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This online colloquium is dedicated to discussing Matthew Hoye’s book, Sovereignty as a Vocation in Hobbes’s Leviathan. The discussion will commence with three critical commentaries, presented by Diego Rossello, Andrés Rosler and Meghan Robison. The author will then respond to his critics. We extend our gratitude to Amsterdam University Press for their support of this colloquium.

Matthew Hoye

Leiden University

Many thanks to the contributors for their thoughtful, critical, and constructive comments. I begin with a précis, then respond to the comments.

A Précis of Sovereignty as a Vocation in Hobbes’s Leviathan

The book consists of seven chapters, including an introduction.[1] Chapter Two studies the development of Hobbes’s political thought in the context of the English Civil Wars, focusing on urban republicanism. I argue that many of Leviathan’s political theoretical developments respond to the particular threat of urban republicanism. Specifically, I argue that the signature developments in Hobbes’s political theory in Leviathan can be profitably triangulated against (i) the general European idea that cities and boroughs are the communal wellsprings of republican ideas and practices, (ii) particular considerations regarding the role of borough corporations and the civil wars; and (iii) Hobbes’s discussions of democracy, specifically what I argue are particularly communal and naturalistic sources of democracy in Elements, which are the foundation of all other regimes. Doing so reveals how new additions to Hobbes’s political theory in Leviathan—the theory of the state, representation, and others—function to undermining not just republican ideology broadly understood (as has been long understood), but also, or specifically, the borough democratic and oligarchic republican practices that gave life to those ideas. The chapter concludes with a puzzle: Hobbes may have solved the problem of borough democratic and oligarchic republicanism, but he is (seemingly) left without an account of new foundations. That is, whereas democracy in Elements served pivotal historical, epistemic, and institutional functions in the politics of founding new regimes, democracy in Leviathan is stripped of these functions; there, democracy is merely a regime type, not an essential step in creating all regimes. It follows that either Hobbes abandoned all discussion of the real politics of new foundations—something quite different from theories of the social covenant—as seems to be assumed in much of the literature, or he did not, and the standard model of Hobbes’s thought in Leviathan has somehow failed to take note. I focus on the latter and the rest of the book explicates the politics of new foundations in Leviathan and some general implications for how we think about law and obligation in Hobbes.

Chapters Three through Five address constitutive rhetorical action and the politics of new foundations in Leviathan. Chapter Three explicates the idea of rhetorical action. Rhetorical action has been largely passed over in Hobbes scholarship on rhetoric, which has been laser-focused on textual rhetorical techniques, not enacted rhetorical practices. I trace the practice and the theory of rhetorical action from its first emergence in the poets, founders, and orators of antiquity through its reconceptualization and domestication in the works of the Greek philosophers and the Roman rhetoricians. Finally, I trace the modern re-emergence of the concept in the theatrical and poetic rhetoric of the early modern period. I show how the idea of rhetorical action—most especially in its relationship to new foundations—was considered a singularly powerful tool by which leaders of exceptional virtue or magnanimity could command the obedience and allegiance of the many not by engaging in dialogue but by the fact of their eminent virtue. The orator-founder does not persuade; their very eminence transforms their audience, transfixing each member to a higher ethical-political order beyond pure self-interest, diffidence, and acrimony. Did Hobbes take notice? Chapter Four situates Hobbes and Leviathan within the history of rhetorical action, arguing that there are many reasons to believe Hobbes was not just aware of this line of rhetorical practice and theory but deeply engaged with it.

Chapter Five explicates Hobbes’s theory of new foundations in Leviathan. Against the aforementioned assumption that Hobbes does not set out a theory of new foundations, I show that Hobbes does and that it is set out (initially) in xii built upon the core character traits of wisdom, sincerity, love, and divine revelation in the foundation of a new regime. That, of course, is puzzling: wisdom, sincerity, love, and divine revelation are not what we have come to expect from Hobbes’s sovereigns! Indeed, xii is not just surprising, it seems almost impossible as it disagrees with axioms of Hobbes interpretation. I address three: natural/political equality (xii indicating that there are politically and socially crucial inequalities of persons), that justice cannot exist before the sovereign (xii indicating that there is something like natural justice), and that there is no real distinction between regimes by institution and conquest, both resting on a pervasive fear (xii attesting to just the opposite: that there is a fundamental distinction and that Hobbes holds tight to it). On each count, I argue that on more or less basic textual grounds, the axioms do not hold, and indeed, they fail in ways that support the theory of foundations found in xii.

Chapter Six begins with a particular observation that, on its face, seems to yet again disagree with the standard account of law in Hobbes: why is it that in the concluding passages of Part II of Leviathan,Hobbes declares that his goal throughout was to teach sovereigns “natural justice”? Not natural law, not that all laws are outputs of sovereign command, certainly not to brandish the sword of sovereignty to bolster the law, but that the natural person who bears the office of the sovereign must be a philosopher of natural justice. To my knowledge, only Leon Harold Craig has taken this statement seriously. I argue that this is not an esoteric claim, wayward remark, or slip of the pen. Hobbes concludes on that point because it was the point and, more specifically, an integral element of his overarching theory of law. Beginning with a critique of natural justice and magnanimity in Aristotle and Hobbes’s De Cive—and then turning to Leviathan through analyses of the relationship between natural justice and nomos, natural law, the command theory of law, and the law of God—I argue that Hobbes’s account of law routinely references the necessity for instantiated and eminent sovereign virtue. I argue that natural and positive laws are conditioned by eminent sovereign virtue and that although that condition may be latent during normal times, it is essential for the practical realization of both in moments of emergency and crisis. Notably, this analysis has the benefits of, among other things, agreeing with xii and making sense of Hobbes’s discussions of the fool, which no longer seems unfinished or tagential, but essential.

Chapter Seven considers obligation and if sovereign vice explains regime collapse. From the perspective of Hobbes’s discussion of the subject’s obedience, the sovereign can do no wrong (except at the limit of the subjects right to life). I do not challenge that claim. But, taken from the perspective of Hobbes’s discussion of that sovereign’s character, they certainly can do wrong, where wrong is a measure of actions that naturally spur subjects to revolt (psychologically or politically) or, if they are fighting a war for that sovereign, lay down their arms. I say “naturally” because this will happen no matter what the sovereign commands, the state ideology extols, or the science of politics dictates; it is a function of human nature. Hence, Hobbes’s practical advice to sovereigns is to be eternally vigilant of how they hold themselves publicly and privately. Theories of obligation are one thing; leadership is quite another. Sovereign inequity, cowardice, greed, vanity, rashness, pompousness, arrogance, deference to vain elites, and, most fundamentally, sovereign barbarity—flagrant sovereign vice—are naturally dishonorable. Subjects may not have any right to disobey—at no point do I argue that such a right exists—but they will nevertheless. That is Hobbes’s point. Both theories and ideologies of obligation and facts of natural obligation are in play; the latter deserves far more attention. Sovereignty as a Vocation in Hobbes’s Leviathan attempts to put those considerations at the center of the debate.

Response to the Commentators

Diego Rosello and Andrés Rosler point to missing lines of analysis, while Meghan Robison asserts significant interpretative errors. I take each in turn.

Rosello

Rossello’s first and second objections are that vital elements of Hobbes’s philosophy—his scientific method and materialism—are unaddressed. Both points are accurate, and the book is worse off because of those shortcomings. To respond, let me sketch how I was thinking about the relationship between materialism, the scientific method, and my arguments. I do so, noting that I will invite many more objections, but it may clarify my thinking.

Instead of thinking about materialism or the scientific methods abstractly or separately, we need to frame them within Hobbes’s philosophy of history. Hobbes had a philosophy of history that amounts to a history of theology and materialism, mediated by epistemology, where the latter is the only variable element and, thus, the driving force of meta-historical change. Materialism is the ontological claim that all there is matter in motion, meaning that Aristotelian metaphysical realism or Cartesian mind/body dualism, for example, are philosophically wrong (they may be politically or ideologically operative, but that is a separate question).

Theology—not this or that religious faith, but the universal human trait of belief—is an emergent property of the prior universal of human curiosity. Curiosity is fickle; in the first instance, it is the human pox generating corrosive and, for the vast majority, unbearable psychic strife streaming from an endless search for prior causation. Save for the rare philosophical soul, curiosity constitutively obliterates cognitive foundations, a sense of meaning, for persons and societies. “God,” for Hobbes, is that bundle of ideas that allow curiosity—regarding the meaning of one’s life, community, society, and place in the cosmos—to rest. “God” is that bundle of ideas that enables the vast majority of humanity to stop searching for a yet deeper cause by standing as the cause. That “God” is the lodestone of human dignity, human civility, and peace. It is a feign of universality wherein the feint is best left unapparent.

