How to Think Politically

by James Bernard Murphy

  9

  Thomas Hobbes: The Absolutist

  The defining event in the long life of Thomas Hobbes was the English Civil War, which erupted in 1642, when he was in his mid-50s. Until then, he had led a quiet, low-key life of private scholarship and service to a noble family as a tutor and adviser. All of this was threatened when Oliver Cromwell and his supporters rebelled against the authority of King Charles I, plunging England into civil war. When the ever fearful Hobbes got an early whiff of trouble ahead, he became the ‘first of all that fled’ by removing himself to the safety of France before his homeland collapsed into open conflict. He had already spent some time there during the Thirty Years War (1618–1648), which tore Europe apart and caused unparalleled devastation, and the fearful Hobbes had no intention of hanging around in England for something similar.

  Fear is the abiding theme both of Hobbes’s life and of his work. Whereas Aristotle said that human beings are inclined to politics by their nature and by a passion for justice, Hobbes believed that it was fear of the state of nature that pushes us into politics. We run screaming out of the savagery of the pre-political world into the arms of any state that will protect us from its terrors. He claimed that the passions dominate reason, and that fear is the strongest of the passions. Hobbes was born in England in the year that the Spanish Armada set out to invade his country. A contemporary of his wrote that, on the morning of 5 April 1588, Hobbes’s mother ‘fell in labour with him upon the fright of the invasion of the Spaniards’, leading Hobbes to observe that he and fear were born as twins.

  After Cromwell had defeated the king (whom Hobbes initially supported) and established himself as Lord Protector of England, Hobbes quietly slipped back home from exile in France and made his peace with the new regime. But when Cromwell died and the new king (Charles II) eventually returned to England to claim his throne, Hobbes was again in a sticky position. He became a target for having abandoned the monarchy in exile, and for his alleged atheism, a dangerous position to hold in seventeenth-century England. He already had plenty of enemies who were outraged by his unorthodox political views. He was now being investigated by Parliament for heresy, but his former pupil, the new King Charles, protected his old teacher, for whom he still had affection. And so, despite having lived in very dangerous times and in fear of his life, repeatedly ending up on the wrong side of events, Hobbes survived unscathed until he was 91, an extraordinary age in the perilous seventeenth century.

  Although personally timid, Hobbes displayed astonishing intellectual courage in his writings, challenging many of the reigning orthodoxies of his day. For example, he was a radical sceptic about the possibility of discovering moral or religious truths in a deeply religious and moralistic age. There is no objective moral truth to be discovered by reason since, as Hobbes observes, ‘those who refer to right reason do mean their own’. Every person, he said, calls what he likes ‘good’ or ‘just’ and what he dislikes ‘evil’ or ‘unjust’. In contrast to classical appeals to natural justice or natural reason, Hobbes looks instead to legal conventions. He compares the moral language of right, good and just to the language of arbitrary units of measurement, such as a pound or a quart. Obviously, natural reason cannot define a ‘true’ pound or quart, for there is no such thing. But in the realm of pure conventions what really matters is not the ‘truth’ of a convention but merely that there is agreement about it. Similarly, says Hobbes, what matters is that our moral, religious and political disagreements are settled, not that they are settled ‘right’ in an objective sense. Whoever has the power to define the meaning of a pound, a quart or what is good, just and right as they please is the sovereign. If we hope to live in some modicum of civil peace, then we must accept radical limits upon human knowledge. Reason cannot save us from violent moral, religious and political conflict; only sovereign power can. Hobbes is less concerned with who or what commands than he is that there are commands. Without them, we face only chaos and death.

  It is often said that Hobbes’s great innovation in political theory was to defend the priority of the right over the good. In the classical theories of Plato and Aristotle, the first task is to define the goods that constitute a happy and flourishing human life. Once these are identified, then justice defines our rights to those goods. Hobbes’s scepticism about the goods of human life led him to reject this classical priority of the good over the right. Although no consensus is possible about human goods or virtues, he claimed, all rational people agree on the worst thing: violent death. On that fixed point of negative agreement Hobbes erects his Leviathan – the all-powerful state he named after the biblical sea monster. But he has not really reversed the priority of the good over the right. He has rejected classical conceptions of the good in favour of another conception of the good: life itself. What Hobbes gives us is really the priority of a consensus good (life) over more controversial goods, such as the moral virtues, about which we will never agree. This is the opposite of Socrates, who proclaimed that ‘not life, but good life, is to be chiefly valued’.

  This inalienable natural right to life is highly vulnerable without a government, because it leads to a situation where the measures I judge necessary to defend my life appear to others as threatening to them, and vice versa: what I see as defence, you see as offence. My doubts about your intentions lead me to pre-emptive strikes against you, just as your doubts motivate your aggression against me. Without a sovereign power to keep us all in ‘awe’, everyone becomes afraid of everyone else, an extremely volatile situation that will eventually generate violent conflict.

