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Routledge Philosophy GuideBook to

Hobbes and Leviathan

Hobbes is one of the most important figures in the history of ideas and political thought and his book Leviathan is widely recognised as one of the greatest works of political philosophy. In this new book Glen Newey offers a balanced guide to this key text that explores both its historical and philosophical aspects. The author introduces:

• the relevance of Hobbes’s ideas to modern political thought
• the major interpretations of Leviathan
• Hobbes’s life and the background of the Leviathan

The Routledge Philosophy GuideBook to Hobbes and Leviathan is the ideal introduction for students who wish to understand more about this important philosopher and this classic work of philosophy. Glen Newey is Professor of Politics and International Relations at the University of Keele.

Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason Sebastian Gardner

Mill on Liberty Jonathan Riley

Mill on Utilitarianism Roger Crisp

Wittgenstein and the Philosophical Investigations Marie McGinn

Spinoza and the Ethics Genevieve Lloyd

Heidegger and Being and Time, Second Edition Stephen Mulhall

Locke on Government D.A.Lloyd Thomas

Locke on Human Understanding E.J.Lowe

Derrida on Deconstruction Barry Stocker

Kant on Judgment Robert Wicks

Nietzsche on Art Aaron Ridley

Rorty and the Mirror of Nature James Tartaglia

Routledge Philosophy GuideBook to

Hobbes and Leviathan

Glen Newey

LONDON AND NEW YORK

CONTENTS

 - Introduction ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vii 

• 1 Hobbes’s life
• 2 Leviathan: the book
• 3 Human knowledge, reason and ignorance
• 4 The state of nature: law and right
• 5 State of nature to commonwealth
• 6 Contract and consent
• 7 Sovereignty, state, commonwealth
• 8 Law, crime, punishment
• 9 Religious liberty and toleration
• 10 Leviathan and international relations - Conclusion - NOTES - BIBLIOGRAPHY - INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The writing of this book has taken an unconscionable time—far longer, embarrassingly enough, than the composition of Leviathan itself—and I have incurred a number of debts. My overriding debt is to Linda Holt. She read the entire manuscript several times, an act far above and beyond the call of marital duty. Her sharp critical eye spotted mistakes which had escaped me, and her constant prodding to be clearer, while not always welcomed at the time, has invariably proven justified on closer reading. There can be very few academic writers who have the daily benefit of advice from someone with such acute critical intelligence and so strong an ability to empathise with the intellectual content of an academic book such as this. More importantly her companionship and engagement have provided constant support in the process of writing it. Her influence is present on every page. Several other people also read the book in draft and made valuable suggestions. My former doctoral supervisor and now colleague, John Horton, corrected a number of infelicities and encouraged me to clarify a number of passages which were unclear in the manuscript. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank him for many professional and personal acts of kindness over a period now of over twenty years. A beneficial consequence of my arrival at Keele has been access to the vast erudition of John Rogers, whose landmark scholarly edition of Leviathan appeared while this book was being written. His blend of philosophical acumen and expert knowledge of Hobbes has been an extremely valuable resource during the latter stages of writing this book. My series editor, Jonathan Wolff, also read the whole manuscript more than once. He has been a model editor, dispensing encouragement and advice in equal measure. His interventions have helped to make this a far better GuideBook than it would otherwise have been. I am also indebted to the lengthy list of editors at Routledge who have been involved with the project. All have shown forbearance in the face of my near-pathological inability to complete the book. I am particularly grateful to Priyanka Pathak for balancing the scholarly and commercial constraints with which any project of this kind has to contend. I am also indebted to suggestions made by an anonymous reader for Routledge. I am also very grateful to the Human Values Center at Princeton University The Center provided unmatched research facilities during a very enjoyable year I spent as a Laurance S.Rockefeller fellow there, where the first draft was written. I would particularly like to record my gratitude to George Kateb, now retired from the Center, and to Stephen Macedo. The arrival of Attila Newey during the writing of the book, and his increasingly animated interactions with his sister Laura, have provided a vivid domestic illustration of the state of nature. As time has worn on, he has learned how to switch off my computer with a single well-aimed jab of his forefinger, thereby saving me from numerous errors. Like everybody else mentioned above, he is not to be held responsible for any errors which remain.