Epistemology is the cognitive apparatus mediating materialism and curiosity. Unlike materialism and curiosity, epistemology is a human construct. For Hobbes, the history of that construction is the history of humanity. Hobbes charts four epistemic eras. To understand that history, we need to start at the end. The correct epistemology—the one that gets the ontology and theology right—is, for Hobbes, nominalism and, therethrough, the scientific method of resolution, composition, definition, and logical reasoning. Truth is a function of sound nominalist scientific reasoning as a principle of inquiry and, crucially, because that method accommodates the truth of materialism and curiosity. Politically, it is the epistemology least prone to vainglory and all the strife that follows because it is self-aware that the universals in play are attributes of language (not, as will be seen, nodes to eternal essences).

Now, let me wind back the clock. Nominalism and the scientific method needed to be discovered. That discovery process involved much good fortune, mistakes, and muddling through, hampered by corrosive and vainglorious politics made worse by corrosive and vainglorious epistemologies. The first era is pre-linguistic, where experience is unmediated by epistemology, where immediate sense experience provides causal accounting of events, and no causes before that, or in general, are considered. Here, humans are no different than animals. The second era follows the invention of words (interestingly, in Leviathan, Hobbes changes it to the invention of speech), up to Socrates or perhaps Pythagoras. The pre-Socratic city-states were internally peaceful because there were no absurdities of vainglorious essences, rulers defined “God,” the epistemic framework allowed as much, and material world mirrored the polyarchy of the heavens. The sovereign ruled over both political and theological matters, and peace followed. The pre-Socratic epistemology was, for Hobbes, quite wrong—it was not scientific in any sense—but it had the real virtue of getting the politics right, and internal peace followed.

The post-Socratic moment—Socrates, Plato, worse Aristotle, even worse Aristotelians, and worst of all, the vainglorious theologies built upon Aristotelian absurdities—was a function of an epistemic revolution that mistook an exception (geometry, where language captures logical truths which appear radically independent of materialism) with the rule. Confusing the exception for the rule, the epistemology posits essences in all matters of investigation without recognizing that the universals in play are merely properties of common nouns. Promulgating those ideas through a corrupted early church, Aristotelianism functions as a necessary obfuscator of the material world while simultaneously moving any definition of “God” beyond sovereign control. In essence, the Aristotelianism is an epistemological generator of the most radical vainglory, whereby individuals confuse their own thought (words) with access to transcendental truths. That, for Hobbes, is the root of two millennia of human and political discord.

Hobbes’s political science is the first work of true political science because it is the first nominalist political science. The political manifestation of that philosophical step forward is where the real challenges begin. If nominalism is correct, then the challenge facing Hobbes’s sovereign is to both understand the nominalist and materialist philosophy that is the truth of the world while, first, also ruling over the vast majority of citizens who will never get anywhere near the philosophical debates at hand, and need a “God” all the same. Second, that sovereign must waging a transhistorical war against hegemonic Aristotelianism which has captured the minds of the elite both in aristocratic culture and the church. That, it seems to me, is the operative political theological background of Leviathan. If so, a crucial interpretative point follows. Leviathan as a text may be able to carry some of the water for this enterprise in the long term, at least in elite circles and universities. But the text will never be read by the masses. And that is the rub: the only way to bridge the masses and the sovereign is through public actions and deeds of the sovereign. That is, for Hobbes, a question of character and culture.

Again, this ultra-rough sketch is not meant to address Rosello’s fair criticisms but merely gesture toward where I think a complete response would go.

            Rosello’s third point—that I do not engage in the mirror of princes tradition—is also quite right. He points to low-hanging fruit that I simply leave dangling. I only note that such an engagement could prove definitive in all the ways that robust historical contextualization does. So, for example, much of my analysis stands on simple textual readings of Leviathan, positing that many passages do not mean what they are often taken to mean. Well, it is entirely possible that a more sophisticated contextualization of those passages—in the mirror of princes tradition or any other tradition—could show decisively that Hobbes was writing ironically, cryptically, esoterically, or what have you. That kind of account could plausibly disprove mine. Note, though, that that is also necessary if one wants to defend, rather than simply state, such a position. Of course, the opposite may happen: historical contextualization could be decisive in supporting or furthering the discussion of virtue in Hobbes’s political theory.

Rosler

Unfortunately, my response to Rosler will be brief because I think we are more or less in agreement. Rosler’s discussion of Hart and Warrender, and Warrender’s account of Hobbes and Hart’s reading of Warrender, put my footnote-length gesture towards these debates to shame. I would only note in support of Rosler that these kinds of perplexities regarding the nature of law, legitimacy, and politics follow from taking Hobbes at his word. The passages highlighted by Rosler are, indeed, baffling. Take the “reputed voyd” discussion. In his edition of Leviathan, Noel Malcolm notes forthrightly what most scholars presumably thought but did not address, namely that the “reputed voyd” passage appears to be incompatible with the standard model, so it must be a mistake. One benefit of the virtue-first critique of Hobbes is that these and similar passages make more sense: what Hobbes seems to imply is that sovereign vice, when pushed to extremes, begins to look a lot like a war against citizens, which, if true, means that the social covenant is, indeed, reputed void. Of course, this is a poor response to Rosler’s discussion because, at that point, fascinating legal questions are obviated—because it is not a sovereign and citizens, but enemies at war. In other words, there is no question of legal legitimacy in predatory regimes; it is a state of war, not a civil state. The baffling questions primarily apply before that point because the citizens of a well-run state typically do not consider themselves to be needing virtuous sovereigns, partly because they do not see the law as pure command. Instead, they see the law as reflecting the social covenant (a point which I will return to in response to Robison next).

Robison

Robison strikes exactly at the interpretative heart of the project, reading the text more or less at face value and asserting that I have got it more or less wrong. Robison starts with a passage in Leviathan concerning the two possible modes (“seeds”) of religion, which I take to be two kinds of founders. Robison points out, quite correctly, that Hobbes writes that

For these seeds have received culture from two sorts of men. One sort have been they, that have nourished and ordered them, according to their own invention. The other, have done it, by Gods commandement, and direction[.][2]

Then Robison asserts, again following Hobbes, that the distinction is between humane and divine, not two sorts of human. The problem is that the passage quoted by Robison unambiguously establishes that Hobbes is writing of “two sorts of men.” So, how do we reconcile “two sorts of men” with the humane/divine distinction? We are well served by attending to Hobbes’s definition of curiosity. On that account, “divine” and human are ontologically indistinguishable (to assert otherwise would be to also necessarily assert that Hobbes’s materialism is not what it seems). The difference, I believe, regards modes of representation. One claims direct representation, one indirect, but both represent a bundle of ideas that bring curiosity to rest. From that perspective, what Robison asserts to be Hobbes’s main point is immaterial, at least to my argument.

 Robison then dovetails those concerns into the next criticism regarding the nature of character. Robison first states the following:

When Hobbes explains the necessity of the failure of a regime as the people’s lack of belief in the founder, Hoye assumes that the founder’s character is what grounds his authority. But what seems relevant for Hobbes, in my view, is the people’s belief in the founder’s character, not the founder’s character itself.

We can meet halfway insofar as I assume, perhaps like Robison, that one’s character and the public’s perception of that character are dynamically related and modulating in practice. What matters is the people’s belief in the founder’s character, but of course, that depends on the enactment of the sovereign’s character. My arguments assume a dynamic relation. Indeed, this is a point I develop at length in Chapters Three and Four as it is central to the whole tradition of virtue ethics and acutely important in the discussion of rhetorical action. The difference between perceived character and actual character is crucial, ever-present, impossible to resolve, and thus a constant concern of the sovereign (at least, any sovereign hoping to keep the peace and keep their head). It is, again, central to the discussion of the fool (which, it is worth stressing is a discussion of new foundations, virtue, and vice). Of course, that is all in the very nature of sincerity, honesty, love, and other-regarding virtues. Again, as I develop at length and by way of many examples from the text, this is a point that Hobbes repeats over and over. Indeed, Robison appears to agree with me, concluding that “Moreover, and more importantly, Hobbes claims that when a people living under a religious government become sceptical about the character of their leader—that if they are sceptical about that character, then they will necessarily be sceptical of the religion.” Exactly.

