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Political Theory beyond the Rhetoric–Reason Divide: Hobbes, Semantic Indeterminacy, and Political Order

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 October 2011

Daniel Skinner
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Abstract

This article engages the longstanding debate over Hobbes's use of rhetoric, with the aim of rethinking both the political logic of Leviathan and the way contemporary theorists approach rhetoric in relation to reason. Rhetoric was a particularly acute problem for Thomas Hobbes, whose pursuit of a stable political order may appear to require the absence of rhetoric and the presence of a purely rational order. This appearance is misleading, and it is suggested therefore that political theorists rethink how they understand rhetoric to grasp more fully Hobbes's understanding of political order. The common view that Hobbes resolves the problem of semantic indeterminacy must be questioned. Hobbes in effect understands that stable meaning structures are impossible to attain, even under Leviathan. This reworking suggests the need for refining our understanding of Hobbes, who envisions political order not by privileging reason over rhetoric, but by moving beyond engagements with language altogether.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 73 , Issue 4 , Fall 2011 , pp. 561 - 580
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2011

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References

1 David Gauthier illustrates this tendency when he notes that, for Hobbes, “The ‘rational’ order corresponding to the unlimited right of nature is the condition of war of every man with every man” (Gauthier, , “The Social Contract as Ideology,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 6, no. 2 [1977]: 151Google Scholar). Victoria Kahn notes that “the majority of Hobbes's critics, at least in the twentieth century, have persisted in reading the Leviathan primarily as a logical argument,” which seems to stem from these readers' willingness to take Hobbes at his own word that he has attempted to utilize reason rather than rhetoric (Kahn, , Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism in the Renaissance [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985], 157Google Scholar).

2 Johnston, David, The Rhetoric of “Leviathan”: Thomas Hobbes and the Politics of Cultural Transformation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986)Google Scholar; Skinner, Quentin, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

3 Although various forms of contextualism have fostered studies of rhetoric in Hobbes and have become dominant among political theorists of the last thirty years, many influential interpreters of Hobbes, notably Gauthier, Oakeshott, and Warrender, have played down the role of rhetoric in Hobbes. See Gauthier, David, The Logic of Leviathan: The Moral and Political Theory of Thomas Hobbes (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969)Google Scholar; Oakeshott, Michael, Hobbes and Civic Association (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2000)Google Scholar; and Warrender, Howard, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: His Theory of Obligation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1957)Google Scholar.

4 Gary Remer argues that Hobbes's project requires exchanging the “humanist rhetorical epistemology” (of probability) with one of certainty, modeled after geometry, derived from certain (because established) principles, and notes that to actualize this project, one must reject consensus as a basis for political life (“Hobbes, the Rhetorical Tradition, and Toleration,” Review of Politics 54, no. 1 [1992]: 5–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar). As I argue below, I agree with this point in principle, but not insofar as Hobbes's ultimate political solution is concerned.

5 Hobbes, Thomas, Human Nature and De Corpore Politico, ed. Gaskin, J. C. A. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 250Google Scholar.

6 Kahn, Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism, 152. See also Jacobson, Norman, Pride and Solace: The Functions and Limits of Political Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 63Google Scholar.

7 Remer also argues that “Hobbes did break with his humanist past,” even as he notes that the possibility of “a forty-one-year-old philosopher totally breaking with his previously held ideas” is “implausible” (“Hobbes, the Rhetorical Tradition, and Toleration,” 7). In Remer's view, the civil war constituted for Hobbes a new imperative for establishing firm foundations for civil society, even as he continued to engage in classically humanist activities.

8 Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, 6.

9 Ibid.

10 See, e.g., Shapin, Steven and Schaffer, Simon, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989Google Scholar).

11 Grassi, Ernesto, Rhetoric as Philosophy: The Humanist Tradition, trans. Crois, J. M. and Azodi, A. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2001)Google Scholar; Burke, Kenneth, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969)Google Scholar and Burke, , A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969)Google Scholar.

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14 Though Johnston's book predates Skinner's by ten years, Johnston notes in the preface that his study arose from engagements with Skinner's “interpretation of Hobbes” in a seminar where he received “the benefit of Professor Skinner's response” (ibid., ix–x). I thus regard Johnston's argument as a response to the early manifestations of the Skinnerian position. Skinner's, Johnston cites “Conquest and Consent: Thomas Hobbes and the Engagement Controversy,” in The Interregnum, ed. Aylmer, G. E. (London: Macmillan, 1972)Google Scholar, chap. 3, and his The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, vol. 2, The Age of Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 93–108Google Scholar.

15 Another important challenge to the “break hypothesis” is chapter 2 of Reik, Miriam M., The Golden Lands of Thomas Hobbes (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1977)Google Scholar. Remer notes the similarities in Reik's and Johnston's positions (Remer, “Hobbes, the Rhetorical Tradition, and Toleration,” 6).

