New article: Legal Thought in Early Modern England. The Theory of Thomas Hobbes

Raffaella Santi (2018):  Legal Thought in Early Modern England: The Theory of Thomas Hobbes, in: Economics World, Vol. 6, No. 5, 384-389

doi: 10.17265/2328-7144/2018.05.005

Description

Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury (1588-1679) is one of the most influential British philosophers of the seventeenth century. The paper reconstructs Hobbes’s legal theory, focusing on his definition of law (civil law, as he calls it) found in Leviathan, XXVI, 3. The definition is only apparently simple, since it has been interpreted in different ways, especially with regard to the connections with natural law—and the Hobbesian assertion that civil law and natural law “contain each other”. Moreover, the definition of civil law changes in the corresponding paragraph of the Latin version of 1668. What is the meaning of this change? What about the divisions of the law/divisio legis, which—as Hobbes emphasizes—appears in different forms in different writers? Finally, if a good law is “that which is needful, for the good of the people”, what is it that dictates the paths to be followed by the sovereign representative, who is also the supreme legislator, when writing a new law? These are the main problems in Hobbes’s legal thought that the paper will address.

 

Online Colloquium (5): Reply by Boucher

This online colloquium has been established to discuss David Boucher’s recent book, Appropriating Hobbes: Legacies in Political, Legal, and International Thought. We began with an introduction to the text by Professor Boucher, followed by responses from Howard Williams, Eleanor Curran, and David DyzenhausWe finish this week with a reply by David Boucher. Many thanks to Oxford University Press for supporting this colloquium.

Response to my critics

I am honoured and extremely grateful that three such distinguished scholars have taken the time to consider my arguments and selectively respond to different aspects of Appropriating Hobbes. I began my career examining and criticising the ‘Cambridge School’ of intellectual history, concluding that methodological pluralism enabled us to draw-out different aspects of a thinker’s arguments, enabling us to evaluate them against the various criteria that have emerged to shape our different academic disciplines.[1] I had hoped to escape the necessity of returning to methodological justifications, but selectively examining how Hobbes has been received and manipulated in different contexts necessitated a justificatory framework to hold the whole project together, which two of my critics use to hoist me by my own petard. The principal claim that there is no Hobbes independent of our interpretations of him, is I admit contentious, but at least to me it seems obvious. David Dyzenhaus is the most disappointed that I do not by-pass Hobbes’s interpreters and spend more time attending to Hobbes’s actual arguments. He then seems unwittingly to confirm my contention by using Oakeshott and Kelson as interpreters of Hobbes who are said to help us a good deal to understand the complexity of Hobbes’s theory of law, which funnily enough looks very like their own theories of law. There is a certain irony in directing me to Oakeshott in that he too was accused of ignoring what Hobbes actually said.[2] Howard Williams appears sympathetic to my claim that each generation, each discipline, reinterprets Hobbes anew, each having to do their own thinking for themselves. He begins, however, by telling us what Hobbes’s authentic argument is, presumably independent of interpretation. Eleanor Curran, too, expresses sympathy with my project, but is disappointed, if that is not too strong a word, with my apparent inability to remain faithful to my methodological precepts. Just like Schmitt detected a fatal flaw in Hobbes through which the light of liberty shone, Curran detects in me the flaw of intruding some of my own opinions into the debates, particularly in responding to Schmitt. Let me respond, as best I can to some of their criticisms.