            Having conceded that the issue is about character and the people’s perception of their sovereign’s character, Robison then asserts that it is not about character at all. Robison narrows in on the final part of a long paragraph on the political-theological calamities that follow from corrupt (unwise, unloving, insincere, prophane) bishops and foreign popes. Hobbes writes:

Or who does not see, to whose profit redound the Fees of private Masses, and Vales or Purgatory; with others signes of private interest, enough to mortifie the most lively Faith, if (as I sayd) the civill Magistrate, and Custome did not more sustain it, than any opinion they have of the Sanctity, Wisdome, or Probity of their Teachers? So that I may attribute all the changes of Religion in the world to one and the same cause; and that is, unpleasing Priests; and those not onely amongst Catholiques, but even in that Church that had presumed most of Reformation.[3]

It is undoubtedly a convoluted passage, but we agree that the critical line is “if (as I sayd) the civill Magistrate, and Custome did not more sustain it …” and therein, the kicker being “did not more.” I take it to mean that the sovereign must hold itself, and sustain a suitable public culture, that eclipses the particular failings of priests and teachers. Robison seems to take “did not more” as a rejection of the place of character in maintaining faith.

How can we decide which is correct? One is to look at the chapter. For instance, the paragraph immediately preceding it makes essentially the same point, arguing that sovereigns must attend to the conduct of deputies (judges, priests, ambassadors) as their deeds rebound back on the sovereign because they are, effectively, representatives. This is not to say that one poor judgment will ruin a regime—basic human failings are taken into account—but it is to say that persistent, recurrent, and self-indulgent failings amass, and when they do, the regime follows suit. As Hobbes writes: “So that Justice faylingh, Faith also fayled”[4]; “as the fayling of Vertue in the Pastors, maketh Faith faile in the People[.]”[5] Another way is to consider the Latin version of the text. There Hobbes writes that:

There is no one who does not understand the nature and purpose of indulgences, private masses, and many other things unnecessary to the people’s salvation, and how much power they have to extinguish even the most lively faith, were that faith not sustained by the civil power and by custom.[6]

That, it seems to me, supports my interpretation. Everything we know about sustaining faith in Hobbes—spelled out in xii and across Leviathan—indicates that Hobbes is not asserting that “civil power” means some abstract institutional metric but that it relates to the foundations of religious power: love, wisdom, sincerity, and divine revelation.

            I should add—and here I am unfairly moving beyond the scope of Robison’s criticisms—that by focusing only on the few passages from xii, Robison leaves unmentioned that Hobbes expressly states—in the introduction and conclusion, throughout the text, and at crucial moments, and tracked with endless long quotations in the book—exactly that sovereign character is the paramount consideration. Those passages, even in general, must be weighed against criticisms like Robison’s because they flesh out the implications of Robison’s claim, namely, that they must be dismissed as slips of the pen, ignored, or treated as Hobbes getting his own ideas wrong. Maybe that is correct, but I doubt it.

            Robison concludes by asserting a kind of democratic social covenant where the people make “by their own art” a community founded upon human agreement. That is true as a question of ideology, but even then, only under the most placid political conditions. But on any political analysis of the crucial moments in the life of a state—foundations, crises, wars, civil tumult— and certainly from the perspective of the sovereign as a political person, that answer is insufficient. When Hobbes writes about the practical politics of establishing a religion (one-half of sovereignty), he always speaks of individual founders. When he writes of the practical politics of establishing a new regime (the other half), he always speaks of individual conquerors or exceptional individuals. For this reason, Hobbes calls the people the “matter” and not, the “maker” of the commonwealth, the latter term being reserved for individual founders.

Hobbes is very eager to have everyone think they are co-authors of this enterprise, but that is the trick of constitutive rhetorical action: making the many simultaneously and willfully consent—which functionally means self-ostracization from political power—while simultaneously believing (maybe rightly) that the ruler is the rightful sovereign. My point is that we need to attend to the difference between the descriptive surface of the social covenant, and the analytical heart of the matter wherein eminently virtuous leaders have crafted the values of the subjects. Certainly, the post-foundational period in the life of a regime—let’s call it normal politics—is conducive to the kind of social covenantal ideology noted by Robison and theorized by Hobbes. But even here, we should recognize that the operative dynamic is tenuous. We know so because of what Hobbes says happens the moment the sovereign slips up and dabbles in vice. At that moment, the entire apparatus begins to unfold, not despite but because of that ideology: the people see eminent sovereign vice and say to themselves, I did not authorize that (it is, in other words “reputed voyd”). I think that is key. My interpretation does not discount the standard model; it takes it seriously. It merely focuses on another set of questions related to real politics that follows from the standard model. What they amount to are enormous burdens (Sorell’s term) on the natural person of the sovereign. Such burdens are depicted in the frontispiece: large-souled sovereign, standing above and apart from the war-torn boroughs, with the masses all standing in awe, breathlessly and silently united, but in constant evaluation of the character of the sovereign.

A Note of Thanks

Thanks again to Gonzalo Bustamante Kuschel, Diego Rosello, Andrés Rosler Meghan Robison. I would also like to take this opportunity to once again thank Roy Tsao and Andrew Corsa for their comments on the manuscript.

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[1] This section directly replicates or paraphrases the introduction to Sovereignty as a Vocation in Hobbes’s Leviathan.

[2] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Noel Malcolm, vol. II, The Clarendon Edition of the Works of Thomas Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 170.

[3] Hobbes, II:186.

[4] Hobbes, II:184.

[5] Hobbes, II:184.

[6] Hobbes, II:186.

This online colloquium is dedicated to discussing Matthew Hoye’s book, Sovereignty as a Vocation in Hobbes’s Leviathan. The discussion will commence with three critical commentaries, presented by Diego Rossello, Andrés Rosler and Meghan Robison. The author will then respond to his critics. We extend our gratitude to Amsterdam University Press for their support of this colloquium.

son. The author will then respond to his critics. We extend our gratitude to Amsterdam University Press for their support of this colloquium.

Andrés Rosler

Universidad de Buenos Aires, CONICET

Calling Sovereign Virtue

At first glance, if told about the very recent publication of J. Matthew Hoye’s book, Sovereignty as a Vocation in Hobbes’s Leviathan, it is more than likely any reader interested in Hobbes’s political theory—particularly his Leviathan—would go: “just what the world needs, another book on Hobbes and sovereignty”. However, the very reference to the combination of sovereignty and vocation in the title of the book indicates that its subject-matter is not just another day in the office of Hobbesian studies in that the idea of sovereignty is not understood in simply institutional or impersonal terms, or as a quasi-theological affair indicating the workings of some kind of God. This is a book that aims at showing how the concrete virtues of the natural person (or persons) of the sovereign bear upon the abstract “Seat of Power”.

           Mind you, as Hoye states, there has been no shortage of scholarship on Hobbes dealing with moral and civic virtue in the latter’s political work. However, that is the point: most of that scholarship focuses on the virtue of the sovereign’s citizens but not on the virtue of sovereign agency in itself (8, 20, 135, 179, 260).^[1] Hoye’s work stands out as an impressive attempt to show how “the virtues of the natural person bearing the office of the sovereign suffuse Hobbes’s political philosophy” (7). Hoye has certainly a point that if Hobbes’s purpose is to teach “both how to govern, and how to obey” (8), Hobbesian scholarship has been largely interested in explaining only half of Hobbes’s purpose, viz. how subjects and/or citizens are supposed to obey, but not quite in showing how the sovereign is supposed to govern. Any reader of this book will have to agree that “teaching sovereigns ‘how to rule’ is fundamentally important to Leviathan’s political philosophy” (9), as important as teaching citizens how to obey.

           Hoye shows that although Hobbes’s Leviathan has a lot to say about the need of sovereignty (including institutional design, law, etc.) to keep deep political strife at bay, Hobbes is also keen on showing how “any sovereign who acts like a stereotypical Hobbesian agent is sure to invite discord, civil war, and perhaps their own destruction, all at their own fault” (9). So, even if “taken from the perspective of Hobbes’s discussion of the subject’s obedience, the sovereign can do no wrong”, “taken from the perspective of Hobbes’s discussion of that sovereign’s character, they most certainly can do wrong, where wrong is a measure of actions that naturally spur subjects to revolt, no matter what the sovereign commands, the state ideology extols, or the science of politics dictates” (20). There appears to be then some sort of “moral causation” behind Hobbes’s recommendations to sovereign agents about how to act in so far as moral virtue can contribute to empirical analysis and avoid some undesirable results:^[2] “Subjects may not have any right to disobey…, but they will nevertheless. That is Hobbes’s point. (…). Sovereign vice rots out the state. What remains is a real threat of civil war and a pervasive desire by the multitude (informed by experience) for a new founder, a leader of eminent virtue” (20).

           For obvious spatial reasons in what follows I’d like to concentrate my attention on one single aspect of the book, namely Hoye’s reluctance to subscribe what he calls “the ‘orthodox’, ‘traditional’, or ‘standard’ view of Hobbes as a forefather of legal positivism” (216). Hoye assumes that Hobbes’s insistence on sovereigns to take natural justice seriously is not compatible with legal positivism. Still, I’d say that it is not all that easy to expel Hobbes from the camp of legal positivism.

