How does Noel Malcolm describe Hobbes’s theory of power? What do your readings of Leviathan—and anything else we’ve read this semester—add to Malcolm’s reading? What do Hamilton, Mortimer & Scott, and/or Armitage reveal about the social, political, and ideological forces that shaped this Hobbesian theory of power? What does this exercise reveal about the contingent origins of Hobbes’s Leviathan? What do these contingent origins suggest about the implications of “Leviathan’s Revenge” as manifested in the effect of Covid19 on Leviathan’s legacy as revealed in the articles from the Spring and summer of 2020? the age of Coronavirus as represented by the three articles from the Spring and summer of 2020.
The student responses quoted below were informed by the following readings:
- Noel Malcolm, “Hobbes Science of Politics and His Theory of Science” (2002)
- James J. Hamilton, “The Social Context of Hobbes’s Political Thought” (2014)
- David Armitage, “The Cromwellian Protectorate and the Language of Empire” (1992)
- Sarah Mortimer and David Scott, “Leviathan and the War of the Three Kingdoms” (2015)
- Christian Oliver, “Of Leviathan and Lockdowns,” Politico, (April 30, 2020)
- David Lay Williams, “What Would Hobbes Say about the Pandemic? Governments should protect lives – and help the poor,” Washington Post (May 18, 2020)
- Eileen Hunt Botting, “A novel (coronavirus) reading of Hobbes’s Leviathan” (20 July 2020)
The Hobbesian theory of power states that people form the commonwealth, the Leviathan, and obey it out of a fear of death in the brutish state of nature (a pseudoscientific chain of cause and effect is used to reach this conclusion: envy leads to war leads to fear leads to formation of the commonwealth). If this is the case, how does one explain suicide in the Hobbesian philosophy, especially within commonwealths? There are many ways to argue against Hobbes’s logic because, in the end, his theory is not a science, it only uses the language of science to hopefully convince the reader of the theory’s veracity—Hobbes finds power in the immutability of science and tries to employ the aesthetics of that immutability in order to give more power to his own philosophies.
…Leviathan was born out of a tumultuous time period strife with violence, death, and immense social and political change. This makes the re-emergence of Hobbes’s ideas in pandemic-era literature all the more reasonable: humanity is going through a similar period of violence, death, and change, arguably more so given the amplifying abilities of technology, which yields similar ideas of wanting citizens to yield to the government or wanting the government to be stronger in order to ensure the most survival. These ideas are manifested most evidently in the Oliver and Williams articles, with the Oliver articles calling attention to the violent origins of Leviathan and with the Williams article outlining reasons why Leviathan seems to provide reasonable solutions to the problem of the pandemic (due to similar violent origins leading to similar desires in people as the English Civil War did to Hobbes back then).
– Aryan Ashraf
I’m not confident enough to make the claim that Hobbes subsumes the economic to the social (although Hamilton does write that “the laborer’s labor is a commodity because it is a form of power,” and thus an expression of human power), and thus ultimately to the Sovereign, but it definitely appears that way. Hamilton even tells us that Hobbes “harbored traditional prejudices against the greed of those engaged in trade” and claimed that these men (proto-capitalists?) were “subordinate [in] influence to that of the aristocracy” (17). Our previous discussions of Hobbes’s social position seem consonant with this—Hobbes was someone who had ensconced himself in the world of the aristocrats, although not one himself, and adopted a variety of their views. Accordingly, he held little esteem for the rising bourgeoisie.
… Man today serves—at least—two masters. On the one hand, we are citizens and our allegiances lie with our government and its representatives. On the other, we are Homines oeconomici and we must look to the market for our livelihood. For the Sovereign to end civil and religious strife, he needed to be the ultimate arbiter of the Commonwealth and the Church—this he could do. Today, however, ensuring peace would mean ending strife caused by economic pressures—this the Sovereign cannot do. He can be head of the Commonwealth and head of the Church, but he can’t be head of the economy. Returning to Marx again, the commodity fetish reveals that capitalism really does move by itself; it is its own form of motion, yet it is subject to laws that reside within the sphere of capital itself, we as humans are unable to control them (even though we set them into motion). For this reason, the Sovereign’s power today cannot extend to the economic sphere and is thus undermined. Hobbes is not to be judged as right or wrong, but rather to be considered an expression of his historical epoch, not of ours. The owl of Minerva has taken flight—it isn’t returning.