16 Johnston, The Rhetoric of “Leviathan,” 67.

17 Ibid., 23.

18 Ibid., 56.

19 Ibid., 112.

20 Ibid., 61.

21 Ibid., 91.

22 Ibid., 61.

23 Hobbes, Human Nature and De Corpore Politico, 19.

24 According to Aristotle, rhetoric is “the ability of observing in any given case the available means of pisteis.” In his translation, Hobbes renders pisteis as “proof,” while W. Rhys Roberts renders pisteis as “persuasion.” Roberts argues that “Hobbes's sense of logic and his command of English lead to nothing more distinctive than ‘proofs’ (even ‘arguments’ would be better than this) in his Briefe of the Art of Rhetorique” (Roberts, W. Rhys, “Notes on Aristotle's Rhetoric,” American Journal of Philology 45 [1924]: 353Google Scholar). Yet for Hobbes, “arguments” would decidedly not have been “better” since “argument” does not encapsulate the scientific ethos he sought.

25 Johnston, The Rhetoric of “Leviathan,” 107.

26 Ibid., 62, emphasis added. Kahn inclines toward this position: “Hobbes wants to have it both ways. He wants to formulate a political science that will be grounded on the truth, but will also be persuasive” (Kahn, Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism, 156).

27 Johnston, The Rhetoric of “Leviathan,” 67, emphasis added.

28 Ibid., 12.

29 Ibid., 13.

30 As Johnston notes, poetry and history are also marked by different relationships with tropes and figures, each style demanding their particular and proper placement.

31 See Bird, Alexander, “Squaring the Circle: Hobbes on Philosophy and Geometry,” Journal of the History of Ideas 57, no. 2 (1996): 217–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32 Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 5, in Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan, ed. Curley, E. M. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), 26Google Scholar.

33 Johnston, The Rhetoric of “Leviathan,” 92.

34 This position is to be distinguished from the more commonly held position that Hobbes eventually conceded that reason had to be accompanied by rhetoric to give reason persuasive and political force. See, inter alia, Goodhart, Michael, “Theory in Practice: Quentin Skinner's Hobbes, Reconsidered,” Review of Politics 62, no. 3 (2000): 531–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar. My point in making this distinction is that failure to do so obscures not what Hobbes thought he was doing (for he certainly made the reason–rhetoric distinction), but what contemporary theorists can gain from reading his work beyond the problematic distinctions he made.

35 Pettit, Philip, Made with Words: Hobbes on Language, Mind, and Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 54Google Scholar.

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37 Kahn, Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism, 164.

38 Tom Sorell calls attention in particular to the similarities between, on the one hand, The Elements 1.7–10 and Leviathan chap. 6 and, on the other, Aristotle's Rhetoric 2.2–11(Sorrell, , “Hobbes's Unaristotelian Political Rhetoric,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 23, no. 2 [1990]: 96Google Scholar).

39 Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, 277.

40 Wildermuth, Mark E., “Hobbes, Aristotle, and the Materialist Rhetor,” Rhetoric and Society Quarterly 27, no. 1 (1997): 69CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kahn, Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism, 156.

41 Norman Jacobson, Pride and Solace, 63.

42 Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, 263.

43 Ibid., 277. This suggests that the problem of language in Hobbes is not, at least primarily, the “inherently polysemic character” of words. Rather, to take a Derridean approach, the “problem” is the inherently disseminating nature of language.

44 Pettit, Made with Words, 25.

45 Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 4, in Leviathan, ed. Curley, 19. See also Pettit, Made with Words, 29.

46 Pettit, Made with Words, 29–30. See also Silver, “Fiction of Self-Evidence in Hobbes's Leviathan.”

47 Kahn, Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism, 162.

48 Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 4, in Curley, 22.

49 Kahn, Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism, 22.

50 As, for example, Wolin, Sheldon argues in Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 228Google Scholar.

51 Davide Panagia argues similarly about Hobbes's theory of representation. For Panagia, Hobbes's concept of representation increases, and does not stop, the “play of signification” (The Poetics of Political Thinking [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006], 42)Google Scholar.

52 Remer, “Hobbes, the Rhetorical Tradition, and Toleration,” 12.

53 Remer comes to a similar conclusion, noting that nothing in Hobbes's argument suggests that Leviathan cannot be tolerant. The more important point is that Leviathan cannot tolerate disorder, and would not do so in pursuit of an “ideal” (ibid., 33).

54 Winifred L. Amaturo, “Thomas Hobbes and the Political Life of the Body” (PhD diss., Yale University, 2007), 34.

55 Michael Oakeshott, Hobbes and Civic Association, 20. Though my reading of Hobbes departs from Oakshott's in crucial ways, it shares a common concern to distinguish Hobbes's use of reason from the much richer features of his political arguments.

