These articles and excerpts explore the short, medium and long-term reception of Leviathan showing how the Enlightenment struggle with Hobbes shapes the emergence of empiricism and, by extension, Enlightenment sociology and psychology. This, by extension, also shapes and is shaped by the impact of Hobbesian theories on conceptions of order and disorder in the international arena? What do the excerpts from Locke, Mandeville and Hume suggest about the relationship between empirical epistemologies and the conditions of power that link the sexual and racial contracts?
The student responses quoted below were informed by the following readings:
- Jon Parkin, “The Reception of Hobbes’s “Leviathan”” (2000)
- Paul Sagar, “Chapter 1: Sociability” (2018)
- David Wooton, “Chapter 4: Selfish Systems: Hobbes and Locke” (2018)
- David Armitage, “Hobbes and the Foundations of Modern International Thought” (2004)
Hirschman follows the philosophical evolution of ideas that eventually led to the modern capitalistic climate, in which profit and exploitation are seen as commonplace. In doing so, Hirschman tracks the ideas of Hobbes, Hume, Mandeville, and Smith and the role their contributions played in this evolution. In particular, Hirschman notes how Hobbes’s ideology (paired with Machiavelli’s) aided in a more pessimistic perception of human nature in the general discussion that was happening at the time as to how leaders (and, at times, people in general) should work to control their impulses or their “passions”…
However, the readings from this week seem to criticize Hirschman’s treatment of these other philosophers’ ideas in relation to Hobbes, with Quentin Taylor in particular noting how Hirschman, even though he acknowledges that Hobbes was significant in introducing new ideas to the discussions being had at the time, seems to deny Hobbes any significant impact on economic thought. Taylor supports this idea by claiming that Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” is a direct resolution to the problem of self-interest identified by Hobbes, a connection that is not as intensely identified by Hirschman.…
As for my personal opinion, however, I believe it is important that all of these ideas (Hobbes, Hume, Smith, etc.) stem from a place of trying to predict and outline human behavior and human nature. That is exactly how Hirschman’s book starts, with philosophers trying to figure out how to control the passions, how to predict human nature and then control it. Unfortunately, humans are more unpredictable than not, and I feel like, at least in terms of political economy, this can be seen in the institution of slavery. By the time the Civil War approached, slavery was unprofitable and inefficient, and it was identified to be so by the people back then. So why was it still maintained? If people were so selfish, would it not make sense to get rid of something unprofitable? Would Smith’s invisible hand not have moved?
– Aryan Ashraf
Reading through the Taylor situated Smith more firmly as a post-Hobbesian for me. Taylor shows how Hobbes’s vision was compatible with “buying and selling, making contracts, choosing a trade, and traveling freely,” all aspects of the civil society that Smith attempts to pursue (422). However, while Hobbes grounds civil society in the political through the Sovereign (even if, as Taylor notes, Hobbes’s state was “considerably smaller” than other contemporary visions), Smith looks to the market as the guarantor of this vision of civil society (421). Thus, the reduction from Hobbes’s two drives to Smith’s one allows Smith to make the move from the political to the economic as the foundation of civil society.
Additionally, the legacy of Hobbes on Smith becomes clearer when we take into account Sagar’s treatment of Mandeville vis-à-vis Hirschman’s. Hirschman positions Mandeville as an intermediary between old ways of thinking and Smith. As Hirschman notes, “Mandeville had put forth similar thoughts” to Smith and that Mandeville’s treatment of one particular vice (luxury) was echoed in Smith’s sole focus on “cupidity or avarice” (112 & 18). Sagar shows us that Mandeville’s work was fundamentally a reaction to Hobbes, making him a mediator between Hobbes and Smith. Mandeville took up Hobbes’s starting point but showed how pride, rather than fear, would ultimately lead us into a state of sociability: Mandeville focused on “turning pride in new directions” such that men could live together in large societies (Sagar 48). If Smith’s work is a clarification of Mandeville, then he implicitly accepts the Hobbesian premise Mandeville starts from, but goes in a new direction—he is a post-Hobbesian.
– J. Doe
Hobbes’s “market-based notion of human value” and the commodification of human labor as a key characteristic of an early capitalist society has significant implications for the role of slavery in the development of capitalism and must be further examined (Taylor 423, 426). This notion of the commodification of human labor may be a crucial thinking point between Hirschman’s The Passions and the Interests and Mills’s The Racial Contract.
Taylor even mentions Hirschman’s The Passions and the Interests in his survey on appearances of Hobbes in political economics theory, stating that Hirschman portrays Hobbes as “one among many” and fails to directly link Hobbes to Smith and classical economics (418). Sagar discusses the links between Hobbes, Mandeville on human sociability and self-passions, and David Hume on pride as the source of social hierarchy and artificial justice, perhaps providing the connections that Taylor notes the absence of. Hume’s concept of the unifying power of a people as from their own will, rather than the representation of a sovereign, provides a picture of a state without sovereignty and may be vital to our consideration of modern capitalism under The Passions and the Interests (64).
