might well surmise (as many do)
for example that Hobbes thinks that we are "naturally wicked" since we are so craven in the so-called state of nature. But
Hobbes resists this notion, writing:
For though from nature, that is from their first birth, as they are merely sensible creatures, they have this disposition, that
immediately as much as in them lies they desire and do whatsoever is best pleasing to them...yet are they not for this reason to
be accounted wicked.[35]
23.
For Hobbes, the state of nature is not a kind of snapshot of us as we "really" and eternally are. Rather what we really are for
Hobbes is whatever we make of ourselves. Elsewhere he writes:
The Desire, and other Passions of man, are in themselves no Sin. No more are the Actions, that proceed from those Passions,
till they know a law that forbids them: which till Laws be made they cannot know.[36]
24.
Determinations of wickedness and goodness are therefore not "given" by nature. Even sin itself is a product of Law, of
human conventions. Whereas Locke revives Aristotle's use of nature as a way to depoliticize social hierarchies, Hobbes' state
of nature, if anything, has the opposite effect -- it exposes all that we considered to be natural in our own society to be simply a
naked relationship of power. Such arrangements are produced by the political process and susceptible to alteration. For
Hobbes (unlike Locke) neither class nor family relationships are in any way "natural" -- even marriage is an artifact of power.
There can be no such thing as "natural" slaves with Hobbes, nor is there any reason for anyone to passively accept their fate
as "God's will." If anything, Hobbes has (re) invented the idea of nature in order for us to abandon it once and for all when it
comes to telling us about ourselves.
25.
Ultimately for Hobbes, the idea of "nature" as such tells us very little about ourselves. From its vastness, Hobbes retains
only one "truth:" the human body. He writes:
For if we look on men full grown, and consider how brittle the frame of our human body is, which perishing, all its strength,
vigour and wisdom itself perisheth with it; and how easy matter it is, even for the weakest man to kill the strongest: there is no
reason why any man, trusting to his own strength, should conceive himself made by nature above others...All men therefore
among themselves are by nature equal; the inequality we now discern, hath its spring from the civil law.[37]
26.
So the only thing that we do "know" from nature, is how fragile and irreplaceable we are. Nature refers us then, not to an
idea of God but back onto ourselves. Paradoxically the only "law" that we receive from the heavens, the law of selfpreservation, is the heart of Hobbes' repudiation of higher truths as the foundation of politics.
Hobbes' body
27.
Hobbes' valuation of the body qua body can be seen by looking at his version of the fall of Adam and Eve in Leviathan.
Unlike Locke who sees in the temptation a fall from "a state of perfect obedience,"[38] Hobbes writes that the only real crime of
the first couple was not so much disobedience (since as he says they ate of the apple of knowledge but "acquired no new
ability to distinguish between them aright.")[39] but rather having been ashamed at their nakedness. He writes:
And whereas it is said, that having eaten, they saw they were naked; no man hath so interpreted that place, as if they had
been formerly blind, and saw not their own skins: the meaning is plain, that it was then that they first judged their nakedness
(wherein it was God's will to create them) to be uncomely; and by being ashamed did tacitly censure God.[40]
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
Thus, the one real "sin" we can be said to have performed before we entered into society (wherein we learn to "distinguish"
good from evil by adapting these terms according to our own interests) was to have questioned the one thing that God clearly
gave us, our own bodies. For Hobbes, his doubting of the inherent worth of the body is a censure of God, in that it questions
the only thing that we know that he has given us. For Hobbes, to truly love and trust God must mean to love and trust
ourselves as his creation.
While this may sound like Hobbes is essentializing the body, his own methodology demands that we think otherwise. For
Hobbes as we have seen, no facts are absolute. Although the body may be "there," the meaning that we attach to its thereness
is necessarily a narrative of our own construction. I see Hobbes as an early practitioner of strategic essentialism, choosing the
"fact" of the body as the basis upon which he will build his new subject and ascribing to that body those qualities which best
lead to a desirable outcome. Because Locke is much more of an essentialist, the unexamined body that he offers us (as I will
show) is a much weaker basis on which to build such a subject.
This understanding of the body as a literal(ized) thing manifests itself in the kind of political vision that Hobbes constructs
upon it. Hobbes famously argues that our common mortality makes us fundamentally equal. This equality is not merely rooted
in the fact that Hobbes assumes we should fear death. Stephen Holmes points out that for Hobbes there are times when
people will value other things over their life. The fear of death is but one of the many passions that make up the human
psyche.[41] But Hobbes makes the ability to be killed rather than simply the fear of death itself central to what makes us equal - it is the ongoing "fact" of the body, not the perceptions that we have of it that anchors equality, which makes it a political
matter. This is Hobbes' way of avoiding an endless relativism in terms of his commitment to our individuality. The narrative of
the body is the one story that is pulled out of contention, the one thing that Hobbes has removed from the political fray. The fact
that all of us will think about things differently at different times (something that Hobbes wishes to preserve at all costs), even
when it comes to our death, is not incommensurate with a basic equality that is beyond our respective powers. None of us can
be immortal, regardless of what we think; our ability to "make ourselves" will necessarily always be limited by this stark fact.
Hobbes' focus on the body seems to challenge the traditional Christian doctrine that the body is merely the vehicle of the
soul. But again Hobbes is challenging the political salience of such a doctrine more than the doctrine itself. True to his
empirical stance from our "grosse and corruptible" position, Hobbes sees that death is necessarily a mystery. While a more
traditionally Christian doctrine might not see either the fear of death or death itself as making us equal (since in the afterlife,
believers and non-believers have very different and un-equal fates), for Hobbes, so long as we live, this "vehicle" of the body is
the one and only operative basis of political and personal identity, the only thing that we can be sure of.[42] With Hobbes, the
epistemological buck stops at the body.
In addition to anchoring our equality on the body, Hobbes also offers a fairly straightforward body centered definition of the
concept of freedom:
a FREE-MAN is he, that in those things, which by his strength and wit he is able to do, is not hindered to doe what he has a will
to do. But when the words Free, and Liberty, are applyed to any thing but Bodies, they are abused.[43]
33.
For Hobbes, freedom must always be rooted in the body. And freedom can never be vicarious. For a body to be called
"free" it and only it must literally be free -- there can be no freedom by proxy as we so often get with Aristotle or, as we will see,
with Locke.
34.
Even when his concept of freedom appears to violate the power of the sovereign that he appears to love so much, Hobbes
does not relent. Thus we have the right to fight the sovereign when it condemns us to death (in practice this may only amount
to the right to kick and scream on the way to the gallows). Hobbes also gives us the right to betray our original sovereign when
another sovereign conquers us in war and also the right to pay others to fight for us when we are too cowardly. And even if we
are captured by an "infidel" sovereign, because he has always kept an interior space within which we can think what we want,
Hobbes allows that it is our right to follow such a sovereign as well.[44] These are not arbitrary rights but rather sketch out a
consistent commitment on Hobbes' part to maintaining the source of all of our rights -- our living bodies. The basis of who we
are, Hobbes never asks us to jeopardize or give the body up.[45] And, as I argue further, the insistence on keeping the body
alive is not simply a craven fear of death for Hobbes. Hobbes has good reasons for keeping us all alive.
35.
Hobbes' body centered notions of freedom and equality may seem to be sparse offerings compared with the moral and
ethical notions of freedom that we get with Locke and Rousseau. But the power to be in control of one's own self tends to
disappear in later social contract theorists who seem to offer their subject more rights initially but as we'll see ultimately
complicate and compromise our personal integrity in the name of a greater, higher good.
From Hobbes body to Locke's "property in one's person"
36.
It is tempting to think of Locke as the "inheritor" of Hobbes' system. If Hobbes is a theorist who believes in a linear
development of society, it seems quite plausible to think that Locke is simply echoing what Hobbes would say if responding to
a more favorable and future climate. In Locke's time the contentious issues of the English civil war were to some extent
resolved via the Glorious Revolution. Tangled religious issues began to take a back seat (thanks in no small part to Hobbes'
fulminating against the frequent use of scripture to make political decisions) to coalition politics, to questions of property rights
and the franchise. Perhaps it seemed that the blueprint for personhood and sovereignty as lain down by Hobbes could now be
put into practice. But as I have been suggesting, the connection between Hobbes and Locke is more tenuous than this line of
reasoning suggests.
37.
In many ways though, Locke does seem to continue Hobbes' work. Locke too pays attention to the body as the basis of
personhood and he too is committed to empiricism, to the validation of sensory experience, as a basis for knowing the truth.
