Author: Thomas Hobbes
Year: 1968 (1651)
Publisher: Penguin Books
Language: English
In 1577,
Etienne de la Boetie’s work “Discours de la servitude volontaire” (see review
on this blog from July 2021) framed the question why people, villages, cities,
and entire nations allow themselves to be subjugated and oppressed by a single
ruler who without their consent would have no means of exercising control over
them. His was a simple but wildly controversial question and the book gives one
of the oldest comprehensive arguments in favour of civil disobedience in
European philosophy.
I have
found no evidence that Thomas Hobbes ever read de la Boetie. Indeed, as tantalising
as the thought is, efforts by scholars much more accomplished than I to connect
Hobbes with de la Boetie have also amounted to nothing (see e.g. Reiss, Timothy
J., “Utopia Versus State of Power, or Pretext of the Political Discourse of
Modernity:Hobbes, Reader of La Boétie?” in French Connections in the English
Renaissance by Catherine Gimelli Martin & Hassan Melehy (eds), London,
2013). And yet, Hobbes’s most famous book “Leviathan” seems to address perfectly
the concerns of his French precursor. If de la Boetie asks “why?”, then Hobbes
answers “this is why!” and moreover explains why it cannot be in any other way.
“Leviathan”
is written in four parts, the first two of which are the ones most commonly
cited in modern public discourse.
1. Of Man
2. Of Common-Wealth
3. Of A Christian Common-Wealth
4. Of the Kingdome of Darknesse
In its most
basic albeit no doubt most useful and essential interpretation, “Leviathan” is
understood to demonstrate how mankind, being the egotistic, violent, and greedy
creature that we are (Hobbes’s opinion of humans seems to be akin to Jonathan
Swift’s of yahoos (see review on this blog of “Travels Into Several Remote Nations
of the World, By Lemuel Gulliver” from March 2022), would be unable to function
as a peaceful collective had there been no overarching power to pacify us. Hobbes
calls this primordial unfettered anarchy the State of Nature and in the most
famous part of the book concludes that in such a state, human life would be “solitary,
poore, nasty, brutish, and short.”
Hobbes’s
argument is that if there were no laws, and more importantly still, no one to
enforce them, there would be nothing stopping individuals from murdering one
another and stealing from each other. The state of nature is by definition a
state of war. Hobbes specifies that war does not necessarily mean a constant
ongoing use of force. For a state of war to exist, it is enough that the threat
of force, or the suspicion that someone may use force, prevails. Consequently,
it would make sense for rational beings to come together and agree on a set of
rules that would limit the liberties of each of them to harm others in exchange
for a corresponding limitation of the risk of being harmed by others. We know
this line of thought today as the “social contract”, but Hobbes did not use
that term. Instead, he uses the terms “covenant” and “common-wealth” to cover different
aspects of what we understand as the social contract.
Without a
central authority that has the power to enforce the contract the agreement as
such has no purpose as it can always be broken with impunity for, as Hobbes
writes, “the Passions of man are commonly more potent than their Reason”. This
is why Hobbes introduces the sovereign; the Leviathan, with unlimited power to
make sure that people live in peace within the framework of the covenant.
The
sovereign is not a party to the contract but rather a result of it. The
contract is not between the people and the sovereign but between people and
people. The sovereign as an entity is the ensuing result of this agreement as a
third party. Consequently, the sovereign is not bound or constrained by the
contract. The power of the sovereign is unlimited and unchecked and must remain
so. I understand Hobbes’s argument to be that since the amount of violence that
can be wrought upon others by all of us is constant and unlimited, when the authority
to exercise violence is transferred from us to the sovereign it follows that it
must remain unlimited. Furthermore, analogous to the inability of people to
regulate themselves, which requires the creation of the sovereign in the first
place, the sovereign also cannot be expected to regulate himself which is why there
can be no basis for a limit to his power or accountability for his actions. For
peace to be guaranteed, and for the social contract to remain intact, the
sovereign may not in any way be challenged or disobeyed.
Hobbes
certainly acknowledged that such a state of affairs would by necessity bring about
a series of negative consequences for individuals and collectives alike but
argued that any inconvenience would be preferable to the alternative which is the
state of war. The only condition under which subjects are absolved from
obedience is if their sovereign fails to uphold peace and security between them
as per the covenant.
Lesser
known is Hobbes’s analysis of Christianity with regard to the civil law and the
division of power between God and the sovereign. Hobbes, who may or may not
have been an atheist, goes to great pains to disconnect the power of God from our
lives on Earth. He argues that obedience to God’s law is not obedience to God
but to the sovereign who enforces it. In Hobbes’s view, God Himself is incapable
of enforcing his own laws on Earth and needs to rely on kings and princes to do
it for Him. In that dwells the difference between crime and sin. Both disrespect
the legislator all the while the former is being enforced and the latter is not.