Dyzenhaus makes some telling and substantive points. First, why didn’t I use Oakeshott as an interpreter of Hobbes’s theory of law. I did consider reintroducing him again into the chapter on legal positivism, but on balance decided that the book was in danger of becoming more about Oakeshott than Hobbes, having invoked him as a protagonist in the ideology versus philosophy debate, and in the individualist versus collectivist debate. I also resisted the temptation to include him in the Hobbes among the idealists’ debate, about which Williams writes in this symposium. Secondly, I should have given much more emphasis to the content of the laws of nature. The difficulty in writing a book that comes at Hobbes from so many different angles is that the same material can easily be repeated over and over to the annoyance of the reader. Hobbes’s use of the laws of nature is drawn upon extensively throughout the book, one of the most important uses he makes of the idea, which is recognised by the classic international jurists, is its complete identification with the law of nations, an aspect of Hobbes that the legal positivists tend to ignore. Thirdly, my claim that law is made by the sovereign and not by judges and lawyers, is taken to be an overstatement that ignores the fact that, as Kelson tells us (alluding to Hobbes), sovereignty is institutionally complex, and subordinate judges themselves participate in sovereignty by interpreting enacted law through their understanding of the laws of nature. I do not wish to deny the complexity of sovereignty in Hobbes as his interpreters see it, but I would want to insist that whatever the process by which laws, and especially the common law, acquires legitimacy, the authority that confirms their legitimacy, if even by the silence of the Leviathan, derives by whatever circuitous route, from ‘the’ Sovereign. I have left Dyzenhaus’s most telling point until last. He appears to think that I believe Hobbes is a blank screen upon which we project ourselves, and if this claim were true engaging with Hobbes, or with the many debates that invoke him, would be a surreptitious form of intellectual narcissism, ‘because we would be no less projecting our prejudices onto these appropriators of Hobbes than we would onto Hobbes himself’. When I said there was no ‘it’ independent of interpretation (echoing Oakeshott and other Idealists), I simply meant that it is meaningless to try to separate them, they are mutually dependent, and this is what I take Gadamer and Ricoeur to be saying, and why I use them in justification. Interpretation is not a direct engagement with the text. There is a tradition of interpretation which frames our initial responses (prejudices), but which by means of the hermeneutic circle (Gadamer), or arc (Ricoeur), are modified within the constraints of our own horizons, and those projected by the text. The text doesn’t have an independent existence, despite what Kant says about the much ridiculed idea of ‘things in themselves’, and even he conceded that although they have an independent existence we cannot know them independently of the a priori categories that structure our thought.

Curran is puzzled by the status of a particular intervention I make regarding Schmitt’s regret that Hobbes allowed the subjects of Leviathan freedom of conscience, which ultimately opened the way to the corrosive influence of liberalism on modern European politics. I suggested that Schmitt could have made a much stronger case by focusing on Hobbes’s argument for the retention of the natural right to self-preservation which allowed for the individual to flee justice if it threatened his or her life. I mentioned that Jean Hampton also emphasised this point. Curran suggests that I appear to be pronouncing on what Hobbes actually meant which undermines the status of my methodological claims to see Hobbes through the eyes of his appropriators. Leo Strauss was a contemporary of Schmitt and indeed, as I pointed out in the text, accused Schmitt of missing this more glaring element of liberalism in Hobbes’s text.[3] My remark has to be seen in the context of the hermeneutic tradition of interpretation, and the criticism of Schmitt emanating from Strauss in the context in which Schmitt read Hobbes. This, however, does not wholly absolve me of the charge, and if the book had been primarily about methodology I would have argued, following Charles Taylor, that the interpreter cannot wholly suspend judgment, or belief, when an author says something that appears ludicrous by our own standards. Indeed, identifying it as ludicrous is to apply those standards. There are other ways in which the interpreter cannot wholly stay above the fray. Again, following Taylor, but more so Hayden White, and tangentially J. H. Hexter, my choice of words, tempo of the narrative, and particularly the literary ‘trope’, influences how the reader understands, or perceives the incidents portrayed. Therefore, the way in which I have subconsciously portrayed Schmitt as something of a tragicomic figure, a modern king Cnut the Great, ordering the tide of liberalism to abate, is bound to influence a reader’s impression of him, especially if he or she is unfamiliar with his work.