But Locke's empiricism is not Hobbes'. As Ernst Cassirer tells us:
Without doubt Locke took an important step forward and first blazed the trail for empirical investigation. But he stopped half
way and recoiled before the most difficult problem. For where the higher functions of mind -- those of comparing,
distinguishing, judging and willing -- are concerned, Locke suddenly proves unfaithful to his genetic method. He is content
merely to enumerate these faculties and leave them as fundamental powers of the mind without tracing them to their source....
Locke successfully attacked innate ideas but he permitted the prejudice regarding innate operations of the mind to survive.[46]
38.
In many ways, Locke is only half an empiricist. It is true that he argues that we are a product of our senses, of our
environment, but he says these things while seeking them to reconcile them with silent and eternal truths. We may be born a
tabula rasa, but our job from birth is to figure out and obey the abiding truths that precede us -- truths that we have a God given
ability (reason) to discern. For Locke, reason is not or should not be entirely based on our own experience. In fact, when
reason is unguided by natural law, it leads us into "a wild wood of uncertainty, to an endless maze."[47] A man of a different
sort of faith than Hobbes, Locke believed that although mysterious, a life led in accordance with higher truth was the only
possible moral undertaking a person or a society could make.
39.
Although Locke clearly was heavily influenced by and adapted a great deal from Hobbes, he has other important influences
as well. Central among these is the tradition of Christian Aristotelian theology as epitomized by Richard Hooker. Hooker, who
Locke invariably referred to as "the Judicious Hooker," was himself influenced by St. Thomas Aquinas and also of course by
Aristotle himself.[48] In his Ecclesiastical Polity, Hooker laid out a notion of politics that Locke cites and incorporates repeatedly
(including direct citations) in Two Treatises on Government. A brief analysis of Hooker's arguments and Locke's response
helps to understand better how Locke is un-like Hobbes in several important ways.
We see in the Preface to Ecclesiastical Polity evidence of what Hooker's ideal community might look like:
Far more comfort it were for us...to labour under the same yoke, as men that look for the same eternal reward of their labours,
to be joined with you in bands of indissoluble love and amity, to live as if our persons being many our souls were but
one, rather than in such dismembered sort to spend our few and wretched days in a tedious prosecuting of wearisome
contentions (my emphasis).[49]
40.
Here we have a vision of a society that very much approximates an Aristotelian vision of the city wherein both individual
interests and collectivity can coexist unproblematically. For Hooker, our diversity -- which stems from our respective abilities to
know higher truths -- can be reconciled in a common relationship to God, who is the master of us all. Under God's rule, we are
united by "bands of indissoluble love."
41.
For Hooker, love serves a political purpose in that it ensures that the necessary hierarchies that he sees as essential for a
just order be allowed to function without rancor or interference. Because error and misinterpretation of Christ's words is
rampant, Hooker looks to Protestant clergymen (like Jean Calvin) to lead their flock in the correct direction. Some questions, he
writes, "are so familiar and plain, that truth from falsehood, and good from evil, is most easily discerned in them, even by men
of no deep capacity."[50] But other more dense matters require the "Offices of Christian men" to "be a light to direct others."[51]
Hooker goes on to say:
There are but two ways whereby Spirit leadeth men into all truth; the one extraordinary, the other common; the one belonging
but unto some few, the other extending itself unto all that are of God; the one that which we call by a special divine
excellence Revelation, the other Reason (my emphasis).[52]
42.
We have already seen that for Hooker, easier questions can readily be answered by the many. Reason, the vehicle of this
lowly connection to the truth, is something to which we all have access. But reason must coexist with revelation, so that this
more limited relationship to the truth can be bolstered by direct and higher insight.
43.
This sentiment echo's Aristotle's own notion that even a slave has some reasoning faculties, but that his limited capacity to
reason must be bolstered by his master's:
It is clear therefore that it is the master who ought to be the cause of...virtue in the slave...Hence they are wrong who would
deny all reason to slaves.[53]
44.
They are "wrong" because the slave does have reason -- that reason just happens to principally reside with the master. The
master and the slave share one reason in essence and are thereby joined through the bonds of family and the polis for
Aristotle (and bonds of love for Hooker).
45.
We can see in Locke a very fair approximation of this system; he too sees it as possible to coexist as one and yet be many,
and he too sees us as bound by bonds of love. Locke, in paraphrasing Hooker in The Second Treatise, writes:
This equality of Men by Nature, the Judicious Hooker looks upon as so evident in it self, and beyond all question that he makes
it the Foundation of that Obligation to mutual Love amongst men, on which he Builds the Duties they owe one another,
and from whence he derives the great Maxims of Justice and Charity (my emphasis).[54]
46.
But with Locke there are some crucial differences. For one, Locke sees that the period of revelation is over (his term for this
change is the "withdrawing of miracles,").[55] Hooker held to the ongoing possibility of a religious community being directly
ordered by a leader who was in communication with God himself. But Locke, like many of his contemporaries, felt that we
would have to wait for the time of the second coming to expect any more miracles. In these times all we have left is "mere"
reason to guide us.
47.
At first glance, this might not seem like a significant difference from Hooker in that Locke is simply offering a secular version
of Hooker's community. But the point is exactly that a secular "version" of the ecclesiastical community undoes the essential
basis of that order -- the absolute and certain connection to higher truth that justifies and guides all that we do and which
makes social inequality not only bearable but desirable.
48.
Locke's task is to reconcile reason with (or more accurately without) revelation as best he can. In A Discourse on Miracles,
Locke attempts to do just this. He begins this essay by mimicking Hobbes' conversation about miracles and revelation in
Leviathan, arguing almost verbatim that "it is unavoidable that that should be a miracle to one, which is not so to another."[56]
But Hobbes' argument is set up only to be refuted. Ultimately, Locke makes the exact opposite argument, stating that God only
performs miracles that are by their nature perceivable as being "true" by any reasonable person. There can therefore be no
doubt that one must not only obey God, but also believe in God. Locke thereby does away with the interior space of doubt that
Hobbes grants us. The upshot of this is that whether a miracle is actually present or not, it is in within the capacities of reason
to know the truths that a miracle and revelation represent -- i.e. "mere" reason works in and of itself.[57]
49.
In considering how to have a just political order in a time without miracles, Locke therefore basically re-articulates Hooker's
vision as if reason were equivalent to revelation after all. As with revelation, the ability to reason serves to distinguish some of
us from the rest and so "mere" and common reason becomes transformed into something else, namely, faith. [58] In The
Reasonableness of Christianity, he writes:
The greatest part of mankind want leisure or capacity for demonstration, nor can carry a train of proofs...[H]earing plain
commands, is the sure and only course to bring them to obedience and practice. The greatest part cannot know, and
therefore they must believe. And I ask, whether one coming form heaven in the power of God, in full and clear evidence and
demonstration of miracles, giving plain and direct rules of morality and obedience, be not likelier to enlighten the bulk of
mankind...than by reasoning with them from general notions and principles of human reason? (my emphasis).[59]
50.
Here the reason of the great thinkers seems to be as good as revelation in terms of discerning higher truths, at least as far
as the "bulk of mankind" is concerned. The faith of the lower classes serves to ensure their continued obedience not only to
God's law but to their representatives here on earth. Thus Hooker's ecclesiastical community is preserved in its new secular
guise.
51.
But elsewhere in this essay, Locke acknowledges that reason on its own -- even the reason of the greatest thinkers -- is not
enough. We have already seen how reason unguided by higher truth leads us into "an endless maze."[60] And therein lies the
problem: while reasonable men are able to know a miracle when they see it (as opposed to Hobbes' subject, who still might not
be sure), they can do so only because God has vouchsafed to have his miracle occur in a way that they can understand. It is
still up to God to reveal the truth and reason remains a largely passive faculty. The truth is not being discovered from the
ground up, but is being revealed from heaven down. Reason is not a truth-making faculty as it is for Hobbes; it can only derive
truth from a higher source.
52.
I interpret Locke's question "Who shall be judge?" as one revealing the epistemological crisis of the loss of revelation. We
can make good guesses on earth, but ultimately we are all accountable to our true "owner" in whose name we act, God
himself:
And he that appeals to Heaven, must be sure he has Right on his side; and a Right too that is worth the Trouble and Cost of
the Appeal, as he will answer at a Tribunal, that cannot be deceived, and will be sure to retribute to every one according to the
Mischiefs he hath created to his Fellow-Subjects.[61]
53.
Accordingly the "withdrawing of miracles" is a problem for Locke. For one thing, the power of the "truth" fades over time. As
the period of miracles recedes into the past, even the reasonable members of society might themselves begin to reenter that
"wild wood" of relativity. In his own lifetime, Locke railed against myriad false teachings and doctrines that "blinded" us from our
ability to know the truth for ourselves.[62] And even at its best, reason can never know something to be true with the certainty
of revelation and prophecy -- it is an essentially derivative faculty.
