I'm going to talk this afternoon about Thomas Hobbes of the various philosophies we're going,
considering in this course of lectures. Hobbes was the one who lived the longest. He lived from
1588 to 1679. When he was born in April 1588, he said afterwards, this is an
in an anecdote told by John Aubrey, that his mother went into labor because she heard news
that the Spanish Armada was going to invade England.
And he thought that he had, he described the fact that he had a very nervous disposition
to this event, that his mother had had to go into labor suddenly.
Here in the, with the Spanish Armada invasion of England, just incidentally, you could usually
get people on this trick question, who was the only King of Spain who was also King of
England?
And of course it was King Philip of Spain because remember he was married to Queen Mary
and so he had the title of King of England even though he wasn't, didn't have any powers
King of England, but he had the title just like the Prince Philip, the husband of the
present Queen Elizabeth, could, if he wanted to, have been chosen to be called King Philip,
but he didn't want to do that. So the King of Spain could be King Philip, but that doesn't
really have anything to do with Hobbes, but if I mention it, why not? Yeah, why not? So
So Hobbes was trained, he went to Oxford, he was a specialist in classics, he was trained
in the classical humanist tradition, he, one of his, I think his first published work was
a translation of Thucydides, it's strange that, I think his last work was a verse translation
and the Odyssey. It's strange that in a way that even though he was an expert in the classics,
he thought that, and he says that in his great work with Leviathan, that the classic shouldn't
be allowed to be taught to young people because this was very dangerous. It would encourage
people to have false ideas of liberty. He didn't want that, as I'll be explaining later, but
Even though he thought the classics had dangerous ideas, he himself was quite an expert in Latin and Greek.
Now, why was he studying that? I mean, it sounds like, why did he choose that as a field to go into?
Well, at that time, study of the classical languages wasn't just, say, something acquired
just for the purest sake of learning or because this was something that was fitting for a
gentleman to do. Hobbes himself came from a fairly poor family. His father was a clergyman
in the town of Malmesbury in England, but he certainly wasn't a very high social standing.
The reason he studied that, someone who was an expert in the classics could be very useful
serving a noble or someone in government because they would be very good at composing materials
both in Latin and in other languages, they would be very skilled in language.
So, studying classics was a promising way, career path in those days, just as, say, people
would go today into pre-law or pre-medicine.
In the time when Hobbes went to university, going into classics was a good career choice.
After he got his degree at Oxford, he spent the rest of his life serving noble families,
both as a tutor to their children or as an advisor on policy, and he lived with the noble
families.
The two families in particular he lived with were the Earl of Devonshire and his cousin,
the Earl of Newcastle. Both of these were members of the Cavendish family. That was
one of the most influential English families. Hobbes, for nearly all his adult life, stayed
with them and served them.
In Hobbes' youth, this was a time in the early 17th century, this was a time in Europe of
Quite a bit of skepticism about in politics and religion.
Previously, in the previous century, there had been an ideal among the Renaissance humanists
of having kind of a restoring the Ciceronian Republic, the Republican values favored by
Cicero on a European scale.
And the Renaissance humanists tended to be very idealistic. You remember, for example,
the utopia of Thomas More in other works, other writers of Rasmus, had ideas of how
we could have peaceful relations between states, how we could have the scholars would kind
to form a universal republic based on the study of the ancient classics.
But by the time Hobbes was a young man, European intellectuals tend to take a much more cynical
view of politics in which politics was viewed purely as a power struggle.
Instead of the Cicero, the Roman historian Tacitus was very influential. Tacitus had
a very cynical indeed view of the various Roman emperors that he wrote about. Everything
would involve the play for power among these emperors. There's a very good book I would
recommended by the great Roman historian Sir Ronald Sine.
So he himself wrote in a style like... Oh, good idea.
Thank you, excellent idea. So, Simon himself wrote rather like Tacitus and had similar
views, so it's a good way of getting some attention to what he was saying. Now, as I
say, the writers at the time, influential among European intellectuals, stressed power
Two writers in particular influenced Hobbes' views.
Hobbes went on trips to Europe, he escorted one of the sons of the Earl of Devonshire
to Europe and he met various important European intellectuals.
One of the persons he was most influenced by was a Dutch writer named Justice Lipsius.
Lipsius said that, well, we really can't know anything about ethics.
We all have various views on what's proper conduct, what's the best thing to do, but
we really can't attain any truth about this.
We just have conflicting opinions, except for one thing.
We do know that everybody wants to survive, everybody wants to live.
So we can use that really as the only basis for ethics.
If we can use that and possibly try to get some agreement on what we need, if we all want to survive, then we could try to see what can we do to best survive.
And as we'll see, this becomes perhaps the dominant theme in Hobbes' work in political
philosophy, is how can we each ensure our survival?
You can again see similarity to a Randian idea, but it's developed in a very non-Randian
way.
Hobbes hadn't had the benefit of studying the final speech in Atlas Shrugged, so he made some mistakes.
Now, another writer who influenced Hobbes a great deal was the Dutch jurist and theologian Hugo Grotius,
who was the founder of it, one of the founders of international law and Grotius had us in
similar view to Lipsius that he thought again that each person wants to survive so we should
take this as each person really has a right to do to do what he needs in order to survive but
Grotius took this this in a very non-libertarian way one might think well you start off with saying
people have a right to survive can you derive other rights from this so we would get in we
We would get at least a somewhat liberal system, we wouldn't have a system, say, where the
government can do anything it wants to people, because after all we're starting that each
person wants, has the right to do what he needs to survive, but Grotius took this to
justify, say, slavery because, say, people who would be captured in war might agree that
They Would Become Slaves In Order Not To Be Killed
So, this was perfectly alright because people would be doing this in order to survive, so there was really nothing wrong with slavery.
