Hobbes on Art, Science and Politics [00:25:26]

“For by art”, he says in the introduction, “For by art is created that great Leviathan
called a commonwealth or a state, which is but an artificial man, though of greater
stature and strength than the natural for whose protection and defense it was intended.”
The sovereign, he says, or Leviathan, this great artificial man, the sovereign is
something more like what we would call today an office, rather than a person, as when
we speak of the executive as an office. And it is simply the person who inhabits the
office, although that might be somewhat questionable in some of our recent executive
decisions. But for Hobbes, Hobbes creates this office of a political called the sovereign.
Now, his language in that sentence that I just read from the introduction, “For by art”,
again, “is created that great Leviathan called a commonwealth or a state.” When Hobbes
uses the term “art” there, “For by art is created,” that term is deeply revealing of his
purpose. Again, for Aristotle, by contrast, art presupposes nature. Or in other words,
nature precedes art. Nature supplies the standards, the materials, the models, for all the
later arts, the city being by nature, man by nature, nature provides the standard. Nature
precedes art and human artifice or human making. But for Hobbes, think of this by
contrast, art does not so much imitate nature, rather art can create a new kind of
nature, an artificial nature, an artificial person, as it were. Through art, again, is created
the great Leviathan. Through art properly understood and by “art,” of course, I mean
something like human making, human ingenuity, human artfulness, through art we can
begin not just to imitate, but we can transform nature, make it into something of our
own choosing.

“Art” here is not to be understood also as the antithesis of science, as when we speak of
the arts and the sciences. Rather, science is the highest form of art. Science is the
highest kind of human making. Science, or what Hobbes simply calls by the name
“reason,” is simply the fullest expression of human artfulness. “Reason,” he says in
chapter 5, “reason is not a sense and memory born with us, reason is not born with us,
nor gotten by experience only,” he says, “but is attained by industry, first in the act
imposing of names and secondly, by getting a good and orderly method.” Think of those
terms. “Reason,” and again, he uses this synonymously with other terms, like science or
art, is not simply born with us. It is not simply a genetic endowment, nor is it simply the
product of experience, which Hobbes calls by the name “prudence.” But rather reason,
he says, is attained by industry, by work, and it is developed first, he says, by the
imposing of names on things, the correct names on things, and second by getting a good
and orderly method of study. Reason consists in the imposition of a method for the
conquest of nature. By science, Hobbes tells us, he means the knowledge of
consequences, and especially, he goes on to say, “when we see how anything comes
about, upon what causes and by what manner, when like causes come into our power,
we can see how to make it produce like effect.” We can see how to make it produce like
effects. Reason, science, art is the capacity to transform nature by making it, imposing
on it, a method that will produce like effects after similar consequences. There is, in
other words, a kind of a radically transformative view of reason and knowledge and
science, political science, civil science, running throughout Hobbes’s work. Reason is not
about simple observation, but rather, it is about making, production, or as he says,
“making like consequences produce the desired effects.”

We can have a science of politics, Hobbes believes. We can have a civil science, because
politics is a matter of human making, of human doing, of human goings on. We can
know the political world. We can create a science of politics because we make it. It is
something constructed by us. Hobbes’s goal here, as it were, is to liberate knowledge, to
liberate science from subservience or dependence upon nature or by chance, by fortuna,
by turning science into a tool for remaking nature to fit our needs, to impose our needs
or satisfy our needs through our science. Art, and especially the political art, is a matter
of reordering nature, even human nature, first according to Hobbes, by resolving it into
its most elementary units, and then by reconstructing it so that it will produce the
desired results, much like a physicist in a laboratory might. This is Hobbes’s answer to
Machiavelli’s famous call in chapter 25 to master fortuna, to master chance or luck,
fortune. But you might say, Hobbes goes further than Machiavelli. Machiavelli said in
that famous chapter 25, that the prince, if he is lucky, will master fortuna about half the
time, only about 50% of the time. The rest of human action, the rest of statecraft, will
be really left to chance, luck, contingency, circumstances. Hobbes believes that armed
with the proper method, with the proper art, or scientific doctrine, that we might
eventually become the masters and possessors of nature. And I use that term “masters
and possessors of nature,” a term not of Hobbes’s making, but of Descartes from the
sixth part of the Discourse on Method, because I think it perfectly expresses Hobbes’s
aspirations, not only to create a science of politics, but to create a kind of immortal
commonwealth, which is based on science and therefore based on the proper civil
science, and therefore will be impervious to fluctuation, decay, and war and conflict,
which all other previous societies have experienced.

You can begin to see, in other words, in Hobbes’s brief introduction to his book, as well
as the opening chapters, you can really see the immensely transformative and really
revolutionary spirit underlying this amazing, amazing book.

Hobbes’s “Great Question”: What Makes Legitimate Authority Possible?

Hobbes’s central question is, what makes authority possible? What is the source of
authority? And you might say, what renders it legitimate? Maybe the question is, what
makes legitimate authority possible? How can individuals who are biologically
autonomous, who judge and see matters very differently from one another, who can
never be sure whether they trust one another, how can such individuals accept a
common authority? And, again, that is not just what constitutes authority, but what
makes authority legitimate. That remains not only the fundamental question for Hobbes,
but for the entire, at least for the entire social contract tradition that he helped to
establish.

And to answer that question, Hobbes tells a story. He tells a story about something he
calls “the state of nature,” a term he did not invent, but with which his name will always
and forever be associated, the idea of the state of nature. “The state of nature” is not a
gift of grace or a state of grace from which we have fallen, as in the biblical account of
Eden, nor is the state of nature a political condition, as maintained in some sense by
Aristotle, when he says the polis is by nature. The state of nature for Hobbes is a
condition of conflict and war. And by a “state of nature” he means, or by a state of war,
he means a condition where there is no recognized authority in his language to keep us
in awe, no authority to awe us. Such a condition, a state of war, may mean a condition
of open warfare, but not necessarily. It can signify battle, but Hobbes says it can also
signify the will to contend, simply the desire or the will to engage in conflict, renders
something like a state of nature. A state of war can include, in other words, what we
might call a “cold war,” two hostile sides looking at each other across a barrier of some
type, not clear or not certain what the other will do.

So the state of nature is not necessarily a condition of actual fighting, but what he calls a
“known disposition to fight.” If you are known or believed to be willing to fight, you are
in a state of war. It is a condition for Hobbes of maximum insecurity where in his famous
formula “life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Perhaps he should have said
fortunately short. This is the natural condition, the state of nature, the state of war that
Hobbes attributes to, again, the fundamental fact of human nature. Now, his claim that
the state of war is the condition that we are naturally is to say, among other things, that
nature does not unite us in peace, in harmony, in friendship, or in solidarity. If nature is
a norm, it does not, again, mandate or incline us to peace, friendship and solidarity with
others. Only human art or science or art, human contrivance, can bring about peace.
Conflict and war are primary. Peace is derivative. In other words, for Hobbes, authority
and relations of authority do not arise naturally among us, but are rather, again, like civil
science itself, the product of contrivance or art.

From one point of view, reading Hobbes, his account of the state of nature seems to
derive from his physics of motion and rest, in the opening chapters of Leviathan. He
begins the work, you remember, with an account of human nature, account of human
psychology, as a product of sense and experience. We are bodies in motion, and who
cannot help but obey the law or the physics of attraction and repulsion. We are bodies in
constant motion. He seems, in other words, to have a kind of materialistic psychology in
which human behavior exhibits the same, as it were, mechanical tendencies as billiard
balls that can be understood as obeying, again, geometric or causal processes of cause
and effect. Right? The state of nature is not seen by him as an actual historical condition
in some ways, although he occasionally will refer to what we might think of as
anthropological evidence to support his views on the state of nature. But the state of
nature, for him, is rather a kind of thought experiment after the manner of experimental
science. It is a kind of thought experiment. It consists of taking human beings who are
members of families, of estates, of kingdoms, and so on, dissolving these social relations
into their fundamental units, namely the abstract individuals, and then imagining, again,
in the manner of a chemist or a physicist, how these basic units would hypothetically
interact with one another, again almost like the properties of chemical substances in
some ways. How would we behave in this kind of thought experiment? That would be
one way of reading that Hobbes seems to, wants us to think about the state of nature as
akin to a scientific experiment. Hobbes is the, again, the great founder of what we might
call, among others, is the experimental method in social and political science. And there
is a reason, perhaps a reason for this, too. And I will end just on this note.