           According to Hoye, “Hobbes is neither a positivist, in H. L. A. Hart’s sense…, nor a command theorist, in John Austin’s sense…. In both cases, the reason is that the ultimate source of civil law’s legitimacy is the social contract” (216, n. 2). It is absolutely true that Hart and Austin are not contractarian thinkers. However, part of the point of subscribing to legal positivism is that legal positivism keeps the normativity of law aloof from its legitimacy. Hence, legal positivism may well be go hand in hand with different accounts of legitimacy: contractarian, utilitarian, etc. Contemporary legal positivism treats this as a conceptual matter, but in Hobbes’s case this is explained mainly by political reasons. The only way to keep, say, civil war at bay is to avoid bringing moral or political guests into a legal party. This is the original beauty of the command theory of law.

           Secondly, Hoye claims that “Contrary to Hart, Hobbes makes clear that where the civil laws are antithetical to the natural laws, they are in fact simple coercion” (216, n. 2). Hoye seems to rely on a passage often neglected by Hobbesian scholarship, a rather baffling statement in Leviathan, chapter XXIV, regarding the distribution of lands by the sovereign made “in prejudice” of “the common Peace and Security”, a distribution that Hobbes takes to be “contrary to the will of every subject, that committed his Peace, and safety to his discretion, and conscience; and therefore by the will of every one of them, is to be reputed voyd” (225, emphasis added by Hoye). This statement seems to be behind Hoye’s claim that “Hobbes makes clear that where the civil laws are antithetical to the natural laws, then the civil laws lose their force, and although they are still promulgated as laws, they are in fact simple coercion” (216, n. 2). Hobbes’s claim is a puzzling statement since the sovereign may well breach natural law but that does not affect the legal normativity of his dispositions.

           It is even more perplexing that having taken the high road of natural law, Hobbes immediately adds that this distribution of land may well be “a breach of trust and of the Law of the Nature; but this is not enough to authorize any subject, either to make warre upon, or so much as to accuse of Injustice, or any way to speak evill of their Soveraign; because they have authorized all his actions, and in bestowing the Soveraign Power, made them their own” (225). This distribution then may well be taken to be legally void by the citizens, but it has much the same practical effect as any legally binding disposition enacted by the sovereign. Perhaps it is mainly a question of reputation: subjects are to repute void what is actually legally binding.

           Now there is reason to believe that Hart himself felt rather close to Hobbes’s political philosophy. For instance, in his essay “Commands and Authoritative Legal Reasons”, in which he sets out to explain his theory of legal authority on the basis of Bentham’s jurisprudence, Hart holds that “the main criticism” which he makes to Bentham “was first suggested to me by Hobbes who said some simple but illuminating things about commands and the similarity between commands and covenants as sources of obligation or as obligation-creating acts”. Hart immediately adds: “But I do not thing I should have seen the full importance of Hobbes’s remarks on these topics had I not had the benefit of the work of Joseph Raz on what he terms ‘exclusionary reasons’ which resembles in many respects the notion which I have taken from Hobbes”.^[3] Hart’s reference to Raz is also revealing since at Oxford Hart used to prescribe “a tough course of reading in what he saw as the philosophical classics pertaining to the student topic’s”, and Raz—who wrote his doctoral dissertation under Hart’s supervision—recalled that the latter “didn’t make suggestions except for some strategic things: for example: ‘Do I have to read anything by Hobbes in order to say anything about him? («Yes!»)’”.^[4] 

           Furthermore, and this goes to the very heart of his theory of law, in a working notebook en route to The Concept of Law, Hart already states his key idea of “the notion of a rule binding valid by virtue of its ‘source’ not content”, which is a theme on the variation of the content-independent nature of commands in Hobbes’s case and of rules in Hart’s. Now Hart’s notebook is rather scarce regarding reference to other authors: “Hans Kelsen is the only theorist who appears to preoccupy Herbert (his few companions being John Austin, Jerome Frank, Thomas Hobbes, and the Hobbes scholar Howard Warrender, of whom only the last gets more than one mention)”.^[5] Indeed, Hart writes down in his notebook that: “Obligation as the differential of modern nature of law but caricatured by command. This is likely to become central idée maitresse of the book. What principles are may become clear in course of reading Warrender in this can I draw my distinction between the command habit caricature and the far more central notion of rule-like acceptance”.^[6]

           It goes without saying that Hart is making reference to Howard Warrender’s classical study on Hobbes’s theory of obligation: The Political Philosophy of Hobbes (Oxford University Press, 1957), which came out not long before or perhaps just when Hart started working on his masterpiece The Concept of Law. If I’d have to select a single text from Warrander’s book that may have caught Hart’s eye I’d put my money on the following passage: “The reason why the individual ought to obey the civil law is, in the first place, that he has covenanted to do so, and not that the punishments of the sovereign bring it about that obedience is in his interest. This is made more evident by Hobbes in a passage where he distinguishes between the citizens being obliged to obey the covenant for its own sake, and ‘being tied being obliged’, or being compelled by the sanctions of the civil law to honour his obligations”.^[7] The passage by Hobbes at stake (in De cive, chapter XIV.2) sounds remarkably Hartian: “Some have thought that being obligated and being kept to one’s obligation are the same thing and that consequently this is a verbal not a substantial distinction. So I will put it more clearly. A man is obligated by an agreement, i.e. he ought to perform of his promise. But he is kept to his obligation by a law, i.e. he is compelled to performance by fear of the penalty laid down in the law”.^[8] Of course, Hart prefers to understand obligations in terms of general social practices rather than in contractarian terms, but there is a remarkable Hobbesian air to Hart’s distinction between having an obligation to do something and being obliged to do it.^[9]

           The same applies naturally to Hart’s corresponding distinction between the internal and the external viewpoints on obligation and Hobbes’s distinction between obligations in foro interno and in foro externo. Warrender explains that: “The obligations of man in the State of Nature can be made to show very different characteristics according to the perspective from which they are described”. The very same obligation “considered from the point of view of the individual living in the State of Nature” would be seen in a different light by “outside observer… who contemplates the condition of men in the State of Nature”: “In this condition [the State of Nature] men may discharge their obligations, but in their relations with their fellow men, they may present to the external observer forms of behaviour which would be consistent with a situation in which no obligations existed whatsoever. (…). Even if the State of Nature were a condition of security, but still a condition where every man had to interpret the law for himself, duty could be completely discharged with each man obeying his version of natural law, but men could still present the external appearance of living in a state without obligations”.^[10] Of course, the content of Hobbes’s distinction does not correspond entirely to Hart’s, but the point is that their structure is quite the same: obligations look rather different if seen from the internal and the external viewpoint, if not entirely non-existent.

           To conclude, Hoye’s new book on Hobbes with its salutary emphasis on natural virtue as a vocation for sovereigns is a correction to the somewhat exaggerated attention paid to the impersonal nature of Leviathan and a refreshing challenge for anyone interested in Hobbes’s political philosophy.

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^[1] Unless otherwise stated, numbers between brackets refer to J. Matthew Hoye, Sovereignty as a Vocation in Hobbes’s Leviathan: New Foundations, Statecraft, and Virtue, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004.

^[2] For the idiom “moral causation” see Terence Irwin. “Moral Science and Political Theory in Aristotle”, History of Political Thought 6 (1985): 154, 163.

^[3] Hart, H. L. A. Essays on Bentham. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982, 244.

^[4] Nicola Lacey. A life of H. L. A. Hart. The Nightmare and the Noble Dream. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, 161.

^[5] Lacey, A Life of H. L. A. Hart, 227 (emphasis added).

^[6] Lacey, A Life of H. L. A. Hart, 228.

^[7] Howard Warrender, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, 205.

^[8] Thomas Hobbes, On the citizen, edited by Richard Tuck and Michael Silverthorne, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, 155.

^[9] See H. L. A. Hart, The Concept of Law, 2nd ed., edited by Penelope Bulloch and Joseph Raz, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994, 82-90.

^[10] Howard Warrender. The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, 68-70.

Call for participation of dossier 2026

Title: Actualidad de la filosofía de Thomas Hobbes (Current relevance of the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes)

Guest editors: María Liliana Lukac de Stier (UCA – Argentina) and Andrés Di Leo Razuk (UBA/UNLaM – Argentina).

Article languages: English, Spanish, French.

