92 - Hobbes, Thomas

Summary

Rawls was so struck by what he called the overwhelming and dramatic effect on our thought and feeling of reading Hobbes’s Leviathan that he deemed it the greatest single work of political thought in the English language (LHPP 23). He did so despite his view that “Hobbes’s substantive theory can’t be, in general, correct; since constitutional democratic institutions that violate his conditions for the Sovereign have actually existed and have not been noticeably less stable and orderly regimes than the kind of absolutism that Hobbes favored” (LHPP 85). Rawls attributed Hobbes’s error in thinking that a system of divided government limited by a constitution must be unstable, to Hobbes’s exclusion of “reasonable desires” to act from principles of fairness/reciprocity and of reasonable self-restraint from his political account of human psychology. As far as political questions are concerned, Hobbes took such reasonable desires to be too weak or unreliable to secure a stable society, preferring instead to rely exclusively on a common set of rational desires (LHPP 88). But, in Rawls’s view, reasonable elf-restraint and fairness are necessary for sustaining the sort of social cooperation on which constitutional democracy depends. Study of Hobbes helps us to see the importance of these reasonable notions and to think about how the social contract view might be recast to make room for them.