54.
In some ways, Locke still seems to have improved upon Hooker. Reason is something that is available (at least to some
degree) to all of us. And also even the most privileged and rational are going to be somewhat off the mark. The loss of
revelation is a gain of something else, of politics, of human centeredness, of a new idea of freedom. And of course this is
precisely what this sort of break with ancient epistemology does for Hobbes. But Locke in some way gives us the worst of both
worlds: the potential relativism and uncertainty of Hobbes' subjects, with the absolute duty to follow the Good of Aristotle and
Hooker. With Locke the yardstick of absolute truth is still present, only it, like God, is now invisible. There is still better and
worse, there is still "nature" lurking behind every act and thought and judging all that we do.
The upshot of this is that Locke demands that we organize ourselves into a hierarchy and obey natural law, to form a social
division of labor that benefits some of us far more than others, but he cannot justify these demands with the same sort of
absolute certainty that Hooker did. At the same time, his acceptance of the loss of revelation means that unlike as with Hooker
(and Aristotle) where there is an absolute step between some members of society and others in terms of discerning truth (with
Hooker it is between prophets and everyone else, with Aristotle it is between everyone else and slaves), with Locke all we have
is social relativity. The purpose of this "absolute step" in the ability to discern higher law is to ensure that those below that step
fully trust and in some sense merge with those above them who know absolutely better than they do what God or nature
intends. With Locke however, since even the highest person is quite possibly wrong and even the lowest person might just be
right (however deeply unlikely the latter event might be for Locke) the demands that Locke puts on his subjects serve as the
source of major resentment and uncertainty.
56.
Ultimately, Aristotle and Hooker ask much less from their lowlier subjects than Locke does. For them, lower persons have
nothing to lose whatsoever by placing themselves under the tutelage of the higher. In giving themselves over to their master's
reason, they sacrifice nothing. They are absolutely lower and would be even worse off yet without the help and guidance of the
higher. But Locke's subject might have had an entirely different fate under different circumstances. For Locke, class
background and training are crucial in bringing a person to reason. He writes:
55.
There are some Men's constitutions of body and mind so vigourous and well framed by nature, that they need not much
assistance from others; but by the strength of their natural genius, they are, from their cradles carried towards what is
excellent; and by the privilege of their happy constitutions are able to do wonders. But examples of this kind are few. [63]
57.
He admits further that "of all the men we meet with, nine parts of ten are what they are, good or evil, useful or not, by their
education."[64] For most of us then, reason is not "natural" to us, but rather a product of social engineering, not so much
merited as created.
58.
And since "knowledge and science in general is the business only of those who are at ease and leisure," Locke asks not
only that the lower put themselves under the higher, but that they sacrifice their own chance at being reasonable for the sake
of the higher -- somebody has to provide the ease and leisure for others.[65]
59.
For Locke, reason is not a "thing" that one can hold onto -- it is not a personal attribute at all, but is rather a result of a social
division of labor. To disrupt that hierarchy means to disrupt reason itself. Unlucky circumstances rather than "nature" have
prevented the lower echelons of society from realizing their own potential.[66] Yet in order to continue to have any reason at
all, the division of labor must be adhered to.
60.
Here again, Locke has given us the worst of both worlds; Hobbes' expectation of egalitarianism but Aristotle (and Hookers')
demand for hierarchy. While in theory any of us might be fully reasonable, in practice most of us can't be allowed to. Whereas
Hobbes is willing to advance his epistemology to its logical end -- even when that might mean dismantling tradition, centralized
power and the church -- Locke cannot afford to do this. The purpose of Locke's system remains what it was for Hooker. With
an absolute standard to maintain, there is no room for a sentiment for equality.
Locke's body
61.
The Lockean subject arises in accordance with the kinds of epistemological problems that are presented above. Locke, like
Hobbes gives us a "self" that is rooted in a body, but Locke's self is more Aristotelian, more poorly bounded, and more troubled
than Hobbes'. Hobbes never uses the language of ownership to describe our relationship to our body. To speak of ownership
implies a kind of separation between who we "really" are and the bodily vehicle that we occupy. For Hobbes, we simply are our
bodies -- there is no epistemological distinction to be made -- at least so long as we are alive. In his notion of self ownership,
Locke is inherently reintroducing the notion of the soul which stands over and above my body, and which is inherently
connected to those very external standards by which the body is to be judged and organized. With the idea of the soul
necessarily comes a commensurate devaluation of the validity of the body qua body as well as the human centered politics that
stems from it.
62.
Crucially for Locke, the question of self-ownership is prefaced by the notion that ultimately we are all the property of God as
when he writes:
For Men being all the Workmanship of one Omnipotent, and infinitely wise Maker; All the Servants of One Sovereign Master,
sent into the World by his order and about his business, they are his Property, whose Workmanship they are, made to last
during his, not one anothers Pleasure.[67]
63.
From the moment of birth, we already belong to a far higher power whose will clearly and always trumps our own. But at the
same time, Locke sees that we all also have a "property in our own person." In The Second Treatise, in his chapter "Of
Property," he famously writes that:
[E]very Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any Right to but himself.... Whatsoever then he removes out
of the State that Nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his Labour with and joined to it something that is his own
and thereby makes it his property.[68]
64.
Just as Locke sees wild nature as a thing to be harnessed and conquered, so too by analogy is our own body a territory to
be tamed and improved. The true "I" then is a kind of agent for God, taming and controlling ourselves and the world in his
name. This is why we are not free to do as we please but are only free to follow the dictates of natural law.
65.
Accordingly, Locke's basis for our personhood is compromised in ways that Hobbes' is not. For Hobbes, the only way to
violate our sense of self is to destroy the human body. For Locke, our basis for self, the "property in our own person" is undone
66.
whenever we act wrongly, whenever our self-ownership conflicts with the dictates of our true master.
There are of course important political connotations to this vision of "self-ownership." In subsequent passages in "Of
Property," Locke suggests that those persons who are "quarrelsom and contentious" and who therefore do not make good use
of their internal property, should also not be rewarded with external property either. He writes that "[God] gave [the world] to the
use of the Industrious and Rational, (and Labour was to be his Title to it)...."[69] And Locke even seems to suggest that a
reasonable person can not only extend their properly controlled boundaries into the material world (at the expense of a less
reasonable person), but possibly even into the "property "in another person as well. He writes:
Thus the grass my horse has bit, the turf my servant has cut, the ore I have digg'd in any place where I have a right to them
in common with others become my Property, without the assignation or consent of any body. The Labour that was mine,
removing them out of that common state they were in hath fixed my Property in them (my emphasis).[70]
67.
We see here how in the same way that God's "ownership" of us compromises our own bodily integrity. It is also possible
that to some degree the master can "own" at least part of the servant. Even though by his own arguments the servant's labor
ought to give him the right of ownership, for Locke his labor is located within the rubric of the master's subjectivity ("the Labour
that was mine").[71] The servant is reduced in some sense to a supporter of the master's person and his reason. Notice how
Aristotelian this sounds. For Aristotle, as we have seen, faculties can be shared across personal boundaries when the division
of labor requires it. As with Aristotle, it behooves Locke's "quarrelsom" person to surrender their self-control to someone who
can make better use of it, not for the sake of the master's greed and power, but rather for the benefit of both master and
servant. Both are ruled, not by the master's will, but by the master's reason which itself is in the service of a higher truth -natural law. We have layers within layers of compromised self-ownership.[72]
68.
It is worth spending a moment pondering just how unequal Locke's conception of subjectivity makes us. While for Hooker,
inequality may be an unfortunate side effect of our different aptitudes (which is yet resolved by our bonds of love), for Locke,
difference and hierarchy are actually required. Without revelation, which comes straight from God, truth can only be produced
by human communities -- to the degree that it can be produced at all -- when we collectively split up the task, when some of us
sacrifice ourselves to others for the sake of the whole. For Hooker the thing that makes us unequal in society is the degree to
which we can perceive God's laws. Once the prophet speaks, all of us are equalized. And this equalizing tendency an ongoing
and regular feature of political life. For Locke on the other hand this equalizing moment never occurs; hierarchy becomes
permanent and meaningful. The faculty of reason, since it is produced and improved by a social division of labor, can not even
be said to exist without it. Since Locke's politics is premised on the unlikelihood of revelation, his politics preserves this
inequality for all time, or at least until the age of miracles comes back.
IV. Hobbes and the question of sovereignty
69.