So, as Grotius took his right to survive, it had a very much non-libertarian aspect
because you would be really doing whatever you need anything that was
needed to survive any system of deprivation of liberty that enable you
to be that enabled people to survive would be all right there was nothing you
could say against it because we don't really know anything else about ethics
that would go against that. And Grotius found support for his views from interpretations of the Bible that were rather non-standard, but we'll see. Hobbes did this also. Hobbes had his interpretation of the Bible, which tended to be somewhat unusual.
So Hobbes then was influenced by these political writers, but there was another very important European influence on Hobbes in this concern, not political philosophy, but general philosophy, metaphysics, theory of knowledge.
College. And here, just as in ethics I mentioned there was a trend towards skepticism, in philosophy
there was a rejection of the previously dominant Aristotelian views, views that were similar
to those held by Aquinas and his later scholastics. And what the dominant trend in European philosophy
was to reject Aristotelian views. Aristotle believed that, as I mentioned in a lecture
on Aristotle, we can find out what the nature of various substances are, let's say, when
we want to know how human beings can lead the best life. We ask, what is the nature
of a Human Being, what is the nature of these objects.
The way Aristotle arrived at his views on what nature of various substances consists
Joseph is that he started off, as I mentioned about his ethics, but he did this more generally,
he started off with common beliefs. Say, he was assuming, say, that generally our beliefs
are true. Say, if I say, look it out and I see objects have a certain color in thought
that unless there were arguments of the contrary, we should believe that the objects have the
color they really do.
In the philosophers who were dominant in the early 17th century, rejected that view.
They say, no, what we perceive really doesn't correspond to reality.
We have no reason to think it does.
Descartes, of course, was the most famous of these philosophers.
He wasn't a skeptic about, in fact, he intended his philosophy to refute skepticism, but he
doubted nearly all our common beliefs about the world. He thought that, say, our beliefs
about ordinary perception were all ones that were, couldn't be, were not founded in reason.
We could, skeptical arguments would destroy these. And Hobbes really developed his views
in Europe.
He was independently from Descartes but he corresponded with Descartes and gave objections
to his views and eventually, I think in 1648, he met Hobbes and also on one of his trips
to Europe, he met Galileo.
He had a letter of introduction to him and he was able to meet Galileo in 1636.
So those are a few of the intellectual influences on Hobbes.
So I want now to say a little bit about Hobbes' metaphysics theory of knowledge because we'll
see this, at least I hope we'll be able to show this, that this is very relevant to his
political views.
Now, Hobbes, like Descartes, was a skeptic about our ordinary beliefs about the world.
We thought that each of us know that we have various perceptions of things.
I see various colors and shapes, but I can't know anything about any real objects that
are causing these perceptions and shapes.
All I know is that there are various perceptions that I'm having.
And even that is going too far, as I said, perceptions that I'm having.
According to Hobbes, we don't have any real knowledge of the self other than the perceptions.
All I know is that some of these perceptions are occurring in some way, but I can't really
form a conception of the self.
So Hobbes, in his reply to, one of his replies to Descartes, really rejected what Descartes'
argument that, you know, he said, well, I think therefore I am.
Hobbes said, well, you know, you can take this as trivially true, but it isn't really
giving us any knowledge of an eye, of an ego, that's really any substantive knowledge.
All we can say is perceptions are occurring in some way, we can't know anything about
it.
Similarly, he thought that space and time just considered by themselves, like space
is considered kind of as a receptacle or emptiness in which perceptions occur, is purely imaginary.
And time, he says, is the shadow of motion. The notion of space and time as distinct entities apart from the perceptions is another false idea.
This is purely imaginary. So perhaps you could see this in some ways as a precursor of Kant, who thought that space and time are what we call forms of intuition,
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We thought that language is purely a conventional system of signs.
We could have a language, so far as we know, we could imagine a single person having a
language.
It would just consist of a certain set of sentences, and we would have various conventions
explaining how the sentences were related and we could have deductions kind of explaining how one
thing followed from the other. We wouldn't know whether anything really corresponded to the
system in reality. We would just have the convention. So, given this view of language,
Research. He tended to have a very negative view of experimental evidence. At the time
he was writing, there was quite a development of experimental science in England. The Royal
Society had been founded with the motto nullius inverba, kind of loosely translated, don't
I won't give any credence just to words, but he didn't like the Royal Society.
He said, for example, he was commenting on Robert Boyle, who had produced a vacuum.
He said, well, how do we know that Boyle has really produced a vacuum?
All he's done is emptied out some air from a certain pump, but how do we know there's
nothing left?
He has no basis for saying he's come up with a vacuum. All he's done is a particular experiment at one time. He hasn't given us any reason for any general laws.
It's a bit like Mises criticizing the econometricians. He says what they're doing is a purely historical interest. They're not coming up with any general laws.
Laws. So Hobbes is saying you can't get through experimental science any general laws. He
had also rather odd views on mathematics. He spent a great deal of time on Euclidean
Geometry, like the idea of a deductive science, but he thought that one could give the terms
of Euclidean geometry a physical interpretation, say you could take a certain physical phenomena
as showing a line without any breadth, you could have a pure line, it wasn't just an
and John Wallace, who was a professor of mathematics, I think at Cambridge, who was a much better
mathematician than Hobbes, but not as good a philosopher, so it was kind of a, each one
had various advantages and disadvantages in this struggle. Now, so far it sounds like
On Hobbes' view, we don't know very much. We do have his kind of conventional knowledge, but we don't know very much.
