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“That Democratic Ink Must Be Wiped Away”: Hobbes and the Normativity of Democracy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2021

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Abstract

Hobbes's preference for monarchical sovereign forms and his critique of democratic political organization are well known. In this article I suggest, however, that his opposition to democratic life constitutes the central frame through which we must understand some of the most important theoretical mutations that occur throughout the various stages of his civil science. Key alterations in the Hobbesian political theory from The Elements of Law to Leviathan can be interpreted as efforts to retroactively foreclose the emergence of a substantive democratic normativity that the prior theoretical framework allowed for or suggested. Hobbes's opposition to democracy is ultimately so significant so as to fundamentally structure various key elements of his political philosophy.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 83 , Issue 3 , Summer 2021 , pp. 305 - 328
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of University of Notre Dame

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Footnotes

My thanks to Ruth Abbey and three anonymous referees at Review of Politics for providing me with detailed critical commentary on this paper, which improved it significantly. Research for the project of which this paper is a part was supported by a Singapore Ministry of Education AcRF Tier 1 Grant.

References

1 Quentin Skinner, From Humanism to Hobbes: Studies in Politics and Rhetoric (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 211. See also, for example, Deborah Baumgold, Hobbes's Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 43–45; Burgess, Glenn, “Contexts for the Writing and Publication of Hobbes's Leviathan,” History of Political Thought 11, no. 4 (1990): 675–702Google Scholar; Quentin Skinner, “Hobbes on Persons, Authors and Representatives,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes's “Leviathan” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 159–61; Alison McQueen, “Mosaic Leviathan: Religion and Rhetoric in Hobbes's Political Thought,” in Hobbes on Politics and Religion, ed. Laurens van Apeldoorn and Robin Douglass (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 128–32; Ellen Meiksins Wood, Liberty and Property: A Social History of Western Political Thought from Renaissance to Enlightenment (London: Verso, 2012), 255.

2 Skinner, From Humanism to Hobbes, 208.

3 See especially Blau, Adrian, “Textual Context in the History of Political Thought,” History of European Ideas 45, no. 8 (2019): 1191–1210CrossRefGoogle Scholar, but also Blau, Adrian, “History of Political Thought as Detective Work,” History of European Ideas 41, no. 8 (2015): 1178–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Blau, Adrian, “Extended Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” History and Theory 58, no. 3 (2019): 342–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For an elaboration of these methodological principles in relation to Hobbes scholarship specifically, see Adrian Blau, “Methodologies of Interpreting Hobbes: Historical and Philosophical,” in Interpreting Hobbes's Political Philosophy, ed. S. A. Lloyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 10–28.

4 Blau, “Textual Context in the History of Political Thought,” 1200.

5 Ibid. Although there is nothing preventing a historian from thinking philosophically, or a philosopher from thinking historically, Blau attributes much of the failure to do so to the nature of disciplinary training, which must emphasize certain skills at the expense of others. For an instructive example, see Blau's account of the tendency of historians to misinterpret Hobbes's famous discussion of the “Foole” in Leviathan to the extent that it is not analyzed philosophically. Blau, “History of Political Thought as Detective Work,” 1189.

6 Blau believes that although obscured by his programmatic methodological writings, Skinner's interpretations are exemplary in their combination of historical and philosophical analysis. Especially notable here, for example, is his reading of Hobbes on liberty. Blau, “History of Political Thought as Detective Work,” 1189.

7 I do not here consider the Latin Leviathan to constitute a substantial new moment in Hobbes's political philosophical development, at least with respect to the issues I deal with in this paper, the major conceptual formulations I highlight from the English Leviathan being reiterated in the Latin version. For a recent and highly useful summary of the differences between the two Leviathans, see Vieira, Mónica Brito, “‘Leviathan’ contra ‘Leviathan,’” Journal of the History of Ideas 76, no. 2 (2015): 271–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Noel Malcolm, general introduction to Leviathan, vol. 1, Editorial Introduction, ed. Noel Malcolm (Oxford: Clarendon, 2012), 175–95. In any case, however, it should be noted that Hobbes himself declares that he wished for Leviathan to appear in Latin as part of the pedagogical effort to counter the “seditious principles” of the democrats. Hobbes, Leviathan, vol. 3, The English and Latin Texts (ii), ed. Noel Malcolm (Oxford: Clarendon, 2012), 47, 1129. References to Leviathan will be to chapter followed by page in Malcolm's edition.

8 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, vol. 2, The English and Latin Texts (i), ed. Noel Malcolm (Oxford: Clarendon, 2012), 19, 288.