When Hobbes was a young man, he worked as a private secretary for a short time, a
private secretary to another very famous Englishman by the name of Francis Bacon, the
great founder of what we think of as the experimental method, the method of trial and
error, of experience and experiment, and arguably Hobbes was influenced in many ways
by Bacon’s own philosophy of experience and experiment. And Hobbes took Bacon’s
method in some ways applying it to politics, tried to imagine, again, the natural
condition of human beings, and what we are by nature, by a process of abstraction, and
abstracting all of the relations and properties that we have acquired over history,
through custom, through experience, stripping those away like the layers of an onion,
and putting us almost, as it were, in an experimental test tube or under a microscope,
seeing how we would under those conditions react and behave with one another. I will
leave it at that, although I will start next week by showing how that view of Hobbes is
only at best partially correct. So anyway, have a wonderful weekend with your parents
here, and I will see you next week.

Hobbes on Individuality [00:00:00]

Professor Steven Smith: Where else are we? Today we’re going to continue the state
of nature, Hobbes’s most famous discovery, his most famous metaphor, his most famous
concept. At the end of class last time, I tried to identify Hobbes’s central problem, is the
problem of authority, what makes authority possible, what makes authority legitimate,
and in order to answer that question, I suggested, he created this idea, this metaphor
again, of a state of nature, a state in which he says we are naturally in. Hobbes’s state
of nature is virtually the opposite of Aristotle’s conception of the natural end or the
natural telos of man. It does not consist of our perfection, a condition of our perfection
as Aristotle believed, but for Hobbes the state of nature is something like the condition
of human life in the absence of authority, in the absence of anyone to impose rules,
order, law on us. What would human beings be like in such a condition, a condition of
the type that he imagined maintains in periods of crisis, civil war of the kind that was
true of England in the 1640s? And I suggested at the end of last time that in many ways
Hobbes’s idea of the state of nature can be understood in a sense as an extension of his
scientific methodology set out in the opening chapters of the book. Let’s imagine, as he
says, human beings as if they were in a sort of laboratory test tube. Let’s strip human
beings of all their social ties and customs and traditions. Let’s see what they would be
like in abstraction from all of the social and political relationships which they enjoy and
see how they would interact with one another almost as chemical properties.

And you can see Hobbes working along that line but I would say this as it were scientific
or proto-scientific conception of the state of nature is not the whole answer to this story
because underlying Hobbes’ conception of the state of nature is a powerful moral
conception, a moral idea of the human being, and that’s what I want to talk a little bit
about today. Hobbes is a moralist, which seems odd in some ways. How could grim and
dour old Thomas Hobbes be regarded as a moralist or someone with a moral conception
of human nature and the human condition? But that’s what I want to suggest to you
today. The term, in a sense in which we might better characterize his conception of the
state of nature, is one of individuality. Hobbes shows us what it is to exercise the
qualities of moral agency; that is, to say to do for ourselves rather than to have things
done for us or for you. Hobbes introduced into our moral language the idiom of
individuality. And this concept, the concept of what it is to be an individual, a moral
agent, isn’t really–is really not older than or at least not much older than the
seventeenth century. Until the Renaissance or not much later, people considered
themselves primarily not as individuals but as members, members of a particular family,
of a caste, of a guild, of a particular religious order, of a city or so on. The idea that one
is first of all a self with an “I,” an ego, would have been regarded as unintelligible and
even as late as the nineteenth century Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in
America says, “individualism is a recent expression arising from a new idea.” That idea
appeared new to Tocqueville as late as the nineteenth century and this idea of the
individual, I want to suggest, is at least in part and maybe in large part traceable back to
Hobbes.

What is Hobbes’s individual? Hobbes conceived us through a process of abstraction from

the web of attachments in which we find ourselves. We are beings, he argues again in
the opening chapters, whose fundamental characteristics as human beings are willing
and choosing. We are beings for whom the exercise of the will is a preeminent feature
and much of our happiness as human beings depends upon our capacity to exercise our
will and our ability for choice. Life for Hobbes is an exercise in continual willing and
continual choosing that may be temporarily interrupted but can never come to an end
except with the end of life itself. Hobbes’s individuality or individualism is closely
connected to this conception of a human being or human well-being as success in the
competition for the goods of life. “Continual success,” he writes in chapter 6, “continual
success in obtaining those things which a man from time to time desireth is what is
called happiness or felicity. Our well being depends on our ability to achieve the objects
of our desires, the objects of our choices, for there is no such thing,” he continues, “as
perpetual tranquility of mind, no such thing as perpetual tranquility, while we live here,
because life itself is but motion and can never be without desire nor without fear no
more than without sense.” These are the characteristics of human life, sense, fear and
desire, continual desire for one thing after another, and for Hobbes this fact is not simply
a physical or factual description of human behavior but it is a moral condition because
we are each of us bundles of activity and initiative, of likes and dislikes, of desires and
aversions. Life for Hobbes is competition or struggle not just over scarce resources,
although that might be part of the struggle, but for honors, for anything else that a
person might value or esteem.

Hobbes is fascinated and, is again like Montaigne and a number of others, he is

fascinated with the diversity, the sheer diversity, multiplicity of human desires. What
leads one person to laughter, leads another person to tears, what leads one person to
piety and prayer, leads another person to ridicule and so on and so on. Even moral
terms, Hobbes says, terms like “good” and “evil,” he says are expressions of our
individual likes and dislikes. We like something, he says, not because it is good but we
call something good because we like it and the same with other moral qualities and
attributes. They are expressions for him of our psychological states and aspirations and
it is this individualism that is the ground of the general competition that we all
experience for the objects of our desires that he says the–or from this he infers that the
natural condition is one of competition, of struggle, of enmity and of war. In a famous
passage from chapter 11 he posits, as he puts it, “a general inclination of all mankind, a
perpetual and restless desire of power after power that ceaseth only in death.” This is,
as he puts it, “a general inclination of all mankind,” this constant restlessness and
motion and expression of our individuality and what I have been calling Hobbes’s
individualism is connected, in fact even is underwritten by another attribute that is
central to Hobbes. It is his skepticism.

Chapter 2. Hobbes’s Skeptical View of Knowledge [00:09:49]

Like many of the great early modern philosophers, Montaigne, Descartes, Spinoza,
Hobbes was obsessed with the question about what can I know or, maybe put a different
way, what am I entitled to believe, and there are many passages in Leviathan that
testify to Hobbes’s fundamentally skeptical view of knowledge. Right? He is a skeptic not
because he believes that we can have no foundations for our beliefs whatever but he is a
skeptic in the sense that there can be no, on his view, transcendent or nonhuman
foundations for our beliefs. We cannot be certain, he thinks, of the ultimate foundations
of our knowledge and this explains, you may have wondered about this, this explains the
importance he attributes to such things as naming and attaching correct definitions to
things. For reason, he writes in a famous passage, “for reason is nothing but reckoning,
that is adding and subtracting the consequences of general names agreed upon.”

