Talking Politics: History Of Ideas | Hobbes On The State | Transcript
CATHERINE: Hello, I'm Catherine Carr, the producer of Talking Politics. This is the first talk in our new series History of Ideas. To kick off, David introduces us to the ideas of Thomas Hobbes in his classic book Leviathan. It's a story of cowardice and courage, war and peace, terror and the search for security. It's all here.
DAVID: Why start with Thomas Hobbes and Leviathan? Why start in 1650? The history of political ideas goes back much further than that and many of the ideas that we still use to organize our political life have their origins in the ancient world with the Greeks: Plato, Aristotle… Ideas like democracy and justice and law. And that of course is one place we could start. But I want to start later than that, and I want to start with Hobbes for two reasons.
The first, it’s just such an amazing book Leviathan. There really isn't another book like it about politics. It feels a bit like a jolt in the history of ideas. It has some claims to be the most rational book ever written about politics, but it's also slightly mad, and Hobbes may have been a little bit mad when he wrote it. He wrote it in very late middle age. He'd been very sick. Not that long before he nearly died. And there is a view that he might still have had what used to be called brain fever and Leviathan reads like the work of someone who was a bit feverish. Hobbes was among many other things a mathematician and the book is inspired in part by a kind of mathematical, geometrical understanding of politics. But it's also a work of art. The language in it is extraordinary. It's metaphorical and allegorical and analogical. The title Leviathan, that means a biblical sea monster. This is a book that is both about Euclidean geometry and about biblical imagery. Like I said, there really isn't anything like it.
But another reason to start with this book and with Hobbes is that it is the beginning of one story in the history of ideas, and you could say it's our story. Not us as human beings. That's the older, longer story. That's the one that goes back to the ancient Greeks and much further back than that. This is the story of us as moderns—modern citizens or modern subjects of modern states. And the modern state, the idea of the modern state, is still the organizing principle and institution of our politics and our world. And it's the idea that I'm going to use to try and structure some themes through this series of talks.
There is a real question now, even now as I record this—I'm recording this at the time of coronavirus—about whether that period dominated by the idea of the modern state is coming to an end. It may be just now starting its great unraveling. We don't know. I will touch on that later on. I'm not going to talk about it now because I want to go back to the beginning. But it is possible to argue that a significant part of that story has its origins with Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan. And that's what I'm going to try and talk about today.
Before I get onto Hobbes himself, who he was, what he thought, where he came from, I'm just going to spend a few minutes fleshing out that idea. I just want to say a bit more about what I mean by the modern state. It's not at all obvious, I think, what it does mean, even if I say it is the organizing idea of our politics. I’m going to do it as simply as I can. The real story is much more complicated than this but that doesn't matter now. And I'm gonna do it by trying to contrast in very broad terms what we might think of as a modern conception of politics, organized around the idea of the state, and what came before it, which I'm going to call pre-modern, and includes the ancient world, the Greeks, but more than that too.
So one way to make the difference between the pre-modern and the modern, the difference that is in part marked by Hobbes’ Leviathan is to say that all political communities, wherever they are, shape size doesn't matter, they all have lots of different kinds of people in them but they have two basic types as well. You can divide most political communities up between the people that we would recognize as having a particular kind of power, decision making power, the ability to set certain kinds of rules, to impose those rules, and the larger group, who live under those rules, who have to bear the consequences of those decisions, who make up what you might call the body of the state, as opposed to that narrow group, the elite group, who have some kind of special power within the state. There are lots of different terms we could use to describe these people: the many and the few, or the mass and the elite. We might call them the people and the government. Those words that apply across the history of ideas. But it is possible to identify I think in almost all kinds of political communities people we would recognize as having a kind of governing power and people we would recognize as being, what we might think of as the body of citizens. [6:38]
In pre-modern conceptions of politics when the fundamental question is asked, and I think in many ways the fundamental question of politics often is, what is the relationship between these two sets of people: rulers and ruled, government and people? In pre-modern terms that question tends to present itself as a kind of choice. You are often invited to pick sides, or at least to say whether you primarily identify your stake, your political community, with its head or its body, with the few or the many, sometimes with the rich or the poor. There are lots of ways this division plays out. That choice was the choice that Hobbes wanted to get away from.
In the idea of the modern state, particularly the one that I'm going to be talking about today, the structure of politics is specifically designed to get away from seeing that as a choice. Government and people do not stand in the kind of opposition to each other where you either have to pick sides or, as often happened in ancient conceptions of politics, you have to construct an elaborate balance between them. You weigh them off against each other. You try and put them on the scales so that it doesn't tip too far one way or the other. You set up the rich and the poor so they don’t tear each other apart. In the Hobbesian, the modern, conception of politics, you construct a state so that there is no choice. Government and people are still separate. They are not the same and we know they're not the same. I don't know who's listening to this. I know this podcast is sometimes listened to by people who are members of governments. They are definitely the few. The many, most of us the rest of us, aren't. We never get that confused. I don't think any of us think we're in government when we're not. Government and people are still separate, but we're locked together in a kind of mechanical embrace. We are co-dependent. We depend on each other. We authorize them. They act for us. In a way where it's quite hard to tease the two apart.