While Hobbes' "body" isn't necessarily any truer than Locke's "property in one's person," I do think that as a founding myth
of self, a platform from which to build a political order, Hobbes' story is far preferable to the deeply compromised, sacrificerequiring and uncertain basis for subjectivity that Locke offers us. To think more about what a politics based on Hobbes might
look like, I would like to suggest how thinkers who are frustrated with the practice of liberalism but are drawn to its promises
might benefit from a closer engagement with Hobbes. In particular, I would like to focus on one such thinker, Hannah Arendt. It
is true that Arendt herself had little nice to say about Hobbes.[73] She castigates him for his ideas about truth, for his notion of
will and sovereignty. Yet in some ways, I believe she is subscribing at least partially to guilt by association. I believe that she,
like many scholars, associates his ideas with those who "develop" these concepts to the point that we cannot read the word
"will" or "sovereignty" or "nature" without connotations that have little to do with Hobbes himself.
70.
To begin with the idea of will, Arendt's critique of Hobbes (among other modern political theorists, including Rousseau) is
that his notion of action involves a completely internal dialogue where a goal is first desired and then the project becomes to
realize this goal in the world.[74] This "philosophical equation of freedom and free will" as she puts it serves for Arendt, as a
solipsistic basis for action and politics.[75] It treats each of us as if we were isolated monads when in fact our actions have
consequences and affect other people, even as their actions affect us.
71.
In my own reading of Hobbes, I see that he, unlike either Locke or Rousseau, does in fact mandate an idea of will that only
works in a truly social manner -- not as a monolithic general will, but as the interaction of various separate wills. In other words,
he offers exactly what Arendt is looking for. In Leviathan, Hobbes describes the will as "the last Appetite in Deliberating" which
is to say the desire that is produced by an act of judgment, of balancing different appetites and aversions.[76] Deliberation is a
kind of reasoning for the emotions -- a "putting an end to the Liberty we had of doing or omitting, according to our own Appetite
or Aversion."[77] Hobbes goes on to say:
And because in Deliberation, the Appetites, and Aversions are raised by foresight of the good and evill consequences, and
sequels of the action whereof we Deliberate; the good or evill effect thereof we Deliberate; the good or evill effect thereof
dependeth on the foresight of a long chain of consequences, of which very seldome any man is able to see to the end.[78]
72.
Here, Hobbes is saying that our will as such should not be supreme since it is not "right." Rather it should simply be seen as
the end result of a necessarily limited personal dialogue. "Very seldome" do we manage to produce a worthwhile decision from
this solipsistic method of judgment.
73.
For Hobbes, it is far better when the will is immersed in a larger context -- in the social -- in order to be able to produce an
appropriate and desirable response. This is quite possibly why Hobbes chose to have his chapter "of Speech" precede his
chapter "Of Reason and Science." Before one can use reason, one must fix things with names, articulate and communicate its
existence. For Hobbes, this fixing of names and speech itself become worthwhile only when it is spoken before other persons.
He writes:
[A] man may play with the sounds and equivocall signfications of words; and that many times with encounters of extraordinary
Fancy: but in a Sermon, or in public, or before persons unknown...there is no Gingling of words that will not be accounted
folly...Judgment therefore without Fancy is Wit, but Fancy without Judgment not.[79]
74.
Having other persons to bounce ideas off of and submitting ourselves to the judgments of others, helps to transform us from
persons who are entirely preoccupied with our selves into beings who are able to make better judgments. To speak, to hear, to
have reactions, makes the world real and makes judgment possible, makes our ideas "real."
75.
Hobbes makes a basic distinction between a person's opinion, which is a "contemplation of his own" (akin to Plato's concept
of thought as a dialogue with oneself), and belief, which only arises when a person interacts with someone else and listens to
what they have to say.[80] Belief for Hobbes arises based our perception of the speaker's honesty rather than on the content of
what he or she has to say.[81] Interpersonal relationships thus undergrid the entire system of what comes to be believed in by
persons in a community. It is where new socially produced "truths" come from. Through speech and dialogue, we forge
relationships, come to trust one another and ourselves.
76.
In my mind, this notion of speech and communication in Hobbes is precisely the same notion of collectively forging stories
together, of building reality that Arendt calls for in her own work. She herself writes: "Man's reason, being fallible, can function
only if he can make "public use" of it."[82] Will (when defined as an isolated judgment) for Hobbes is not the end but the
beginning of a story of how politics is forged.
All of this helps us to understand Hobbes when he writes:
For all men are by nature provided of notable multiplying glasses (that is their Passions and Self-Love,) through which, every
little payment appeareth a great grievance but are destitute of those prospective glasses, (namely Morall and Civill Science,) to
see a farre off the miseries that hang over them...[83]
77.
Notice that he speaks of both moral and civil science -- i.e. the science of us being together. We begin to get a sense that
with Hobbes the true purpose of getting us into society is not to repress the appetite crazed animals that we "truly are" (since
Hobbes already told us that we are not "naturally wicked."), nor is it just to save our lives. Rather, just as with his understanding
of a single, state sponsored church, the purpose of society is to get us together long enough so that our deliberative faculties
become socialized and we become more "real" insofar as reality itself is produced by our interactions. It is precisely when we
consider our appetites and aversions in a social context that we come to know what is appropriate for ourselves, both
individually and collectively.
78.
Locke, in his own considerations on will and judgment has a very different point to make. He argues that the mind, which is
the determinant of will, in its weighing of matters can lead to a "a variety of mistakes, errors, and faults which we run into in ...
our endeavors after happiness."[84] But for Locke, the solution to this is not civil science but rather a separate faculty that we
possess on our own:
To prevent this, we have a power to suspend the prosecution of this or that desire.... This seems to me the source of all
liberty.... For, during this suspension ... we have opportunity to examine, view and judge of the good and evil of what we are
going to do.[85]
79.
80.
81.
82.
83.
Unlike as with Hobbes, for Locke, we do not require the externalization of our judgment process for it to work. The answer
seems to lie within ourselves -- in our power to suspend desire.[86] Yet for Locke there is a social dimension to this process
because as I've argued, our power to suspend desire and thereby to reason is not actually "ours" at all but rather is produced
by the social division of labor that offers the privilege, education and leisure by which to do so. In Hobbes' social context, we all
have something to offer. We are all speaking and listening bodies, each separate and unique but each important as a member
of a public. For Locke, our contributions are not equal, nor are the results of collective engagement.
It is worth noting that to some extent both Hobbes and Locke downplay the will's primacy. Hobbes, by seeing the will as
being at once the beginning and the terminus of a conversation, Locke by subsuming the will to other mental faculties and
ultimately to reason. But this difference is critical for it only reinforces what I've been saying about the two divergent social
visions that are produced by these thinkers' respective epistemologies -- the one cooperative and the other hierarchical.
If Hobbes' notion of will is not what we thought it was then what about the idea of sovereignty? Isn't this a political extension
of the idea of will, a solipsistic reading of the social, insisting on there being one will for a community which must become
internalized by each of us so that we come to "rule" ourselves?[87] This is indeed a common enough reading of Hobbes'
sovereign (including Arendt's) but it excludes an important fact: Hobbes' sovereign is not himself bound by the social contract -he does not become the model of selfhood for all of us -- he is different, he is outside.[88] For Hobbes, the sovereign is not
necessarily expected to act rationally, morally or according to the dictates of civil science. While Hobbes hopes that the
sovereign will comport himself well, and argues strenuously for why he should, he concedes that his system might be
"obnoxious to the lusts, and other irregular passions of him, or them that have so unlimited a Power in their hands."[89] An
overemphasis on sovereignty averts our eye from what else is occurring within Hobbes' society.
Hobbes may love power and authority but philosophically speaking he is at least as -- if not far more -- interested in the
effect that the presence of the sovereign has on its subjects than on the sovereign itself. When the people "author" the
sovereign, they are also authoring (or "making") themselves, both individually and collectively.[90] For Hobbes, the main
purpose of the sovereign then is to enable a social space to develop, a space of speech and mutual recognition that the
sovereign has nothing to do with, except insofar as his presence enables this process to occur at all. This sovereign is in a
sense therefore a stop-gap measure and not the main attraction. This reproduces the arguments that Hobbes makes for a
state church. It is not that Hobbes thinks that the state church is "right." It is mainly that he doesn't want us killing each other
over religion questions. The church itself provides a forum in which we meet, we talk, we engage as individual believers and
from the congregation ideas may well bubble up, maybe even transform (or bypass) the church itself.
I think that to some extent Hobbes has "invented" sovereignty in the same way that he has "invented" nature as something
that he defines in order to locate it outside of our selves. The existence of concepts such as nature and sovereignty play some
role in the type of selves that we become, exactly by defining an outer limit to it. It is Locke who brings both of these attributes
84.