INTRODUCTION

THE POLITICS OF CHAOS

A spectre haunts Leviathan, one of the foremost works of political philosophy ever written. The spectre is political breakdown, and the chaos which follows from it. And the emotion pervading the pages of Leviathan, which this vision of chaos evokes, is terror. As its author, Thomas Hobbes, wrote in his autobiography “fear and I were born twins together”. His mother gave birth to him on 5 April 1588, his delivery being hastened—or so Hobbes liked to say in later life—by the reported approach of the Spanish Armada, the fleet sent by King Philip II of Spain to invade England. During his adult years, much of Europe was convulsed by war. Hobbes was forced into political exile in 1640 by the political strife between King Charles I and Parliament. From exile in France, Hobbes observed the collapse of Charles’s rule in England, and the King’s eventual overthrow and execution at the hands of republican revolutionaries. In the most famous passage in Leviathan, Hobbes graphically expressed this dread of violent turmoil. The passage is known to many who have never read the book. Hobbes is discussing what life is like in the state of nature, when human beings lack effective government.

Whatsoever is consequent to a time of war, when every man is enemy to every man, the same is consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security, than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition, there is no industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently no culture of the earth [i.e. agriculture]; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing such 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; and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. ( L p89)

In short, Hobbes is saying, a life without government is not worth living. Leviathan was first published in 1651, over three hundred and fifty years ago. Why should we still bother to read it now? After all, in many respects our world is quite unlike the one in which Hobbes was writing. Mid-seventeenth-century Europe was shaken by religious strife. Tolerant liberal democracies familiar to us today, with their freedom of religious worship and political expression, lay far in the future. Many countries were still subject to the rule of an absolute monarch, as in the France of King Louis XIV. There were few international institutions or organisations of the kind we

citizens’ compliance with the law—notice the effect on car drivers, for instance, when they come within range of an operating speed camera. In fact, it is precisely when force is not directly visible that the power of the sovereign is working as Hobbes intended. It works when the sovereign is powerful enough to instil in citizens a well-founded fear of the consequences if they break the law. “The passion to be reckoned upon,” Hobbes says, “is fear” ( L p99). At the same time, of course, the state of nature—the alternative to politics—is so awful precisely because it is also a state of constant fear. Hobbes, then, has to navigate between two opposite fears, of life without political authority, and life with it. Leviathan would not have survived as long as it has if Hobbes had merely tried to scare his readers. The fearfulness of the state of nature carries its own political message. If we have good reason to be afraid of the state of nature, we have at least that reason to prefer anything which prevents it, or helps us to get out of it—assuming, which some readers of Hobbes have always disputed, that his alternative is less terrible than the state of nature. This brings us to the double-edged core of Hobbes’s theory. For his solution, in effect, is to create something which is fearful—the Leviathan of the book’s title. This is an absolute ruler, in the form either of a single all-powerful individual or (as Hobbes also allowed) a “sovereign assembly” such as a ruling council. The point of creating an all- powerful sovereign is precisely that it will be more terrible than the purely private force which any individual can muster in the state of nature. The sovereign’s overwhelming power is what gives everybody reason to agree to obey; anyone who fails to do so, having already agreed to do so, is a “fool” ( L p101). That is, those who are subject to the power of the sovereign are cowed into obedience. But of course the other side of this coin is the danger, well known to us now, of tyranny by the sovereign. In his efforts to ensure that the sovereign is strong enough to enforce order, Hobbes risks making the sovereign a despot. Like Hobbes, our fate is to be caught between two opposed fears: of life without effective government, and life with a government which (at least in its tyrannical form) is all too effective.

LEVIATHAN AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

Hobbes’s fork of fear is familiar enough to us. For instance, the dread of tyrannical government, and the dread of lawlessness, have been felt by turns by the citizens of Iraq first under Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship, and then since the 2003 invasion in murderous internecine conflict. However, I have also pointed out some basic differences between our world and the mid-seventeenth-century environment in which Hobbes was writing. Much of Leviathan, particularly Part 3 and Part 4, is devoted to matters which we would now regard as being politically marginal at best: for example, the authorship of books of the Bible (ch. 33), the sig-nificance of miracles (ch. 37), the legitimate extent of the political power of the church (ch. 42). This has meant that Parts 3 and 4 have received much less attention than Part 1 and especially Part 2, which contains the kernel of Hobbes’s political theory. Nonetheless, even when Hobbes addresses matters which may seem politically marginal to us, he never forgets their political significance. For him the key political question is: “Who rules?”, particularly in the face of deep disagreements about religion,