9 On the inferiority of democracy in relation to monarchy especially, see Leviathan, 19, 2:288–94. On Hobbes's failure to definitively prove the inferiority of democracy, Skinner writes, “Faced with this sore point in his argument, Hobbes takes considerable pains to cover it up. He does so in part by calling attention to his lack of proof as little as possible.” Skinner, From Humanism to Hobbes, 317.

10 Thomas Hobbes, “The Prose Life,” in The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic, ed. J. C. A. Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 247.

11 Thomas Hobbes, “The Verse Life,” in The Elements of Law, 256.

12 See, for example, Leo Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and Its Genesis, trans. Elsa Sinclair (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), 59–60; Apperley, Alan, “Hobbes on Democracy,” Politics 19, no. 3 (1999): 165–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Richard E. Flathman, Thomas Hobbes: Skepticism, Individuality, and Chastened Politics (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), 135–42; Tomaž Mastnak, “Godly Democracy,” in Hobbes's Behemoth: Religion and Democracy, ed. Tomaž Mastnak (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2009), 210–40; Kinch Hoekstra, “A Lion in the House: Hobbes and Democracy,” in Rethinking the Foundations of Modern Political Thought, ed. Annabel Brett, James Tully, and Holly Hamilton-Bleakley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 191–218; William Lund, “Neither ‘Behemoth’ nor ‘Leviathan’: Explaining Hobbes's Illiberal Politics,” in Mastnak, Hobbes's Behemoth, 288–91; Jakonen, Mikko, “Needed but Unwanted: Thomas Hobbes's Warnings on the Dangers of Multitude, Populism and Democracy,” Las Torres de Lucca, no. 9 (2016): 89–118Google Scholar; Kapust, Daniel J., “The Problem of Flattery and Hobbes's Institutional Defense of Monarchy,” Journal of Politics 73, no. 3 (2011): 680–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bruce J. Smith, The Sense of Injustice and the Origin of Modern Democracy (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2018), 70–89; Holman, Christopher, “Hobbes and the Tragedy of Democracy,” History of Political Thought 40, no. 4 (2019): 649–75Google Scholar.

13 Hobbes, Leviathan, 25, 2:410.

14 For a systematic effort to trace out Hobbes's changing conception of liberty from The Elements of Law to Leviathan, particularly in relation to the republican problematic, see Quentin Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). For a recent challenge to Skinner's account, which does not see the conceptual mutation as being motivated by an engagement with republican thought, see Robin Douglass, “Thomas Hobbes's Changing Account of Liberty and Challenge to Republicanism,” History of Political Thought 36, no. 2 (2015): 281–309. Contra Skinner and many others, for the argument that the most important elements of Hobbes's concept of liberty are consistent from the Elements to Leviathan, see Pettit, Philip, “Liberty and Leviathan,” Politics, Philosophy & Economics 4, no. 1 (2005): 131–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kapust, Daniel J. and Turner, Brandon P., “Democratical Gentlemen and the Lust for Mastery: Status, Ambition, and the Language of Liberty in Hobbes's Political Thought,” Political Theory 41, no. 4 (2013): 648–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Thomas Hobbes, The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic, ed. Ferdinand Tönnies (London: Simpkin, Marshall, and Co., 1889), 2.8.3.

16 Ibid., 2.2.1.

17 Ibid., 2.2.2.

18 Ibid., 2.2.5.

19 Ibid., 2.25.

20 See, for example, Quentin Skinner, “Hobbes and the Studia Humanitatis,” in Visions of Politics, vol. 3, Hobbes and Civil Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 55; Jakonen, “Needed but Unwanted,” 105.

21 Although Hobbes does not speak on the matter, one might speculate on any number of particular organizational strategies or institutional configurations that could function to militate against the concentration of assembly authority in the hands of a few, through limiting and restraining the influence of ambitious elites.

22 See, for example, Robert P. Kraynak, History and Modernity in the Thought of Thomas Hobbes (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 38; Mastnak, “Godly Democracy,” 225; Kapust and Turner, “Democratical Gentlemen.”

23 Thomas Hobbes, Behemoth: The History of the Causes of the Civil Wars of England, in The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, ed. William Molesworth, vol. 6 (London: John Bohn, 1840), 257.

24 Ibid., 359.

25 Hobbes, Elements of Law, 2.2.9.

26 David P. Gauthier, The Logic of Leviathan: The Moral and Political Theory of Thomas Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 146.

27 Don Herzog, for example, writes that “some of our historically minded theorists have complained that Hobbes's account of liberty seems too stifling and have called on us to resurrect notions of ancient liberty. They shouldn't be surprised that Hobbes's concept confines our political discourse. That's precisely what it was designed to do.” Don Herzog, Happy Slaves: A Critique of Consent Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 104.