Summary and objectives:

There is no doubt that any valuable recovery of a classical thinker is primarily motivated by a problematic of the historical moment in which it is taking place. In the specific case of Thomas Hobbes, since the critical recovery of his work at the beginning of the 20th century by thinkers such as Strauss and Schmitt, the British philosopher’s texts have not ceased to be consulted in order to consider a variety of issues. In turn, the richness of Hobbes’ thought can be seen not only in the different interpretations that have been developed of his philosophy, but also in the fact that they are often even antagonistic. Thus, within Hobbesian hermeneutics we find liberal, totalitarian, statist, anarchist, theistic, atheistic, conservative or progressive positions, to mention but a few influential currents, and within each of them, the internal divisions that can be seen only further demonstrate the fruitfulness and versatility of Hobbes’ writings, which provide useful theoretical tools for reflecting on different problems.

This dossier attempts to form part of this intellectual maneuver, proposing to link Hobbes’s thought with current and concrete problems that challenge us today and that have only recently begun to form part of Hobbesian studies. The intention, then, is to bring together in this special issue different treatments that are still emerging in isolation. It should be made clear that, although the focus is on current issues, any submissions to this dossier must apply all the academic rigor involved in approaching and recovering the texts of a classical philosopher such as Hobbes, in order not to de-characterize his work.

The following is a description of the current problematic, treated in the light of Hobbesian thought, which would be included in this dossier. It is thus demonstrated how the 17th century philosopher can be highly topical and provide creative ideas for the resolution of urgent ethical-political conflicts:

– Feminisms

– Drug trafficking

– Terrorism

– Artificial intelligence

– Dissolution of the state and sovereignty

– Multitude as a political category

– Neopunitivism and criminal law

– Anarchisms

– Consumption and addictions

– Privatization of wars

– New political enemies

Deadline for submissions: 15 May 2025

Publication: January 2026

Send to: https://revistas.ucm.es/index.php/LTDL/about/submissions

For enquiries about the publication, please contact: dileorazuk@gmail.com

Journal Las Torres De Lucca is indexed in Scopus.

On the occasion of the death of J.G.A. Pocock, one of the most important voices in the intellectual history of the 20th century, on 12 December 2022, and the 100th anniversary of his birth, the European Hobbes Society wanted to pay tribute to his memory. To this end, the contributions of three prominent historians will be published, freely reflecting on his legacy, highlighting aspects of his influence and applying, in essay form, the categories developed by Pocock to contemporary political analysis. Each has freely chosen the form in which they wish to express their tribute. We are grateful to Professors Patricia Springborg, Frank Ankersmit and Jorge Myers for agreeing to participate.

Jorge Myers, Professor National University of Quilmes, Director of the Centre for Intellectual History (UNQ/CONICET).

The Many-Feathered Owl: J. G. A. Pocock’s Rethinking of the Foundations of the Languages of Politics

In the course of a career that spanned over six decades, J. G. A. Pocock made a decisive contribution to the ongoing historiographical revolution in the study of political thought and language that has transformed the practice not only of intellectual history, but of history tout court, during the last seventy years. He did this through the medium of a vast yet precisely centered oeuvre, composed of his three major books –The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law(1957), The Machiavellian Moment (1973), Barbarism and Religion (6 volumes,1999-2015)-, a series of substantial collections of articles -notably Language, Politics and Time (1971), Virtue Commerce and History (1985), The Discovery of Islands. Essays in British History (2005)^[1] and Political Thought and History: Essays on Theory and Method (2009)-, scholarly editions of classic works of political thought –The Political Works of James Harrington (1977) and Harrington’s The Commonwealth of Oceana and A System of Politics (1992, with a new introduction)- and a truly ample array of uncollected articles published in journals and anthologies. Throughout this formidably vast scholarly enterprise Pocock carved out as his specific dominion of knowledge the history of the languages of politics as they developed -within a British frame of reference- from the Renaissance to the end of the Eighteenth Century; and, among these, preeminently those employed to articulate a diversity of republican idioms and projects. Despite the remarkably wide-ranging historical curiosity of which his essays on Mozi and Chinese political thought^[2] or his numerous writings on the Maori contribution to New Zealand political discourse^[3] give evidence, a unifying thread may be detected throughout as constituting the specific problematic -the problematique générale- that engaged his reflection over so many years: the reconstruction and exploration of languages of politics in the British Atlantic (to which should be added his important partial reconstructions of those of the Italian Renaissance and of the French Enlightenment) oriented towards an interrogation of the conditions of possibility for a modern concept of revolution to emerge -together with the responses which that emergence evoked- and for which an understanding of the complex transformation of the religious dimension of political thought and discourse throughout the early Modern era was characterized by him as being crucial.

Closely associated throughout much of his career with the group of historians who have come to be labelled “the Cambridge School” of history of ideas in context, his theoretical and methodological perspective was in many ways uniquely his own. This is especially evident in his stage-by-stage elaboration of the notion of “languages of politics” as the crucial element in the historical reconstruction of political thought. In its first formulation, in his seminal article “Languages and their implications” -conceived at the close of the 1960s- his effort to establish “the methodological autonomy of political language”^[4] relied heavily on the arguments developed by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (and his related works on the subject): languages of politics could be understood to function in the same manner as the paradigms underpinning “normal science” for “scientific communities” in the longer or shorter time-spans separating one “revolution” from the next. This characterization had several implications for the practice of the history of political thought. First, the relative significance of “key works” within the authorial canon of political thought -for any period or intellectual current- diminished, as did the role of the “author” himself (or herself): for if, according to Pocock, “authors -individuals thinking and articulating- remain the actors in any story we have to tell”, the fact that the “units of the processes we trace are the paradigms of political speech”^[5] meant that those very works previously seen as “classics” effecting revolutionary changes in meaning -Machiavelli, Hobbes or Locke- were themselves constructed through the medium of the available paradigms of political speech, and this fact in itself had a levelling effect. Consequently, a meticulous exploration of the entire range of political utterances available to each of those “key authors” -newspapers, pamphlets, parliamentary speeches, legislation, sermons- became -almost- a more significant exercise than the exegesis of the “classics” themselves: certainly, if the study of a vast array of obscure and “minor” works did not entirely displace the key works as the focus of the historian’s analysis, it became the necessary prelude to any informed understanding of the range of meanings they conveyed when written or published. If this consequence of the “Kuhnian” conceptualization of political languages remained compatible with the contemporaneous methodological suggestion being made by Quentin Skinner in relation to the aim of avoiding any proleptic interpretation of political utterances articulated in the past, another, also derived from it, suggested a significant divergence between Skinner’s and Pocock’s understanding of the historical reconstruction of political thought and discourse: “Once history is seen in linguistic depth such as this, the paradigms with which he author operates take precedence over questions of his ‘intention’ or the ‘illocutionary force’ of his utterance, for only after we have understood what means he had of saying anything can we understand what he meant to say, what he succeeded in saying, what he was taken to have said, or what effects his utterance had in modifying or transforming the existing paradigm structures.”^[6] Rather than simply examining the canonically-significant texts of the past by relating them to a context whose meticulous reconstruction could offer more or less precise clues as to the authors “intention” when producing his act of speech, the historian should seek to identify “languages” of politics -whose governing paradigms determined, at least in part, the vocabularies disposable to their users-, to reconstruct them as perfectly as possible from the full historical record, and to relate all works -including the canonically-significant ones- to the range of possibilities available within that paradigm: a proposition which seems obliquely nearer to the project of Begriffsgeschichte than to that of the “Cambridge School”. 

Writing at a moment in time when the epochal climate was suffused with structuralism in its various formulations, that early effort at characterizing the nature and role of languages of politics attested, undoubtedly, to the presence of that atmosphere, even as it deliberately sought to avoid the principal limitation of structuralism, i.e. the complete abolition of authorial agency: in that and the other essays that accompanied it in that book, the “author” seems usually to be the locus of decision -insofar as he or she could choose to use one language of politics rather than another (or to combine several as part of a specific rhetorical strategy), even if the range of languages available for such choice was strictly dependent on the moment in history inhabited by the author-, while the processes which could shift paradigms over time and even overthrow them were situated in the interplay between specific instances of speech action deployed by authors in the context of polemic and explanation, and the underlying paradigms which determined the range of available words and meanings.