85.
86.
87.
88.
89.
right back where Hobbes didn't want them -- into the self and into the community. In declaring the people sovereign, Locke has
colonized them in their entirety. To so reinscribe them into the law of nature is to deny them the space of self-creation that
Hobbes so carefully carved out for them. Hobbes' sovereign is not the people, as it is for Locke, precisely because the people
themselves are meant to develop as they will in the space that is excluded from sovereignty. Hobbes says as much when he
writes: "In cases where the Sovereign has proscribed no rule, there the Subject hath the liberty to do, or forbearance,
according to his own discretion."[91]
We could read this as saying that the space that is carved out is very little indeed but we must remember that Hobbes is a
theorist with a developmental agenda -- he looks to a future of "morall and civill science." As we become self-governing, then
the space will necessarily grow larger. This sovereign as such does not therefore necessarily persist over time in any
philosophically important way -- when we have become "who we are," when we become "real" and self aware, the need for
such a sovereign as Hobbes has conceived him seems almost superfluous. At the very least, sovereignty itself is not the
crucible of political life as it is for Locke.
Richard Flathman makes a different argument about Hobbes' sovereign in his discussion of Hobbes' absolutism. For
Flathman, we must accept the Leviathan as a necessary part of the price of politics. Its presence is crucial as an ongoing
feature of society. Hobbes, he argues persuasively, is not a utopian, and does not see an easy road to common endeavors.
But the alternative to an absolute state, he tells us, is anarchy.[92] At any rate, the absolutism of the Leviathan is not what we
think it is -- it is not totalitarianism and it is also not absolute monarchism. By analogy, we learn Hobbes' political absolutism
from its religious basis. As such, Flathman writes, that "[a]lthough absolute...this characteristic of [God's] rule over [the people]
not only permits but obliges them to rule themselves in some parts of their thought and action."[93] Hobbes himself, as
Flathman points out, dedicates a great deal of effort to ensuring that the sovereign will act justly and to the degree possible, in
accordance with the public felicity. [94] But ultimately Flathman needs to turn beyond Hobbes, to Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and
others to ensure that the precious individualism that Hobbes makes possible does not succumb to the power of his absolute
state.
My argument with Flathman on this matter is several fold. First of all, the choice between anarchy and absolutism is
somewhat overdrawn. To suggest as much is to deny Flathman's own valuable insight that voluntarism is not nihilism. The
value of voluntarism is, as I take it, precisely in its reclaiming from externalized models, the power and authority of human
actors. In "On the Jewish Question," Marx makes a strong argument for how the state is the disembodied power and
responsibility of its citizens.[95] The idea that state sovereignty is all that stands between us and chaos presupposes a
particular (and liberal) vision of order, perhaps a consequence of trying to read Hobbes into the contemporary liberal lexicon.
Also, the analogy between God and the sovereign is problematic (Flathman himself argues that they are not "parallel" and
not meant to be taken as literally as Hobbes might want us to).[96] Even if Hobbes intended that the power of the state be
invested with the ultimate power of God for political purposes, his own empiricism suggest a different idea. God is absolute for
Hobbes because he alone has command of truth. The state, like all else on earth, is by definition devoid of such absolutism -sovereign power must always be to some degree arbitrary. Sovereignty comes to mean for Hobbes something more like "the
last word" than "the arbiter of truth," a significant difference. Which is again to say that the production of "truths" does not occur
in the state at all, but rather once again amidst the body politic. Flathman argues that the notion of absolutism itself contains
the very freedoms that liberalism offers us (from the analogy that God "obliges" us to rule ourselves in some ways). But I am
saying that these freedoms are contained exactly outside this concept -- in the space created by its absence.
Accordingly, I don't see that the making of selves that constitutes Hobbesian society is nearly as threatened in Hobbes'
system as Flathman implies. For Hobbes nothing on earth can be absolute, very much including the sovereign. For all his
desire that the sovereign be the last word, Hobbes allows for a loosening of that power whenever either the surface or the
interior of the body is threatened -- we have seen how Hobbes allows for autonomous thought even in the face of God himself,
how Hobbes allows that the sovereign can take our life, but cannot demand it. These are indications that the power of the
sovereign himself is not ultimate but rather instrumental for Hobbes. Because I think that over time the sovereign becomes
increasingly less necessary, and less important, these seemingly small things take on a greater salience and serve to
undergrid a kind of democracy that a thinker like Flathman is clearly attracted to (as am I). [97]
In Hobbes, given this different understanding of what sovereignty means (and doesn't mean) for him, given the foundations
of self that he offers, I find some of the things that Arendt was looking for in vain with Aristotle. Arendt was drawn to Aristotle's
republican vision but she was not willing to accept slavery as part of the price. For Arendt, while it should certainly not be
dominant in our life, necessity should nonetheless be present -- it is the grounds of life itself after all. As opposed to Aristotle or
Locke who were willing to countenance a system of freedom whereby some sacrificed their chance at reason for the sake of
others, Arendt writes:
Man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject to necessity, because his freedom is always won in his never wholly
successful attempts to liberate himself from necessity. And while it may be true that his strongest impulse toward this liberation
comes from his "repugnance to futility," it is also likely that the impulse may grow weaker as this "futility" appears easier, as it
requires less effort.[98]
90.
The very act of requiring the mediation and sacrifice of others is for Arendt itself a source of enslavement, leading to the
very sorts of corruption that Locke and liberal thinkers who followed him came to fear. Arendt obviously cannot look back to
Aristotle for a way out of this dilemma. Hobbes, I believe comes much closer to offering the possibility of a vision where people
mediate themselves while offering each other the solid "reality" that Arendt calls for.[99] Hobbes gives us an epistemology
whereby Arendt's claim that we are not only originators but also sufferers of action has a basis.[100]
91.
And Hobbes is even less likely than Arendt to submit us to external yardsticks where the body is "lower" than the mind (how
could it be for Hobbes, when the body is the basis of our identity and our power?). Granted, Hobbes' valuation of the body
seems to dwell on the very "life processes" that Arendt complains have swamped the possibility of a genuinely free politics, but
again for Hobbes, the body is the basis for rather than the last word in politics; this is not so incommensurate with Arendt's
notion of "mere" life after all.
92.
Also, Arendt's understanding of representative thinking, which is only possible through the faculty of the imagination, works
far better with the Hobbesian subject than the Lockean one. Hobbes' self-as-body can only be in one place by definition.
Locke's subject does not need to re -- present the other in his mind -- they are always there. The very situated subjectivity by
which representative thinking works is not possible with a Lockean subject where such clear divisions are always written over
by the ceaseless blurring and overwriting of selves. Arendt's adage that representative thinking means "being and thinking in
93.
my own identity where actually I am not" requires the kind of spatial relationships that Hobbes seems to offer.[101]
The spatial relationships of Hobbesian subjectivity also allow for one of Arendt's dearest political convictions, the need for
respect. It will be recalled that Locke, like Hooker relies on love to smooth over the contradictions forged by his notions of
subjectivity. Locke requires that we love each other in order to make a kind of coherent whole out of the various and conflicted
persons that we are. But love (at least in its Christian Aristotelian form) entangles us and brings with it presuppositions of
natural hierarchy. As Arendt writes in The Human Condition:
Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but antipolitical,
perhaps the most powerful of all antipolitical human forces. [102]
Arendt goes on to contrast love with respect:
Respect, not unlike the Aristotelian philia politike, is a kind of "friendship" without intimacy and without closeness; it is a regard
for the person from the distance which the space of the world puts between us, and this regard is independent of qualities
which we may admire or of achievements which we may highly esteem.[103]
Unlike Locke, Hobbes does not force us to love each other. He writes:
[T]hey who shall more narrowly look into he causes for which men come together, and delight in each other's company, shall
easily find that this happens not because naturally it could happen no otherwise, but by accident. For if by nature one man
should love another, that is, as man, there could be reason be returned why every man should not equally love every man, as
being equally man.[104]
94.
Hobbes does not find love in the state of nature. He does not naturalize it, and does not use it to glue us together. With
Locke, love has no history; the requirement to love itself glosses over our real differences, makes them untreatable (how can
you work out a problem when you can't even admit to its existence?) It is exactly this requirement to love that creates in us a
smoldering amour propre, the resentment of other people in our boundaries.
95.
The fact that I live in my body and you live in yours is the only way that Hobbes expects us to relate to one another. But
Hobbes also offers us a way to reach across these safely separated boundaries so that we have something to offer to one
another. The fact that I by myself am not complete, am not capable of making sound judgments without you is also part of
respect; we can respect one another because we both have the same thing to offer one another -- recognition. My ability to
offer you recognition is indispensable and yet absolutely equivalent. I can recognize you simply by virtue of my existing outside
of you.