What's odd about this idea—and I'm going to try and make more sense of it as I go through not just this talk but the ones that follow… so it doesn't have to make sense now. I'm still not completely sure it makes sense to me. What's odd about this idea is that it's more confusing than the ancient idea. The ancient idea makes a lot of sense. Politics does often feel like a choice between being on the side of the people or the government. Is your state really a people state or is it an elite state—aristocratic, monarchical? Does it belong just to the few—the oligarchs? Or can the many really have a say in it? Can they really control its destiny? That makes sense as a choice and getting away from that choice feels constraining and odd. And yet the idea of the modern state is the most powerful, the most successful, and, as Hobbes shows, the most frightening idea in the history of political ideas. And it is the one that rules our world still, for now anyway and maybe for a long time to come. [9:44]
I'm just going to give a couple of examples before I talk about Hobbes just to try and illustrate that and then I'll get to the substance: Leviathan. So to pick an example of a pre-modern conception of politics, I'm choosing a book that could be the start of this course of talks, and some people think it is the first modern book about politics. Machiavelli's The Prince predates Hobbes by nearly 150 years and it’s often thought to be a very modern book and it is still read by many contemporary politicians. The word is that Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair's press officer, made sure that everyone who worked in Blair's office had a copy ready on their desk. It feels modern because it feels quite cynical. It's about power. It's about understanding politics in its own terms. There's a certain kind of ruthless enterprise that doesn't abide by the normal rules, and particularly for Machiavelli, the rules of Christianity. It's not a holy game; it's a game of power. And many of those lessons speak to politicians now as though they were written yesterday. That's what makes it feel modern. It's better to be feared than to be loved. Sounds like a precept from the 21st century, as well as the early 16th century. And yet I don't think you can start a history of modern ideas about politics with that book because it's not a modern book.
And the evidence it’s not a modern book is in the first line, which most people would ignore. It’s not the interesting bit of the book. It's about the description of what goes on in the inner circles of power. But the first line of Machiavelli's The Prince, and I haven't got it in front of me so I'm just gonna paraphrase it. I’m sure this is close to at least one translation. The first line says, all the states that have held dominion over men are either republics or principalities. Either, or is the pre-modern conception of politics. At some level, politics divides up between republics, citizen states, or people states; states where you identify the state with the body of the people. In the pre-modern world that does not include most people, the many is nowhere near all. The many excludes all those types of people from slaves to women to children who don't count as being ruled because they don't exist in the world of rules, they exist in the world of a kind of property. The ancient world was no fun. Machiavelli's world was no better. It's pre-modern because it sets up politics as, at a deep level, an either or question. Machiavelli thought some of the rules about politics might cut across that divide but many of them didn't.
So if politics is a choice, and you have to say is it a principality—which essentially means a monarchical or kingly state ruled by its single head—or is it a republic, a people state? And then you ask of our states? Can we give an answer? And I think we can't because we're moderns and these are modern states. And if you take a couple of examples, the United States of America, the United Kingdom… Well the United States of America self-consciously a republic. It calls itself a republic. So in Machiavelli's terms, and many of its founders had read Machiavelli very carefully, it’s definitely in theory, at least, a state without a prince. And the United Kingdom is not a republic. It's a monarchy. We have plenty of princes. We probably have too many. Not just Prince Charles but all the other ones as well. But those aren't actually our princes and the Queen is not our prince either. Our prince, as I record this, is lying in a hospital bed suffering from the virus that he's trying to protect us from. Our prince is Boris Johnson. And of course the United States of America has a prince too, Donald Trump. And he presides over a kind of princely court, autocratic and scary. Our prime minister, the American president, have a power that goes beyond what Machiavelli would consider acceptable in anything that passed as a republic or a people's state. And yet they aren't princes in the Machiavellian sense because a Machiavellian Prince treats his state as his estate, as his possession, as a kind of property. Johnson and Trump have their power thanks to us, because of us, on sufferance from us. At the same time they have a kind of power that goes beyond anything that could be tolerated in a real Machiavellian republic because our states are not either republics or principalities. They are both, which actually means they are neither.
And that conception of politics, where the government owes its power and its authority to the people, and as a result of that the people are subject to the power and authority of the government in a mutually codependent relationship, so that even though we might think politics is about the old choice, it's really hard to tease them apart. That is the story that in part at least begins with Thomas Hobson's Leviathan. And as I go through these talks, I hope, talking about both the idea and the many, many types of criticism of that idea, that our politics will come into a different kind of focus. That even if we go all the way back to 1651, we will recognize something of us in them. [15:20]
Hobbes. Who was he? The first thing to say about the man himself is that a key fact about his life is given by the dates, when he was born and when he died. He was born in 1588, the year of the Spanish Armada under Elizabeth I. He died in 1679, 91 years later, towards the tail end of the reign of Charles II. Even today that would be a long life. I suppose 91 isn't super exceptional now, still pretty exceptional. In the 17th century that is a super long life. And Hobbes lived during one of the most turbulent political periods in all of history. And at the heart of that long life, right in the middle of it, was profound political turmoil. And so his life was defined, right at its heart, by a kind of breakdown of politics. And it was the breakdown of politics that inspired him to write some, but not all of his thoughts.
The two great political traumas were, on the one hand, the really awful European trauma of the Thirty Years War from 1618-1648. So the middle part of Hobbes’ life. One of the worst wars of all, and a kind of war of all against all. A deeply violent, at times almost genocidal, war across the European continent, dividing people on grounds of religion, ethnicity as we would now say, dynasty, economic divisions, social divisions, family divisions, hideous, violent, brutal, interminable, the worse that politics can be.
And then in Hobbes’ own life, as a subject of the English crown, the great trauma in the middle late part of his life was the trauma of the English Civil War, or the English revolution as it was sometimes known that runs roughly from 1640, or more precisely I suppose 1642, through to 1660 and the restoration of the Crown. And it contains the execution of a king. The creation of a new kind of politics. The attempt to create a new kind of republic, and its failure. And Leviathan, Hobbes’ masterpiece, was written in 1651. If you run the story of the English Civil War from 1642 to 1660, it comes right bang in the middle of the trauma. And it's the trauma that informs the book.
The second thing to say about Hobbes is that he liked to joke, or it was reported of him that he liked to joke, about the year of his birth 1588 that his mother went into labor when she heard the news that the Spanish Armada was sailing up the channel because it so traumatised her. And that therefore he was born, I quote, ‘twinned with fear,’ that is, his birth made him throughout his life an extremely anxious and fearful man. And he was, apparently, I suppose today we might call it paranoid. But he had reason to be paranoid as well. It was a very very dangerous time and mistakes—political mistakes, intellectual mistakes, religious mistakes—could cost you your life.
Hobbes was frightened of political breakdown and he sought to avoid it. And he literally avoided it in the case of the English Civil War because the other fact about Leviathan is that Hobbes didn't write it in England. He wrote it in Paris, in France, where he went in part to escape the dangers, the threats to him of the war. It was a kind of safe haven. It was a book written in a kind of safe haven. And yet the paradox of Hobbes’ life is, even if he claims he was a fearful man, you would never guess it from reading Leviathan because Leviathan is intellectually and politically completely fearless. That's what makes it such a jolting book. It's as though nothing is holding him back. And it was an incredibly dangerous thing for him to write. It did nearly cost him his life after the Stuarts were restored in 1660 because it's a book written right at the crux of the conflict, and so it was itself slightly conflicted about whose side it was on because it was trying to get away from picking a side. And when the King came back it looked somewhat disloyal. More than that… I won't talk about this in detail here. It's a book that gave the impression, because of the way it tried to subsume religious divisions in a greater political conception, that it was a book not just against religion but possibly against God. And Hobbes became known as a kind of atheist. In the 17th century, atheism literally could kill you. So to be Hobbes was to be fearful and also absolutely fearless. And it's the fearless Hobbes, the brain fever Hobbes, who wrote Leviathan. [20:32]
What did he do in his life? What did he do, I suppose we might say now, for a living? Well he did lots of things but he was also, if you had to put a word to it, a kind of servant. He was born in relatively humble circumstances. He rose by his wits, his intelligence, and he came into the service of, and then under the protection of, an aristocratic family, the Cavendish family. And he worked for them in lots of different capacities. He was a kind of house intellectual. He was that pet mathematician. He was a tutor to their sons. Took them on grand tours of Europe. So he's a kind of travel guide. He was a correspondent. He looked after some of their business affairs and in return they provided him with protection and security until they couldn't, until the Civil War made it too dangerous to be associated with eminent families. They protected him again as best they could afterwards. Part of the reason that Hobbes was in Paris was that relationship had broken down.