– Emily Lathers
While Hobbes proposed two fundamental drives for people, the intellectual and idealistic drives such as honor, duty and responsibility, and the materialistic drive of human comfort, Smith is attempting to coalesce these into one fundamental drive. Additionally, Smith tries to transition away from the Sovereign and State based system of Hobbes and closer to a more modern system in which market forces drive society. Further, Hobbes views humans as just another part of the entire overall market, with human labor as another commodity to be controlled by either the state or the collective with which the state is formed. To some extent this seems innocent, because the market and state incentives drive the value of jobs and thus determine what people will do, however it can also take a darker path and point towards slavery.
– Kip Rodes
To me, Mandeville’s endorsement of the private interest over the public good seems fundamentally anti-Hobbesian, in that it builds a sovereign not out of the interest of their people, but out of scrupulousness. According to Hirschman, Mandeville celebrated avarice as a means to contribute to the public interest. While Hobbes didn’t explicitly condemn the use of one’s individual passions, to indulge your own interests in an office built on the will of the people seems to me to be a misappropriation of the covenant of power. However, as Paul Sagar writes, Mandeville’s The Fable of The Bees has a satirical twinge to it—making fun of those that peruse their self-interest in the name of the public good. He seems to build off of Hirschman’s characterization of Mandeville to contradict it on the basis of his further work.… Smith seems to take Hobbes’s philosophy of networked interest and run with it—John Parking traces his influence from Hobbes while building his model of the Invisible hand—which correlates with Hirschman’s analysis of Smith’s “unitended effect” of acting on self-interest. Again, while this theory may build off of Hobbes’s observations, it does not seem Hobbesian in nature—an idealized monarch who represents their people should act through their people’s interests, not their own. According to Taylor, this dissonance is not accidental, and Smith did make an effort to separate himself from Hobbes—perhaps to distinguish his philosophy from the existing platform he had built it off of. Sagar charts Hume and Smith’s creation of a non-Hobbesian theory of the state one “without sovereignty”—doing away with Hobbes proposition of a unified state. This paves the way for the self-serving politician to act on his own best interests in the “interest” of the state.
– Walter Ben Rosin
Hobbes influence on enlightenment thinkers is really interesting because it is all at once positive (they agree and ideas are traced to Hobbes) and negative (they disagree and ideas are given to counter Hobbes) as many of the authors this week present. The most interesting disagreement in enlightenment thinkers to me was found in the article Sociability and how disagreements about the conclusions drawn from Hobbes seem to spur on thinkers like Hume and Smith to reconstruct their arguments to support their polarizing conclusions. The picture that Sagar seems to present is one where Humes and Smith reconstructed their ideas of human nature, and society to support their different conclusions on political structure and sovereignty.
I didn’t find this idea so clearly in the articles but from their analysis of responses to Hobbes, I wonder how much Hobbes was right when he claimed to have created political science. It seems that his work was so influential that he was the starting point for saying anything new. His ideas on the relationship between human nature and political structure seem to be taken for granted as ways to explain and describe the nature of sovereignty, but why? I’m sure Hobbes is not the first to do so in this way but the problems he set up shaped the following generation of thinkers. Particularly his pessimistic take on the anti sociable nature of humans and his positioning of self interest as the primary motivator behind all human drives.
– Kestrel Valdez
Taylor situates Smith’s Wealth of Nations in opposition to Hobbes’s thinking that “Wealth… is power” adding that “the person who either acquires, or succeeds to a great fortune, does not necessarily acquire or succeed to any political power, either civil or military” (Taylor 420). True power, for Smith, lies in the pursuit of self-interest for the greater good of society, be it wealth or some other less tangible form of capital. Similarly, Hume is presented as a champion of “self-love,” believing that all acts of benevolence are selfish to some extent and thus self-interest is necessary in begetting charity. Meanwhile, Mandeville insists that personal gain is the only truly viable incentive for societal success. Combined into one doctrine, we arrive at Sagar’s discernment that the goal of humanity elusive success, a never-ending competition of outperformance (29). For Hirschman, this capitalist world is hell-bent on staunch individualism and the obsessive pursuit of personal gain, a trait inherent to his Hobbesian understanding of human nature. Channelling these (literally) self centered ideas of power, benevolence, and success into political economics expands self-interest beyond survival and into materialism and mass consumption, creating a problem that cannot be confined by one or the other, but instead pervades all of society by political and economic means. Survival cannot be pursued for its own sake becomes the very means of existence are dependent on the accruement of wealth.
– Nina Zhuo