96.
Arendt is right when she tells us that love is apolitical.[105] If we all love and in some sense are one another, merging
across our boundaries, who needs politics? I (the patriarch) can sit in my chair by myself and decide what "we" want and need
-- and my decisions will of course serve me best, disguised in the wrapping of universality. The merging of selves means that
the truth that is "obvious" to me is therefore "obvious," to you and must simply be interpreted (by me). This is the idea of
sovereignty that Arendt detests (with good reason), and it is not what Hobbes prescribes.[106]
Finally, Hobbes might allow for Arendt's conception of politics as something that can surprise us. As Arendt writes:
The miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal "natural" ruin is ultimately the fact of natality, in
which the faculty of action is ontologically rooted. It is, in other words, the birth of new men and the new beginning, the action
they are capable by virtue of being born. [107]
97.
With Hobbesian subjects, birth itself, into bodies that are real (are "ontologically rooted") is the basis for our ability to be
unpredictable. Each birth announces the arrival of a new subject who will do and be things that were never done or
experienced before. Separately and together Hobbes' subject can be different, unique, unknown and strange. We reject
"nature," we strike out to become something new. The spirit of democratic Athens that Plato and Aristotle decried, the sense of
politics as a dizzying adventure that could have any outcome can be preserved in Hobbes' system.[108]
98.
Here, we can begin to see how it is that Hobbes is not a nihilist, and also not an atheist. As I said before, Hobbes only
seeks to avoid us presuming things about God when we really have no idea (and then ordering ourselves as if those
presumptions were true, regardless of the political and human costs of those arrangements). If our role as living beings is to
recognize and give consciousness to the divine, then we must differentiate ourselves, become something that is
unrecognizable -- we must be surprising to God and to ourselves. To do so is to finally embrace our radical freedom that is the
one thing that we know we have received from God. In this way, Hobbes is not "turning his back on God," so much as turning
towards humankind, following his faith that is so deep that he is able to commit to the absolute unknown, trusting that it will be
in keeping with our mission on this planet. The fact of God's existence for Hobbes serves largely as a cipher, a limit to our own
hubris, an ethical check on relativism. Without an idea of God however muted, Hobbes might well deserve his title of "the beast
of Malmesbury." Without God he would indeed be a proponent of naked power and domination for no other reason than for
mere life. But with his silent God, Hobbes offers us a way to turn to ourselves.
99.
Ultimately, Hobbes' faith in God allows him to have faith in us. It allows him to trust us with a responsibility that Locke will
not concede: the responsibility to create ourselves as we see fit. And while God is silent, we have his gift to us, the "fact" of the
mortal body. I find that Hobbesian ethics work precisely because in valuing the body as he does, he enhances the
preciousness and the irreplaceability of each of us. This is precisely the point that Derrida makes in The Gift of Death as when
he writes:
Death is very much that which nobody else can undergo or confront in my place. My irreplaceability is therefore conferred,
delivered, "given" one can say by death. It is the same gift, the same source, one could say the same goodness and the same
law. It is from the site of death as the place of my irreplaceability, that is, of my singularity that I feel called to responsibility. In
this sense, only a mortal can be responsible. [109]
100.
101.
102.
103.
104.
Hobbes does indeed make each of us irreplaceable and precious. By placing our relationship to mortality in a secular
context, he creates an ethos of responsibility first to the self and then to one another. And Hobbes does this even while
preserving the possibility of religion, of the afterlife, of resurrection. Our attitude towards death then locates us in our bodies,
makes each of us unique, but at the same time, shapes us as a community.
Why bother with Hobbes and not simply embrace Nietzsche as an ethical model for selfhood?[110] Nietzsche after all
articulates far more clearly than Hobbes an ethical system that can emerge when external judgments are shed. Wouldn't it
make more sense to abandon the "modern" project altogether? Isn't Hobbes too compromised by his own authoritarianism to
rescue from his bad image, regardless of how ill merited it may be?
I don't see Hobbes and Nietzsche as two unrelated choices, but rather as having a kind of "genealogy" that links them as if
Locke had never happened.[111] I think that Hobbes and Nietzsche have at least as much to tell each other as Hobbes and
Arendt. I think that reading Hobbes through a Nietzschean prism (which to some degree I have) helps clarify apparent
incongruities in Hobbes. To do so helps him not be always defined as a thinker of police states and oppressive sovereignty.
But I think that Hobbes also has something to say to Nietzsche. I find in Hobbes' solidity a useful counterbalance to the kind of
immensely difficult self-transformations that Nietzsche requires of us. Thus when Nietzsche writes for example: "[T]here are in
fact a hundred good reasons why every one should keep away from [the dangerous knowledge I describe] who can do
so,"[112] part of this sentiment may stem from a conviction that what he asks of us is probably more than most of us can stand.
It's not that there is no "democratic" or at least progressive possibility in Nietzsche -- clearly there is, but on a political level the
Hobbesian self is more feasible, more available on a widespread level, and much less difficult to come to. For Hobbes, all we
need to develop as individuals and then as a society is some space and some time. Hobbes keeps us alive against all costs to
preserve this one, precious thing. And Nietzsche's own theory can serve to counter against any nascent slippage back to "bad"
sovereignty that might persist in Hobbes' society despite our having attempted to read it out of him. Furthermore, Nietzsche's
perspectivism, his "revaluation of values," offers a way to ensure that the collective and ongoing process of self-discovery and
creation that Hobbes theorizes does not itself become mired in dogma. Nietzsche prevents Hobbes' developmental theory from
reaching any kind of ultimate end and thereby continually remain part of the realm of politics itself.
I see Hobbes as the liberal road not taken; probably what would emerge from a return to Hobbes would be so different that
the term liberalism would no longer be useful. But I see in the promise that has attracted so many to liberalism, something
worth preserving. Only this promise must be delivered free of its complications of external law, the requirement of sacrifice, the
requirement of love. Hobbes might have given us equality, freedom, authenticity and faith, all of the things that liberalism seeks
for but doesn't find on its own. With the integral selves he has envisioned we don't need to command ourselves to love one
another and we don't have to hate one another as a result.
The kind of collectivity that emerges from Hobbes is not built on sacrifice and the obfuscating glaze of nature as it is with
Locke. It is not even the police state that Hobbes himself seems to prescribe. Although Hobbes talks of cruelty and fear, he is
simply acknowledging behavior that already exists but which is denied by the requirement to love. If we need to always love,
then our hatreds turn inward (as Nietzsche tells us) into self-loathing or violence. Hobbes'" state of nature" is a reflection of life
conducted under a cruel and watching God of our own creation. With Hobbes we are no longer each other's prison wardens,
but are rather one another's fellow citizens, warts and all.[113] From this position, one can only wonder what will happen next.
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Notes
[1]I would like to thank Thomas Dumm, Austin Sarat, Nasser Hussain, Michael Rogin, Hanna Pitkin, Norman Jacobson and
Shannon Stimson for help in thinking about and writing this article.
[2] As Richard Flathman has noted "Contemporary liberals are at once attracted to and fearful of the diversity and
unpredictability that Hobbes theorized; they are both in quest of and wary concerning institutions that promise the order he
promoted." Richard Flathman, Willful Liberalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), p.4.
[3] Richard Tuck, Thomas Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 27.
[4] In varying degrees I have in mind works that at the very least see Hobbes as offering a kind of individualist ethos that belies
his darker tone. This includes works by Richard Flathman Thomas Hobbes: Skepticism, Individuality and Chastened Politics,
(Newbury Park, CA,: Sage Press, 1993) and Willful Liberalism as well; Michael Oakeshott Hobbes on Civil Association
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975); George Kateb, "Hobbes and the Irrationality of Politics," Political Theory Vol.,
17, No.3 (August 1989); Alan Ryan "Hobbes on Individualism," in G.A.J. Rogers and Alan Ryan eds., Perspectives on Thomas
Hobbes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988); Gregory S. Kavka, Hobbesian Moral and Political Theory, (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1986); and Richard Tuck.
[5]In saying this, I recognize the important differences between Flathman and Kateb, my position being somewhat closer to
Flathman's.
[6]Flathman himself acknowledges that some will find his work a kind of repudiation of liberalism, but the attempt to read a
voluntarist and Nietzschean ethos into liberalism among thinkers such as himself, Richard Rorty, and others remains inscribed
within certain boundaries of liberal doctrine. Although full of admiration for Flathman's treatment of Hobbes, I find that this need
to justify his reading of Hobbes as liberal has certain problematical effects on his reading of Hobbes, particularly in terms of his
discussions of the state and absolutism, as I will be discussing later in this essay.