One other word to describe Hobbes before I try and say what he actually said, and maybe even believed, in philosophical terms—going beyond his interest in maths and science and optics and mechanics and geography, geometry and everything else—the word to describe Hobbes is that he was a skeptic, skepticism being the philosophical position of doubt. The most famous skeptic of this period was a friend of Hobbes’ in France, Rene Descartes the celebrated philosopher and skeptic who came up with the catchphrase of skepticism, the phrase for which Descartes is known. As we go through these talks a lot of the people I'm going to be talking about will have the kind of catchphrase associated with them, and I'll get onto Hobbes in a moment. Descartes’ catchphrase was ‘Cogito ergo sum.’ I think therefore I am. It's the skeptic’s answer to the question, ‘Is there anything we can know for sure?’ It would probably be clearer if it was, ‘I doubt therefore I am.’ That is, if you doubt everything, if you say you want to be absolutely certain, there is only one thing at root you can be certain of, which is that there does exist the doubter. There does exist the skeptic. You can't have skepticism unless there is someone or something capable of thinking that out. I doubt therefore I am. Hobbes’ skepticism didn't go quite that deep and it wasn't quite that elaborate but his skepticism was his attempt to answer what he saw as the fundamental question not just of politics but of social life, of being alive during the period when he was alive, which is, if people keep destroying their political communities, tearing them apart because they keep posing politics as a kind of choice—your church or my church, your king or my parliament, your family or my family, your tribe or my tribe— If that was the source of the misery and the conflict and the death, is there anything that runs underneath it that is beyond doubt, even for the people who disagree about everything else? Can you find the one thing on which all rational human beings ought to be capable of agreeing? And Hobbes thought that you could and that you could start thinking about politics afresh by going right down to the bottom of doubt and finding the bedrock of certainty on which it would be possible to construct an idea of politics, which would last, which would endure, which wouldn't break under the pressure of human division because it is anchored in something that goes beneath that.
So what did Hobbes think were the things that we could all agree on? Well, we can all know that we're alive. It's a bit like Descartes, to have these divisions, we have to be living them. And we can all understand… and this is the dawn of the scientific revolution, when people are beginning to explore what drives the natural world, what keeps it moving. To be alive is to be in motion, that life is a form of animation because the opposite of life is to be inanimate. The inanimate thing is dead. The animate thing has an animator. Anima means a kind of soul. But for Hobbes it was more like a motor. We are motivated to keep moving. That's what it means to live. This was the age where people were exploring the ways in which the heart was a kind of motor pumping blood around the body. People were beginning to think about—and Hobbes spent a lot of time thinking about this—how light moves. The world is built out of motion and we are creatures in motion and that's the definition of being alive. And to be alive is to want to stay alive. Creatures in motion, motivated in the ways that we are, want to keep moving because to cease to move is to die. And of course some people don't want to live but in Hobbes’ terms that's not a basis for rationality. If you are a thinking, sane human you will want to keep moving. [26:06]
This motion will bring us into conflict with each other. That's another thing on which Hobbes thought we ought to be able to agree because we just have to look around us. He sometimes described life as a kind of race. We're all running because we're all in motion. Who knows what we're running for or towards but we're running away from death. That's for sure. Can't do it indefinitely but we can do it for as long as we can. But it's not like a 400 meter race around a neat running track where we all stay in our lanes and the prize goes to the person who crosses the line first. It's more like... and this isn't Hobbes’ image but this is sometimes what it makes me think of… that crazy race, I think it's a village in Gloucestershire, where they chase a cheese, a giant rolling cheese down a hill. And after a while you can't see the cheese, it's long gone, but people are just careening down and bumping into each other and some of them keep going and some of them don't get up because there are no lanes and we're all pursuing the same thing often. And we don't really have a sense of what's the right and the wrong path to take. We are bouncing around. We bounce into each other. We bounce off each other and we knock each other over and if you go down and you don't get up you have stopped moving and to stop moving in the race of life, for Hobbes, is death.
What makes these collisions so dangerous is that they are going to look different to each of us. We are not going to perceive the threat in the same way because if I am careening towards you and you are careening towards me, I'm the threat to you but you’re the threat to me. But we ought to be able to agree, even if we can't agree on any individual collision and what should come out of it, that it would be better to avoid collisions. Life will go better if we crash into each other less, if, when we're pursuing the same object, we can somehow keep in our lanes though there are no lanes, but we can imagine them or construct them. Maybe if there were rules of the game, if there were certain principles, guiding principles that would steer us away from the most destructive kind of clashes, where we might think that because you might be a threat to me I have to take you out of the knees before you can even come anywhere near me.