However, he did think that there were some philosophical views we could know, some propositions we could know.
And one was, we would know that when we have perceptions, there's something causing it.
And this cause must be a material body of some sort, and so we know that only material bodies can cause anything,
and one material body can only be moved by another material body.
So really, in the Hobbesian system of the world, there is really nothing outside our own perceptions except material bodies of various sorts, and we don't have really any idea of what the real properties of those bodies are.
Now, why is this important for political philosophy, for Hobbes' political philosophy?
Well, we can see this if we look at, by looking at what Hobbes says about politics.
Hobbes wrote, there were three main works he had on politics really developing the same position.
One was a manuscript that was part of the Elements of Politics, that was part of a larger work called Elements of Philosophy.
This was something he was working on around 1640.
Then, a version of this part, the Elements of Law, which is part of Elements of Philosophy,
was published under the name, The Citizenry, de Quire, in 1642.
And then, of course, his most famous book, The Leviathan, was published in 1651.
I should say before going into the details of political philosophy,
to just further finishing up on his life,
in the 1630s, the English king, Charles I,
was having a big struggle involving taxation.
The King wanted to raise money for a war against the Dutch, but this was very unpopular, and people weren't willing voluntarily to give him taxes to support his war.
You see, at that time, taxation was very unusual. The King was really supposed to live off his own domains,
The taxation had to be voted separately, the king would appeal to parliament for separate
grants of money, but parliament wasn't willing to give him any money, so as a result in 1629,
the king hadn't called any parliament together, and the king claimed that he had the right,
because he would be the judge of threats to the country, he had the right to raise taxes
is independently. And then some people protested this. And in the famous, there was a famous
case called the Ship Money case in which a man named Hampton had refused to pay the taxes
and he was arrested. But the court held that he was right and they said the king didn't
have the right to raise taxes in this way. So as a result, the king was forced to call
A New Parliament in 1639, and then a war broke out and the Scots revolted against the king
for religious reasons. They defeated the English army. When the English Civil War broke out
between the king and his opponents.
The result was the king's execution in January 1649.
Now Hobbes had been, as I mentioned,
he was the father of the Duke of Devonshire.
So the Duke of Devonshire was a supporter of the king.
So he went into exile with the Duke of Devonshire.
Hobbes spent the years 1640 to around 1651 in France.
However, he wanted to get back to England and he published, when he came back to England,
while the Commonwealth, the government that had replaced the monarchy was still in power.
And when he did that, after he published Leviathan, all his royalist friends turned against him
So then when King Charles II came back, Hobbes was in quite a bit of trouble. People in power didn't like Leviathan, but he managed to escape being imprisoned or having to go into exile again, and then he lived out his life peacefully.
So, as I say, those are the main works that Hobbes wrote on politics.
But to get back to what I was suggesting before, we want to know why are Hobbes' views on philosophy relevant to politics.
well you remember that Hobbes thought since we don't we don't know anything
really about the real world apart from our perception so we don't we can't
grasp the essences of objects if there are any such in the in the outside world
In general, and in particular, we can't have any idea of an objective notion of what's good.
Remember, Aristotle tried to do this by saying, how can we get knowledge of human nature?
But Hoppe said, we can't do that.
So all we have is that each person could say, good is what I want.
We would have a completely relative notion of the good.
Good and bad are just whatever the person wants.
We can't say anything objective about what is good or bad.
Good just means someone, if I say something is good, that means I'm attracted to that thing. If I say it's bad, I'm repelled by it.
Hobbes takes this in a very sense, very much like physical particles in motion.
Saying something is good means I'm just attracted to that. I'm sort of drawn toward it like one material particle being drawn toward another.
And similarly, if I don't like it, I'm repelled from it, like one material particle being
repelled from another.
So this seems like it doesn't, we can't get very far with this, well, so are we just left
with one person liking one thing, one person liking another thing?
Well, Hobbes saves the day by appealing to this idea that I mentioned that both Lipsius
Hoppe's and Roche's have, that one thing we do know is that each person aims at his
own survival. Again, Hobbes gives this a material interpretation. Every particle tries to conserve
itself. It wants to keep going as much as possible. It has some drive, which Hobbes
called El Conadis to keep in being. So Hobbes from this says we can get a right of nature.
Every person has a right in nature to do whatever he needs to survive. We're starting with this.
This is his fundamental principle.
This is sometimes misunderstood.
Hobbes isn't saying in the state of nature, that's a state where we don't have any government,
there's no organized body of law, you can do whatever you want.
It isn't you can do anything at all.
You have a right to take or do anything you want because there are no laws to stop you.
It's only that you can do anything you want that you think is needed for your own survival.
Hobbes says that it wouldn't be the case, say, that being cruel, by which he means taking
Revenge on someone in a way that we don't think is needed for our own survival would
be something that it's all right to do, we wouldn't have a right to do that, we'd only
have a right to do whatever it is we think we need to survive.
Spinoza, who was a later thinker, thought that we do have, in the same nature, a universal
right to do anything we want, but this is not Hobbes' view.
Now a similar related misunderstanding of Hobbes is that he thought that in the state of nature, everybody was hostile to everybody else. Everybody would be trying to kill everybody else.