[7]Perhaps the term liberalism itself gets in the way?
[8]This is certainly the argument of C.B. MacPherson, Alisdair MacIntyre and Leo Strauss among others.
[9]Kirstie M. McClure, Judging Rights: Lockean Politics and the Limits of Consent, (Ithaca, NY.: Cornell University Press, 1996)
p. 57I. would challenge her categorizing Rousseau along with Hobbes and Hume (in my mind his epistemology is quite a bit
like Locke's and is even directly influenced by Locke via Rousseau's connections to French Lockeans such as Condillac and
Buffon.
[10]Among his many attacks on Aristotle, Hobbes called him "the worst teacher that ever was, the worst politician and ethick."
Quoted in Arnold A. Rogow Thomas Hobbes: Radical in the Service of Reaction (New York, W.W. Norton & Co., 1986), p. 44.
[11]See for example, David Gauthier, The Logic of Leviathan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977). Kirstie M. McClure, as we have
just seen makes a similar point, or in a different way, various writings of David Wooton.
[12]Tuck, p. 34.
[13]See J.G.A. Pocock "Time, History, and Eschatology in the Thought of Thomas Hobbes." In Politics, Language, and Time,
pp. 148-201. New York: Athenaeum; or A.P. Martinich The Two Gods of Leviathan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
1992).
[14]Tuck, pp. 27-31 and Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London: Penguin Books, 1968), p. 711.
[15]A. P.Martinich, Thomas Hobbes, (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997), pp.84-5.
[16]However, Hobbes has few kind words for these thinkers directly. And some of those who defend Hobbes as admiring the
Puritans over reach. For example, Christopher Hill cites Hobbes as having written: "If in time as in place, there were degrees of
high and low, I verily believe the highest of times would be that which passed betwixt 1640 and 1660." Christopher Hill, The
World Turned Upside Down, (New York: Viking Press, 1972) p. 313 But this sentence is the first passage of Behemoth , the
very next sentence of which is "For he that thence, as from the Devil's Mountain, should have looked upon the world and
observed the actions of men...might have had a prospect of all kinds of injustice, and of all kinds of folly, that the world could
afford.." Thomas Hobbes, Behemoth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p., 1. This is hardly the stuff of praise,
certainly not the "grudging respect" that Hill claims it to be.
[17]Andrew Sharp, editor, The English Levellers, (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 208.
[18]Hill, pp. 141-2. As Hobbes puts it himself,"...I can find no where that any man shall live in torments Everlastingly."
Leviathan, p. 646, see also p. 661.
[19]Hill., p. 314.
[20]Ibid., p. 113. There is ample evidence in the literature on Hobbes' own "human-centered" politics. For example, Arlene
Saxenhouse writes "about "Hobbes's human-centered world where political order is imposed against, rather than in conformity
with, nature." Thomas Hobbes, Three Discourses , (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) p.125. See also Richard
Flathman, Christopher Hill, Stephen Holmes. Martinich would disagree with this interpretation wholeheartedly.
[21] Flathman, "Thomas Hobbes," p.1.
[22]"Leviathan," p. 131. Locke says something similar, but as we will see, he does not stick to his convictions with nearly the
rigor of Hobbes.
[23] See Michael Ayers, Locke: Volume I: Epistemology ( New York: Routledge Press, 1991).
[24]"Behemoth," p. 52.
[25]"Leviathan," p. 586.
[26]Ibid., p. 498.
[27]Ibid., p. 499.
[28]This is certainly Tuck's take on this. Tuck, p.30.
[29]This needs to be qualified somewhat: Hobbes does care when the overriding religion is one, such as Catholicism or
Presbyterianism in which the absolutism of the religion precludes the possibility of internal thought.
[30]"Leviathan," p. 331.
[31]Ibid., p.332.
[32]Ibid., p.332. I don't make as much of the difference between "true religion," "natural religion" and false religion as Flathman
does. Even when God is present, there is doubt and the need for interpretation. Flathman, pp.22-3.
[33]Hobbes own arguments against rules punishing heresy point to the fact that there must always be a limit to the church's
power when it comes to matters of individual conscience.
[34]Norberto Bobbio, Thomas Hobbes and the Natural Law Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).
[35]"De Cive", p.100.
[36]"Leviathan," p. 187.
[37]De Cive, p.114.
[38]John Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity (Stanford, CA.: Stanford University Press, 1958), p.25.
[39] "Leviathan," p. 260. This is further interesting insofar as obedience seemed to be the only thing we owed to God in the
case of revelation. If we don't even owe God that, what is left?
[40] Ibid.
[41]Stephen Holmes in Introduction to Behemoth, xl. As when Holmes cites Hobbes' report that in ancient Ethiopia, kings
would commit suicide upon the demand of the high priests even though the priests were unarmed (and not even present).
Hobbes lists the "Feare of Death" as one of the many passions which "encline men to Peace." But there are others ("Desire of
such things as are necessary to commodious living; and a Hope by thier Industry to attain them." Leviathan, p.188.
[42]It is true that much of Calvinist influenced theology at the time also argued that one was never sure of one's status in the
afterlife and thus one's attitude to death ought indeed be marked by a great deal of anxiety. Hobbes' connections to Calvinism
are worth noting. He professes admiration for Calvin and William Perkins among others. Thomas Hobbes, "The Questions
Concerning Liberty, Necessity and Chance" in The English Works of Thomas Hobbes (London: Scientia Aalen, 1962) p. 266.
Yet again the political salience which he derives from his understanding of death and the afterlife is different. For Calvinism, the
doubt of election was meant to inscribe the subject all the more forcefully into an obedience to higher laws. For Hobbes, the
inability to know of the afterlife from this "grosse and corruptible" perspective requires that we turn to our own ethical and moral
devices.
[43] Leviathan., p.262.
[44] Ibid., p. 625.
[45]Once again, to reiterate Holmes' point, this is not to say that for Hobbes, people never will give up their bodies for various
reasons. But Hobbes will never require them to do so. If they do, it is out of their own choice.
[46] Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), p.101.
[47]"The Reasonableness of Christianity," p. 64.
[48] John Locke, "Second Treatise," in Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), p. 270.
for one example. The term "judicious" is interesting insofar as it recalls the period of rule by judges in the Hebrew tradition.
Locke, like many of his contemporaries saw the time of the Hebrew judges as an ideal political community when the words of
God could be directly imparted to a community via a divinely chosen leader. Hooker holds on to the ongoing possibility of such
judgment as the basis for a political order. As such, he might well be considered "judicious."
[49]Richard Hooker, Ecclesiastical Works ( The Works of That Learned and Judicious Divine Mr. Richard Hooker) (New York:
D. Appleton & Company, 1851), p. 152. Note the use of word "contentions" which Locke might echo in his own talk about the
"quarrelsom and contentious.
[50]Ibid., p., 129.
[51] Ibid., pp. 129-130. Hooker goes on to write:
But ye will say that if the guides of the people must be blind, the common sort of men must not close up their own eyes and be
led by the conduct of such....Which thing though in itself most true, is in your defence notwithstanding weak: because the
matter wherein ye think that ye see, and imagine that your ways are sincere, is of far deeper consideration that any one
amongst five hundred of you conceiveth. Let the vulgar sort amongst you know, that there is not the least branch of the cause
wherein they are so resolute, but that to the trail of it a great deal more appertaineth than their conceit doth reach unto. Ibid., p.
130.
Here Hooker almost sounds like Robert Filmer but of course, instead of Filmer's devotion to tradition qua tradition, Hooker
stresses, as Locke will, devotion to truth itself which may in fact be at odds with tradition (just as Christ himself was).
[52] Ibid., p.133.
[53] Aristotle, The Politics (New York: Penguin Books, 1962), pp. 96-7.
[54]"Second Treatise," p.270. It is clear in the text that Locke is quoting Hooker in order to establish his own basis for moral
virtues.
[55]"The Reasonableness of Christianity," p. 97.
[56]Ibid, ("A Discourse on Miracles," p. 80.
[57]He repeats this sort of idea to give just one example in the beginning of his chapter "Of Property" when he writes: "Whether
we consider natural Reason.....Or Revelation....'tis very clear that God...has given the Earth to the Children of Men," In other
words the same conclusions can be reached by either system, either together or independently. "Second Treatise," p.285.
[58]Strictly speaking is not right to say that for Locke some are not reasonable at all. Rather, he sees reason as a kind of
continuum as when he writes:
A day labourer in a country village has commonly but a small pittance of knowledge because his ideas and notions have been
confined to the narrow bounds of a poor conversation and employment; the low mechanic of a country town does somewhat
outdo him: porters and cobblers of great cities surpass them.