Knowledge, in other words, is for Hobbes a human construction and it is always subject
to what human beings can be made to agree upon and that skeptical view of knowledge
or at least skeptical view of the foundation of knowledge has far reaching consequences
for him. If all knowledge, according to Hobbes, ultimately rests on agreement about
shared terms, he infers from that that our reason, our rationality, has no share in what
Plato or Aristotle would have called the divine Noos, the divine intelligence. Our reason
has within it no spark of divinity. Our reason does not testify to some kind of inner voice
of conscience or anything that would purport to give it some kind of indubitable
foundation. Such certainty as we have about anything is for Hobbes always provisional,
discovered on the basis of experience and subject to continual revision in the light of
further experience, and that again experiential conception of knowledge. That kind of
skepticism about the foundations of knowledge has further implications for Hobbes’s
views on such things as religion and religious toleration.

“There are no signs or fruit of religion,” he says, “but in man only,” he says in chapter
12. That is to say, the causes of religion can be traced back and are rooted in the
restlessness of the human mind in its search for causes. And it is because, he says, we
are born ignorant of causes, we are ignorant of the causes of things, that we are led to
search out beginnings and origins and this leads us ultimately, he says, to posit the
existence of God who is, so to speak, the first cause of all things. Hobbes does not,
despite this kind of rationalistic view of religion and his view that religion has its origin
again in the restlessness of the human mind, Hobbes doesn’t deny the possibility of
revelation or some kind of direct communication of God to us. But what he does deny is
that anyone who has claimed to receive such a revelation, he denies that any such
person has the right to impose that view on anyone else because nobody else can
correctly have the means to verify a person’s claim to revelation. No one can impose
their claim of revealed knowledge on another. Does this make Hobbes an atheist, as
many would have maintained in his day? No. It makes him a skeptic about revealed
religion.

Chapter 3. The State of Nature [00:14:11]

So it is because of this individualism and skepticism, a view of life as willing and
choosing, that there are in the state of nature so to speak no standards to adjudicate
conflicts, that the central issue of politics arises, namely what makes authority possible,
how are people who are biologically individually constituted, so to speak, how can any of
them ever–any of us ever be capable of obeying common rules or having moral
obligations to one another? How is that possible, Hobbes continues to ask in a manner of
speaking on almost every page of the book. But before answering that question,
consider a little further Hobbes’s account of the state of nature and what makes it seem
like a plausible starting point to answer the question of what makes authority possible.

To say that the state of nature consists primarily of individuals with again diverse likes,
dislikes, beliefs, opinions and the like is not to say that the state of nature is a state of
isolation, as it sometimes attributed to him. People in the state of nature may have
regular and continual contact with one another. It is just that their relations are
unregulated. They are unregulated by law; they are unregulated by authority. The state
of nature is simply a kind of condition of maximum insecurity, an unregulated market
with no common laws or rules to sustain it. The emphasis on the individual is just
another way of saying, again unlike Aristotle, that no one has natural authority over
anyone else. Relations of authority exist only by, so to speak, the consent or the will of
the governed. And the fact that relations in the state of nature are unregulated for him
makes it–it’s synonymous with making it a condition of war, of “all against all,” in his
famous formulation. Now, you might look at that formulation, the state of war is one
against–of all against all and you might say that such a condition of civil war, of
maximum insecurity, of the total breakdown of condition of rules and laws is if anything
the state of the exception. How often does that really occur in our experience in human
life? But Hobbes, like Machiavelli, as we saw, likes to take the exceptional situation and
turn it into the norm. It becomes the normal condition, state of security, insecurity, fear,
conflict and the like.

This is not to say, again, that the state of nature for Hobbes is one of permanent
fighting. But it is one of permanent fear and distrust and he asks his readers…there are
so many wonderful passages in this book, this just happens to be one of my particular
favorites, he asks his readers if you don’t believe me, again think of his skepticism, don’t
believe me, he says, check your own experience and see if I’m not right. And this is what
he writes. “Let him, the reader, therefore ask himself,” Hobbes writes, “when taking a
journey he arms himself and seeks to go well accompanied. When going to sleep, he
locks his doors even when in his house, and even when in his house he locks his chests
and this, when he knows, he says, there be laws and public officers armed to avenge all
injuries shall be done to him. What opinion, Hobbes asks, he has of his fellow subjects
when he rides armed? What does that say about your thinking about your fellow citizens
when you arm yourselves going for a trip, of his fellow citizens when he locks his doors
at night or of his children and servants when he locks his chests? Does he not therefore
as much accuse mankind by his action as I do by my words?” You can see the
mischievousness of Hobbes in that delightful passage. What about you, he says, and this
is not in some kind of state of nature. This is in a completely fully functioning society
when you go armed, when you lock your doors, when you lock your chests at night,
don’t your actions and your experience simply confirm what I’m saying? And this tells us
another thing about the state of nature which it is easy to forget. The state of nature, at
least for Hobbes, is not some kind of primitive anthropological datum that we find by
going back in time somehow. Rousseau will speak about it more this way. For Hobbes,
the state of nature exists, he says, whenever authority is not enforced. The state of
nature fully continues, in many ways, oddly even in civil society, he says, whenever we
have reason to believe that our lives or our properties or ourselves are not secure. In
fact, we can never be fully free of the fear and of the anxiety and uncertainty of the
state of nature, even within to some degree of fully constituted civil society.

The only exception to this of course in Hobbes’s account of the state of nature when he
says “don’t you lock your doors at night” are of course Yale students living here on
campus who are so trusting that they never lock their doors at night in the entryways
and so on and then of course are always stunned to find when something is stolen from
them, how could this be? And I tell them lock your doors but they still don’t believe me.
Maybe you’ll now believe Hobbes if you don’t believe me. So the state of nature, it’s a
state of insecurity, it’s a state of conflict. How do we get out of it? This is of course the
huge issue that Hobbes asks for the rest of–for much of the book. What do we do to get
out of this state of nature to enter a condition of civil society and civilized life? How do I
give up my right to do whatever is in my power to secure my person or my possessions,
when I have no expectation, you might say, that others around me are prepared to do
so as well? This is sort of a classic example of what economists and other people like
them call the prisoner’s dilemma. Why should I act in such a way if I have no
expectation or reasonable expectation that those around me will reciprocate?

Hobbes’s members of a state of nature seem to be in a classic prisoner’s dilemma

problem. Maybe we can say, we could say or Hobbes could say, that laying down our
right to do all things in seeking peace with others is the rational thing to do in the
condition of nature. We are all rational actors and therefore it is rational for us to seek
and to desire peace, but note that that is exactly what Hobbes does not say, he does not
say this. Far from having a sort of rational actor model of politics, he operates with an
irrational actor model. He assumes that it is not reason but our passions that are the
dominant force of human psychology, our desires, our aversions, our passions. And
although I have said that Hobbes has emphasized the diversity of our passions there are
still two main passions that he feels universally dominate human nature and these two
passions are pride and fear.

Chapter 4. Pride and Fear: Passions that Dominate Human Nature

[00:23:14]
Pride and fear, these are the Hobbesian equivalents of the two great–what Machiavelli
called humors you remember, the two humors of the two great social classes, the
desires of the rich and powerful as it were to rule over others and the desire of the weak
not to be ruled. Machiavelli called those the two umori, the two humors. And Hobbes
similarly works with a kind of model. He’s a great political psychologist, the two great
passions of pride and fear. Pride, he says, is the passion for preeminence, the desire to
be first and also to be seen to be first in the great race of life. Prideful people, he tells
us, are those overflowing with confidence about their own abilities to succeed and we all
know people like this, don’t we, like Yale students? They’re all overflowing with
confidence, kind of alpha types. Machiavelli might call them sort of manly men who are
fully confident about their abilities.