Introduction 3

morality and politics. Hobbes’s detailed discussion of miracles in Part 3 seems at first to be devoid of political relevance. He notes that what is regarded as miraculous depends on the education and experience of the observer; and also, more importantly, of those who receive reports of miracles. Moreover, because they are taken as signs of God’s will, and those who witness them are regarded as divinely inspired, miracles are potent political weapons. Then Hobbes argues ( L pp305–6) that because different people will have different opinions both on what counts as a miracle, and whether a given report of a miracle should be believed, we need an authority to decide these questions. Since reports of miracles always make claims to power, to allow a public free-for-all is a recipe for anarchy. Judgement on miracles has to be handed over to the ruler: “private reason must submit to the public” ( L p306). In his insistence that public reason must trump private opinion, Hobbes in fact anticipates a central claim of modern philosophical liberalism. Some of Hobbes’s insights have been lost by modern theorists. Modern academic political philosophy, at least in the English-speaking world, usually tries to infer political arrangements from moral considerations, such as the idea that everyone is owed equal respect, or that nobody should try to enforce a political regime which others could reasonably reject. Most often, it assumes that we are all subject to certain moral norms, and tries to work out what these norms require of us politically. However, as modern liberals are well aware, societies are beset by internal disagreement over morality. The problem then is to try to withstand the forces of moral conflict: for example, modern political theorists sometimes try to devise a set of principles which are morally acceptable because they can command universal agreement. But such arguments tend to undermine themselves. It starts off with the political problems posed by disputes over morality or “values”, and then tries to resolve the disputes by coming up with a moral solution. The risk is that the solution is open to disputes similar to those which caused the political problem in the first place. 2 If so, the agreement is no longer “universal”, and theorists find themselves reduced to saying, in effect, that people who do not agree with the suggested principles, at any rate ought to do so. This is a journey up the hill and then back down again. Hobbes would have had little time for this approach to political philosophy. His starting-point is admittedly the same as many modern liberal thinkers: the fact of persistent disagreement, which nowadays is often ascribed to the pluralism or multiculturalism of modern societies. But from there Hobbes’s approach diverges radically. Modern liberal theories typically seek to find a common moral grounding for political principles. By contrast, Hobbes tries to identify a motive, or set of motives, which can have overriding force for people, and then asks what set of political arrangements will result if people act on the motive in question. He finds it in the natural impulse towards self-preservation: “the final end,” Hobbes says, which people have in setting up political authority over themselves, “is the foresight of their own preservation” ( L p117). Precisely because Hobbes gives such weight to the motive of self-preservation, he thinks that people will be prepared to relin-quish a great deal in exchange for a secure state (or “common-wealth”, as he calls it). Thus he believes that they will readily hand over responsibility for law-making to the sovereign—who may be an individual, a monarch, or an assembly like Parliament or Congress—and with it full discretion over the content of the law. This makes Hobbes’s state look much more authoritarian than those of

Hobbes and leviathan 4

As Hobbes notes, the problem is to find a conclusion which impresses itself on reason with just this force. If we do,

we are not to renounce…our natural reason…By the captivity of our understanding is not meant a submission of the intellectual faculty to the will of any man, but of the will to obedience where obedience is due. For sense, memory, understanding, reason and opinion are not in our power to change…[and] are not effects of our will, but our will of them. We then captivate our understanding and reason, when we forbear contradiction. ( L pp255–56)