And Hobbes thought we could, rationally, all of us as humans, agree on those rules and he called them the laws of nature. They're natural because they are laws that apply to us as living creatures, living, rational creatures. There are many of them but they can be summed up by a simple principle. We should try and seek peace. Peace is the thing we're after, not war, not collision, not conflict. Life will go better if we all try to seek peace. And that's the law and we have to live by that law. So that should be the thing that guides us. But, and this is the problem that produces the new kind of politics, the law of nature is also a right, a right of nature to do whatever we think is necessary to preserve our peace because our peace is our continued existence. If that law applies to all of us it means we all have the right to interpret it in a situation of conflict, conflict over anything: religion, love, money, tax, war, aesthetics. I might not like you because I don't like the way you look. Humans are capable of fighting about anything. The law of nature, which says, ‘seek peace,’ when translated into the right of nature, which says, ‘do what you need to do to preserve yourself,’ because it would be nonsensical not to seek to preserve yourself, that means the conflict will continue because the conflict will not look the same, depending on which side you're on. And Hobbes was pretty clear that rational human beings in a world, where even though they know everyone ought to seek peace, they also know that everyone has the right to judge what counts as peace. Rational human beings will preempt each other and if they see a distant threat, a badly perceived threat, something that might turn into a threat, they will try and take it out before it becomes a threat. And the recipe of everyone seeking peace will be what Hobbes famously, chillingly, called the war of all against all, the nightmare that in some ways was Europe in the first half of the seventeenth century. [30:33]
But there is one more step to go. There is still one more thing that we can agree on. If we understand the nature of the problem, that seeking peace is a recipe for war because we cannot agree on what counts as peace, there is something we can agree on: to let one person decide for all of us what counts as peace. To hand over our right to make that choice. To do it rationally. To do it willingly. To someone who will make the choice for all of us. And then—this is the magic of the arrangement—it’s mechanical but it's almost alchemical. It's turning something that doesn't exist into gold. If everyone agrees to make that transfer, the person with whom the right to decide on peace rests then has the power to force everyone else to abide by his or her or its definition of peace. We've agreed to take that definition as our definition, then, if we don't like it, say that person decides on a definition of peace that feels to us as an individual like it risks the end of our life, the person who has the power can force everyone else to force us to play by the rules because we have all handed over the power at once.
The two key terms that Hobbes used to describe this arrangement are words that still run all the way through our politics. The person to whom and with whom that power rests is called ‘the Sovereign’ and the process by which is done is called ‘Representation.’ The Sovereign represents us by deciding for us about peace. That's how it works. And that for Hobbes was the only way to achieve peace. But those words don't really mean what they mean for us. They are narrower, more technical, more pared down, slightly more chilling than we might want them to mean, particularly representation. Sovereignty for Hobbes is a neutral term. It just means the decider, the decision maker, and Hobbes is adamant, though he has personal preferences… He probably… in fact I think he certainly thought it went best when the decision maker was a single person, a single human being, that is a king or queen. It's worth remembering that the sovereign under whom Hobbes was born and spent the early years of his life, in many ways the best sovereign he ever knew, was a queen, Queen Elizabeth. But his preference was for monarchy. But he said, and in 1651, when the King two years previously had had his head chopped off, this was important for Hobbes to say… and it got him into trouble afterwards. It doesn't matter. It could be a parliament. It could be an aristocracy. It could be a small group, a large group, or it could be one individual. If it's a Parliament, the decision will have to be made by majority voting. What matters is that there's a decision, and that decision is taken to be the decision of all.
And if you can get that right, you can get peace. And if you can't get that right, you have no choices. Your politics will break down. And the thing that Hobbes wanted to emphasize above anything else is that what people think is the political choice—republic or principality, Protestant or Catholic, me or you, us or them,—is not the political choice. If that's how your politics boils down, something's gone wrong. The political choice is order or chaos. The political choice is you either have a state with this tight, mechanical, interlocking relationship of representation so that you cannot have a sovereign without the authorization of the people, but the people have no rights against the sovereign because the sovereign is the decider. You either have that arrangement or you have nothing. You either have that as your politics or you don’t have bad politics, you have no politics at all. That for Hobbes was the real choice. [35:01]
So let me try and say a bit more about the implications of that radical, jolting, slightly mad, incredibly powerful argument. There are various misconceptions about Hobbes. So one of them, because the thing that he is known for is his description not of the world after the state has been created but in the first part of Leviathan, his description of the world that he called—as did many other people writing in this genre—the state of nature, the state of human beings in their natural condition before they have created this artificial machine, which is the decision making machinery of the state.
That description of the natural human condition is, in Hobbes’ version, famously bleak and miserable. His catchphrase is, ‘nasty brutish and short.’ To describe the life of humans in the absence of a state, the war of all against all, is the state of nature. And it leads people to imagine Hobbes must have had therefore a bleak view of what humans are, indeed a kind of negative or even cynical view, that he didn't think the best of us. He thought the worst of us. He thought in the absence of a state we were all going to go around killing each other because that's what we are. We're kind of killing machines. That doesn't really capture Hobbes at all. Not least because to be a skeptic is not anything like the same as being a cynic. So a cynic thinks the worst of people. A cynic always looks for the nasty motive behind human action. A skeptic doesn't think the worst of people, or the best of people. The skeptic just wants to know is there anything we can know for sure. And Hobbes was one of those.