And yet Hobbes is a great debunker of human pride. Pride is equivalent to what he calls
vanity or vainglory. It is a kind of exaggerated confidence in one’s own power and
ability. It is pride, the desire to lord it over others and to have one’s superiority
acknowledged by others, that is the great problem for Hobbes to be averted. But if pride
for him is one of his great universal passions so is its opposite, fear. Hobbes makes the
fear of death that may come to us at any time in the state of nature, perhaps he
exaggerates this, by making it appear that the state of nature is a kind of existential
condition in which death can come to you at almost any moment. But there is more to
fear than this, simply fear of death, although Hobbes emphasizes and dramatically
perhaps overemphasizes this. Fear is not just the desire to avoid death but to avoid
losing, you might say again, in the great race of life, to avoid losing and to be seen as a
loser. It is the desire to avoid the shame of being seen by others as losing out somehow.
There is a social quality clearly to both of these passions, pride and fear, one again the
desire to have one’s preeminence esteemed by others, fear, the desire to avoid shame
and dishonor.

How we are seen by others is a crucial cardinal part of Hobbes’ moral psychology and
each of us, he says, contain. These do not simply represent two classes of individuals,
two classes of persons. Each of us contains these two warring, you might say, elements
within us, both self-assertion and fear of the consequence of self-assertion. The question
is for Hobbes, how do we tame these passions? It is most of all pride that Hobbes wants
to tame and of course the very title of his book, Leviathan, he tell us later on comes
from what? Do you remember? Where does it come from? Who remembers? Passage
from what? Job, Book of Job, where he refers to Leviathan as king of the children of
pride. The book is based on a biblical metaphor about overcoming or subduing pride. As
the great Marsellus Wallace says in the film Pulp Fiction, pride never helps, it only hurts,
if you remember that magnificent speech. Fear, Hobbes says, is the passion to reckon
on, is the passion to bew reckoned on. It is fear, not reason, that leads us to abandon
the state of nature and sue for peace. The passions that incline men to peace, Hobbes
writes, are fear of death. This is not to say that Hobbes believes fear to be the naturally
stronger of the two passions; in fact, far from it. There are many people certainly even
around us who Hobbes believes do not fear death as they should, the proud aristocrat
who prefers death before dishonor, the religious zealot prepared to sacrifice his life and
of course those of others in order to achieve the rewards of heaven and of course just
the risk taking individual who seeks to climb Mount Everest just for the honor and
esteem involved. And it is part of the broader educational or pedagogic function
of Leviathan to help us see, Hobbes thinks, the dangers of pride and the advantages of
peace. Properly directed, fear leads to peace.

Chapter 5. The Laws of Nature [00:29:09]

Fear is the basis, even of what Hobbes calls the various laws of nature, that lead us to
civil society. The laws of nature for Hobbes are described as a precept or a general rule
of reason that every man ought to endeavor peace and it is out of fear that we begin to
reason and see the advantages of society; reason is dependent upon the passions, upon
fear. The first and most fundamental law of nature, he says, is to seek peace and follow
it.

Not only should one seek peace but we have an obligation, he says, to lay down our
arms, to lay down our right to all things on the condition that others around us are
prepared to do so as well. And Hobbes goes on to enumerate 19 laws of nature, I won’t
go into all of them, 19 laws of nature that constitute a kind of framework for establishing
civil society. These laws he even compares as his equivalent of the Golden Rule which he
states in the negative: Do not do unto others what you would not have them do unto
you. Here is Hobbes’s rewriting of the Golden Rule in terms of these laws of nature but
these raise a question for us as readers of Hobbes. Right? Don’t they? What is the status
of the laws of nature? What is the moral status, if any, of these laws? Hobbes, as we
see, sometimes writes as a sort of scientist or proto-scientist for whom nature and one
supposes the laws of nature operate with the same kind of necessity as the laws of
physical attraction. That’s how he often writes about human behavior, that we obey the
same laws of physical attraction as do any other bodies that we might choose to
describe. They describe how bodies in motion always and necessarily behave, these laws
of nature.
And yet at the same time, Hobbes writes as a moralist for whom the laws of nature, he
calls “precepts of reason” or general rules according to which we are forbidden to do
anything destructive of life.” In this sense, the laws of nature, as he describes them,
appear to be moral laws with moral commands, commands you not to do anything that
is destructive of life, your own or that of others, and these moral laws, in this sense, we
have presumably the freedom to obey them or disobey them. If they acted with a kind of
mechanical necessity or even geometric necessity, they could not possibly be moral laws
in that way. They can only be moral if there is some semblance of human choice or will
expressed in the relationship, our ability to do otherwise. So these laws of nature, seek
peace and so on, do not simply seem to be descriptive of how people do behave. They
seem to be prescriptive of how people ought to behave and this Hobbes even suggests
at the end of chapter 15 when he writes about the laws of nature, “these dictates of
reason men used to call by the name ‘laws’ but improperly for they are conclusions or
theorems according to what conduces to the conversation of mankind.” These used to be
called laws of nature, he says, but improperly. So if they are only improperly laws of
nature why does Hobbes continue to use the term? Why does he use this terminology of
“laws of nature”? In a sense, this might simply be Hobbes’s way of paying homage to the
ancient tradition of natural law going back to the medieval scholastics, to the stoics, and
perhaps even beyond them. The natural laws for Hobbes are not divine commands or
ordinances, he says, but they are rules of practical reason figured out by us as the
optimal means of securing our well-being. These laws of nature, as he describes them,
do not issue categorical commands so much as sort of hypothetical rules. If you want X,
do Y; if you want peace, here are the means to it. And he calls these laws, these 19 laws
of nature, the true and only moral philosophy. So you can see in that passage Hobbes
takes himself to be a moralist writing within the great tradition of moral philosophy.
These laws of nature are for him the true and only moral philosophy.

Well, this brings me to some criticisms or at least some questions about Hobbes’s
conception of the laws of nature. What are we to make of these laws, as I’ve asked
before? In one sense, there seems to be a genuine moral content to Hobbes’s laws of
nature which can be reduced to a single formula: Seek peace above all other goods.
Hobbes, more than anyone else, wants us to value the virtues of civility. Those, you
might say, summed up in a word are what the 19 laws of nature command. The civility
entails the virtues of peace, equity, fairness, playing by the rules. Peace is for Hobbes a
moral good and the virtues are those qualities of behavior that tend to peace and vices
are those that lead to war. Consider the disadvantages of war and the benefits of peace.
Here is what Hobbes writes. “In such a condition, that is the state of nature, there is no
place for industry because the fruit thereof is uncertain and consequently no culture of
the earth, no navigation nor building nor instruments of moving and removing things as
require much force, no knowledge of the face of the earth, no account of time, no arts,
no letters, no society and which is worst of all continual fear and danger of violent
death.” This is again the sort of existential condition in which Hobbes wants to put us in
the state of nature and all the benefits he lists there, he enumerates, that are denied to
us in such a condition, again no knowledge, no geography, no cultivation of the earth, no
navigation or building. All of these things are the fruits of peace, he tells us.

But at this point, a careful reader such as all of yourselves no doubt, would no doubt be
suggesting, I’ve gone too far in suggesting or calling Hobbes a moral philosopher whose
motto in a way could be summed up in the phrase “Give peace a chance.” Is that what
Hobbes believed? Why is the peace the highest good anyway? Why not justice? Why not
honor? Why not piety? Why not the examined life? What makes peace so good for
Hobbes? Well, I’ve given a number of… have quoted him on a number of reasons but one
suggestion might be that it is not so much peace alone that Hobbes cherishes as life.
Peace is a means to life. Every creature, he says, has a built-in desire to preserve itself,
to persevere in its own existence, to continue in its own steady state you might say, and
to resist invasion or encroachment by others. We are all endowed, he says, with a kind
of natural right to life and the desire to preserve oneself is not just a biological fact,
although it is also that, it is for him a moral right, it is a moral entitlement, every being
has a fundamental right to its own life. We not only have a right to our lives but to do
whatever we regard as needful to protect our lives.