56 Amaturo, “Thomas Hobbes and the Political Life of the Body,” 32.

57 Pettit, Made with Words, 115.

58 Ibid., 132.

59 “For Hobbes aims to educate the reader both to the primary necessity of rhetoric in the construction of the commonwealth, and to the further necessity of disguising this rhetoric as logic” (Kahn, Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism, 161).

60 Wolin, Politics and Vision, 232.

61 Grassi, Rhetoric as Philosophy, 20.

62 Hobbes, Human Nature and De Corpore Politico, 127.

63 Pettit, Made with Words, 135.

64 Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 14, in Curley, 79.

65 As Stillman puts it, “a discursive victory over metaphor could occur only outside of discourse” (Stillman, Robert E., “Hobbes's Leviathan: Monsters, Metaphors, and Magic,” ELH 62, no. 4 [1995]: 793)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

66 Hobbes, Human Nature and De Corpore Politico, 97.

67 Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 15, in Curley, 99.

68 Wolin, Politics and Vision, 233.

69 And this, to the point that, as Kahn notes, one cannot distinguish between rhetoric as the cause or as the effect of disorder (Kahn, Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism, 153).

70 Hobbes, Human Nature and De Corpore Politico, 103.

71 Jacobson, Pride and Solace, 57.

72 Pettit, Made with Words, 90.

73 Hobbes, Human Nature and De Corpore Politico, 40.

74 Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: Continuum, 2004), 45Google Scholar.

75 Nelson, John S., “Political Theory as Political Rhetoric,” in What Should Political Theory Be Now? Essays from the Shambaugh Conference on Political Theory, ed. Nelson, John S. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983), 169–242Google Scholar.

76 Garsten, Bryan, Saving Persuasion: A Defense of Rhetoric and Judgment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

77 Habermas, Jürgen, The Theory of Communicative Action: Reason and the Rationalization of Society, trans. McCarthy, Thomas, 2 vols. (Boston: Beacon, 1984)Google Scholar. On the “philosophy/rhetoric” binaries in Habermas, see Abizadeh, Arash, “On the Philosophy/Rhetoric Binaries: Or, Is Habermasian Discourse Motivationally Impotent?,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 33, no. 4 (2007): 445–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

78 Garsten, Saving Persuasion, 22.

79 See Vico, Giambattista, On the Study Methods of Our Time, trans. Gianturco, Elio (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990)Google Scholar; Grassi, Rhetoric as Philosophy, 35–41.

80 See Ogden, C. K. and Richards, I. A., The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language Upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism (New York: Harcourt, 1923)Google Scholar; Toulmin, Stephen, The Uses of Argument (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958)Google Scholar; and Booth, Wayne C., The Rhetoric of Rhetoric: The Quest for Effective Communication (Malden: Blackwell, 2004)Google Scholar.

81 Grassi calls this a “rationalistic attitude toward rhetoric” that “excludes every rhetorical element because pathetic influences … disturb the clarity of rational thought” (Grassi, Rhetoric as Philosophy, 18). Despite Grassi's criticisms of rationalism, he also reinscribes the distinction between reason and rhetoric, even as he affords rhetoric “priority” (see ibid., 96–97).

82 Jeffrey Murray notes that “Burke investigates the tropes of metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony” to examine not their “purely figurative usage” but rather “their role in the discovery and description of ‘the truth’” (Murray, Jeffrey W., “Kenneth Burke: A Dialogue of Motives,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 35, no. 1 [2002]: 22CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

83 See Foucault, Michel, “The Order of Discourse,” in Language and Politics, ed. Shapiro, Michael (New York: NYU Press, 1984)Google Scholar.

84 Foucault, Michel, “Two Lectures,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Gordon, Colin (Brighton: Harvester, 1980), 93Google Scholar.

85 Edward Said notes that “Foucault says, language—whether studied or written—occupies a space which is not defined by rhetoric but by the library” (Said, Edward W., Beginnings: Intention and Method [New York: Columbia University Press, 2004], 301Google Scholar). Yet in suggesting that taking rhetoric seriously can deepen Foucault's project, I am not reinscribing the intentional subjects that Foucault would reject. Instead, the sense of “rhetoric” I have used here allows for a decentralized, nonagentive rhetoric that is not the product of sovereign speakers.

86 For example, for Butler, “the structure of address is not a feature of narrative, one of its many and variable attributes, but an interruption of narrative. The moment the story is addressed to someone, it assumes a rhetorical dimension that is not reducible to a narrative function” (Butler, Judith, Giving an Account of Oneself [New York: Fordham University Press, 2005], 63CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

87 Certeau, Michel de, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Rendall, Steven F. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), xxGoogle Scholar.