No, he doesn't think that. He does think, though, that everyone poses a danger to everybody else.
Even the strongest person can be killed by someone who is physically weaker.
People aren't so different from one another that one person is incapable of damaging somebody else.
Everybody is in danger from somebody else, but people aren't otherwise hostile.
He thought that we can have, we can certainly have attachments to people, we can have friends
or people we're in love with, there's nothing in his psychology views that goes against
that.
And he didn't think that people just had some kind of unmotivated hostility.
However, it's also the case, besides each person being fearful of the other, what he calls his diffidence.
Diffidence in that way, he used the word meant fear rather than being timid.
Each person is in fear of the other person.
Persons are also motivated by pride. Each one wants to surpass other people.
So we have people fearful of each other and dominated by pride, but they all want to survive.
So how are they able to survive given that their people are in this state of being fearful
Hoppe thought we could deduce laws of nature, and he has, I think, 19 of these laws of nature.
These laws of nature would be sort of hypothetical imperatives to use const, if you want to survive,
you should do this, such and such, and the most important of these was if someone is
willing to make an agreement with you to have peace, to renounce a use of arms against you,
You should make such a covenant. If, say, you imagine this makes sense because you say
people are not intrinsically hostile to each other, so they would find it in their interest
to make such an agreement. Imagine, say, there are just two people and one, each one doesn't
know what the other one is going to do, so if they could agree that they wouldn't attack
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Let's agree that we'll both lay down our guns, so we won't be fighting each other.
So, okay, I'm laying down my gun.
Once I've done that, why should you give up your arms?
You'd now be the only one with any arms.
You could have power over me.
So, it seems like you would promote your own survival,
not by giving me any or giving up your arms, but just by keeping them.
So we have, in general, the law of nature that we should seek peace if we can, make covenant to seek peace,
but on the other hand, it seems like it would be a foolish idea just to keep to a covenant if we don't have good reason for the other person going to do so also,
Because that would weaken us, we would just be giving up our protection.
So it appears that Hobbes is saying there is a right to survive when there are ways of getting,
there are steps we should take given by the law of nature that we should do to live in the court, to secure what we want.
and so on, but we can't really take these steps because we have no way of ensuring that
the covenant will be kept, as Hobbes famously said, covenants without the sword are but
words. So the big problem for Hobbes is how, if at all, can he get out of that? I should
I would say some people have argued in this way, A. Taylor, who you remember I mentioned
him very briefly in the lecture on Plato, he was a great Plato scholar, he also wrote
on a great many other subjects in philosophy, and he had a view of Hobbes that when Hobbes
talks about the law of nature. He meant that there are laws of nature because they're not
just advice to people on how to get out of the state of nature where people are constantly
in threat to each other. These are laws of nature because God has promulgated these laws
to us. God has told us we ought to follow the laws. But in this view, Howard Warrinder,
I'll put him down also, he had a book called The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, its Basis
In the case of Genesis, came out in 1957, he also takes this view, their laws, the laws of nature are ordained by God, we can also, while I'm mentioning books, there's another important one on this, giving this view by F.C. Hood, called The Divine Politics of Hobbes, but a problem with this is that Hobbes really doesn't say that.
Hobbes does sometimes talk about laws that God has ordained, but this is only when he's concerned with a particular case of the people of Israel as described in the Bible.
He holds that that's talking about real historical events, so God has told them certain things because we read in the Bible that he has,
in general, in Hobbes, a notion of God as telling us what to do.
You can see from what I've said already about Hobbes' philosophy, you would have a tough
time saying that, because remember, we don't know anything about what's causing our perceptions
of the world.
We know that there's some material body causing them, but we don't know anything about this,
so we wouldn't really be able to show by reason that there's a God who's capable of giving
us commands to tell us what to do.
We'll later see what Hobbes' views on religion, but this wouldn't be part of his main philosophy.
The philosophy wouldn't be that he'd be claiming we know by reason that we can, but we know by reason that God has commanded us to keep these laws of nature.
So I've gotten Hobbes into a big problem, he's gotten into a big problem so far.
Now, how does he get out of it?
Well, he says that, imagines, and he describes it in detail in the Leviathan, he says that, suppose everyone in a certain society makes a hypothetical agreement with everybody else, or rather, everybody else leaving aside one person.
Everybody else said, I will surrender my right to act as I think best to promote my own survival according to the right of nature, if you do as well.
And we all surrender our rights to this one person who's outside the agreement called the sovereign.
I got to a complication about one person a bit later, but it's simply not just taking this one person.
So we all agree, let's say, everyone in this room says, they're all going to let me decide how to handle threats against everybody else.
Instead of each one of you saying, well, if I think this person next to me is going to shoot me, I'm going to act first against them.
We're all saying, we'll all let me decide how to deal with the threat.
So in that way, we can all lay down our arms, we can go about our business peacefully, and then I've got all the, I have the job now to decide of coping with all the threats against people, setting up a system of laws so that people can live at peace.
Now, of course, one obvious problem with this is, how do you know that I won't start abusing my power?
Now, one reason for thinking that I wouldn't, other than that I'm just too nice a person to do that,
would be that if I did, then if I was unable to maintain order, then I really wouldn't be,
I really wouldn't be, that people have no reason to continue to keep their promise, their agreement to give me
not to act for themselves. Once they saw that I was no longer maintaining sovereignty in the way that I was supposed to, even though I'm not a party to the agreement, they would have no particular reason to follow what I was saying, my orders, because I would be acting against them, I wouldn't be protecting them.