– J. Doe
Hamilton discusses the socioeconomic context of Hobbes’s Leviathan, including social class and political sympathies, and argues that more macro-level social contextualization is needed in intellectual history today. Hobbes is portrayed here as growing up one of the “common people” but reaching “acquired gentility” by his death (p. 20).… Social value, for Hobbes here, is therefore dependent on nobility, titles, and wealth, but not from one’s lineage, land, or birthright (p. 23). This likely reflects Hobbes’s own social mobility, as his social view would not contradict his status as “acquired gentility” (p. 20). Hamilton describes the peerage and gentry as differentiated from the working class by the existence of leisure—leisure to read and leisure to explore science (p. 25). This may explain some of Hobbes’s emphasis on the theory of science in Leviathan, as at this time science was almost entirely practiced by the educated, wealthy, and to use Hamilton’s term, “better sort” (p. 25).
It is also worth analyzing Hobbes’s view of the working class, which is interpreted differently in the articles by Williams and Botting. Williams writes of Hobbes’s commonwealth with the desire to protect from poverty, “If the sovereign wants to keep its job, it must care for the needs of the poor” (p. 92), whereas Botting points out, “Although Hobbes gestured toward the political need to provide for the ‘wants’ of ‘the poor,’ his priority was not so much to care for the dispossessed, but rather to protect the power of a ‘rich’ and sovereign ‘king’” (p. 100). I find myself agreeing with Botting here, as if Hobbes had truly wanted his ideal commonwealth to support the working classes and limit poverty, then Hobbes’s absolute sovereign might have had public accountability and he might have found more similarities in the platforms of the Diggers and Levellers than with the Royalists. We thus must ask, what would Hobbes think of 21st century class divide and extreme wealth disparity? Hamilton quotes Hobbes with ““Prudence… in priuate men, iustly and moderately to enrich themselues.” But he complained that “the most part of rich subiects, that haue made themselues so by craft and trade,” care only about “present profit.” He decreed that a person is “Worthiest of Riches, that has the qualities most requisite for the well using of them” (p. 30)
– Emily Lathers
Another effect of the terrors Hobbes was subjected to is his focus on survival and stability over liberty. While liberty became the hallmark of many political philosophers in the following years, especially as the debates became about slavery and colonialism, Hobbes was fighting a war of religion rather than one of freedom. This, in many ways divided his country along far more divisive lines, and forced him to determine a more cutthroat policy. In the end, I believe that Hobbesian theory is the most reliable route to ending many of the modern day problems. However, it is a route that requires collectively abandoning our political liberty – something that is unlikely to happen. The advances of liberty have given us a taste of freedom that we are loathe to relinquish. And in the end, Hobbes is trying to save his country from an inside force tearing his country apart through concepts of honor and religion, and his text is geared towards that outcome. Meanwhile, later philosophers were attempting to reconcile freedom, and modern philosophers are merely trying to reconcile self-determination and the will of the state. While we are faced with a crisis, it is not on the same scale as the religious crises faced in the 17th century, and thus Hobbes text should be read with that understanding in mind. While it is still applicable, we need to determine how much of it is necessary, and how much can be left in the 17th century to maintain our modern freedom.