And again, this is not simply a brute fact of nature. It is a moral entitlement for Hobbes,
the source of human worth and dignity. But now you will suggest, I’ve really gone too
far, attributing to Hobbes a doctrine of human dignity that one might expect to find in a
philosopher like Kant or someone else. Didn’t Hobbes cynically write in chapter 10, “the
value or worth of a man is of all things his price,” what price we will fetch in the
marketplace no doubt, the value or worth of a man is his price, a phrase incidentally
quoted by Karl Marx to indicate the sheer heartlessness of the kind of the bourgeoisie
society that Hobbes was hoping to bring about. And doesn’t Hobbes’ materialism and his
sort of mechanistic theory of nature seem to detract from any inherent worth of the
individual? There seems to be something to that and yet Hobbes certainly regards life as
a precious good, perhaps the most precious good of all, and he writes with a lively sense
of how fragile and endangered life is.

The work as a whole can be seen as an effort to dispel what he believes to be false
beliefs, false doctrines and beliefs, that disguise the truth from us, truth about the value
of life; for example, beliefs about the afterlife and all beliefs that detract from an
appreciation for the value of life as it is. This provides the moral basis of what I would
call Hobbes’s humanitarianism and yet that humanitarianism seems to raise further
problems. Doesn’t Hobbes or does Hobbes’s attempt to instill in us, the readers of his
book, his attempt to instill in us an appreciation for life and the value of life, does this
simultaneously create an aversion to risk, an extreme fear of conflict and challenge or
disorder? You could say is this constant fear that Hobbes harps on fear of death and the
value of life, to put it rather rudely, is this not another word for cowardice? Does Hobbes’
emphasis on the preservation of life as the supreme moral value, does this turn his
mightyLeviathan into a kind of commonwealth of cowards? Where Aristotle made the
courage of men in combat a central virtue of his ethics, Hobbes pointedly omits courage
from his list of the moral virtues. At one point, he even suggests that courage is really
just a species of rashness and his example of courage comes from duels and duel
fighting which he says will be always honorable but are unlawful. “For duels,” he says,
“are many times effects of courage and the ground of courage is always strength or skill
though for the most part,” he says, “they be effects of rash speaking and the fear of
dishonor in one or both of the combatants.” In other words, courage for him again is a
form of vanity or pride, the desire not to appear less than another. It is a form of
rashness, he says.

And that suspicion is further carried out in Hobbes’s very interesting treatment of
military conscription which he talks about in chapter 21. There he describes battle, as he
says, “a mutual running away” to armies confronting one another he describes as a
mutual running away, and furthermore he says when it comes to conscription there
should be allowance made for those that he calls “men of natural timorousness,”
cowards in other words. A man that has commanded as a soldier, Hobbes writes, to fight
against the enemy though his sovereign has the right enough to punish his refusal with
death may nevertheless, Hobbes writes, in many cases refuse without injustice as when
he substituteth a sufficient solider in his place. In other words, Hobbes’ view of this is
why do the fighting yourself, if you can get someone else to do it for you? There is no
intrinsic virtue in courage or battle, if you can get somebody else to do the job for you, a
sort of perfect description, I think, of our volunteer army, how we pay people to do this
difficult and dangerous work for us. But the question is, can even a Hobbesian society,
one which insists on rules and so on. Anyway, can a Hobbesian society do without what
we might call them the manly virtues, the civic virtues, pride, love of honor that Hobbes
seems to condemn? Consider the case of Ralph Esposito. Who is Ralph Esposito, you
ask? His name is not in the index of Hobbes’s book but Mr. Esposito is a New York City
fireman who came to Branford College to be a Master’s Tea guest not long after 9/11
and at length he discussed there people like himself who daily risk their lives running
into building burning–burning buildings to rescue total strangers. Why do people do this?
Is it because some people have a kind of built in sense of thumos, that wonderful
Platonic term, pride, courage, love of risk that no society, not even a Hobbesian one, can
do without? Even Hobbes’s society presumably cannot do without a fire department or a
police department; yet, if one were to follow Hobbes’s risk averse psychology, if one
were to follow the 19 laws of nature that advise us to seek peace and to avoid conflict,
why would anyone ever become a fireman, a soldier, a risk taker, a policeman of any
sort? Why would anyone ever risk one’s life for one’s country or a cause just to help
other people, people that we don’t know and probably will never know? Even in the
passage that I cited earlier, where Hobbes describes the benefits of civil society, he
speaks of activities like navigation, exploration and industry. Presumably, these are
activities that are all engaged in risk taking behavior of one kind or another that seem
not to be able to be explained by Hobbes’s law of nature alone. So the question I want to
leave you with today and that I want to pick up again on Wednesday is, in the end, what
do societies require more of? Do they require more of Hobbes’s men of natural
timorousness or do they require more Ralph Espositos? And on that we’ll finish up
Hobbes on Wednesday.

The Sovereign State: Hobbes, Leviathan

Chapter 1. Introduction: Hobbes’s Theory of Sovereignty [00:00:00]
Professor Steven Smith: Okay, good morning. I’m going to show another movie today
but not until a little bit later in the class. We’ll get it. We’ll get there. Don’t worry! It
doesn’t fit until the last part of the class. But today, I want to talk about sovereignty.
There are two great concepts that come out of Hobbes that you have to remember. One
is the state of nature and the other is sovereignty. I spoke a bit about the first one
yesterday or Monday rather. Today, I want to talk about Hobbes’s theory of the
sovereign state, the creation of the sovereign. Hobbes refers to the sovereign as a
mortal god, as his answer to the problems of the state of nature, the state, the condition
of life being solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. And it is only the creation of the
sovereign for Hobbes, endowed or possessed with absolute power, that is sufficient to
put an end to the condition of perpetual uncertainty, anxiety and unrest that is the case
of the natural condition.

Let me talk for a while about some of the formal features of Hobbes’ sovereign power, of
the Hobbesian state. In the first place, what I want to impress upon you is that the
sovereign is for Hobbes less a person than it is or he is an office. The sovereign is
described by Hobbes as an artificial person by which he means the sovereign is the
creation of the contract or the covenant that brought this office into being. The sovereign
does not exist by nature but rather, Hobbes tells us again, the sovereignty is the product
of art or science. It is the product, the creation of the people or of what we might call, in
Jeffersonian language, it is the product of the consent of the governed. The sovereign
and, again, this is crucial, is for Hobbes, the representative of the people. He is the
sovereign representative. It is the people who endow the sovereign with the authority to
represent them on their behalf. And, in that respect, Hobbes’s sovereign has many of the
features or characteristics that we come to associate with what we call modern executive
power or executive authority. When Louis XIV of France famously said L’état c’est moi. “I
am the state,” he was expressing a peculiarly pre-modern in that way conception of the
state; that is to say, he regarded the state as in some ways his personal property. “I am
the state. The state am I.”

But this is very different from Hobbes’s sovereign. The state for Hobbes is not the
possession of the sovereign. Rather, the sovereign does not own the state. He is
appointed or authorized to secure for the people the, in many ways, limited ends of
peace and security. He has much the same function and to some degree much of the
same personality as what we would call a modern day CEO, that is to say there is a kind
of anonymity and impersonality about the sovereign. I mean, unless you’re in the Yale
entrepreneurial society who can name the CEOs of many companies? And the answer is
you probably can’t. They are for the most part relatively anonymous individuals unless,
you know, they get into trouble like Ken Lay or someone like that or do something
amazing like Bill Gates. For the most part, they are rather impersonal and anonymous
and that is in many ways the characteristic of Hobbes’ sovereign. Hobbes’s theory of the
sovereign, interestingly, contains within itself elements of both secular absolutism and,
in some ways, modern liberalism and it is the tension between these two that I want to
bring out in my discussion here.