And Hobbes thinks that even though each person in this covenant has surrendered all his rights,
the right to decide to act according to the law of nature, according to the right of nature to the sovereign,
still one thing couldn't be surrendered is that if there's a direct threat to one's own life,
one can always act to deal with that.
Say, supposing I thought the sovereign was going to kill me, I wouldn't have to go along
with what he said, I could just act for myself.
So if it turned out the sovereign really started abusing people and didn't secure peace, people
wouldn't take him to be the sovereign anymore.
and in fact this led to trouble for Hoppe when Leviathan was published because he he he thought that although he had been a supporter of the monarchy under Charles I he thought that when the new government replaced the monarchy they were the ones who were preserving order they were the sovereigns so he had really thought since the old sovereign wasn't around
Do what he's supposed to, he has to preserve order for you to have reason to obey him.
Now there's one, a couple of problems with this aspect of Hobbes.
One is Hobbes says that each person always aims to preserve himself.
But what about religious martyrs? They're people who, in the Christian view, who were
revered because they wouldn't renounce their faith when they were threatened with death.
So Hobbes seems caught in a bit of a dilemma. If he says those people acted wrongly since
they're acting as their own survival, then it seems like he has to go against what the
Christian Teaching. So, how is he going to handle this? Well, he says that, as usual
with him, when he seems to face religious challenge, he was a very careful student of
the Bible. He had his own views. And he appeals to an episode, remember, where there was a
The soldier named Naaman, who comes to be healed from some sort of leprosy by bathing
in the River Jordan, and then he wants to convert to the Hebrew God, but he still continues
Hoppe says people always have the right to appeal to the privilege of Naaman.
So this is how he gets out of the religious martyr issue.
Now another issue, though, that would seem to raise a problem for his views that we always
If you don't feel like risking your life to make Iraq safe for democracy, so he said,
I'm not going. Can you do that according to Hoppe? If he said, yes, you do have the right
to Refuse to Go, then he can't really maintain his position that the sovereign is all-powerful.
I mean, if he said, well, you don't have to accept the death sentence that's handed out
against you, you can try to resist.
This isn't really much of a practical problem, because after all, there aren't very many
death sentences handed out.
But if you say, the king can't decide, or the sovereign can't decide who to put into
to the Army, then you get into a real problem, or at least it seems like you get into a real
problem maintaining a strong absolutist view of sovereignty.
Now the way Hobbes gets around that is he said, well, you do have to do what the sovereign
If you go into the army, but this really doesn't change your condition, because what in the
state of nature, you would have to evaluate the risks of, possible risks, say if you,
someone in the Iraq case, you would have to say, if there were no government, you would
Do I think the Iraqi government is threatening my existence? If I did, I might want to act against it. If not, I wouldn't.
So what I've done in the Hobbesian view is just I've transferred to the sovereign the right to decide what the risks are.
So, I'm not really, in his view, worsening my own position. I've just made this sovereign the agent for deciding such questions.
So, in his view, it sounds a bit tenuous, sounds like something very hard to agree with him on this.
But he says, this isn't really changing your own position.
in your own position, you're just reapportioning who decides what the risks are to your own
life.
And remember, the sovereign is someone, each person is designated as sovereign as his representative,
so really, the sovereign is really acting as the agent for each of us.
So I can't really say I don't want to do what the Sovereign says because he's really, I've
given him the legal, the power to act for me.
So what he's doing is really legally what I'm doing.
So if I went against him, I'd really be acting against myself.
Again, it's a view that doesn't immediately commend itself for acceptance, but that was
Hobbes' view of the matter.
So what I've contended so far is how, given some examples, how Hobbes would deal with
various problems if once this universal agreement where everybody says, I will surrender my
The Right to Act According to the Right of Nature to the Sovereign, if you will, as well,
how this would operate once this covenant came into being.
But we haven't really gotten to the major problem for the Hobbesian argument, which is,
Would a covenant, in the way Hobbes described it, come into being at all?
What I've given so far is just this, we have just a series of hypotheticals, imagine say
each person in this room is saying, if everyone else in this room will give up all his or
to me, then I will do so as well. Now, does this give us an agreement? It doesn't appear
so because all we have is a series of hypotheticals. If I do this, then if everyone else does this,
then I will do it as well. Each person says that, but we don't have any agreement. You
Supposing a little boy says to his father may I go to the movies tonight and the father
says yes you can if your mother says you can and then he goes to his mother and she says
yes you can if your father says you can so does he have permission to go to the movies
It doesn't appear that he does because all he has is two hypotheticals.
One says, you can go if the other one says you can go, the second one says you can go
if the first one says you can go, so you don't have any agreement.
So you'd have, similarly in the Hobbesian system, you'd have just a series of hypotheticals.
So, what you need is someone to take the initial step, someone saying, I surrender my right
to decide according to the law of nature, then that would bring into effect all the
other hypotheticals, but you'd have the problem of why should anyone take this first step?
Now, before I try to answer that one, there's another problem I think Hobbes is able to
solve that might have occurred to you as a problem, is that suppose some people do agree
to surrender their rights to the sovereign, but some, but not everybody, you might think
Why should those who haven't agreed to do so surrender their rights?
It's like the case I gave before, where the two of us and I say,
I'm throwing down my arms, what if you do and I throw down my arms,
why should you throw down your arms?
Similarly, in this case, some people have said,
we'll give the right decision to the sovereign.
Why should I do it if the others do it? Wouldn't I be in a better position just not to surrender?