Williams seems to ‘get’ what I was trying to do and appreciates its importance and partial novelty. Or, perhaps I was able to get my point across better in the chapter on Idealism, with which he is primarily concerned. What he particularly likes is the demonstration of the way the works of major philosophers develop over time, as they are read and re-read in different contexts. The novelty of a philosophy may be experienced anew, and differently by each audience. This is something that Croce understood all too well, that is, the importance of the interpreter in passionately breathing new life into dead and petrified texts. The text must resonate for the person who, and the age which, reads it. Otherwise the account given is mere chronicle. Those familiar with my work on R. G. Collingwood will see the impression he has made on the way that I conceived this book, but it also demonstrates that there is no Collingwood independent of interpretation, and that my Collingwood in today’s context is very different from Quentin Skinner’s version of Collingwood. Skinner also claims to have been heavily influenced by him.

Since I am among friends, and on the subject of Idealist interpretations, I hope I may be allowed to indulge myself by repeating what I consider to be one of the most eloquent and profound sentences on Hobbes. In The Philosophical Theory of the State Bernard Bosanquet argues:

For Hobbes, then, we might venture to say, political unity lies in a will which is actual, but not general; while for Locke it lies in a will which is general, but not actual. If the two are pressed to extremes, the former theory annihilates “self,” and the latter annihilates “government.” [4]

 Professor David Boucher (Cardiff University and the University of Johannesburg)

 

[1]  David Boucher, Texts in Context: Revisionist Methods for Studying the History of Ideas (Dordrecht, Martinus Nijhoff, 1985).

[2]  J. M. Brown accuses Oakeshott of ‘a singular lack of interest in what Hobbes actually said.’ ‘A Note on Professor Oakeshott’s Introduction to the Leviathan’, Political Studies, 1 (1953), 55.

[3]  Furthermore, the individual’s retention of the natural right to self-preservation ‘sets the path to the whole system of human rights in the sense of liberalism. . .’ Leo Strauss, ‘Notes on the Concept of the Political’ in Heinrich Meier, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: the hidden dialogue (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2006), 101.

[4]  Bernard Bosanquet, The Philosophical Theory of the State (London, Macmillan, 1899), 93.

Online Colloquium (4): Dyzenhaus on Appropriating Hobbes

This online colloquium has been established to discuss David Boucher’s recent book, Appropriating Hobbes: Legacies in Political, Legal, and International Thought. We began with an introduction to the text by Professor Boucher, followed by responses from Howard Williams and Eleanor Curran. We now have a response from David Dyzenhaus (Toronto) and will finish with a reply by David Boucher. Many thanks to Oxford University Press for supporting this colloquium.

Response from David Dyzenhaus

In Appropriating Hobbes, David Boucher provides a fascinating account of the ways in which Hobbes has figured in the thought of later political and legal theorists. But for those like me who turn to his book to further illuminate our understanding of this great philosopher’s political and legal thought, the book will prove disappointing. Its most striking feature is Hobbes’s absence from most of the text. Hobbes is of course mentioned frequently. But his arguments as he himself made them figure hardly at all, though perhaps most of all in the chapter on which I shall focus in this comment—‘Hobbes among the Legal Positivists: Sovereign or Society’.

Boucher might well retort to the disappointed that where we go wrong is in supposing that there are arguments as Hobbes himself made them. He suggests that Hobbes is a kind of blank screen onto which we project our preconceptions or ‘prejudices’ in Gadamer’s sense, that is, our prior judgements about the point of political theory. If he were right about this claim, it might seem at first plausible to focus on what people have made of Hobbes, without much regard for Hobbes himself. But only at first. For if this methodological claim were true, there would be little point in engaging in the debate between those who have made use of Hobbes, because that engagement would also be with a chimera. We would be no less projecting our prejudices onto these appropriators of Hobbes than we would onto Hobbes himself.

Boucher, of course, does not fully accept his own suggestion. He agrees with Gadamer that we cannot wholly remake texts in our own image. Indeed, Gadamer’s point about prejudice as pre-judgement is that such judgements are always provisional. It is through their engagement with the text in a way that is always open to finding out that the text brings us up short, resists our interpretation, that the hope of an authentic interpretation lies.  But the way he approaches the reception of Hobbes’s thought largely neglects Gadamer’s point.