28 Thomas Hobbes, On the Citizen, ed. and trans. Richard Tuck and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 9.9.

29 Ibid., 10.1.

30 Ibid., 13.15.

31 Ibid., 10.8.

32 Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty, 107.

33 Douglass, “Hobbes's Changing Account of Liberty,” 291.

34 Hobbes, Leviathan, 21, 2:324.

35 Ibid., 21, 2:332.

36 Ibid. Although we will not deal with the question specifically here, Perez Zagorin (among others) argues that “Hobbes's claim that individuals possessed an identical freedom in every type of polity is one of the worst defended in his work.” Perez Zagorin, Hobbes and the Law of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 81.

37 Hobbes, On the Citizen, 10.9.

38 Ibid.

39 Ibid., 7.5.

40 Anon., “England's Miserie and Remedie in a Judicious Letter from an Utter-Barrister to His Speciall Friend, concerning Leiutenant Col. Lilburn's Imprisonment in Newgate, Sept. 14 1645,” in Divine Right and Democracy: An Anthology of Political Writing in Stuart England, ed. David Wootton (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1986), 277.

41 Richard Overton, “An Arrow against All Tyrants and Tyranny. . .,” in The English Levellers, ed. Andrew Sharp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 62–63.

42 Anon., “To the Right Honorable and Supreme Authority of This Nation, the Commons in Parliament Assembled,” in Sharp, The English Levellers, 77.

43 Baumgold, Hobbes's Political Theory, 54.

44 See, for example, M. M. Goldsmith, Hobbes's Science of Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), 157–60; Alexandre Matheron, “The Theoretical Function of Democracy in Spinoza and Hobbes,” in The New Spinoza, ed. Warren Montag and Ted Stoltze (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 207–17; Noel Malcolm, “Hobbes and Spinoza,” in Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 38; Herbe, Karlfriedrich, “Au-delà de la citoyenneté: Hobbes et le problème de l'autorité,” Rivista di storia della filosofia 59, no. 1 (2004): 220–21Google Scholar; Sagar, Paul, “Of Mushrooms and Method: History and the Family in Hobbes's Science of Politics,” European Journal of Political Theory 14, no. 1 (2015): 109CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

45 Hobbes, On the Citizen, 5.8.

46 Ibid., 5.9.

47 Ibid., 6.13.

48 Ibid., 6.14.

49 For a recent attempt to outline the various types of personhood and representation that can be identified within Leviathan, many of which have not been generally noticed by readers, see Fleming, Sean, “The Two Faces of Personhood: Hobbes, Corporate Agency and the Personality of the State,” European Journal of Political Theory 20, no. 1 (2021): 5–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

50 Hobbes, Leviathan, 16, 2:244; Thomas Hobbes, On Man, in Man and Citizen (De Homine and De Cive), trans. Charles T. Wood, T. S. K. Scott-Craig, and Bernard Gert (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1991), 72.

51 Hobbes, Leviathan, 16, 2:244.

52 Ibid., 16, 2:246.

53 On this point see Mónica Brito Vieira, The Elements of Representation in Hobbes: Aesthetics, Theatre, Law, and Theology in the Construction of Hobbes's Theory of the State (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 154.

54 Hobbes, On Man, 84.

55 Hobbes, Leviathan, 16, 2:246.

56 Ibid., 17, 2:258–60.

57 Ibid., 17, 2:256.

58 As David Runciman points out, without this representation, authorization would reduce politics to a set of fragmented interpersonal relations, the multitude of individuals remaining a mere conglomeration of distinct natural persons as opposed to a collective body. David Runciman, “Hobbes's Theory of Representation: Anti-Democratic or Proto-Democratic?,” in Political Representation, ed. Ian Shapiro et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 21.

59 Hobbes, Leviathan, 17, 2:260.

60 Ibid.

61 Ibid., 17, 2:262.

62 Ibid., 17, 2:260.

63 Runciman, “Hobbes's Theory of Representation,” 19.

64 Regarding the former, Arash Abizadeh highlights that the sovereign bears not only the person of the state, but in addition that of each individual who authorizes the representative relation: “The state is an artificial person that a sovereign represents by fiction. It is not the state itself but the individuals who covenant to establish it, who authorize the sovereign to represent the state. . . . The sovereign bears not only the person of the state, but also the person of each individual covenanter: each authorizes the sovereign to act in the name of both the commonwealth as a whole and in his own name as subject.” Arash Abizadeh, Hobbes and the Two Faces of Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 257.