All the other people would have, but I wouldn't. Why should I do it?
Well, I think Hobbes could answer, you really wouldn't be in a better position if you didn't
the agreement you might not be because the other people would just be by surrendering to the sovereign would be saying they no longer pose a danger to you maybe the sovereign would they're saying they've agreed they're surrendering all their right to act against you to the sovereign's decision only if he says to act against you will they act against you so they're no danger
The Theory of Money and Credit
Then you have no reason not to, but even if this is right, this still leaves unanswered the big problem for Hobbes is how do we get one person to make the initial step of agreeing, of saying I'm surrendering to the sovereign.
So, putting all these other agreements, all these other hypotheticals into practice, what gets the process started?
Here, Hobbes' answer is that, really similar to his answer to the other problem I mentioned, really, the person, the initial person really has nothing much to lose.
All he said is that by agreeing, say, imagine he agrees to give up his rights, so imagine, let's say, nobody else agrees to do anything.
so all that's happened is really that he's really in the same position he was
before he hasn't really surrendered anything because he's if nobody else
agrees then his surrender doesn't take come into effect he said he said well I
If I, I hereby surrender everything to the sovereign, then he's really, you could say he's really not lost anything than he's just in the state, the state he was before, but if everybody else goes along with him, then possibly he's in a better situation.
He hasn't really lost out. He's at most taken a useless step. He's saying, I'm surrendering everything, but he hasn't lost out on anything.
Now you could say, well, maybe this is misunderstood, that what he's saying is not just he's surrendering if everybody else is surrendering, but he's added the additional step that he has surrendered his rights absolutely.
Absolutely. Even if you take it that way, then still all of these losses are now up to the sovereign to decide how to respond to the threats to him.
So maybe that doesn't make him all that badly off. So according to Hobbes, chapter 15 of Leviathan, he said,
If you said that nobody would make such an agreement, there's no justice.
He said, only a fool would say this.
Whether Hobbes' argument holds up, I think, is more a question of matter, but that at
least was Hobbes' opinion.
Now, in understanding Hobbes' position, there is an influential interpretation I think it's
It's important to avoid, this was one that pioneered by a very good philosopher named
David Gaultier in a book called The Logic of Leviathan.
He said that he applied modern game theory to try to reconstruct Hobbes' argument, and
what he said is, what we have here is a prisoner's dilemma. Remember, you all know the prisoner's
dilemma in elementary game theory. Let's imagine something like there are two prisoners and
And each one is told separately, each one is accused of a certain crime, and he's told
that if you confess, but the other person doesn't confess, say, you'll get one year
in prison and the other person will get ten years in prison.
If you both confess, you'll get three years in prison.
If neither of you confesses, you'll get five years in prison.
I probably got all the numbers wrong.
I usually do that in giving an example.
But the way it's supposed to work out is, it would be better for both of them if neither
One Confesses, but it will be to the advantage of each one to confess rather than not confess
because you'll always be better off regardless of what the other person does if you confess,
if you confess from the way the particular structure of payoffs is worked out.
So it's because you can't come to any binding agreement with the other person, you can't
realize the best feasible option for both of you, which is you both agree not to confess
so you go to jail for fewer years than if you both do confess.
So what Gaultier said is that people in the Hobbesian state of nature are in a prisoner's
is Dilemma. It would be to the advantage of all of them if they made their universal agreement
to surrender all their rights and assigns to the sovereign, but it's to the advantage
of each one that everybody else make the agreement and that he not make the agreement. And so
What Hobbes is saying according to Goethe is if the government somehow can force everybody
to make this agreement, sort of everybody somehow manages to make the agreement, say
the government is kind of standing over them, somehow forcing them to all agree, then they're
They're all better off, they've somehow gotten out of this prisoner's dilemma.
But you can see from the way I presented Hoppe's argument, it's not a real prisoner's dilemma
because his point is that if everybody else or most people make the covenant, you're not
particularly better off if you don't agree.
You might not be worse off, but you're not better off either.
So we don't have a standard prisoner's dilemma according to, so Gaultier's analysis really
isn't fully accurate as a way of understanding Hobbes.
It's a very important book, but he hasn't really gotten Hobbes' argument right.
Hobbes' argument is that we really don't have much to lose if we make the agreement,
And we have a great deal to gain, so it's to our interest to make the agreement.
Now you recall I mentioned there was one complication about sovereignty.
It doesn't have to be everybody surrenders to one person.
I just gave that kind of a simpler way of looking at the argument and Hobbes himself
tended to favor monarchy, ruled by one person as the best form of government, but you could
have cases where people had surrendered the sovereignty to a group or they all decided
to exercise sovereignty in a democratic way.
That would still be sovereign according to Hobbes.
They all agreed to surrender their rights and decide according to the law of right of
nature to this one body whether it's individual or a group. Now supposing we've somehow overcome
all these obstacles and we do have a Hobbesian sovereign in operation, can the sovereign do
anything he wants. Can he pass whatever laws he wants? Well, in one sense, he really can
unless he does something that shows he's not able to maintain order, because then, as I
mentioned before, people wouldn't recognize him as sovereign anymore. People have no right
to Resist what he says, because remember they've surrendered their rights to act on their own
behalf to him. He's the representative. However, Hobbes holds that even though the people can't
resist the sovereign, the sovereign really shouldn't do anything he wants. There are
In particular, limits to what he should do, especially, he should act in a way that he judges will best preserve peace.
He shouldn't interfere, say, with people's property unless he thinks doing so is needed for peace.