Reason is both strong and weak, and has to be in order to serve Hobbes’s purposes. It is weak insofar as its power to discover the truth about certain aspects of the world (such as the nature of God) is very limited. But it is strong to the extent that, just because of this, it imposes a stringent standard on belief: if this power is indeed weak, then reasonable belief and action need to take account of this. While reason cannot stop people from holding beliefs which are irrational, reason can devise means to counter the ill effects of their doing so. Hobbes thought not that reason should resign from the public sphere, but that the sovereign—the supreme ruler—should simply decide which religious and political doctrines should be publicly endorsed. He knew that it would be impossible to force all individuals to believe these doctrines, as private citizens (e.g. L p323). Again this offers a strong contrast with most modern political philosophy, and in particular the doctrine of neutrality —the idea that the state should remain neutral or impartial between different ideas of the good life, or of the meaning of life, including such matters as religion. The most widely held justification for neutrality runs as follows: since reasonable people hold widely differing views on the nature of the good, any such view is reasonably rejectable; if a view is reasonably rejectable, it cannot be justified to enforce that view politically (e.g. by force of law); but all views are reasonably rejectable; so the state, to be justified, must endorse no such view. It must remain neutral between different ideas of the good life. Thus, liberals who support neutrality rule out theocratic states of the kind which exist in today’s Iran, or indeed an established religion such as the Church of England. They argue that beliefs about the good life or the meaning of life are inevitably controversial, so that it is unjustifiable for the state to impose specific beliefs about these matters on everybody. On this view, the state should be like a referee, rather than one of the competing teams, impartially enforcing rules which apply equally to all sides. Hobbes knew all too well that questions about the meaning of life were controversial. But he thought that these views had to take second place behind the maintenance of the state. Suppose we grant the claim of neutrality that the state cannot justifiably impose its idea of the good on everybody in the face of reasonable disagreement about what the good is. It is clear that this approach assumes that certain goods, and in particular that of security are already in place. But what if the only way to maintain the state were to impose some such idea, however controversial? It is clear that the neutrality argument assumes that security is already guaranteed without it, there is no state to act as a referee.

Hobbes and leviathan 6

Worries about justification are, to this extent, a luxury which can be indulged only when the fundamental political good of security is already in place. It may be said that security itself can be undermined by an unduly repressive political authority But, first, this view is itself controversial, and relies on assumptions about individuals’ motivations within a repressive regime.^3 And, second, even if it is the case that security is best served by a regime of toleration rather than repression, the argument is no longer about justification in the abstract, as it is with neutrality but about the best way to promote security Hobbes’s alternative view, then, puts to one side questions of justification in favour of a more pragmatic approach. The sovereign—whether an individual or assembly—can and should decide controversial matters of doctrine. The fact that, in the abstract, it may be impossible to justify these doctrines—in the sense of providing adequate warrant for believing them—is not the point. It is not the point, for Hobbes, because there are political goods which take precedence over truth. This is why Hobbes is a deeply troubling figure for philosophers, most of whom see themselves as engaged in a project of inquiry —and if the notion of inquiry is to make sense, it cannot do without the notion of truth, at which inquiry aims. Hobbes says, not that we cannot get hold of the truth, but that other things matter more. As he says about law, it “depends not on the books of moral philosophy The authority of writers, without the authority of the commonwealth, makes not their opinions law, be they never so true…yet it is by the sovereign power that it is law” ( L p191). The nature and limits of the “sovereign power” lie at the heart of Leviathan.

Introduction 7

On the recommendation of Magdalen Hall’s Principal John Wilkinson in 1608, Hobbes was recruited to act as a tutor to the future second Earl of Devonshire, William Cavendish. In fact Hobbes’s duties extended beyond those of a tutor (Hobbes was only about two years older than his master), to acting as a general factotum in the Cavendish household. This passage into the service of the aristocracy was one made by many intellectually able young men of humble origins. Hobbes spent most of the seventy-one further years of his life as a member of the household either of the Earls of Devonshire, or of their cousins, the Earls of Newcastle. Not much is known about Hobbes’s activities between 1610 and 1614. It was once thought that he was in Europe with his protégé William Cavendish during this period, but there are strong grounds for thinking that they did not leave England until 1614 (Martinich 1999 pp29–30). In that year he and Cavendish undertook a tour of France and Italy, where Hobbes learned Italian. They returned in 1615. He seems to have made the acquaintance of Francis Bacon, the Lord Chancellor, soon after his return to England in 1615, perhaps helping Bacon to translate the latter’s Essays from English to Italian before their publication in 1618. Hobbes was the source for John Aubrey’s claim in his biography of Bacon that the Lord Chancellor died from a chill caught during a disastrous refrigeration experiment, which involved stuffing a (dead) chicken with snow. In 1620 an anonymous volume was published entitled Horae subsecivae (“Leisure Hours”), comprising a number of essays, some of which have recently been plausibly argued to have been written by Hobbes himself. It is possible to see the foundations of Hobbes’s mature philosophy in two of them, “A Discourse Upon the Beginning of Tacitus” and “A Discourse of Laws” (see Hobbes 1995). Hobbes continued in the Cavendish family service, and was a board member and nominal shareholder on the Virginia Company, in which the Cavendish family maintained substantial interests (Malcolm 1981). William Cavendish died in 1628, having succeeded as second Earl of Devonshire only two years earlier. This temporarily left Hobbes without employment in the Cavendish family. Through the good offices of the Earl of Newcastle, however, he soon secured employment with Sir Gervase Clifton, a friend of the Cavendish family. After a second European tour to France and Switzerland as the tutor of Sir Gervase’s son in 1629–30, he returned to the service of the Cavendish family in the household of William’s widow, the Dowager Countess of Devonshire, at Hardwick Hall. In 1629 he published a translation of the ancient Greek historian Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War. In his Autobiography Hobbes wrote that Thucydides was a favourite of his among historians because he showed “how stupid democracy is” (Hobbes 18411 lxxxviii). Thereafter Hobbes extended his intellectual contacts and reputation both in England and abroad. During the 1630s Hobbes associated with members of the so-called “Tew Circle”, which met at the home of Lucius Cary Viscount Falkland, in the village of Great Tew in north Oxfordshire, and was involved in the intellectual coterie which met at the Earl of Newcastle’s home in Welbeck, Nottinghamshire. The Tew Circle included such friends (and sometimes future exfriends) of Hobbes as Edward Hyde, who later became Earl of Clarendon. Hyde wrote a history of the “English Civil War”,^2 the religious and political conflict which raged across the British Isles between 1642 and 1651. Others of Hobbes’s acquaintance included the lawyer and political theorist John Selden, the poet Edmund Waller, theologian William Chillingworth, and the Oxford