A little over a decade later, in the opening essay of Virtue, Commerce and History –“Introduction: The state of the art”-, Pocock offered a more detailed and sophisticated characterization of what he understood “languages” of politics to be. Acknowledging explicitly the contribution of Saussurean linguistics and the “structuralist turn” derived from it, “language” was now referred, in the course of his argument, to the distinct levels of langue and parole, while “discourse” and “traditions of discourse” appeared as terms interchangeable with “language” and “idioms”: a clear index of the manner in which Foucault now interacted with and partially displaced Kuhn and Austin in his conception of what “languages of politics” were and how they operated, although these latter -as well as linguistic game theory- continued to play a role in the thick description of historically-retrievable “languages”. The central subject with which historical research of political thought (and even of “politics” in a broader sense) was, for Pocock, political discourse, political language: “It is a large part of our historian’s practice to learn to read and recognize the diverse idioms of political discourse as they were available in the culture and at the time he is studying: to identify them as they appear in the linguistic texture of any one text, and to know what they would ordinarily have enabled that text’s author to propound or “say”. The extent to which the author’s employment of them was out of the ordinary comes later.”^[7] More importantly, of the two domains into which that subject could be divided -the history of “states of consciousness” or of private, individual, thought, on the one hand, and of public discourse produced in the interaction between more than one agent, on the other hand- it was the latter which mattered the most to the historian -at least in Pocock’s opinion- while the former was merely a possible ancillary form of research designed to improve understanding of the former: “”But speech is commonly public, and authors commonly publish their works, though the act of writing a text and the act of publishing it may be very different because performed in different situations. (…) The history of discourse is concerned with speech acts that become known and evoke response, with illocutions that are modified as they become perlocutions by the ways in which recipients respond to them, and with responses that take the form of further speech acts and countertexts.”^[8] For the history of political discourse to be meaningful, “a complex mode of Rezeptionsgeschichte is required of the historian.”^[9]

Even as he outlined the frontiers of the object which should constitute the historian’s focus -by his distinction between the history of discourse and the history of thought, as well as between both and the histoire des mentalités-, he reinforced the central aspect of his understanding of the collective nature of discourse and the actions that could be performed through its medium. Languages of politics surrounded and contained individual thinkers and their texts within themselves, however much those individuals might employ their words and idioms to effect changes upon the languages themselves. Hence, the task for the historian intent upon recovering “languages” that had been available in previous historical periods but were no longer so -or at least no longer so with the same characteristics- was to gather sufficient evidence of systematic and shared usage by historical agents of the vocabularies and syntactical possibilities those languages offered: “The more he can show (a) that diverse authors employed the same idiom and performed diverse and even contrary utterances in it, (b) that the idiom recurs in texts and contexts varying from those in which it was at first detected, and (c) that authors expressed in words their consciousness that they were employing such an idiom and developed critical and second-order languages to comment on and regulate their employment of it, the more his confidence in his method will increase”^[10] -and the more the confidence of his reader and fellow-historian would also be expected to increase. If specific languages could be identified and mapped out by the historian, the question of the relationship of language to experience remained still to be addressed. Pocock, on this issue, once again approached a characterization of that relationship which came surprisingly near to that of Reinhardt Koselleck and his colleagues, the remaining space between them deriving almost surely from the constraints imposed by his ultimately-empiricist perspective: “There is a constant and justified demand (…) that the language used by actors in a society be made to yield information regarding what that society was experiencing, and (…) that language be as far as possible presented as an effect of such experience. Here the historian is seen to concede a measure of autonomy to language, and this troubles those who cannot tell the difference between autonomy and abstraction. (…) [The historian] does not suppose that the language of the moment simply denotes, reflects or is an effect of the experience of the moment. Rather, it interacts with experience, it supplied the categories, grammar and mentality through which experience has to be recognized and articulated. In studying it the historian learns how the inhabitants of a society were cognizing experience, what experiences they were capable of recognizing, and what responses to experience they were capable of articulating and consequently performing. As a historian of discourse, it is his business to study what happened in discourse (including theory) in the process of experience, and in this way, which is one among others, he learns a good deal about the experience of those he studies”^[11]. “The historian therefore expects the relation between language and experience to be diachronous, ambivalent, and problematic.”^[12] If experience was not coterminous with the language which could express it, if a portion of “experience” remained beyond the realm of linguistic expression, then the begriffsgeschichtlichetransformation of social history into conceptual history remained just out of reach. For the purposes of Pocock’s theory, this was not necessarily a negative situation.

In practice, the “languages of politics” and “idioms” he explicitly identified and explored were those for which a substantial empirical evidence could be marshalled in support of their use by speakers and writers belonging to the historical period being studied. He suggested that one form of recovery and reconstruction of such languages would be through the careful examination of “the professional vocabularies of jurists, theologians, philosophers, merchants, and so on that for some reason have become recognized as part of the practice of politics and have entered into political discourse”^[13]. Another would be to practice the same method in recovering idioms and languages whose origin was “rhetorical” rather than institutional or professional: “they will be found to have originated as modes of argument within the ongoing process of political discourse, as new modes invented or old modes transformed by the constant action of speech upon language, of parole upon langue”^[14]. The manifold varieties of the discourse of “whiggism” present in the British Eighteenth Century, or of “toryism” both before, during and after the years studied by Pocock; of the “enlightenment” with its different national emphases, or even, although this overlapped with the form originating in professional vocabularies, the languages of Machiavellianism or of Lockeanism or of the “ancient Constitution” over the centuries, were all possible candidates for application of the historical method suggested by Pocock, and exemplars of the theory which underpinned that method.

In his own research Pocock would employ the essential intuitions of that conception of “political languages” -which, as mentioned, evolved over time, incorporating new theoretical references in pace with the evolving patterns of historical theory in general (by the 1990s, the Sattelzeit had entered Pocock’s own vocabulary, and such incorporations were many and constant over the years) which produced subtle (and sometimes profound) transformations regarding their nature- to identify, map out and explore the language of the “ancient constitution” in early modern British political discourse, the “Machiavellian moment” on both sides of the Atlantic, the variegated patterns of whiggism in Eighteenth-Century Britain, the British Protestant Enlightenment -as distinct from the French and Italian variety-, the theological language of Socinianism in its political projection, the discontinuous but ever threatening language(s) of revolution as inflected and resignified within the British tradition in the pre-modern era, and many more. In accomplishment of that vast cartography he reinterpreted and gave a more central emphasis than ever before to the work of James Harrington -elevated to the role of equal with Rober Filmer in the company of Thomas Hobbes’s disputants-, he demonstrated that the obsession of Anglo-American historians with the role of John Locke’s “liberal” thought in the discourse of North American independence occluded the presence of other sources just as potent, and he rescued from oblivion the powerful intelligence present in Josiah Tucker’s writings. As well as, of course, illuminating the many Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon -British and cosmopolitan, historiographical and philosophical, erudite and on the cutting-edge of contemporary politics-, whose Decline and Fall will never be read again in quite the same manner after Pocock´s unfolding of its many layers of meaning.

Pocock never denied that his preoccupation as an active historian was exclusively-centered on British political thought and the early-modern period: when he dealt with other national traditions of political language, it was always with the intention of further illuminating the British authors and discursive traditions he studied, and of refining his own interpretation of them. French, Italian, German political thought was always explored through the prism of the British readers for whom the authors of those nations had proved at some time relevant. Even his excursions into Maori thought were ultimately placed within a general British framework.

It might at first sight seem surprising, then, that even before his principal works began to be translated into Spanish or Portugues, his theory and practice were becoming relevant to Latin American historians grappling with the same type of problems concerning the history of political discourse as those faced by Pocock. In part, this reflects the generally less insular and more eclectic approach to history accustomed by Latin American historians, but, more importantly, it stemmed from the fact that many of the issues at the center of Pocock’s work were also of fundamental importance to the historical reinterpretation underway in Latin America from the 1980s onwards. From the Latin American perspective, the rediscovery of the history of Iberian political thought and discourse in the longue durée has revealed many more parallels between the British and the Spanish traditions than had ever been recognized from the British perspective. For instance, although there is no evidence that Pocock’s The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law was read by Tulio Halperin Donghi, the Argentinian historian can be found dedicating a key part of his interpretation of Spanish political thought and the ideology of Argentinian independence to Spanish discourse on the “ancient constitution” of Spain and its Empire^[15]. Similarly, long before Pocock’s seminal contribution to a rethinking of the British Enlightenment based on the identification of its complex imbrication with British theological discourse, Spanish American historians had been actively doing the same for the Spanish and Spanish American Enlightenment, reinterpreted by authors such as Mario Góngora or, many years later, José Carlos Chiaramonte, as a “Catholic Enlightenment”^[16]. In these cases, the intense interest awakened among Latin American historians by Pocock’s work derived from a situation of confluence between traditions, more than from the unique contributions that work might make to a better understanding of the history of Latin American political discourse.