– Kip Rodes
The natural laws of science, which are first created in the platonic world and then applied to phenomena we see around us, do not have a place in Hobbes’s courting of royalist favor. My analysis of Hobbes’s “axioms” was assisted by a work I didn’t think would be relevant in this class: “The Road to Reality”, by an Astrophysicist, Roger Penrose. I stopped reading his book by chapter 5 (too much math!) but his depiction of Platonic deduction, and its existence independent from our universe, helped me Understand why Hobbes’s work cannot be born in euclidian axioms—instead of created from abstract definitions and existing to serve their own, purely logical purposes, Hobbes’s laws are created of his own passions and those of his royalist compatriots. They are not of the platonic “world” that Penrose described—they are merely observations of our own reality, not creations in the universe of idealized thought.
Turning to the articles applying Hobbes to our own reality, I wonder if Hobbes is at all applicable to the world we see today. It is born of wildly different political and social circumstances, and if Malcolm, Hamilton, Mortimer, Scott, and Penrose are to be believed, Hobbes’s work is far from universally applicable, as it is created from influences and pressures that don’t apply to those studying it today. Although Oliver, Williams and Botting all draw interesting lessons from Hobbes’s valuing of the people under the Sovereign, and the need for a legitimate ruler to protect those people to retain power, they can only grasp at straws when suggesting how Hobbes “would have wanted” us to tackle the pandemic. As is illustrated by their varying interpretations of his work, Hobbes’s contemporary pressures have made his writing too inconsistent to be axiomatic—and thus it is wildly inconsistent when applied to the world around us. I don’t know if Hobbes’s work truly has a relevant future in today’s world. It may be too tied to the circumstances of its creation.
– Walter Ben Rosin
The most salient aspect of Malcolms writing was his analysis that tracks the origins of the artificial man metaphor in Leviathan from the clock analogy in De Cive. Malcolm claims that this tracking shows that the primary importance of the artificial man metaphor is that “ it is artificial, not that it resembles a man.” (Malcolm, p. 6) This adds another layer of understanding to my understanding of Hobbes’s theory of power because it seems to indicate that the although the source of power still might be the individual parts (the men that comprise it), the actual thing that makes it so powerful is that it simply is, that it is constructed. The parts may have some power on their own but the construction, the arrangement, harnessing of the individuals is what makes the Leviathan a powerful entity. Power is inherent in the individuals but it is amplified, experienced and manifested once it is introduced into a constructed system.
The focus we have given to Hobbes theory of power is interesting but I think tricky as we start to see it taken up and applied outside in new contexts. The stress these authors have put on the context of Hobbes shows a faulty comparison many make with Leviathan to the present. It seems many of Skinner’s critics applied here as we forget that in our present day, the state has infinitely more power over us and our lives than Hobbes’ England did. So when Hobbes advocates for a strong state, would he still believe the same. When personal liberties are more easily given up (increased surveillance technology) is it fair for us to call on Hobbes to support these claims?
– Kestrel Valdez
I find the interaction between Sovereignty, Faith, and Liberty of particular interest. Though Armitage explores a variety of nuances and applications regarding the construction of empire, the Hobbesian Commonwealth finds itself in a strange place within this specific framework. Hobbes maintains that Faith is internal meaning that the performance of Faith can be manipulated, but the integrity of Faith cannot. Here, Empire is treated as a figure capable of Faith despite being an artificial entity. This Faith operates under its own Sovereignty, but Empire can be asked to perform another Faith if the English Commonwealth asks. In this setup, the Sovereign answers to the Empire who answers to the Commonwealth, a hierarchy of artifice that, in Hamilton’s “broader” context, necessarily informs Hobbes’s understand of Sovereign Power. Hierarchy is inherent to Empire and thus inherent to Commonwealth because, in the context of imperialism, it is the only tool whereby absolute control has proven to be possible.
Hobbes’s Leviathan was a product of Hobbes’s imagined solutions to real historical problems, but most of those problems were the ones that affected him. When projected onto the problems of the present, we are applying hypothetical historical solutions outside of their context. Oliver, Williams, and Botting make Leviathan relevant to the pandemic not by superimposing Hobbes’s ideas directly onto the present times but by reinterpreting the Hobbesian values to fit a modern context. The future of the Leviathan, then, is not in its inherent value but in its continual re-contextualization.
– Nina Zhuo