There are thus no "unreasonable" people except those that he not too charitably calls "madmen" and "idiots." John Locke, "Of
the Conduct of the Understanding" in The Philosophical Works of John Locke
(London: George Bell & Sons, 1908), p.32. Henceforth, "Conduct."
[59]"The Reasonableness of Christianity," p. 66.
[60]Ibid, p. 64.
[61]"Second Treatise," p. 386.
[62]"Conduct," p.99.
[63] John Locke, "Thoughts Concerning Education" in Essays by John Locke, (London: Ward, Lock & Co., Limited, 1890),
p.210. (Henceforth "Education.")
[64] Ibid., p. 210.
[65]"Conduct," p.46. Elsewhere, in a manuscript that I am preparing for publication entitled Love is a Sweet Chain: Desire,
Freedom and Authenticity in Liberal Theory (Forthcoming, Routledge Press, 2001), I make the argument that the division of
labor mandated by reason goes beyond physical work--the hierarchicalism of Locke's system goes deeper than this. The
division of labor does more than provide the master with a material excess to enable him to enjoy the wealth and leisure and
education to become reasonable. It also involves mediating his desires for him because the (better) reasoning person must
simultaneously be sheltered from and connected to his passions. For Locke, the master's passions supply him the energy and
power to act but also threaten him. The social subordinates, wives, servants and workers thus embody and channel the
master's own passions. They teach him how to control them by their own externalized example. The wife for example must
embody sexual passion and safely mediate it through the marriage bed. Thus the critique I make of Locke is less like C.B.
MacPherson, who in his interpretation of Locke as an advocate of selfishness and greed entirely misses Locke's religious
mission, and more based on a Hegelian master-servant relationship which in fact serves neither party in the end.
[66]In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke writes: "But this at least is worth the consideration of those who call
themselves gentlemen, that , however they may think, credit, respect, power and authority the concomitant of thier birth and
fortune, yet they will find all these things still carried away from them by men of lower condition who surpass them in
knowledge." Quoted in John Dunn The Political Thought of John Locke (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1969),
p.185. In other words, a reshuffling of the educational system could well produce a very different hierarchical arrangement. But
the need for hierarchy itself remains intact.
[67]"Second Treatise," p. 271.
[68] Ibid., pp.287-8.
[69] Ibid., p.291.
[70]Ibid.,p.289.
[71] J.P. Day suggests that C.B. MacPherson, in suggesting the Locke thinks that he is owning the laborer, is in fact confusing
the word labor meaning laborer with labor meaning physical labor. Having bought the labor on the open market, it is not
necessarily so strange that Locke claims that the labor is "mine." i.e. the owner's. J.P. Day "Locke on Property" in Life, Liberty
and Property, p.113. I don't find this explanation entirely convincing however since the possession of labor (understood as
physical labor) is in Locke's own understanding a principle marker of identity and therefore too tied to a person's sense of self
to be so readily alienable. Furthermore, this explanation does not lessen the fact that this does render the master economically
non-autonomous in contrast to the characterization of the first economic man as working alone. Nor does it explain how Locke
calls the servant's labor "mine" (i.e. the master's). To call it "mine" is to obscure and confuse the relationship between the two
persons, to blur their boundaries.
[72] Thus C. B. MacPherson misunderstands Locke's notions of power--Locke is not about naked, crass control and
selfishness at all but rather, just as with Aristotle and Plato, his seeks to submit human relationships under the aegis of a
higher law. But Richard Ashcraft, who declares this community based vision of property as being somehow progressive, also
errs because the net effect of this system is a deep and permanent inequality.
[73] She speaks of him for example as advocating "a society relentlessly engaged in a process of acquisition" thus participating
in C.B. MacPherson style "possessive individual" reading of Hobbes (although the latter's book comes out a few years later).
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 31.
[74] Hannah Arendt, "What is Freedom?" in Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin Books, 1968), pp.160-165.
[75] Ibid., p. 164.
[76]"Leviathan," p.128.
[77]Ibid, p.127.
[78]Ibid, p.129. Earlier Hobbes tells us that the terms "good" and "evil" as he uses them are not absolute but relative to a
situation, to a person or collectivities. Ibid., p.120.
[79]Ibid., p. 137.
[80]Ibid., p. 132.
[81]Ibid., p.133.
[82]"Truth and Politics" (in Between Past and Future), p. 235. I also find that Arendt's harsh attacks on Hobbes for advocating
lying misunderstands him. Hobbes does not advocate lying but rather forging new truths collectively. She is especially
vituperative when she argues that Hobbes suggests that Aristotle writes lies to preserve his own life (Ibid, p. 293) but Hobbes
is clearly no fan of Aristotle, and saw all of his work as lies. At any rate, in the larger matter of "truth," I don't think that even
here, Hobbes deserves the kind of attack he sustains from Arendt. Arendt herself is an advocate of narratives and reality being
forged out of collective speech and action. So the truth for her is not necessarily some Platonic constant (although at times,
such as in "Truth and Politics" it begins to look more like that) but could well be in line with Hobbes' own empiricism.
[83]"Leviathan," p. 237.
[84]John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (New York: Dover Publications, 1959), p.330 and p. 345.
[85]Ibid.
[86]Note too that when Locke says good and evil, he means just that.
[87]As Arendt tells us, this notion of sovereignty extends not only to states but to persons and has tragic results. "It is as
thought the I-will paralyzed the I-can, as though the moment men willed freedom, they lost their capacity to be free.... Because
of the will's impotence, its incapacity to generate genuine power, its constant defeat in the struggle with the self...the will-topower turned at once into a will-to-oppression." "What is Freedom?" p. 162.
[88]"That he which is made Sovereigne maketh no covenant with his Subjects beforehand, is manifest; because either he must
make it with the whole multitude as one party to the Covenant; or he must make a severall Covenant with every man."
"Leviathan," p. 230.
[89]Ibid, p.238. As Richard Flathman writes of Hobbes' attempts to demand good government, "Although presented in a
confident tone of advice readily followed, these remarks are less than encouraging concerning the prospects of good law."
Richard E. Flathman, Willful Liberalism: Voluntarism and Individuality in Political Theory and Practice (Ithaca, NY.,: Cornell
University Press, 1992) p. 43.
[90]To once again use Flathman's term.
[91] Leviathan., p.271.
[92] "Willful Liberalism," p.36.
[93] Ibid., p. 20.
[94] Ibid., pp. 38-43.
[95] See "On the Jewish Question" in The Marx-Engels Reader, Robert C. Tucker, ed. (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1978).
[96] "Willful Liberalism," p. 37
[97]That Hobbes never comes out and says "the sovereign will wither away" is not necessarily evidence that he doesn't intend
for this transformation to occur. For if Hobbes told us we would one day be without the sovereign it would diminish the role that
the sovereign plays for us as standing in for the absolute truth while we make our own truths for ourselves.
[98]"The Human Condition," p. 121.
[99] Ibid., p.199.
[100] Ibid., p.190.
[101]"Truth and Politics," p. 241.
[102] "The Human Condition," p. 242.
[103] Ibid., p. 243.
[104]"De Cive," p. 111. See also, p. 113.
[105]Presumably here she is talking of romantic love. She clearly prefers the idea of love as philia which Aristotle offers. But it
is not clear that Aristotle's notion of philia itself transcends the hierarchies and sacrifices of his system as a perusal of his
discussion of friendship in The Ethics shows. In Love and Saint Augustine, Arendt goes to great lengths to describe more
democratic notions of love related to Augustine's notion of love as caritas. See Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
[106]Again, this is a matter of Hobbes' philosophical basis, rather than his own political prescriptions. His sovereign can make
all kinds of decisions, but we don't have to like them or treat them as if they are in our best interest. Clearly they won't be most
of the time. Only Hobbes gives us the position from which we can come to our own conclusions.
[107]"The Human Condition," p. 247.
[108]And accordingly, I find it telling that Hobbes' first publication was his translation of Thucydides.
[109]Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p.41. I also see in Hobbes an echo of
the ethical system of Emmanuel Levinas. See Emmanuel Levinas, Of God Who Comes to Mind , (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1998).
[110]Flathman makes some very persuasive arguments about the connections between Hobbes and Nietzsche, in Willful
Liberalism via his discussion of voluntarism.
[111]I owe this insight to Professor Nasser Hussain, Amherst College.
[112]Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1989), p.34.
[113]It may even be possible that Hobbes offers us a different kind of political love, one that is utterly unlike that proffered by
Locke.