Now, I should say, what are Hobbes' views about property?
Well, Hobbes holds, in the state of nature, each person is entitled to own property, but only property that's needed for his life.
It's wrong to take property from more property, preventing so much property that other people can't live.
This would be needlessly malicious to them.
The Theory of Money and State The Theory of Money and State
and what property people should have, and it should make sure that each person has enough
necessary, has enough property necessary to live on.
But once the government has set what it's, set out what the property titles are, it's
wrong to interfere with those.
The Federal Reserve specifically holds that it's wrong for the government to have redistributive taxation.
It shouldn't have an income tax. It's better to have the tax on consumption.
It shouldn't just take money from some and give it to others because that wouldn't be its real function.
There was an influential book by the Canadian historian of political philosophy, C. B. McPherson,
that came out in 1962, called The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism.
And he argues that what Hobbes was really doing when he says that the government shouldn't
have redistributive taxation and other things, he says, and he was insuring, he was acting
kind of as a spokesman of the rising capitalist class.
He was favoring, he thought that by having a strong state he would be promoting the economy
and from this, from the, so that we would have a medieval system where people had more
obligations based on kind of a Christian view of natural law, had obligations to each other.
And what Hobbes aimed to do was replace this by a capitalist system in which people could,
subject to certain limits, acquire whatever they wanted.
So, it's a Marxist interpretation where Hobbes is taken to be the ideologist of the rising bourgeoisie, but this is not a very convincing interpretation, because first place, as I mentioned, Hobbes does recognize limits to property, you can't, you have to provide for the poor.
And also, if you said that, if you took McPherson's view, it seemed like you'd have to say that the remnants of the medieval system, which is really the state of nature,
the new system is really, how does it really take the medieval system to be the state of nature, but that isn't at all plausible.
So the state of nature that he's imagining is a system where people really don't have any obligations to each other at all, but on McPherson's view, this new form of state is replacing this previously existing situation, which was the medieval one, so McPherson's really got the chronology wrong.
Hobbes' imagining not changed from the medieval system and changed from this state of nature
where people don't have any fixed obligation to each other.
I think in the time remaining I'll just say a few things about Hobbes' views on religion,
which just like in political theory had a very distinctive position that was quite different
for Nearly Anybody Else.
Some people think Leo Strauss is one of these, in this case Strauss isn't as unusual as Strauss
and sometimes are when they're considering other figures.
Some people say Hobbes is really an atheist because he says we really don't know any,
Remember, he said we don't know anything about God's properties.
Say, if we say God is infinite or all-powerful, we don't have any ideas of those things.
Those things are just words, so when Hobbes refers to God in various contexts,
isn't he really talking in kind of a language that's just designed for popular consumption?
If in those days you said you don't believe in God, you could get into very big trouble and you could lose your own life very easily.
So Hobbes didn't want to say that, but he was really an atheist.
But I think it's more plausible to think that Hobbes did believe in a sort of God, but it was rather peculiar.
He thought there was a first cause, it was some kind of material entity that was causing the war,
Because we really couldn't say much about it. So it was kind of a god. In some sense, we can't say anything really about its properties.
Now, does this make him a practical atheist? I mean, we have people today who say, well, there may be some kind of unknowable first cause, but we can't know anything about it.
Herbert Spencer might be someone who held that view, but the person doesn't engage in any religious practices,
so for all practical purposes you could say Spencer's an atheist even though he thinks possibly there's this unknowable.
Is this true of Hobbes also? Well, it doesn't, I don't think this is right,
Because Hobbes, in the Leviathan, he spends a great deal of time on describing, giving an interpretation of the Bible.
In his other works, he places a great deal of emphasis on understanding what the Bible is saying.
Now, you might say, well, how could he possibly do that, given his very skeptical view about
knowledge?
He says, well, we can't know anything other than our, what, really anything about causes
of our perceptions.
How can he say anything about the God-having-revealed thing to us?
And you remember, I gave that very point as a reason for rejecting the A. Taylor's thesis,
The way Hobbes maintains some religious views, even though he had this very skeptical view of knowledge,
he distinguished very sharply between knowledge and opinion.
And here his views are similar to those of an influential Anglican Church of England theologian at the time,
William Chillingworth, who wrote a book called The Religion of Protestants.
Now, what Chillingworth said is, we believe many things that we don't know, but we just
believe them on testimony, say, for example, most of us, at least, I certainly believe
that Julius Caesar existed, but how do I really know that? It's just based on accepting certain
and Historical Evidence.
So Chillingworth said we should accept the claims
of the Christian revelation because there's testimony for them.
We have no reason to reject and we might as well accept it.
It's not a very strong reason to accept it.
He more or less said, well, here is the historical document.
Why not accept it?
Hobbes, in Book de Kivé, says that the sovereign really has the power, since he's in charge of everything,
to decide what the state religion should be, or how to interpret religion, but he ought to consult Christian divines,
In line with Hobbes' very skeptical view of what we could know, he has a minimalist view
of Christianity says, someone who's a Christian who believes that Jesus is the Messiah, that's
all you need to believe to be a Christian, and the sovereign has the right to regulate,
Christian sovereign should require that that be believed, but it has the right to regulate
Churches and everything else. As long as you say, Jesus is the Messiah, that makes you
a Christian. And this is taken, Hobbes takes this, he makes clear in the Latin parts of
the viaduct, in a very this-worldly way. It means something like Jesus will come back
to earth in some way, and he'll reign over all of us. And people who don't believe in
When the Bible talks about everlasting hell, this doesn't mean that people live or go to hell when they die forever.