Hobbes’s life 9

cleric Gilbert Sheldon. The Circle was familiar with the work of Hobbes’s great contemporary the Dutch legal and political theorist Hugo Grotius, and with continental philosophical doctrines to which Hobbes had already been exposed. This exposure arose from a third tour of mainland Europe which Hobbes undertook from 1634 to 1636, accompanying the third Earl of Devonshire (who, though still a minor, had succeeded to the title when his father died in 1628). They visited France and Italy including two prolonged stays in Paris. There he met Marin Mersenne, a Friar who kept in contact with a wide range of European philosophers and intellectuals, and helped to spread their ideas. Hobbes also met the great astronomer Galileo in Florence. Of his acquaintance with Mersenne, he proudly writes in his verse Autobiography that after showing the Friar his writings on motion, “I was reputed a philosopher” (line 136). His translation of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, with the English title A Briefe of the Art of Rhetorique, was published in 1637. The translation incorporated radical revisions to Aristotle’s text (it was in fact a translation of a Latin summary of the work which Hobbes had previously used for tuition purposes). During the later 1630s Hobbes also wrote a tract in Latin on optics. The 1630s were also years of political unrest in England. King Charles I failed to summon Parliament during the eleven years between the dissolution of 1629 and the Short Parliament of April 1640. In the election for this parliament, Hobbes stood as a candidate for Derby but the influence of Devonshire was not enough to secure Hobbes’s election. The King’s eleven years of personal rule (i.e. rule by Charles I and his advisers without summoning Parliament) were marked by growing dissent, including the famous Ship Money case of 1637, which raised the question whether there were any limitations on royal prerogative. Charles also launched a disastrous invasion of Scotland to enforce the Anglican prayer book in 1639. As political ferment grew, Hobbes published the proroyalist Elements of Law in May 1640. Moves against Charles’ supporters by the Long Parliament, which opened later in 1640, caused Hobbes to leave for Paris in November of that year. He would remain in exile for eleven years. In France he renewed his acquaintance with Mersenne and the other French intellectuals he had met on his visit to Paris in 1634–36. His second major work of political theory, the Latin De cive, was published in 1642 (an English version was published in 1647, as was a French translation by Hobbes’s friend Samuel Sorbière), though it may have been substantially complete by 1640. De cive was part of a projected trilogy whose other two parts did not appear until the 1650s. Hobbes also wrote a lengthy refutation of the Catholic philosopher Thomas White’s book De Mundo, which was not published during his lifetime (now usually referred to as the Anti-White ) (Hobbes 1976). 3 He wrote a tract on optics in English, later incorporated into De homine (Hobbes 1841 Vol. II). Hobbes remained in France until after the publication of Leviathan in mid-1651, by which time Charles had been defeated in the civil wars, executed, and replaced by a republican regime. Hobbes seems to have begun writing the book in 1649, and must have composed it very rapidly: he had written thirty-seven of the chapters (which became forty-seven in all, though Hobbes originally projected fifty) by May 1650. The rest of the book was more or less finished by the end of that year. It was published in London in April or May 1651. 4

Hobbes and leviathan 10