It is true that some of what he writes about, particularly in Leviathan, with the brain fever, is a bit cynical. It's not a rosy picture of what human beings are and what we're capable of. It's also quite funny. It's quite ironical in places. Hobbes writes a lot about the quality of human existence that he calls a vainglory, not just vanity but vainglory, that preening pursuit as everyone's careening down the hill chasing that cheese. They still care about how they look. They want to fall gracefully. They build up all of these elaborate schemes to make sure that they look slightly better than the guy careering down the hill next to them. And for Hobbes that makes us slightly ridiculous because we are slightly ridiculous, and that's a little cynical. But Hobbes did not think that people were nasty. Nasty, brutish, and short does not describe human motivation. It describes our lives in the state of nature: unpleasant, brutish, no better in a way than what an animal might expect, short because we stop moving much sooner than we might, not because we are nasty but because we can't trust each other. [37:56]
One of the words Hobbes uses to describe the problem in the state of nature is what he calls our diffidence for one another. Diffidence means a kind of shyness. It also means a lack of trust. We can't really know each other because we can't really be sure whether other people, for whatever reason, maybe perceive us as a threat. Innocent, naive, little us. You never know. We're shy. We're mistrustful. Our lives are solitary not because Hobbes thought that human beings were naturally solitary creatures. We're always trying to make alliances. We’re always trying to forge little communities that could become bigger communities. We seek peace. We want it. We desperately want it. We know the cost of not having it. But we can't get it, not because we don't like each other but because we don't trust each other. And the state of nature of Hobbes describes a world not of solitary, grumpy individuals wandering around looking for opportunities to do each other harm, but a tragic futile attempts to build communities around family or religion, around prosperity or commerce, trying to create stability, trying to pass things on from generation to generation, and keep seeing it break down, keep seeing it fail. The fragility of political community, which for Hobbes, among other things, was what the ancient world taught us. It taught us, if you do politics that way, the either/or way, you can build the most amazing things, but it won't last. And everything is fragile. The balance is fragile. The choice is precarious in modern politics. If you can get away from the choice it might be ugly to start with but it will last. It's a skeptic’s, not a cynic’s account of politics. [39:47]
Another thing that sometimes said of Hobbes and a tradition that he's associated with, because of the way he constructs the state through an agreement to have a state—people agree that they need one rationally and so they construct one mechanically—is that he belongs to what's sometimes called, usually called, the social contract tradition. The social contract tradition that significantly precedes Hobbes and had a life well after Hobbes, is a way of thinking about constructing politics. But Hobbes doesn't belong to it. Hobbes is different, crucially, uniquely different and the difference is what's so distinctive about Leviathan. And though the difference is strange, it's quite easy to sum it up. The conventional social contract tradition says that to build a state out of nature it has to come in two stages. You can't do it all in one go. First of all, those creatures living a natural existence have to build themselves a society. They have to form themselves into a community because the social contract is going to be between the society and the political entity that will have the power. It will be the contract between a group of individuals who've turned themselves into a people, a community, a society, some kind of unit, and that unit and its government. The social contract tradition, certainly as it preceded Hobbes, tended to have within it the echoes of the pre-modern conception. The contract was trying to get away from the choice because it's a contract. Both sides are locked into it. But the two sides are the two sides of politics, people and the state or government. People and the government together through the contract build something called a state. But first of all you have to build something called a people.
And Hobbes needed for his own intellectual purposes, because he had to get away from the possibility, the lingering taint of that choice, he had to collapse the double contract into a single arrangement. His word for it was a ‘covenant.’ Covenant being an agreement about the future. If I do it, you'll do it. If you do it, I'll do it. But it had to happen in one go. There couldn't be first a society and then a government or a sovereign. The natural state of human beings to be what Hobbes called a multitude, just individuals, had to create government and society all in one go. And that's the argument that he makes in Leviathan. He says, in one of the most important passages in the whole book, ‘A multitude of men are made one person when they are by one man or one person represented, for it is the unity of the representor, not the unity of the represented, that maketh the person one. And unity cannot otherwise be understood in multitude.’ What that means is that you cannot create a society until everyone has a single representative. There is no unity in multitude except through representation so there can never be a choice. There can never be a choice, which Hobbes thought the double contract tradition risked, between society and government. If society contracts with the government maybe the government will break the terms of the contract, and therefore maybe individuals will take the side of society, and that route leads to civil war in Hobbes’ terms.
Crucially, decisively for Hobbes, there is no contract with the sovereign. The only contract, the only covenant, is between the multitude, the members of the multitude. We agree among ourselves to let someone decide for us. We do not come to an arrangement where we say, ‘You are allowed to decide for us if you do this and if you do that.’ We say to each other, ‘If you agree to it, I'll agree to it, and if I agree to it, will you agree to it?’ So the sovereign does not have any obligations under the Covenant. The Sovereign in some respects is still in the state of nature. The sovereign just has those natural rights to decide on what counts as peace. It's just if you get it right the sovereign will be the only person who gets to decide on what is peace. So there will be only one definition of peace and of all the things that go along with peace: the sovereign’s. Not because we have instructed the sovereign under terms to do it, but because we have left the sovereign with the right to do it, and the right then becomes the power because we've all agreed to abide by our covenant with each other. That's how it's meant to work. It's a strange idea. It's a really puzzling idea because everything has to happen in one big bang moment. First you had nothing and suddenly you have a society and a state through a government, all go together, which means you can't have any one part of that package without the whole package. There is no choice. [45:24]
Another thing that’s sometimes said about Hobbes is that he's a forerunner of a kind of totalitarianism because if it's true that the sovereign is under no obligation to us, we have nothing to hold the sovereign to, we have no rights against, grounds to complain. And Hobbes is very clear about this. The sovereign has absolute power. The sovereign decides and we live with the consequences because we have authorized the sovereign to decide. And because we have authorized the sovereign to decide, if some of us break away because we're not happy, the rest of us will pull that person back. That looks like a really nasty form of politics, and even at the time many of Hobbes’ critics said this is out of the frying pan into the fire. Who would want to sacrifice our rights for this? Still a real question. We’ll come back to that question. But it's not totalitarian. It's not even close. Absolutism is not totalitarianism. One way to characterize the difference is, in a totalitarian system, Stalinism, say, the sovereign decides about everything. Politics permeates all of life. The decisions made at the top by the head of the state, by the small group, by the elite, cover everything. People are not allowed to move away from a political life because politics is total. Under an absolute system. The sovereign does not decide about everything. It's not possible but the sovereign can decide about anything. Totalitarianism is everything politics; absolutism is anything politics.
And Hobbes in Leviathan is absolutely clear that it would be absurd to think that any sovereign, any king, any parliament, could pass laws, issue edicts, make commands, that covered all aspects of the lives of the subjects, of the members, the body of the state. This is the middle of the 17th century. If you are in power as a king or a parliament in Westminster or Whitehall you barely have any idea what's going on five miles down the road. Communication is terrible. Transportation is awful. Information is more often rumor. You are completely reliant on news that’s always out of date by the time it reaches you. People five miles away can't be controlled by you. People 50 miles away barely even exist for you. People 300 miles away, are just a rumor to you. Totalitarianism under those conditions is a laughable idea. It's also, Hobbes says, a terrible idea. Why would any sovereign, why would any person left with this right of nature, think the job was to pass laws about everything? Not least, it's very unlikely to lead to peace. The definition of peace will become incomprehensible because there will be too many laws and not enough clarity. And the job of the sovereign remains—though the sovereign cannot be held this job except by God, and it's not clear that Hobbes though God even exists—but the role is to make the lives of subjects better. And so Hobbes says it would be impossible to lay down rules regulating all of the actions and words of men—and for men here let's take that to mean humans, people—it's a thing impossible he said. [48:47]
So where there is no law, and most aspects of life will not be covered by law, Hobbes said that people are free to do whatever is most profitable for themselves. And that word, profitable, makes many critics—including some of the critics I'm going to go on and talk about, not today, but later on—think that Hobbes is some kind of proto-capitalist, this was about defending the rights of the profit makers. He really meant by profitable just to do whatever seems best, as creatures in motion, as we pursue the objects that we're drawn towards and are repelled by the objects that disgust us. That's life. That's what we all do. We're all seeking profit in some sense, not narrow economic profit, but we're seeking to be better than we were yesterday. And we're free to do that. It's the obvious consequence of this political arrangement because most parts of our lives will not be covered by law, but under the Hobbesian arrangement, the sovereign gets to decide which those parts are.