It just means that there are always new people who are going to be annihilated by being burnt in hell.
Getting out of the system where each person is acting on his interpretation of what he
needs for survival.
One thing that concerned him when we tried to apply this to the situation that confronted
him was he feared that intellectuals, especially those who were dominated by certain religious
views, would set people to conflict with each other.
Remember, in Europe at the time, there had been the Thirty Years War, 1618 to 1648, in
which there were tremendous fights involving religion that really had a very bad effect.
One third of the population of Germany, for example, died during the Thirty Years War.
So Hobbes thought that it's extremely important that the sovereign be in control of religion
and prevent these intellectuals, religious intellectuals from setting the people at odds
with one another.
In a book he wrote on the history of English Civil War, Behemoth, Behemoth was another
biblical monster just like Leviathan.
He blames the onset of the English Civil War on dissident religious people, especially
the ones that really got him upset were Calvinists.
He thought Calvinists were the real enemy and the ones he was most concerned to oppose.
So I think the basic here, remember in my first talk I said I didn't think I was going
I'm going to be guilty of the Whig interpretation of history and saying that it was a constant progress for more and more libertarian ideas.
This is, I think, my leading support for saying that I'm not guilty of this.
What we have in Hobbes is how we see how an insistence on security at all costs leads to a very non-libertarian view of things.
So, I think we have a little bit of time for questions, objections. Anybody? Rodman?
Well, I'm not going to convert comedy into tragedy by trying to answer that.
The question was, how could Hobbes say there was a state of nature? This is not an object we can see. It seems like a purely imaginary construction.
I think Hoppe really had two answers to this. One is that he thought that nations were in a state of nature in regard to each other, say, there's no sovereignty, say, between England and France, so they're really in a state of nature in regard to the other.
Then also he thought that regardless of whether we could show historically that there was such a thing as a state of nature, we could imagine ourselves to be in this by saying, well, imagine there is no sovereign. What would it be like for us?
Something a bit like, as we'll see in one of the later lectures, a bit like John Rawls' original position.
It's kind of a hypothetical device. In fact, as Rawls makes clear in his recent public lectures on the history of political philosophy,
he was influenced by Hobbes to some extent. So to some extent, the state of nature doesn't depend on actually looking at something.
We imagine what it would be like to be in it.
The question is, how does one see this?
The power of the sovereign person is the power of everyone else to go along with it.
But if it's really everyone else who is in the social order of doing, why do we need the sovereign?
The sovereign power depends on the personal opinion. Why doesn't the personal opinion belong there?
Yes, the question was, Hobbes says in the same nature, really, people aren't so unequal that even the weakest person can kill the strongest person, so isn't this really still in effect?
One sovereign is establishing that sovereign is just one person, so what is he really doing to enforce, how is he really able to enforce the state of peace?
If you say, well, people are cooperating with him, then isn't it the case that it's the people's cooperation that's really doing the job and not the sovereign isn't doing anything.
I think this is an excellent point. In fact, I think that's how, you know, a return view would say, that's how we do get social order, is that everyone is really coming to accept a certain law of nature, certain rights that people have in the way of doing things, but I think what Hobbes would answer is, it isn't the sovereign himself who's doing it, but what the sovereign is needed is to kind of coordinate
How do you coordinate how all these people who want to agree are to do things? Hoppe,
as you remember, is not a Hayekian. He doesn't think order can develop spontaneously. So
what the sovereign is doing is he's saying, well, this is how we're going to arrange things.
And then everybody else has agreed to follow him. So if he were taken away, we might have
a will to cooperate, but we'd just be in a situation where each of us would have different
ideas on how to cooperate. This is this this part of the argument is really one
he stresses more in elements of law of law in the Akiva is this coordinated
function of the sovereign. So I think that would be the basic response you
might give to your point.
So even if we're all willing to agree, instead of our all having to agree on one
thesis after another, after another, after another, we have to agree on one piece, whatever that guy says.
Yes, that's exactly the point, what Hobbes is saying. If we all want to agree, instead of having to agree on all sorts of different things, we just all agree that this one person is going to decide things.
I think that's an excellent way of putting Hobbes's, at least one of Hobbes's basic points, Matthew.
I was wondering if you could tell me where I could find the reference to that boxed work and also if you could speak a little bit more on the meaning of that biblical story, I'm sorry, how it was worked, the meaning of that biblical story.
Oh, well, the question had to do with this episode from the Bible that mentioned Naaman bowing down in the House of Riman.
What was the reference in Hobbes' work? That I'll look up for you. I don't have a very good memory for such things and I don't know it offhand.
I used to be able to remember things, but not too much anymore, but as to, the other question was, on more, this will be, I guess, the last thing, because we're out of time, on the meaning of it, is something like, as I understand it, what Naaman's point of view, which is not, I should say, doesn't appear to be endorsed by the Bible, it's just something that he says he's doing, is something like, he's saying that he can separate his inner beliefs
from what he's required to do publicly. He's bowing down in the House of Rehman, because that's what his king is told him to do.
But by doing that, he doesn't indicate that he's really believing that.
So I think this is very important, the theme that comes up in Kant's political philosophy, other writers, particularly amongst the German philosophies,
The point here is that Hobbes is saying that you don't have to be a martyr because you can still believe in Christianity internally.
You just don't have to. You just, when you conform externally to what the idol worshippers say, you're not really indicating that you're an idol worshiper.
But I think it would be idle to go on further. Thanks.