Sometimes, but not always, they coincide.
In essence,
Hobbes takes issue with the expectation that people are asked to obey a divine
law professed by someone who claims to have received it through a revelation without
being presented with any reason to believe that such a revelation has actually
taken place. He refers to the Scripture (1 Kings 13) where a prophet sent by
God to Jeroboam is deceived by a false prophet. If even a man of God can be
fooled by a simple con artist, how are common people supposed to be able to
tell true prophets apart from false ones? Therefore, it is rational for all
humans not to rely on scuttlebutt about divine law, but instead to subordinate
themselves under the fixed and unambiguous laws of the sovereign.
Hobbes’s second
argument is that we are actually not living in the Kingdom of God in this era.
He rejects the idea that the Kingdom of God is an ethereal existence but rather
stresses that it refers to this world, though not this time. He identifies the
Kingdom of God as beginning with the covenant between God and Moses and ending
when the Israelites demand a king like other nations have, and the prophet Samuel
anoints Saul to be their king. All of Samuel’s warnings about the consequences
of having a king instead of being ruled by priests coalesce into Hobbes’s
definition of the Leviathan but the words of the prophet fall on deaf ears and
the people insist on a sovereign. God then speaks to Samuel “it is not you they
have rejected, but they have rejected me as their king” and Hobbes sees here
the end of the Kingdom of God on Earth, with God’s approval. The obligation to
obey divine law has thus been transformed to the obligation to obey civil law.
Hobbes
finds a decisive piece of evidence in the fifth book of the New Testament wherein
Christ sends his disciples to all corners of the world to teach, persuade, counsel,
and baptise. Not to rule. Therefore, there is no conflict between being a Christian
and obeying a heathen prince. Nor is it a sin to disavow Christ if commanded to
do so under the threat of punishment. It is simply an act of obedience to once
earthly sovereign. Lip service, as it were. “The (Unum Necessarium) Onely Article
of Faith which the Scripture maketh simply Necessary to Salvation, is this,
that JESUS IS THE CHRIST.” All that is required of a Christian is that they
believe.
This is a
decisive break from the traditional understanding of the king’s right to rule
wherein the king used to be portrayed as being appointed by God to uphold his
law. Hobbes throws that notion out and argues that the sovereign is appointed
by the people and receives his authority from the people and not at all from
God.
In the
final section of “Leviathan”, Hobbes attacks the Church of his day and
particularly its reliance on the teachings of Aristotle whom he calls absurd,
repugnant, and ignorant. Aristotle’s teachings that the human being is a social
and political creature naturally predisposed to thriving in a peaceful and
well-organised community and does not fully bloom until they accept their role
as a political participant in a large-scale society is the direct anti-thesis
to Hobbes’s grim judgment of man as a savage beast.
He goes on
to call out four main sources of darkness in the church: ignorance of the
Scripture, fascination with ghosts and demons, mixing in false philosophy
(Aristotle), and confusing faith with tradition. The Roman Catholic Church in
particular takes the brunt of Hobbes’s critique but the Anglican Church is not
spared with all its rituals and ceremonies with regard to communion and baptism
which the philosopher dismisses as “Incantation, rather than Consecration”.
The many
important observations and well-founded conclusions notwithstanding, Hobbes, in
my view, missed a crucial parameter in his analysis. It is commonly accepted
that the docile and peace-loving philosopher was spurred to his work on government
by the horrors of the English civil war which made him focus on peace within a
common-wealth. This may also explain why he made no efforts to propose a
solution to violence between common-wealths. Modern history has shown that the
likelihood of two democratic countries going to war against each other is
infinitely smaller than if any other type of government is involved. I imagine
that this perspective might have inspired Hobbes to somewhat adjust his stalwart
support for the absolute monarchy.
Needless to
say, Hobbes’s work was hugely controversial in his days and decades to come. Hobbes
was declared persona non grata in Paris for having attacked the Pope, the book
was banned in England and even burned in public displays of outrage, and his follow-up,
“Behemoth”, was graciously withheld from publication by King Charles II with
the benevolent intention of preserving whatever was left of Hobbes’s good name
until the philosopher had passed away. Among his contemporaries, John Locke,
albeit critical of several of the propositions made by him, was one of few
thinkers who recognised Hobbes’s work as an intellectual masterpiece that
opened the door to a new way of thinking about government and power.
As time
went by and the uproar subsided, “Leviathan” cemented its position as one of
the most ground-breaking philosophical pieces of literature in history of
Western thought, and went on to inspire such thinkers as Jean-Jacque Rousseau,
Friedrich Nietzsche, and indirectly Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, and Louis
Althusser.