The power of the sovereign, Hobbes continually insists, must be unlimited. Yet, at the
same time, he tells us that the sovereign is the creation of the people whom he
represents or it represents. Although Hobbes is widely taken to be a defender of
monarchical absolutism, you will note, in your readings, that he displays a kind of
studied neutrality over actually what form the sovereign should take. He only insists that
sovereign power remain absolute and undivided whether it belongs to a single person, a
few, or the many. And among the powers that the sovereign, he insists, must control
are, for example, laws concerning property, the right of declaring war and peace, what
we would call foreign policy, rules of justice concerning life and death, which is to say
criminal law, and, of course, the right to determine what books and ideas are
permissible, that is to say the right of censorship.

Chapter 2. The Doctrine of Legal Positivism: The Law Is What the

Sovereign Commands [00:06:00]
In a sense, the core of Hobbes’s theory of sovereignty can be boiled down to the
statement that the sovereign and only the sovereign is the source of law. The law is
what the sovereign says it is. Does that sound in any way familiar from what we have
read this term? Anyone? Sound familiar? Thrasymachus? Do you remember that name,
Book I of theRepublic? Justice is what the stronger say it is. Hobbes tells us that the law
is what the sovereign commands.

This is sometimes known as the doctrine of legal positivism, which is to say that law is
the command of the sovereign, a sort of command theory of law. And, again, that seems
to point back to Thrasymachus’ point of view in the first book of the Republic. There is
for Hobbes, as for Thrasymachus, no higher court of appeal than the will or the word of
the sovereign, no transcendent law, no divine law, no source of authority outside
sovereign command. And sovereign is appointed for Hobbes to be much like an umpire
in a baseball or a football game, to set the rules of the game. But the Hobbesian
sovereign, unlike umpires, are not just the enforcers of the rules or the interpreters of
the rules, the sovereign is also the creator, the shaper and maker of the rules. And
Hobbes draws from this the startling conclusion, in many ways the infamous conclusion
that the sovereign can never act unjustly. The sovereign can never act unjustly, why?
Because the sovereign is the source of law and the sovereign is the source of the rules of
justice. Therefore, Hobbes concludes, he can never act unjustly. And he supports this
example by a deeply perverse and amusing, I have to say, reading from a biblical story,
do you remember this? He refers to the story of David and Uriah. Everybody will
remember that story from Sunday school or from Hebrew school or whatever. Does
anyone remember that David was the king at that time? He was the king of Israel and he
coveted Uriah’s wife Bathsheba. He wanted to sleep with Bathsheba, so what did he do?
He had Uriah killed so he could sleep with her. And Hobbes reasons from this story that
while David’s action may have sinned against God, he did no injustice to Uriah, imagine
that. I think Uriah might have had a different point of view about this. He did no injustice
to Uriah because, as the lawful sovereign, he could do any, not just anything he liked but
whatever he did was set by the rules of the law. And when Hobbes tells that story, which
he mentions a couple of times in the book, one can only imagine he must have had a
kind of wry grin on his face when he wrote that out. In fact, next semester I’m teaching
an entire course devoted to Hobbes’ critique of religion in which this will, among other
things, figure prominently.

But Hobbes’s teaching about law is, in some ways, less Draconian than it might first
appear. He makes clear that law is what the sovereign says it is. There can be no such
thing as an unjust law, he infers, again, because the sovereign is the source of all
justice. But he does distinguish, he tells us, between a just law and a good law. All laws
are by definition just, he tells us, but it doesn’t follow that all laws are by definition
good. “A good law,” he says in chapter 30, “is that which is needful for the good of the
people.” A good law is needful for the good of the people. But then one asks, what are
the criteria by which we determine the good of the people? How is this determined? And
Hobbes makes clear that the sovereign is not invested with the authority to exercise a
kind of absolute control over everything that people do. The purpose of law, Hobbes tell
us, is not so much to control but to facilitate. Consider just the following passage from
chapter 30, section 21. Hobbes writes: “For the use of laws, which are but rules
authorized,” he says, “is not to bind the people from all voluntary actions. It is not to
bind them from voluntary actions but to direct and keep them in such motion as not to
hurt themselves by their own impetuous desires, rashness or indiscretion as hedges are
set not to stop travelers but to keep them on their way.”

This is the force or purpose of law to set rules, to keep people, as he puts it, on their
way, a law that is intended simply to constrain and control for its own sake, Hobbes
says, cannot be a good law. The purpose of a good law is to facilitate human agency in
some ways. And I think, again, that too is central to Hobbes’s theory of the sovereign.
Its purpose is to facilitate, not simply to control and inhibit. But the power to control or
the power of law for Hobbes also very much applies and here is one of his most
controversial doctrines. It must certainly apply to matters of opinion to what we would
call today First Amendment issues. This is something that Hobbes insists upon. “For the
actions of men,” he says, “proceed from their opinions. Actions proceed from opinions.
And in the well governing of opinions consisteth the well governing of men’s actions.”
So, if we are going to govern or regulate human behavior, we have to begin by
regulating opinion. And it follows from this, Hobbes believes, that the sovereign has the
right to decide what opinions, what books, what ideas are conducive to peace and which
ones aim simply to stir up war and discontent? And these comments of Hobbes’s about
the sovereign’s power to control opinions are directed at two principal institutions, the
Church and, guess what the other one is, the university. Both of these for Hobbes he
considers to be locus, the focus of or centers of seditious opinion that require to remain
under sovereign control.

By the churches, Hobbes is speaking of the reformed church but, in particular, he is

concerned with those radical puritan sects of the type that later came and founded
America, these radical sects that elevate matters of conscience and private belief over
and above the law, that is to say arrogating to themselves, to the rights of conscience
and the private belief, the powers to judge the sovereign. It was these dissenting
Protestants, it was these dissenting sects, that formed the rank and file of Cromwell’s
armies during the Civil War in England. They formed the rank and file of the republican
armies in England against the rule of the king. And, Hobbes tell us he would banish all
doctrines that profess to make the individual or the sect, more importantly in some ways
the sect, the judge of the sovereign. It is only in the state of nature, he tells us, that
individuals have the right to determine just and unjust, right and wrong for themselves.
Once we enter society, once we engage or conclude the social compact, we transfer our
power to do this to the sovereign to determine these matters for us.
And just as important as the radical churches and the reformed sects is for Hobbes the
university and its curriculum. In particular, Hobbes faults the universities for teaching
what, for teaching the radical doctrines of Aristotleanism in the seventeenth century.
Aristotle in this period was the source of modern republican ideas, ideas about self
government, ideas about in some ways what we might call direct democracy or
participatory democracy, people who believe that the only legitimate form of government
is one where Aristotle says citizens take turns ruling and being ruled in turn. It was,
above all, the influence of the classics, Aristotle and Cicero in particular, that Hobbes
regards as an important cause for the recent civil war and the regicide of Charles I.
Consider the following passage that he writes: “As to rebellion against monarchy, one of
the most frequent causes is the reading of the books of policy and history of the ancient
Greeks and Romans. Reading of those books leads people to rebel against monarchy, for
which young men like yourselves,” he says, or young women too, “for which young men
and all others that are unprovided by the antidote of solid reason,” who are susceptible
that is to reading these stories and reading these books, “receive a strong and delightful
impression of the great exploits of war.” “From reading of such books,” Hobbes
continues, “men have undertaken to kill their kings because the Greek and Latin writers
in their books and discourses of policy make it lawful and laudable for any man to do so
provided before he do it he call him a tyrant.”

That’s what you learn, Hobbes believes, from the reading of Aristotle and the Greeks and
Romans, regicide, that the only legitimate form of government is a republic and that it is
a lawful and even it’s your duty to kill your king. Of course, before doing so, he says,
“you must call him first a tyrant.” It’s a wonderful passage. And this is so interesting, I
think, not only because of its humor and Hobbes’s in many ways characteristic
exaggerations, but because it shows how much emphasis Hobbes puts on the reform of
opinion, the reform of ideas, in many ways like Machiavelli and like Plato too before him,
Hobbes regards himself as an educator of princes, an educator and a transformer, a
reformer of ideas. There is a kind of internal irony here I think because Hobbes
sometimes writes as if, as we’ve seen, as if human beings are nothing more than
complex machines that mechanically obey the laws of attraction and repulsion. But he
also obviously writes that we are beings with will and purpose who are uniquely guided
by opinions, ideas, and doctrines and it is in many ways the first business of the
sovereign to act as a moral reformer of ideas. Hobbes realizes this is a difficult and uphill
task that he has set for himself.