 Such a decisive contribution was effected through reception of two key works –The Machiavellian Moment and Virtue, Commerce and History– whose arguments proved highly-illuminating to historians working on the history of political thought in the region. Natalio Botana, for example, relied heavily on Pocock’s reading of British and Anglo-American history in La Tradición Republicana: a study of republican discourse in Nineteenth-Century Argentina whose principal aim was to demonstrate the connections between European (and British) traditions of republican thought and those of Argentina^[17]. In the second half of the 1980s and throughout the 1990s, Pocock’s work came to be more frequently referenced by Mexican, Argentinian, Brazilian, Chilean and other historians of political discourse working on the Nineteenth Century, both in order to use specific observations on discursive traditions and authors present in the British domain for reinterpretation or closer analysis of Latin American authors and discursive traditions, and -more fundamentally- in order to undertake the cartography of Latin American languages of politics with the methodological instruments developed by Pocock. Hilda Sábato, Elías Palti, Paula Alonso, and many other Argentinian historians would make use in one or both ways of his work during the 1990s and after. The current author did so when studying republican discourse in the Argentinian Confederation of Juan Manuel de Rosas in 1995. Even before the availability of a substantial body of translations, Pocock’s historical texts were having an impact on the manner in which the history of political discourse in Latin America was being conducted.

From the beginning of the Twenty-First Century onwards, most of J. G. A. Pocock’s principal works have been translated into both Spanish and Portuguese, and this has widened the area of his influence, both in Spain and Portugal and in Latin America, engagement with his work being visible not only in the field of intellectual history, but also in those of political science, philosophy and even the sociology of intellectuals. This increased presence has also evoked increasing criticism. In recent years a debate has been gradually coalescing around the fact that references to the history of Iberian and Latin American political thought was always all but totally absent from the work, not only of Pocock, but of the bulk of authors associated with the “Cambridge School” -even when such references would have been pertinent to their own fields of enquiry within the British domain. A recent text by Clément Thibaud has summarized the various instances of this critique, and rendered it more complex by suggesting that the diametrical opposition between “republicanism” and “liberalism” present in the work of Pocock (and Skinner, Wood, et.al.), on the one hand, and the uncrossable caesura posited in it as separating the Early Modern Period from the Modern -and the Eighteenth from the Nineteenth Century-, on the other hand, combined with Pocock’s Anglocentrism to produce a model of republican discourse whose applicability to the Atlantic situation in general and to the Latin American in particular, is increasingly showing itself as being untenable^[18]. Without underestimating the importance of Pocock’s specific contribution, Thibaud’s discussion of the limitations of the British and Anglo-American history of republicanism has sought to point the way forward to a more precise understanding of Latin American and Atlantic republicanism and republican discourse: one which even though it supersedes it in its applicability (including Pocock’s contribution), would not have been possible had it not existed.

Pocock, had the language barrier not existed, might have engaged with this criticism in a constructive -if not conciliatory- fashion. He was, after all, a “colonial” himself, albeit of the Pacific rather than the Atlantic wing of the British Empire, whose decline and fall took place within the span of his own life. Throughout his extensive body of work he sought constantly to place the difference between different types of “British” subjects and citizens within the explicit purview of his narrative, whether these were in fact English, or North American, Scottish, or Maori: a study of republicanism plurally centered -whose urgent necessity Thibaud so cogently defends- was already on Pocock’s horizons, even when that horizon stretched no farther than the frontiers where the Union Jack had once flown. In defense of that fecund self-limitation, he might well have repeated the following words from his valedictory lecture upon retiring from his decades-long position at Johns Hopkins University: “It depends what one wants, a history which is one’s own, or a history in which one can move freely; the island or the ocean, the landfall or the voyage. Beyond that, however, lies the understanding that one can’t choose finally, and that that’s what history is about.”^[19]

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^[1] To which should be added those books which were chiefly compilations of the work of others, such as Three British Revolutions: 1641, 1688, 1776: (Princeton, 1980), Terence Ball and J.G.A. Pocock, Conceptual Change and the Constitution (1988), and (compiled conjointly with Gordon J. Schochet and Lois G. Schwoerrer) The Varieties of British Political Thought 1500-1800, (CUP, 1993).

^[2] “Ritual, Language, Power: an Essay on the Apparent Political Meanings of Ancient Chinese Philosophy”, Politics, Language and Time. Essays on Political Thought and History, University of Chicago Press, 1971.

^[3] Among others, “Tanguta Whenua and Enlightenment anthropology”, and “Law, sovereignty and history in a divided culture: the case of New Zealand and the Treaty of Waitangi”, in: The Discovery of Islands. Essays in British History, CUP, 2005.

^[4] Pocock, J.G.A., Politics, Language and Time (Op.Cit.), p.13.

^[5] Pocock, Ibid., p. 25.

^[6] Pocock, Ibid., p. 25.

^[7] Pocock, J.G.A., Virtue, Commerce and History, p. 9.

^[8] Ibid., p. 17-18.

^[9] Op.Cit.

^[10] Ibid., p. 10.

^[11] Ibid., p. 29.

^[12] Ibid., p. 29.

^[13] Ibid., p. 8.

^[14] Ibid., p. 8.

^[15] Halperin Donghi, Tulio, Tradición política española e ideología revolucionaria de Mayo, Eudeba, 1961, Buenos Aires.

^[16] Góngora, Mario, Estudios sobre el galicanismo y la “Ilustración católica” en América Española, Editorial de la Universidad de Chile, 1957, Santiago de Chile; Chiaramonte, José Carlos, La Ilustración en el Río de la Plata. Cultura eclesiástica y cultura laica durante el Virreinato, Puntosur, 1989, Buenos Aires.

^[17] Instrumental for his own reconstruction of the Anglo-American tradition of political discourse, Botana singled out Pocock’s critique of the notion of “gothic liberty” as used by Bolingbroke. Cf: Botana, Natalio, La tradición republicana, Sudamericana, 1984, Buenos Aires, p. 62.

^[18] Thibaud, Clément, “Para una historia de los republicanismos atlánticos (1770-1880), Prismas No. 23, Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, 2019, Buenos Aires.

^[19] Pocock, J. G. A., The Owl Reviews his Feathers, Valedictory Lecture, Johns Hopkins University, 1994 (curated by Zachary Larsen, at www.intellectualhistory.net/thousand-manuscripts-blog/the-owl-reviews-his-feathers)

On the occasion of the death of J.G.A. Pocock, one of the most important voices in the intellectual history of the 20th century, on 12 December 2022, and the 100th anniversary of his birth, the European Hobbes Society wanted to pay tribute to his memory. To this end, the contributions of three prominent historians will be published, freely reflecting on his legacy, highlighting aspects of his influence and applying, in essay form, the categories developed by Pocock to contemporary political analysis. Each has freely chosen the form in which they wish to express their tribute. We are grateful to Professors Patricia Springborg, Frank Ankersmit and Jorge Myers for agreeing to participate.

Patricia Springborg. Honorary Professor, University of Sydney.

POCOCK AND ‘THE TYRANNY OF DISTANCE’

Obituaries for JGA Pocock from the NY Times to the Washington Post and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung all speak of him as a giant figure in the history of historiography, as he surely is.  A tall man with a warm smile and a twinkling eye, he was also a kind mentor and very much aware of his position on the fringes of empire at an extraordinary point of social change. It was not the first time he had appeared on their pages. Patrick Bahners, an editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung who is a great admirer of Pocock and has an Oxford degree, published an essay in the Feuilleton of the FAZ on January 6, 2021, entitled: ‘Er bleibt außen vor, Pocock liest Tolkien’ (‘He remains outside: Pocock reads Tolkien’). Bahners addressed an early unpublished essay by Pocock on Tolkien posted on Richard Whatmore’s St. Andrews Intellectual History website, to argue that Tom Bombadil’s very Englishness was to stand apart, enlisting him in the Brexit debate to argue that England’s incapacity to integrate its own nations, Ireland, Scotland and Wales was symptomatic of its later incapacity to integrate in the EU. This prompted me to respond to Bahner’s piece, which he posted in a later Feuilleton of the FAZ on January 20, 2021 with the title ‘Die Tyrannei des Abstands, Neuseeland und der Brexit’ (‘The Tyranny of Distance, New Zealand and Brexit’) to argue that enlisting Tom Bombadil in the Brexit debate is a step too far; imperial nations have a congenital inability to integrate, but Pocock’s case is a different one.  The British Empire, modelled on the Roman, followed much of its own logic, he set out to show. Just as in the Roman Empire ruler cults flourished on the fringes of the empire where the international relations function of the Emperor was most important, so in its most far-flung colonies the British Empire had greatest salience. Extraordinarily then, at the onset of WWII the world’s two most influential professors of Roman Studies were both NZers. Ronald Syme (1903-1989), a Taranaki boy educated at Auckland University,  who made his career at Oxford; and Ernst Badian (1925-2011), an Austrian Jewish refugee who had migrated to NZ with his family and been a student of LG Pocock, Professor of Classics at Canterbury and JGAP’s father, who made his career at Harvard. ‘The Tyranny of Distance’ did not count in this case.