65 Skinner sees Hobbes as appreciating that which is overlooked by much contemporary Anglophone political theory, which has a reductive view that narrowly identifies the state with government, the former being thereby reduced to a mere apparatus of rule. Skinner, From Humanism to Hobbes, 377. On the importance of maintaining this distinction see also Trainor, Brian, “Hobbes, Skinner, and the Person of the State,” Hobbes Studies 14, no. 1 (2001): 59–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

66 Hobbes, Leviathan, 47, 3:1129–31.

67 See, for example, Goldsmith, Hobbes's Science of Politics, 157–61; Gauthier, Logic of Leviathan, 145; Forsyth, Murray, “Thomas Hobbes and the Constituent Power of the People,” Political Studies 29, no. 2 (1981): 191–203CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Yves Charles Zarka, “Droit de résistance et droit pénal chez Hobbes,” in Hobbes oggi, ed. Andrea Napoli and Guido Canziani (Milan: Angeli, 1990), 177–96; Burgess, “Contexts for the Writing and Publication of Hobbes's Leviathan,” 684–90; Matheron, “Theoretical Function of Democracy,” 211–13; Malcolm, “Hobbes and Spinoza,” 38; Sommerville, Johan P., “Hobbes and Independency,” Rivista di storia della filosofia 59, no. 1 (2004): 60Google Scholar; Herbe, “Au-delà de la citoyenneté,” 220–21; Deborah Baumgold, “The Composition of Hobbes's Elements of Law,” in Contract Theory in Historical Context: Essays on Grotius, Hobbes, and Locke (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 105–28; Paul Sagar, “Of Mushrooms and Method,” 106–9.

68 Philip Pettit, Made with Words: Hobbes on Language, Mind, and Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 80.

69 Ibid.

70 On the extent to which chapter 18 continues to reaffirm a democratic basis for sovereign institution see Janine Chanteur, “Note sur les notions de ‘peuple’ et de ‘multitude’ chez Hobbes,” in Hobbes-Forschungen, ed. Reinhart Koselleck and Roman Schnur (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1969), 233; Burgess, “Contexts for the Writing and Publication of Hobbes's Leviathan,” 690; R. E. Ewin, Virtues and Rights: The Moral Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (Boulder: Westview, 1991), 165–66; Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 1572–1651 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 328; Hoekstra, “A Lion in the House,” 212; Arash Abizadeh, “Sovereign Jurisdiction, Territorial Rights, and Membership in Hobbes,” in The Oxford Handbook of Hobbes, ed. A. P. Martinich and Kinch Hoekstra (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 414–15; Robin Douglass, “Authorization and Representation before Leviathan,” Hobbes Studies 31, no. 1 (2018): 24; Robin Douglass, “Hobbes sur la représentation et la souveraineté,” in Les défis de la représentation: Langages, pratiques et figuration du gouvernement, ed. Manuela Albertone and Dario Castiglione (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2018), 104.

71 Abizadeh, “Sovereign Jurisdiction,” 414.

72 Hobbes, Leviathan, 18, 2:264.

73 Ibid., 18, 2:268. Abizadeh thus notes that Hobbes repeates “the argument he had given in De cive for why an instituted commonwealth always begins as a democracy, namely, that merely to assemble with the intention of establishing a commonwealth is tacitly to covenant to abide by majority rule.” Abizadeh, “Sovereign Jurisdiction,” 415.

74 Hobbes, Leviathan, 16, 2:248.

75 For statements on some of the representative positions see, for example, Goldsmith, Hobbes's Science of Politics, 161; Orwin, Clifford, “On the Sovereign Authorization,” Political Theory 3, no. 1 (1976): 31Google Scholar; Yves Charles Zarka, La décision métaphysique de Hobbes: Conditions de la politique (Paris: Vrin, 1987), 330–31; Flikshuh, Katrin, “Elusive Unity: The General Will in Hobbes and Kant,” Hobbes Studies 25, no. 1 (2012): 24Google Scholar.

76 For arguments that Hobbes's philosophical anthropology, to the degree that it emphasizes the radical nonidentity of individual beings, renders impossible the minimal agreement required to institute sovereignty, see Dungey, Nicholas, “Thomas Hobbes's Materialism, Language, and the Possibility of Politics,” Review of Politics 70, no. 2 (2008): 190–220CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Matthew M. Kramer, Hobbes and the Paradoxes of Political Origins (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), 61–125; Skinner, Daniel, “Political Theory beyond the Rhetoric-Reason Divide: Hobbes, Semantic Indeterminacy, and Political Order,” Review of Politics 73, no. 4 (2011): 561–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar.