How do the readings for last week explain the role of gender and sex in the constitution of the problem that Aravamudan lays out here? What is Downes’ disagreement with Nyquist when it comes to Hobbes and slavery? How do Burnard and Navin’s account of Hobbesian thought in Jamaica and South Carolina help you evaluate this debate? Based on this exercise, how would you respond to Christopher Warren’s article about Leviathan and BLM?
The student responses quoted below were informed by the following readings:
- Srinivas Aravamudan, “Hobbes and America” (2009)
- Mary Nyquist, “Hobbes, Slavery, and Despotical Rule” (2009)
- Paul Downes, “Hobbes, Slavery, and Sovereign Resistance” (2015)
- Trevor Burnard, “Chapter 1: Planter Politics and the Fear of Slave Revolt” (2018)
- Christopher Warren, “Leviathan and the Airway: Black Lives Matter and Hobbes with the History Put Back,” Medium (June 26, 2020)
In reading the Burnard and Navin articles, it especially seems that this latter reading of Hobbes seemed to hold more weight in the eyes of plantation owners in the age of colonization, where there was a difference between servant and slave, where the slave could always rebel. Burnard shows how, even if it may not have been totally all-consuming, the fear that white Jamaicans had of slave rebellion due to this Hobbesian perception of slavery led to them using a Hobbesian conception of coercive obedience in which they would violently invoke fear in their slaves in hopes of coercing them in obeying the sovereign, the slaveowners.… From this, it seems that slaves were not in a Hobbesian state-of-nature, as Hobbes would define it. Rather, it seems the existence of institutional slavery at all placed every single people in the polity that participated in that institution in something like the Hobbesian state-of-nature, not just the slaves.
This brings us to the Warren article on Leviathan and BLM. The most important point of this article to me was the call to action to “reject the Hobbesian fiction of raceless, faceless, anonymous political subjects.” All the Leviathans throughout history have been built off the suffering of black and brown people by the hands of white people in power, and, when their bodies were used to build up the Leviathan as shown in the imagery of the frontispiece of the book, these black and brown bodies were not looking into the Leviathan, consensually producing the political power, but were looking out, having been forced to participate. It is important to recognize this and to refuse to look at not just Hobbes but all social contract theory through this racialized (and, furthermore, intersectional) lens. It is unfair and wrong to do otherwise.
– Aryan Ashraf
At the most basic level, Nyquist and Downes disagree over the relationship between Hobbesian political theory and the Atlantic slave trade—Nyquist attempts to show how Hobbes justifies slavery while Downes argues both that there is no justification and that Hobbes can be used to critique colonial ideologies.
… Following this, if we take Warren’s claim that the US government has “return[ed] [its] citizens to the terrifying state of nature” at its word, then rebellion against current rule becomes just and the establishment of a new covenant becomes obligated. Taken seriously, Warren’s argument seems to approximate a revived version of the Black Belt thesis.
– J. Doe
Aravamundan discusses the failure of British corporate colonialism to recognize the complexity of existing political and economic systems of indigenous peoples in North America, and instead advance an image of the Americas without “civility” in order to justify their colonization and forced assimilation. He speaks of the indigenous fiefdoms and “werowances” (“‘outside’ military chiefs,” p. 45), as well as “inside’ chiefs,” matrilineal practices, “royal funerary rituals,” “sophisticated deployment of agricultural practice,” and a system of territorial and trading alliances. Aravamundan further writes, “Hobbes grants that American political structures might have exited in the form of rudimentary family structures” (p. 56), and that Hobbes’s anti-humanist suppression of the family as a source of political sovereignty makes “consent and conquest into the sole model of political sovereignty” (p. 56). The reduction of complex systems of power and sovereignty into supposedly “rudimentary” and “primitive” family structures, as well as the analysis of “subjection and consent” has vital ties to the arguments of Pateman and Fox-Genovese on the implications of gender and patriarchalism in Leviathan (p. 53). For both gender and race, Hobbes and other political theorists have discounted the existing systems of sovereignty – whether for the power of women in the home or the political and economic structures of peoples indigenous to Northeast America – into the domestic sphere such that they are not recognized as full “individuals” under the social contract. This line of reasoning led to the expansion of British sovereignty from national to imperial (p. 53), thereby also laying the groundwork for the problematic justification of Atlantic slavery as discussed in Nyquist’s piece.