Among the accolades his obituaries pay are to speak of Pocock as a master of the English language, who even in seminars could speak in carefully constructed paragraphs. Here again the frontiers of the British Empire are seen to supply one of its greatest models; but let me emphasize the lucidity and simplicity of Pocock’s prose and the extraordinary coherence of his life’s project. At the University of Canterbury, where I encountered him in my first year in 1961, JGAP was the director of a Political Science Department newly founded in 1959, spun out of the History Department in order to address precisely the causes of social change and their impacts for global intellectual history, burning issues of the day. For, by 1960 the History Department had taken a strongly empirical turn reflected across many disciplines, where behaviouralism and elite studies employing prosopographical techniques challenged grand narratives. In this case it was ‘Namierism’ named after Sir Lewis Namier (1888-1960), a Polish-Jewish born British historian who introduced behaviouralism and elite studies as an important empirical corrective to the standard British grand narrative. Namier had published his The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III in 1929, detailing the social background characteristics of MPs, their psychological drives, personal and local interests, to reveal a politics in 1760 driven by Tories and Whigs jockeying for position within the political elite, and not by big ideas. Important though Namier’s empiricism and behaviouralism proved to be in subsequent historiography, as revealing the nitty-gritty of modern politics, it left big ideas out in the cold. The fortuitous decision of the Canterbury History Department to create a Political Science Department that addressed the causes of social change, gave Pocock his scope. Not only did he set up a thoroughly creditable curriculum addressing social change in the light of current political science giants, sociologists and anthropologists; but by examining the foundations for major shifts in global intellectual history, it served to provide the systematic groundwork for a history of historiography . And it is in historiography that Pocock is remembered as a giant, there being personal and positional reasons for this that have to do with the state of the British Empire and the role of NZ as a frontier colony.

JGA Pocock was the son of LG Pocock, from a South African family, appointed Professor of Classics at Canterbury, and his historian wife from the Chanel Islands, both of whom influenced JGA Pocock’s education as an accomplished Latinist and a path-breaking historian. As noted, at the onset of WWII the world’s two most influential professors of Roman Studies were both NZers. Ronald Syme at Oxford, author of the famous The Roman Revolution (1939) written against the background of the rise of Fascism in Europe, employed prosopographical techniques to show how family, clan and tribe had colonized imperial Rome, whose constitution was inadequate to the task, and whose ideals were deemed a sham. Ernst Badian at Harvard is famous for work on Alexander the Great that was also deflationary in the new empirical tradition, while his study of patron-client relations, Foreign Clientelae 264-70BC (1958), published from his Oxford dissertation, also a study of Roman elite politics, is said to be based on a transcription of the Cicero graffiti on the walls of LG Pocock’s study. 

But JGA Pocock, surrounded by the new empiricism taking the form of behaviouralism and prosopographical studies of the social background characteristics of elites, took another message from Roman Studies and its relation to the empire. It has been JGA Pocock’s life work to show how the British Empire was shaped  by the Roman, but also how its colonies have shaped it. This includes Great Britain, which constitutes an ‘Atlantic Archipelago’, in Pocock’s terms,  along with its former American colonies (The Machiavellian Moment, Princeton, 1975); but also its frontier colonies, of which NZ seems to have been one of the most important (The Discovery of Islands, Cambridge, 2005). In my farewell letter to John which I sent to his son Hugh, who had alerted me that his Dad was failing and would likely not make his 100^th, I compared John to Ernest Rutherford (1871-1937), NZ born and raised, the 4^th of 12 children from Brightwater, my NZ village, who attended Nelson College and, in this case took all of his degrees from the University of Canterbury. Rutherford won the Nobel prize in Chemistry in 1908, and is considered the father of nuclear physics, performing the first nuclear reaction, developing the atomic numbering system, as well as anticipating the controlled nuclear chain reaction, while making important contributions to Xray, sonar and other fields. He like Pocock was a great mentor, and at the Cavendish Laboratories in Cambridge under his tutelage, 4 more researchers won Nobels. He is buried in Westminster Abbey alongside Newton and Darwin, and is claimed to be the greatest and most original of all British scientists – note that like Pocock he is considered British! 

Pocock, whom in my valedictory letter I compare as the ‘Rutherford of the humanities’, has also been influential across many fronts. His most enduring legacy is as an historian of historiography, a much more dynamic field than it sounds. For, as John has demonstrated in his study of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, Barbarism and Religion (1999 to 2015) — at 6 volumes already longer than Gibbon’s original and even then not complete — historiography was a species of political theory. What better choice than Gibbon whose very subject is the Roman Empire as the model for the British, and who documented the growing self-awareness of its strengths and of its frailties? Pocock’s interest is in global intellectual history and its path-breaking transitions, which it was the business of historiographers to chart. His first famous book, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (Cambridge 1957), already set the scene by analysing the 17^th century battle between the Common Lawyers, as supporters of an Ancient Constitution based on immemorial custom, against the legions of the Holy Roman Empire based on feudal law. Once again it is the historiographers and antiquarians to whom the discovery of feudal law is credited, and not the lawyers. It is of course hardly credible that in the 17^th century, Britain, which had lived alongside the Holy Roman Empire for 1000 years, where the Norman Kingdom of England together with the Norman Kingdom of Sicily were the most well-integrated off-shore islands of Europe, should have had to ‘discover’ feudalism. It is even more significant that antiquarians, like the Scottish Sir Henry Spelman, should have been responsible. And extraordinarily Pocock folds the great Thomas Hobbes into this story of the discovery of feudalism and its consequences.

It is here, in the powerful first chapter of  The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, that Pocock inserts the role of humanism under the influence of Lorenzo Valla (1407-1457) and other great unveilers beloved of the Cambridge School. For, as Pocock emphasizes, it is a singular characteristic of medieval and early modern consciousness to treat Graeco-Roman civilization as an immovable object to be confronted; something which Graeco-Roman thought itself was not forced to confront. It rather treated itself as sui generis, simply ignoring its debts to previous civilizations like the ancient Egyptian and Babylonian. Symptomatically, 16^th century humanism, predominantly in French universities, already enlisted antiquarianism against the civil lawyers, insisting on stripping the original Justinian texts of the glosses and commentaries with which they had been transmitted by the Bartolist school, trying to adapt Roman law to new circumstances. During the French wars of religion, diagnosed as a consequence of the failure of this project, Francois Baudouin in De institutione historiae universae et ejus cum jurisprudentia conjunctione (1561), Jean Bodin in his Methodus ad facilem historium cognitionem (1566) and Francois Hotman in Anti-Tribonian (1567) faced a radical confrontation between history and jurisprudence. Hotman declared Roman law irrelevant, paving the way for his laterFrancogallia (1573) and its assertion of the primacy of French customary law, which Pocock sees anticipating the overblown case for Common Law based on ‘immemorial custom’ of Lord Chief Justice, Sir Edward Coke (1552-1634), and the Parliamentarians in the English Civil War. So consequential then, was this confrontation between Roman civil law and indigenous customary law, fought out in terms of jurisprudence and antiquarianism, that in both the cases of France and England it produced religious wars.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, German thinkers in the tradition of Geistesgeschichte, or Intellectual History, have been best able to diagnose the special genius of Pocock’s thought. So Martin Mulsow, Professor of Intellectual History at the University of Erfurt, and Andreas Mahler, Professor of Geistesgeschichte  at the Freie Universität Berlin, in their Die Cambridge School der Politischen Ideengeschichte (Suhrkamp, 2010), see the specificity of Pocock’s contribution. Mulsow in Prekär Wissen (Suhrkamp, 2012), Precarious Knowledge, translated as Knowledge Lost (Princeton 2022), emphasizes the work of antiquarians and other unveilers working in the margins, the producers of ‘precarious knowledge’. Their efforts have contributed to what the Germans call Nichtwissen, systematic obstacles to the distribution of knowledge. So we should not be surprised that Pocock, after his masterful work on ‘the Enlightenments’ of Edward Gibbon, should have turned in his last days to Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), the Tunisian historian and sociologist, considered to be the father of historiography, and best known for his Al-Muqaddima, the introduction to his universal history of empires. Pocock sees Ibn Khaldun anticipating Gibbon’s ‘enlightenments’ (see Pocock, 2019: ‘Two Cities: 1. The desert and the city: reading the history of civilization in Ibn Khaldun after Edward Gibbon. II. Rational Enthusiasm and angelicality: the concept of prophecy in Ibn Khaldun and Edward Gibbon’). Or perhaps we could say, Pocock saw Ibn Khaldun as the producer of ‘precarious knowledge’ or ‘knowledge lost’. But then the same could be said, I have argued elsewhere, for the great Thomas Hobbes, apparently a most conservative figure, who can however be read quite differently, as Pocock already suggests. 

Patricia Springborg
Honorary Professor, University of Sydney
patriciaspringborg@gmail.com; patricia.springborg@sydney.edu.au