THOMAS HOBBES SOUGHT TO DISCOVER RATIONAL PRINCIPLES FOR CONSTRUCTION OF A CIVIl POLITY THAT WOULD NOT BE SUBJECT TO DESTRUCTION FROM WITHIN. Today is Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), birthday. He got his BA from Magdalen Hall, Oxford University in 1608. Hobbes current reputation rests largely on his political philosophy, but he was a thinker with wide-ranging interests. Thomas Hobbes was the first great English political philosopher. His work excited intense controversy among his contemporaries and continues to do so in our own time. In philosophy, he defended a range of materialist, nominalist, and empiricist views against Cartesian and Aristotelian alternatives. In physics, his work was influential on Leibniz, and led him into disputes with Boyle and the experimentalists of the early Royal Society. In history, he translated Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War into English, and later wrote his own history of the Long Parliament. In mathematics he was less successful, and is best remembered for his repeated unsuccessful attempts to square the circle. But despite that, Hobbes was a serious and prominent participant in the intellectual life of his time. Hobbes boasted that the science of politics was no older than his own work De Cive. Many readers from his time to ours have objected to his absolutist conclusions, his attempt to lay a sound scientific foundation for those conclusions is widely recognized. His model of science was Euclidean geometry, and his admiration for fellow natural philosopher Galileo shows how Hobbes believed in a scientific understanding also of the human social world. Hobbes argued that persons characterised by a realistic human psychology in the social circumstances we typically face woud find their rational interests best served by jointly submitting to the authority of the undivided, unlimited, absolute sovereign authority; further such submission is dictated to them as a matter of moral or religious duty. Hobbes was in one sense an early social contract theorist. Hobbes also developed some of the fundamentals of European liberal thought: the right of the individual; the natural equality of all men; the artificial character of the political order (which led to the later distinction between civil society and the state); the view that all legitimate political power must be representative and based on the consent of the people; and a liberal interpretation of law which leaves people free to do whatever the law does not explicitly forbid. In other respects he should be a member of a conservative Pantheon. In Leviathan, Hobbes set out his doctrine of the foundation of states and legitimate governments and creating an objective science of morality. This gave rise to social contract theory. Leviathan was written during the English Civil War; much of the book is occupied with demonstrating the necessity of a strong central authority to avoid the evil of discord and civil war. Beginning from a mechanistic understanding of human beings and the passions, Hobbes postulates what life would be like without government, a condition which he calls the state of nature; much of this was based on Hugo Grotius works. In that state, each person would have a right, or license, to everything in the world. This, Hobbes argues, would lead to a war of all against all (bellum omnium contra omnes). The description contains what has been called one of the best known passages in English philosophy, which describes the natural state mankind would be in, were it not for political community: For Hobbes the state of nature is the condition that human beings are in when there is no civil state, that is the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe Levi¬athan 13.8). This idea inspired Hobbes to write some of his most colourful prose: In such condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. In Leviathan Hobbes lays out the theoretical basis for the Westphalian order, which was dominant I European politics from the treaty of Westphalia in 1648 until the end of the Second World war – in which sovereign and absolutist national states compete against each other for power and influence. Hobbes is an important forerunner to public/rational choice political theory. For Hobbes, as in public choice theory, the state of nature is to a great extent a theoretical constrcut which is used to explain the need for government and justify its existence. Still Hobbes think than under certain circumstances the state of nature is actually realized, but he does not appear to think that there was ever a time in the world when everybody lived under the state of nature. In order to understand Hobbes use of the idea of a state of nature think about how human beings are in a society and then conceptually remove all laws and consider what human beings would be like if they are not constrained by any law at all. In this way we can explain the state of nature analytically. Another way to grasp the idea of the state of nature is to think about how human beings are like in their physical nature, in themselves. This is how people are in the state of nature. One might then add a certain kind of law or instituti¬on, in order to determine how that addition would change the behaviour of people and what new kind of behaviour might then be possible. There are three kinds of situation where people are actually in the state of nature. (I) In the kind of primitive conditions in which there is not government at all, like in America before the Europeans a¬rriv¬ed. (II) Civil war, when government has collapsed and no other has replaced it, examples may be parts of former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. (III) The condition of each government with respect to every other government. Hobbes use the phrase the state of nature mostly in De Cive and it does not appear at all in Leviathan but the idea is there in a more refined version when Hobbes speak about the natural condition of mankind. In both De Cive and The Elements of Law Hobbes says that human beings have four natural powers: bodily strength, experience, reason and passion. People have different amounts of power in these areas, but the sum total of these powers virtually everybody possesses is sufficient to make any person able to kill any other. This power to kill others would not have been much of a problem for everyone if people did not have motives to kill each other. People do have such motives however because in the state of nature, everyone may need to kill someone in order to survive or at least to enhance the chances of her own survival: scarcity of resources causes people to become a threat to each other. In addition some people have a natural desire to dominate others even though their own survival does not require it. Since nobody knows who may need or want to kill her, everyone must fear everyone else. In the preface to De Cive Hobbes says. for though the wicked were fewer than the righteous, yet because we cannot distinguish them, there is a necessity of suspecting, heeding, anticipating, subjugating, self-defending, ever incident to the most honest and fairest conditioned. And since everyone knows that everyone should fear everyone else, one has a still further reason to fear everyone else. The idea is discussed also in chapter 13 of Leviathan. Leviathan starts out by asserting the virtual equality of all human beings in the faculities of body and mind. It does not take much strength and intelligence to kill another person in the state of nature. The job can be done simply by waiting until the victim goes to sleep, one may then sneak up on him and bash her head with a bat or a piece of rock. Alternatively one may conspire with others to kill a more strong or clever individual. Such temporary alliances are possible in the state of nature. Hobbes intention was hence twofold: (a) to put moral and political philosophy, for the frist time, on a scientific basis; (b) to contribute to the establishment of civic peace and to the disposing of mankind toward fulfilling their civic duties. For Hobbes these two jobs were closely connected.
Posted on: Sat, 05 Apr 2014 21:23:21 +0000