– Emily Lathers
The readings for this week describes how slavery used Hobbes to trivialize the political systems of the oppressed indigenous people that were being enslaved and uprooted. While many had pre-existing political structures that functioned for their purposes, colonizers used the fact that Hobbes explained his political system of consent and subjugation as the only feasible one to justify dismantling the native ones. They treated them as rudimentary and not worthy of organizing their own political system, and thus the colonizers were able to force them into whatever roles they deemed fitting.
– Kip Rodes
I found Christopher Warren’s contextualization of the struggle for racial equity within a Hobbesian political theory very interesting—I hadn’t applied Hobbes to race-based subjugation since reading Miller at the beginning of the semester. What grabbed me was that while each of the previous academic works we had read this week used Hobbes to analyze the enslavement and rebellion of African Americans from the perspective of the sovereign, only Warren takes Hobbes to give the victims of state violence a voice. While Burnard, Arvamudan and Nyquist all attempt to contextualize the state’s abuse of the subjugated within the formation of an unequal social contract, or look at how slave masters prevented and feared rebellions within a Hobbesian perspective, Warren builds up an entirely different leviathan made of the abused—a separate unified body for a different group of people. This may be indicative of the ultimate divide within a country like the U.S., which is built on a moral division between ethnic minorities—there cannot be one body politic that unites us all, with a contract some signed more willingly than others. I think that while each reading offers something valuable on the nature of despotic rule and how it fits into Hobbes’s framework of political theory, the concept of a leviathan (or a “corporate body” as warren puts it) is more applicable to racial disparity in the U.S. Is a contract that still subjects many of its citizens to constant danger still an escape from the state of nature? Maybe the formation of Warren’s leviathan is an act of resistance in of itself—and represents not just a movement of resistance, but a willingness of those abused by the U.S. sovereign to escape the state of nature via their own contract—making a leviathan that does not wield the same power as the sovereign, but represents a willingness to escape the current situation of its constituents.
– Walter Ben Rosin
The disagreement between Downes and the arguments of Nyquist and Aravamudan are very interesting… I will outline the core disagreements and talk a little bit about what different perspectives is causing them. I will also propose the question: is there a way for all of their arguments to coexist or at least provide us with some utility in better understanding Hobbes work and its legacy.
… Downes believes that Nyquist and other authors have misinterpreted and overplayed Hobbes participation and stake in the Virginia Company. He claims that Hobbes did not actually take a true stakeholder position and this was almost thirty years before he wrote Leviathan, therefore the impact and the presence in his mind of this company is to be diminished.
Yet, Nyquists discussion on the significance of Hobbes distinction between servant and slaves seems compelling when presented within the greater context of this changing world. It seems unlikely that Hobbes would not be speaking to the growing industry of slavery in his work of Leviathan.…
– Kestrel Valdez
Nyquist’s understanding of the Hobbesian world can only be realized if both the slaver and the enslaved consent to a contract of servitude that allows disobedience to be punishable by “cruelty.” However, as Downes points out, the enslaved are dehumanized and thus do not have the social capacity for consent. In other words, it is not fear alone that binds the enslaved to the slaver but the systems of oppression built to ensure that survival is dependent upon the enslaved’s fear of upsetting the slaver.
In the Warren article, he makes a point that conditions of the body exemplify conditions of the state. Thus, both physical and abstract violence inflicted upon Black people is a direct result of the state’s unwillingness to protect Black people. The Black Lives Matter movement becomes a necessity, bringing attention to the racial prejudice built into existing socioeconomic and political structures.
– Nina Zhuo