  To make matters worse (much worse), Hobbes argues that humans are not only ‘born inapt for society’ but have a natural desire to control and dominate each other. We are anti-social creatures, not just a-social. We are also acquisitive beings with an insatiable lust for glory and for power that ‘ceaseth only in death’. This is another reason why our natural state is conflict, a condition in which we live in constant fear of violent death. Left to our own devices in a pre-political state of nature, without an overpowering government to impose order on us and keep the peace, not only would the goods of civilization be impossible, but we would live in perpetual fear of our lives. In this state of constant and intolerable mutual fear and distrust, life is ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’. No rational person would ever remain in such a situation if they did not have to. And every rational person would pay any price, short of life itself, to escape it.

  According to Hobbes, sovereign authority is established precisely to rescue us from violent controversy of the kind that plunged seventeenth-century Britain into civil war. The sovereign must have all the authority necessary, but only the authority necessary, to settle disputes from whatever source they arise. In principle, this means unlimited authority over universities, churches, families, corporations and towns as well as authority over all controversial speech and expression. But where religious, moral or political debate can be conducted without danger of erupting into violent controversy, Hobbes’s sovereign has no grounds for interfering. He has a presumption for liberty, except where liberty threatens our lives, and it is the sole right and responsibility of the sovereign to decide when that is the case. The sovereign is absolute in theory but may only intervene to keep the peace, otherwise leaving us alone to pursue our own good in our own way. And a strong Hobbesian state does not need to be a large state. Indeed, it may be weakened by over-extension. The result is a rather strange combination of liberalism and authoritarianism.

  Moreover, our natural right to preserve ourselves makes it legitimate sometimes to disobey the sovereign’s commands. Since the only purpose for the extreme political remedy that Hobbes prescribes is to provide naturally warring individuals with an ‘arbiter and judge’ to keep the peace between them, it makes no sense to obey a sovereign who fails to keep you safe, either from others or from himself. For example, if the sovereign rightly orders your arrest, you are also right to attempt to evade arrest, which is why, sa
ys Hobbes, the sovereign brings armed men to arrest you. If the sovereign sentences you to death for a crime of which you are genuinely guilty, then Hobbes believes that you may legitimately try to escape, ‘for no man in the institution of sovereign power can be expected to give away the right of preserving his own body’. Indeed, it would be the most rational thing to do for a guilty man sentenced to death to try to escape, since life itself is the most precious human good. Hobbes would have struggled to see Socrates’s refusal to escape the death sentence that was imposed on him by his fellow citizens in Athens as the act of a rational man. Similarly, if you are commanded by the sovereign to fight against a common enemy as a conscript, then Hobbes believes that you may refuse ‘without injustice’, since the reason you subjected yourself to his power in the first place was to save your life, not to risk it. Here again we see a liberal core to an authoritarian political doctrine. Hobbes never expected or required his subjects to transcend their natural selfishness in political society, unlike Machiavelli, whose ideal was an intensely patriotic citizenry devoted above all to the public good. These exceptions appear to make the authority of Hobbes’s sovereign less than absolutely absolute.

  Hobbes prescribed an almost all-powerful sovereign, the Leviathan state, as the only way to secure peace for human beings. The basis of the highly authoritarian political system that he proposed is the consent of the governed, not God, even if the result, absolute power, is the same. Hobbes was certain that a rational person would consent to put himself under the protection of any ruler who could offer the peace and security of a stable political order, given the only alternative (war). Given that the state of war of all against all is the worst of all possible worlds, no price is too high to avoid it, even if that means surrendering other cherished goods and putting ourselves under an all-powerful ruler. Hobbes offered an extreme political solution to what he saw as an extreme problem. Civil war taught him to go back to political basics and spurred him to make the case for an almost all-powerful sovereign whose one, overriding purpose is to maintain peace and protect the lives of his subjects. According to Hobbes, nothing less can prevent the breakdown of civil order. Peace and security are necessary preconditions for all other goods and must therefore be secured first before other goods can be enjoyed. The first political question that any legitimate state must answer, as the modern philosopher Bernard Williams has written, is how to secure order and safety first. Everything else comes after.

  There is little place in Hobbes’s politics for ideals, which he considered highly dangerous, since they breed discontent with established rules and regimes and foster disagreement that can so easily escalate into conflict and even civil war. That is one reason he despised Aristotle, ‘the worst teacher that ever was’. Aristotle regarded humans as naturally political beings, put virtue and happiness at the heart of political life, distinguished ‘good’ forms of government (as he saw them) from ‘defective’ forms and excluded women from participation in public life. All these influential ideas were, for Hobbes, not merely wrong but subversive of strong stable government, without which order is not possible. In Hobbes’s eyes, Aristotle was really an unwitting anarchist, whose ideas about justice and virtue bred discontent with anything less than perfection, and thereby risked everything. Hobbes believed that ideas have consequences, and since most political ideas are bad, most are damaging and even dangerous. And he was one of the earliest philosophers in the history of Western thought to have treated men and women entirely as equals, and saw no reason why women should not be sovereigns.

  In an age like our own, which is so vulnerable to terrorism, it is obvious that Hobbes’s political views will speak very directly to many people. As the threat of terror increases (or at least the perception of a threat), it becomes more likely that people will be prepared to trade off other goods, such as freedom and privacy, for security – the first duty of the state. Hobbes understood that his arguments for unchecked political power appeal only to people who possess what he considered a rational and prudent fear of violent death. But he was aware that some people, such as those intent on dying for their cause, do not see death as the worst evil. Hobbes has no answer to the challenge posed by this, except to denounce it as irrational. Clearly, there are significant numbers of people who are not ‘rational’ in the Hobbesian sense. They are willing to kill and to die for their beliefs. How can such people be persuaded to accept the legitimacy of his Leviathan?

  10

  John Locke: The Puritan

  A generation after Thomas Hobbes fled to France to escape the perils of the English Civil War, the philosopher John Locke abandoned England for the Netherlands for similar reasons. At the time, he was a scholar in Oxford with a degree in medicine. It was there that Locke became the personal physician and secretary to the Earl of Shaftesbury, who was later appointed Lord Chancellor of England. But his opposition to the reigning Stuart kings of England and Scotland placed Shaftesbury, and therefore his loyal servant Locke, under suspicion by the Crown. Eventually, Shaftesbury fled to the Protestant Netherlands, where he soon died, leaving the vulnerable Locke behind in England without the protection of his powerful patron and master. An increasingly nervous government began closing in on the Puritan Locke in the wake of a foiled plot to assassinate the king and his brother. Although not directly implicated, Locke could feel the noose tightening around his neck in pro-Stuart Oxford. When the University published a list of ‘damnable doctrines’ that it claimed Locke supported, he decided the time had finally come to make his escape by slipping across the Channel to the relative safety of the Netherlands.

  Locke’s departure only confirmed the suspicions about his loyalty back home, provoking the government there to write to the dean of his Oxford college demanding his immediate dismissal from the University. He was summoned back to Oxford to answer for himself. Locke shrewdly replied by letter instead, pleading his innocence of all the charges. His name was added to a blacklist of notable figures that King James asked the Dutch government to banish from that country for undermining the monarchy in England. Events took a dramatic turn in Locke’s favour in 1688, when the Protestant king of the Netherlands led an army to Britain to overthrow the Catholic king of England, who fled in a panic. Now safe to return with William on the throne, Locke sailed back to England, where he wrote many books and essays defending liberty, religious toleration and limited constitutional government. His ideas had a huge impact on the American Founding Fathers in particular, who later had their own dispute with Britain’s sovereign. The American political system they established in the late eighteenth century was, to a considerable extent, inspired by Locke’s ideas about limited government, natural rights, freedom and private property. The world we live in today is therefore a Lockean world to the degree that it is an American world.

  Like Hobbes before him, Locke began his reflections on the nature of government by considering what life would be like without it. His version of the hypothetical state of nature was not an intolerable war of all against all, as the pessimistic and ever fearful Hobbes had imagined it. The moderate Locke replaced Hobbes’s nightmarish vision of man without government with a state of nature that was unstable and inconvenient rather than anarchic and perpetually terrifying. He thought that life without government would be far from ideal but unpleasantly tolerable. According to Locke we are naturally free and have natural ownership of our own bodies (in other words, there are no natural slaves, contrary to Aristotle’s belief), but there is no common power to arbitrate the disputes and conflicts that inevitably arise in our natural condition when selfish humans interact in the absence of a state. So our freedom and our lives are vulnerable without a system of state-enforced laws to protect our natural rights. That is why Locke believed that, while such an existence is bearable, we can do better by establishing a limited government to police and protect the rights we naturally possess.

  Locke’s most influential political idea is that the primary reason individuals create governments is t
o ensure ‘the preservation of their property’, which is always at risk in the state of nature. By ‘property’, he included life itself, since we own ourselves. Originally, he reasoned, God ‘gave the world in common to all mankind’, so no one naturally owned anything except their own body. But God also commanded humans to labour to subdue the earth in order to improve it ‘for the benefit of life’. ‘Thou shalt not be idle’, the Puritan Locke preached. The world exists for the use of ‘the industrious and rational’. By mixing our labour with otherwise useless natural objects we turn them into useful products that can increase our wealth and wellbeing. This transforms their status from being part of the common, God-given patrimony of mankind to being the private property of the individuals who have laboured to make something of them. For Locke, we are the rightful owners of all the goods that we manufacture in this way. But our private property, no less than our lives and our freedom, is very vulnerable in the state of nature, where it is up to each of us to protect ourselves and our goods from those who do not respect them. Locke argues that government was instituted to preserve our property better by setting up a system of laws, criminal justice and force to protect our vulnerable natural rights. We would do well to surrender voluntarily our individual right to punish offenders and to execute the laws of nature to the state, which can dispense justice more impartially and effectively than each of us acting independently, in return for our obedience to its laws. This is the origin and purpose of government.