Hobbes: too tolerant, forgiving of the autocrats who litter history

Thomas Hobbes [1588-1679, 91]

1. Pointed the way, pioneering through recognizing Man in charge of his own affairs.
2. Task to apply Reason to optimise his collective predicament [especially less shooting] and with no God to help.
3. His answer was trading freedom for more “safety”, but stayed with the ancien regime through bowing to absolute leaders [like Charles I], in theory based on consent [sovereignty of the People] but in practice fundamentally flawed because no effective accountability by the leader.
4. And no recognition of individual rights.
5. Understandable product of his violent times.
6. But he overlooked self-interested violent tenacity of autocrats, evident today even in the face of emphatically successful liberal democracy.

• Hobbes was a pioneering thinker in recognizing Man as a biological product, a material animal, in charge of his own affairs, applying Reason to observation, analysis, imagination, remedial action.
• Hence saw no available tangible resort to spiritual entities.
• He evinced a strong interest in science, cf Galileo [who he met late 1635 in Florence], and then in particular claimed the same principles / methods were applicable to Man organizing his affairs – especially politics – and for him applying a specific “mechanistic” model, one now seen as off centre: “heavily indebted to Galileo.. .. all phenomena.. qualities like temperature or color.. mathematical objects .. very nature of human thought itself must be understood as arising from the motions of material bodies. [Jesseph 2004}
• Knowledge started with examination through the 5 senses, scrutinized with imagination, this separating us from [other] animals.
• A “Nominalist” he rejected Neo-Platonists treating “universals” as real.
• Historic context: through his study of history [disastrous Peloponnesian Wars, hubristic debacle forpioneering civilized Athenian democracy] and his own violent times – Elizabethan England, hence James I, Charles I, English Civil War alongside in Europe the Dutch fight with Spain [80 Years War, 1568-1648] and the 30 Years War [to 1648] – he was conscious of societal / communal violence as a major problem, a chronic unhappy“state of nature”.
• He analysed reasons for violence: 1/ competition [for gain, power]; 2/ diffidence [for safety, defence]; 3/ glory [for reputation, honour].
• So his politics addressed challenge to devise an optimal system to reduce violence, at a time when reformers challenged the old order, divine right monarchies and Church.
• His answer to problem of violence was strong central command: the Leviathan, a Monarch, a Dictator. Man formed, joined a “political society”, “as the only guarantee of safety..” [ACG], headed by a monarch [or a group, oligarchy] in theory subordinate to a sovereign People, the ultimate authority, but who surrender their “natural rights” in return for safety.
• The Leviathan has “two inalienable rights” [ACG]: 1/ “cannot have power taken away”; 2/ “cannot be charged with treating subjects unjustly”. He “invokes idea of a “law of nature”..” [ACG}.
• Only one constraint on Sovereign: if he fails to deliver “safety” the People can “disobey.. even rebel” [ACG]giving them  ultimate authority, making the Sovereign subordinate. In theory.
• But there were two pressing flaws:
  • a/ no practical effective accountability of Monarch.
    • Right through recorded history, across near 5 millennia, to this day, we see the violent tenacity of determined capable ambitious self-interested autocrats [kings, emperors, caudillos, dictators] and their self-interested supporters.
    • In practice they proved very hard to “vote out”, resisting forcefully any rebellion, unconcerned about its legitimacy”.
    • A strong autocrat may have made life relatively safer than a weak one but in practical, absolute terms politcs remained violent, as history clearly demonstrated.
    • Thus Leviathans used war both extend their domains and defend them, against internal or external attack.
    •  The absence of a formal consent based leadership succession process engendered chronic violent instability.
    • So activities of “absolute monarchs” frequently threatened “safety” of the people, but with no meaningful redress.
    • A core challenge for Politics was making ALL agents accountable to the People, especially the leaders, recognized later through [independent]: parliaments [and full franchise], courts, security [police], ie authentic checks and balances.
  • AND b/ no formally, legally recognised individual rights, especially security for private property, also freedom of expression, of assembly, from “arbitrary authority”.
• So Hobbes reactionary views basically supported pre Civil War Charles I, as an absolute monarch.
• Interesting was Hobbes apparently having little to say about the importance of England’s pioneering liberal institutional progress, the slow emergence from end 12^th C – ie across over 400 years by then – of England’s Parliament and courts, alongside the Crown, notwithstanding the narrow franchise, sidelining most of the population, but prescient progress the same.
• Hobbes argued with Robert Boyle over the role of experiment in science, missing its importance. Boyle recognized Laws of Nature and the role of experiment in investigating them, but Hobbes did not.
• Importantly he saw no role for religion in government. God off the bridge.
• Life? Born in year of the Spanish Armada he was very long lived for his times. Luck smiled early, a rich uncle opening the way to Oxford age 15, so well educated, and leading to a well connected job afterwards, tutoring the Cavendidh family. He was well travelled too, sometimes to skirt apparent danger, like most of 1640-50 he self-exiled in France. He generally exercised his body in the morning [played tennis till around 75?] and his brain later.

Quentin Skinner and “republican liberty”

ACG cites Quentin Skinner, “compelling criticism of Hobbes” in preferring “republican liberty”, from old Rome to Renaissance, through to Civil War, Republicans like John Harrington, Algernon Sydney, John Milton.

For QS “republican liberty” means “liberty as absence of dependence” [WSE: thus dependent on, exposed to the will of another, like the ruler, Leviathan], hence free of any arbitrary power [WSE: ie free of the will of a Monarch, his arbitrary power].

Hence for Republicans the rules are known, beyond them you are free.

Versus Hobbes’ liberty as “absence of impediments to motion..” [TH: De Cive];

And “ absence of external constraints” {Leviathan]

For QS this introduces a “distinction between liberty and power”.

Liberty as “absence of restraint” [Hobbes] is Isaiah Berlin’s negative liberty, versus positive liberty of Republicans.

QS view has been criticized as extreme [cf LRB, Sep. 2008, “Why It Matters”, Ellen Meiksins Wood], thus in England it does not take account of “a state governed by a partnership of monarchy and unitary parliament.. ..unlike … Europe or anywhere else..

[Ie] a landed class whose power and wealth depends far less than those of Continental aristocracies on autonomous juridical, political and military powers, or on venal office in the state. .

.in which the [English] landed aristocracy derived its.. wealth from its control of property, while the central state, ‘the Crown in Parliament’, maintained public order.”

Thus in England the landed aristocracy, working with parliament, meant inherent [embedded, structural] inequality, because the rest of society, the lower orders, ie especially the rural peasantry, was disenfranchised, were locked outside, did not participate in politics, reserved for the upper orders [aristocracy and later burghers] and parliament.

Some [on the Left] see similar circumstances today, structural inequality, leading them to support, seek “arbitrary” remedial, corrective interference by Leviathan, the central government.