And you can never be sure that the sovereign won't suddenly decide that something that seemed to you to be your personal concern is a threat to the state. You might live in a state where the laws are pretty minimal. Some things are almost certainly going to require sovereign decision, literal war and peace. The Sovereign decides when the state goes to war. The sovereign decides how to pay for it. The sovereign will decide about tax. In all states… in all modern states, the sovereign will need to manage the money supply. Hobbes said that the sovereign will need to look after the basic welfare of the poorest people in the state. That would be a danger to peace in any state to let some people just fend for themselves when they can't. But for instance religion, the biggest source of conflict in the 17th century, Hobbes is literally agnostic on the question of whether the sovereign ought to heavily regulate, partially regulate, or actually be pretty tolerant about religion. If it's not a threat to peace, let people believe what they want to believe. Possibly, even, let them worship how they want to worship. And at some level regulating belief is another thing impossible because no one truly knows what anyone believes in his or her heart. You might have a tolerant, broadly speaking, liberal state, but on Hobbes’ terms you can never be sure. One day the sovereign might decide that your personal practices, your religion, your sex life, how you live, those parts of your life that you think have got nothing to do with politics, what goes on inside the place where you live, inside your bed… the sovereign might decide it's a threat to the security of the state, yare in some sense destabilising the public order. And then you have no recourse. That's what makes Hobbes’ conception terrifying: Not that all aspects of your life will be controlled, but you never know from one day to the next with absolute certainty which ones will be controlled. [51:54]
That's what gives Hobbesian politics its distinctive flavor. It's not the thing that Hobbes wanted. Hobbes is not advocating arbitrary rule. He's doing the opposite of advocating radical uncertainty. But he thinks the only price of security is the knowledge that the sovereign ultimately must be allowed to decide what counts as a threat, which means there is always the risk, and it is the risk in all modern states, even the ones like ours that have multiple, multiple safeguards against this. There is always the risk in a modern state that the sovereign power in the state will decide that the threat is you. [52:40]
So to finish, there are two, I think, really profound implications of this conception of politics. They connect because in each case what makes it modern is, right the way through it, because the choice has been removed. The choice, what was once the choice, has been internalized into the body politic, into the lives of people who are living in this state, both at the top and at the bottom, so that everyone, so as not to make a choice, is leading a kind of double life. There is a doubleness all the way through this conception of politics and there is a doubleness all the way through our conception of politics
There’s a double life for the sovereign because to be a sovereign in Hobbes’ state is both to have extraordinary power and also to have ordinary power because, to go back to how the thing is set up, the covenant that produces the state does not actually give the sovereign some power that did not exist in the state of nature. It leaves the sovereign as the only person with that power, the power to decide that we once all had. We could all decide what counted as peace. Now just one person gets to make that decision. But if only one person is deciding that makes that one person completely different from everyone else. It's almost as though the sovereign is the only one still leading a natural life. And yet it's a completely unnatural life, as Hobbes says, it's a wholly artificial role. It’s being created mechanically. It's a form of artifice. It's a kind of machine. And in the machinery of the state the sovereign has to both—and Hobbes says this explicitly—rule by fear, by terror, conform the wills of all the members of the state by terror of the power of the sovereign, and produce peace. That's the job. That's the role to be both a terroriser and a stabilizer.
And that is the job of sovereign powers in modern states. It always has a little bit of both of those elements in it. They are always slightly terrible and terrifying and yet the role is to make us all safer and more secure. Hobbes wants to strip the fear out of politics by putting it all in one place, where it won 't go away, but we can at least be sure where it is. And if we know where it is, in an ideal version of this system, we can over time increasingly forget about it.
But, if you just think about what it would mean to be such a sovereign, it's going to be really hard. It's going to be profoundly, at times, confusing. Are you meant to be like the people who gave you or left you with the power, or are you meant to be different from them? And there is at the heart of Hobbes’ conception of politics, going right back to the beginning, the original skepticism, a feeling that we are all equal at some level because we are all equally vulnerable. Yes we're different. Some of us are smarter than other people. Some of us are more powerful naturally. We're stronger. We're more adept. Maybe we're more wily; we’re more cunning. Some people are going to look better. Running down the hill some are more elegant than others. But we're all equally vulnerable to each other because even the weakest, even the least cunning person has the power to end the life of the strongest in the state of nature because none of us is ever secure. We're left with a sovereign who hasn't been chosen by us, is not necessarily smarter than us, stronger than us, just another, either vulnerable human being or group of vulnerable human beings. If it's a parliament, still the same people. But now with this extraordinary artificial power. It's not at all clear just how human it is to do that job.
And then the other deep division that Hobbes leaves us with is for the rest of us, those of us who aren't the sovereign in that sense, who aren't the government, the ruler, the decision maker, the absolute power, the rest of us are living in this state because we understand that, actually, it's the only way to rescue us from political conflict. There is at the heart of the Hobbesian account of politics a kind of paradox which is this, as it looks to us, extreme version of politics, this extreme form of power, is the only thing that can save us from politics. And if this state runs well, increasingly, we should have to think less and less about politics. The laws will be there in the background. As long as we don't disobey them, we can get on with our lives and do the thing that is most profitable for ourselves. We can carry on running down that hill, chasing that cheese, and some of us might catch the cheese. Some of us might share the cheese. Some of us might do something else with our time. All of us will do something else with our time because we are at peace at some level. Our state protects us. It keeps us safe and so we don't have to worry about it so much. This is fear to rescue us from fear. But we will be leading under this form of politics a divided life because we never know when the fear is going to come back, and we know that the power to bring the fear back, to take the life and death decisions, does not reside with us. We have authorized someone else to take that decision, which means in the heart of every subject who thinks of themselves under much more modern conceptions, as a citizen of a modern state, is a kind of division that never goes away, and if you nag away at it, it could keep you awake at night, which is, the thing that rescues us from politics is this form of politics, which means that we're never rescued from politics. And that puzzle, that dilemma, that fear and then the attempt to make that fear go away, that's a big part of the story I'm going to go on and tell.