And, in a rare moment of sort of personal self-reflection or self-reference, he notes

somewhat drolly that the novelty of his ideas will make it difficult for them to find an
audience. “I am at the point of believing, he says, “that my labor will be as useless as
the commonwealth of Plato,” he says in a moment of sort of uncharacteristic despair,
“will be as useless as the commonwealth of Plato.” “For Plato” he says “also is of the
opinion that it is impossible for the disorders of the state ever to be taken away until
sovereigns be philosophers.” And while, in many ways, initially despairing of the
possibility of finding a sort of friendly reception or audience for his work, Hobbes then
goes on in a more optimistic note to observe that his book is considerably simpler and
easier to read than Plato’s. Again, you might have a discussion about that over which is
the easier one. But, Hobbes believes it is simpler and easier and therefore more likely to
catch the ear of a sympathetic prince. “I recover some hope,” he says. “I recover some
hope that one time or other this writing of mine may fall into the hands of a sovereign
who will consider it for himself, for it is short and I think clear.” Well, we might question
that. He says it’s a short book and “I think clear” he writes. Well, it’s complex and long.
But nevertheless, perhaps hoping that his advertising it in this way will gain the ear of a
sovereign and that “without the help” he continues, “of any interested or envious
interpreter and by the exercise of entire sovereignty in protecting the public teaching of
it convert this truth of speculation into the utility of practice,” the very end of chapter
31, “will convert this truth of speculation into the utility of practice.”
So, Hobbes clearly believes or thinks that this will be a useful book for a sovereign to
read and hoping it will gain the ear of a sympathetic sovereign or potential sovereign.
Hobbes may, I think, overestimate or maybe I really should say underestimate the
difficulty of the book but he returns to this again at the very end of Leviathan. “The
universities” he says there, where he talks again a little bit about the audience for the
book, “the universities,” he says, ” are the fountains of civil and moral doctrine. The
universities are the fountains of civil and moral doctrine and have the obligation to teach
the correct doctrine of rights and duties.” And this means for Hobbes, first of all,
adopting his book as the authoritative teaching on moral and political doctrine in the
universities. This should be the required textbook of political science of political teaching
in the universities to replace the older textbook, i.e. Aristotle’s Politics. “Therefore,” he
says, “I think it may be profitably printed and more profitably taught in the universities,”
he confidently asserts. “The ideal audience for the book,” he says “should be the
preachers, the gentry, the lawyers, men of affairs, who drawing such water as they find
from the book can use it,” he says, “to sprinkle the same both from the pulpit and from
their conversation upon the people.” This is how he sees it, that it should be taught from
the pulpit. It should be taught from the universities and from this conversation will be
sprinkled upon the people. Hobbes’ hope, like that of all the great political philosophers,
was to be a kind of legislator for mankind. This again is a book with epic, epic ambition.

Chapter 3. Hobbesian Liberalism [00:23:14]

Let me mention, I’ve emphasized in many ways the absolutist and authoritarian side of
Hobbes’s teaching. Let me talk about something that might sound oxymoronic. Let me
call it for the moment Hobbesian liberalism. Hobbes enjoys describing the sovereign in
the most absolute and extreme terms. Sovereign is to have supreme command over life
and death, war and peace, what is to be taught and heard. And yet, in many ways, this
Hobbesian sovereign aims to allow for ample room for individual liberty. And he even
sets some limits on the legitimate use of sovereign power. For all of his tough talk,
Hobbes takes justice and the rule of law very seriously, far more seriously than, for
example, does Machiavelli. At one time in the book or at one point he maintains that a
person cannot be made to accuse themselves without the assurance of pardon. You can’t
be forced to accuse yourself, what we could call the Fifth Amendment. You cannot be
forced to accuse yourself. Similarly, he says, a wife or a parent cannot be coerced to
accuse a loved one. And, in a similar point, he maintains that punishment can never be
used as an instrument of revenge but only for what he calls the correction or what we
would call the rehabilitation of the offender.

Add to the above Hobbes’s repeated insistence that law serve as an instrument for
achieving social equality. In a chapter called, “Of the Office of the Sovereign
Representative,” Hobbes argues that justice be equally administered to all classes of
people, rich, as well as poor, equal application of justice. He maintains further the titles
of nobility are of value only for the benefits they confer on those of lesser rank or they’re
not useful at all. Equal justice, he tells us, requires equal taxation policy and he seems to
be proposing a kind of consumption tax so that the rich, who consume more will have to
pay their fair share. And he argues that indigent citizens, who are unable to provide for
themselves, should not be forced to rely simply upon the private charity of individuals
but should be maintained at public expense. He seems, in this way, to anticipate what
we might think of as the modern welfare state that public assistance be provided, and
the poor, not simply depend on the private goodwill of the others.

But most importantly, I think, is to go back to the importance given to the individual in
Hobbes’s philosophy. Hobbes derives the very power of the sovereign from the natural
right of each individual to do as they like in the state of nature. And it follows, I think,
that the purpose of the sovereign is really to safeguard the natural right of each
individual but to regulate this right so that it becomes consistent with the right of others
and not simply again a kind of open war against all. What is significant about this, I
think, is the priority that Hobbes gives to rights over duties. This, in many ways
arguably, makes him the founding father or maybe we should say godfather of modern
liberalism, the importance given to rights over duties, of the individual over in many
ways the collective or common good.

And I think this is expressed in Hobbes’s novel and in many ways altogether
unprecedented teaching about liberty in chapter 21, a very famous and important
chapter. And here he distinguishes the liberty of, what he calls the liberty of the
ancients, or what he doesn’t exactly call but I’ll call the liberty of the ancients and the
liberty of the moderns. The ancients, he believes, operated with a defective
understanding of human freedom. For the ancients, liberty meant living in a self-
governing republic, living in a republic in which everyone again took some share in the
ruling offices. Liberty, in other words, for the ancients was not just a property of the
individual. It was an attribute of the regime of which one was a member. “The Athenians
and the Romans,” he says, “were free, that is they were free commonwealths, not that
any particular man had the liberty to resist his own representative but that his
representative had the liberty to resist or invade other people.” In other words, liberty
for the ancients was a collective good, the liberty, as he says, to resist or invade other
people. It was a property of the commonwealth not of the individuals who inhabited it.
But that sense of collective liberty, the freedom to resist or invade is, in fact, even
opposed to the modern idea of liberty that Hobbes proposes. And by liberty Hobbes
means something that sounds very familiar to us. Liberty means the absence of
constraints or impediments to action. We are free to the extent that we can act in an
unimpeded manner. And, it follows from him that political liberty means the freedom to
act where the law is silent, as he says. Think of that, that where the law is silent, we
have the freedom to do or not to do as we choose, very important to the way we think of
liberty today in a modern and you might say liberal democracy.

Hobbes’s sovereign is more likely to allow citizens a zone of private liberty where they
are free to act as they choose than in the classical republic where there is a kind of
coerced participation in collective affairs or in political deliberation. And Hobbes here
takes a dig at the defenders of the view, in his own day, that only the citizens of a
republic can be free. “There is written,” he says, “on the turrets of the city of Lucca…”
and let me just ask before I continue this passage, anybody here in Pearson College? So,
you will know the Dean Mr. Amerigo, yeah, your dean? Your dean is from the city of
Lucca. Ask him if this is true when you see him. “There is written on the turrets of the
city of Lucca in great characters, meaning great letters, that this day the
word libertas, libertas is written on the walls of the turrets of the city of Lucca.” Let’s find
out if that’s still true. “Yet, no man,” Hobbes continues, “can thence infer that a
particular man has more liberty or immunity from the service of the commonwealth
there than in Constantinople, the city of the Caliphs, the Caliphate. Living in a republic
alone doesn’t guarantee you more freedom. He says, freedom in that interesting
passage, freedom here requires, as he puts it, immunity, “immunity from service.” A
regime is to be judged for Hobbes on how much private liberty, how much immunity it
grants each of its citizens, an idea of individual liberty in many ways unknown and
unprecedented in the modern world. And, in this respect, one can say that Hobbes has
some connection to the creation of what we think of as the modern liberal state with its
conception of private freedom as immunity from forced participation or forced
participation in politics, very different from the ancients. So what does this all mean?

Chapter 4. Hobbes and the Modern State [00:32:10]

Let me talk about what Hobbes has to say for us today, we who have in many ways
become Hobbes’s children. Hobbes gives us the definitive language of the modern state.
Yet, he remains in many ways as contested for us as he was in his own time. For many
today, Hobbes’s conception of the Leviathan state is synonymous with anti-liberal
absolutism. And yet for others, he opened the door to John Locke and the liberal theory
of government. He taught the priority of rights over duties and he argued that the
sovereign should serve the lowly interest or the lowly ends of providing peace and
security, leaving it to individuals to determine for themselves how best to live their lives.
Nonetheless, the liberty that subjects enjoy in Hobbes’s plan falls in that area that he
says the sovereign omits to regulate. Hobbes does not praise vigilance in defense of
liberty and he denounces all efforts to resist the government. At best, one could say
Hobbes is a kind of part-time liberal at best.

But Hobbes is best when he is providing us with, in many ways, the moral and
psychological language in which we think about government and the state. The state is a
product of a psychological struggle between the contending passions of pride and fear.
Fear, you will remember is associated with the desire for security, order, rationality, and
peace. Pride is connected with the love of glory, honor, recognition and ambition. All the
goods of civilization, Hobbes tells us, stem from our ability to control pride. The very title
of the book comes from this wonderful biblical passage from Job where Leviathan is
described as king of the children of pride. And the 19 laws of nature that Hobbes
develops in his book really are there simply to enumerate or instruct us about the virtues
of sociability and civility, especially directed against the sin of pride or hubris. So, the
modern state, as we know it and still have it, in many ways grew out of the Hobbesian
desire for security and the fear of death that can only be achieved at the expense of the
desire for honor and glory. The Hobbesian state was intended to secure the conditions of
life, even a highly civilized and cultivated life but one calculated in terms of self-interest
and risk avoidance. Hobbes wants us to be fearful and to avoid dangerous courses of
action that are inflamed by beliefs in honor, ambition, and the like. The Hobbesian
fearful man is not likely to become someone who risks life for liberty, for honor, or for a
cause. He’s more likely to be someone who plays by the rules, avoids dangers, and bets
on the sure thing. The Hobbesian citizen is not likely to be a risk taker, like a George
Washington or an Andrew Carnegie. He is more likely to think like an actuary or a CPA or
an insurance agent, always calculating the odds and finding ways to cover the damages.
Later political theorists, like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Nietzsche would even develop a
word for Hobbesian man. They would call him somewhat contemptuously the bourgeois.

But nevertheless, Hobbes was remarkably successful in converting us to his point of

view. The type of individual he tried to create, careful, self-interested, risk averse, this
has become the dominant ethos of our civilization, has it not? We even have entire
disciplines like economics and psychology and I dare even say modern political science
that reinforced this view of human nature. We have all become, whether we choose to
admit it or not, Hobbesians. And yet at the same time, and here is the paradox I think,
even a Hobbesian society cannot entirely exist without some individuals who are willing
to risk life and limb either for the sake of honor, for self-respect or even just from the
sheer joy that comes from risk itself. Remember my example on Monday of Ralph
Esposito. Why do people become firemen, policemen, soldiers, freedom fighters, all
activities that cannot be explained in terms of self-interest alone? Will not even a
Hobbesian society again require fire departments? And where will people come from
that, if they all follow the psychology of fear and self-interest that Hobbes wants to instill
in us? Hobbes regards these passions, what Plato called by the word thumos. Hobbes
regarded these passions in many ways as barbaric, as uncivilized and warlike and to
some degree he was right.

But even the Hobbesian state, Hobbes admits himself, the Hobbesian state lives in the
midst of a Hobbesian world; that is to say, the world of international relations is for
Hobbes simply the state of nature at large. The Hobbesian state will always exist in a
world of hostile other states, unregulated by some kind of higher law. States stand to
one another on the world stage as individuals do in the condition of nature; that is to
say, potential enemies with no higher authority by which to adjudicate their conflicts.
And in such a world, even a sovereign state will be endangered either from other states
or from groups and individuals devoted to terror and destruction. Think of September
11, 2001. This is a problem that a profound political scientist by the name of Pierre
Hassner, a French student of international politics, has described as the dialectic of the
bourgeois and the barbarian, a struggle that is to say between the modern Hobbesian
state with its largely pacified and satisfied citizen bodies and those pre-modern states or
maybe in some ways even post-modern states that are prepared to use the instruments
of violence, terror and suicide bombings to achieve their goals. A Hobbesian state,
paradoxically, still requires from its citizens, men and women prepared to fight to risk
everything in the defense of their way of life. But the Hobbesian point, the paradox being
that the Hobbesian bourgeois cannot entirely dispense with the barbarian, even in its
own midst. Can Hobbes explain this paradox? He seems to avoid it.

This problem has been brought out I think brilliantly in a recent book by a man named
James Bowman, a book calledHonor: a History. He wrote a history of honor. And here he
points out that while affairs of honor, as they are quaintly called, have largely
disappeared from advanced societies but honor still remains a consuming passion in
many parts of the world today including for him most importantly the Middle East.
Honor, in most societies, is thought to be not merely a personal quality, something like
medieval chivalry but is above all group honor, the honor that surrounds the family, the
extended clan, or the religious sect. An assault on one is an assault on all. This helps us
to explain, for instance, why in so many cultures the concept of saving face is so
important, even if to most modern Americans it seems relatively trivial. And one reason
Bowman believes this is that we have such a difficult time in understanding other
peoples and other cultures is that the very idea of defending one’s honor has largely
been devalued in the modern west. We tend to look at human behavior as a matter of
providing rational incentives for human action while most people, in fact, are driven by a
need for esteem and a desire to avoid humiliation.

I remember, for example, during the Vietnam War when Richard Nixon spoke about
achieving peace with honor, and this was largely mocked as a kind of ludicrous idea.
Honor to so many of us sounds quaint, like an honor code or the Boy Scouts’ code or
something like that or something primitive, some kind of primitive ethic which we
therefore don’t really understand. We don’t often see that it was in large parts Hobbes’
efforts to discredit this kind of warrior virtue, this kind of virtue of honor that is so much
a part of cultures that is also responsible for our current blindness.

And that brings me to my final point about our Hobbesian civilization that conceals from
us a very uncomfortable truth. Peace, the peace, security, and safety, what we might
call our bourgeois freedoms that we enjoy, rest on the fact, on the uncomfortable fact,
that there are still people who are willing to risk their lives for the sake of higher goals
like honor or duty. Is that irrational for them to do so? Hobbes would believe it is. I think
he would say yes. It doesn’t make sense from a purely Hobbesian point of view that
encourages us to think like rational actors interested mainly in safety and beating the
odds. Hobbes, in many ways, finds himself in the position of the young military lawyer
played in the following movie clip I’m going to show you.

Professor Steven Smith: Okay, is the point made? The point is made. Then I will not
even provide any further commentary. I only apologize that for some reason I couldn’t
get the picture.