Another response might be that among the classic political philosophers. Hobbes’s political thought is peculiarly open to appropriation.  I think something like this thought underpins Boucher’s project. But that response is ambiguous between two views: the first that Hobbes’s political thought is so riven with contradiction that later interpreters can make of it what they will; the second that Hobbes gives a particularly rich and insightful account of modern politics, one that contains arguments that while made in his own political and social context remain highly pertinent to our own.

I think the second view sometimes tempts Boucher as he does spend some time both on correcting misappropriations and remedying neglect of what Hobbes in fact said. Indeed, it even tempts Quentin Skinner, who, as Boucher notes, argues that there is a real Hobbes out there, but one whose thought can be reduced to context-bound, political advocacy. For Skinner often departs from this stricture about context and engages fully with the merits of Hobbes’s arguments as arguments in political philosophy, and not as mere political advocacy, and he even occasionally hints at their relevance for our present concerns. My claim here is not that Hobbes’s arguments have some transcendent quality. Rather, as Thomas Nagel recently pointed out, it is important not to exaggerate the distance of figures such as Hobbes from us on the basis that it is not clear that they are speaking the same language as us. It ‘isn’t’, he says, that they speak our language, but that we speak their language, because our world has been significantly formed by them’.[1]

However, Boucher manages for the most part to avoid succumbing to this temptation, with the main exception his chapter, ‘Hobbes among the Legal Positivists’. But even here so little is provided by way of Hobbes’s account of the laws of nature and their role in the construction of a civil society in which legal subjects interact within the public order of the sovereign’s enacted law that the reader will come away with little sense of Hobbes’s highly nuanced critique of the common lawyers’ conception of law. In neglecting this aspect of Hobbes’s thought, Boucher perpetuates the strange inattention of Skinner to the details of Hobbes’s picture of the appropriate functioning of the modern legal state.

A singular omission here is Gerald Postema’s fine work, Bentham and the Common Law Tradition (OUP, 1989). Even more striking, given the place of Michael Oakeshott in his book, is Boucher’s neglect of Oakeshott’s wonderful, Hobbes-inspired essay ‘The rule of law’ in which Oakeshott shows how Hobbes’s political and legal thought provides a conception of legality that, he claims, ‘hovers over the reflections of many so-called “positivist” modern jurists’.[2] And it is clear that the jurist he has in mind is Hans Kelsen. Oakeshott’s insight in this line is profound. While Hobbes and Kelsen are not often linked, and while Kelsen never acknowledged any debt to Hobbes, both saw clearly what follows once one makes the decision to try to explain law as a matter of authority rather than as a matter of unmediated coercion. They understood that to explain law as a matter of authority is to explain it as a matter of de jure authority and so they focused on the way in which legality plays a crucial role in transforming might into right.

Kelsen (as ‘Kelson’) barely receives a mention in Boucher’s book. But had he pursued this insight, he might have seen how problematic his claim is that for Hobbes ‘law is made … by the sovereign and not by the judges and lawyers’ (158). For in Kelsen, as in Hobbes, the sovereign is an institutionally complex entity in which subordinate judges play a role in the exercise of sovereignty through interpreting enacted law in light of their understanding of the laws of nature. The ‘Science’ of the laws, Hobbes said, is ‘the true and onely Moral Philosophy’ and Oakeshott observed that they amount to ‘no more than an analytic break-down of the intrinsic character of law, … the jus inherent in genuine law …’. That science, as Hobbes understood things, underpinned his discussion of the themes not only of Boucher’s ‘Hobbes among the Legal Positivists’, but also of the themes in the surrounding chapters on law—3, 5 and 6. More attention to Hobbes’s actual arguments would, in my view, have made this study of the appropriations of Hobbes an even more worthwhile undertaking.

Professor David Dyzenhaus (University of Toronto)

 

[1]  Thomas Nagel, ‘How they Wrestled with the New’, (2016) 63: 14 New York Review of Books 7, his emphasis.

[2]  Michael Oakeshott, ‘The Rule of Law’ in Oakeshott, On History and Other Essays (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1999), 129, 175.

Online Colloquium (3): Curran on Appropriating Hobbes

This online colloquium has been established to discuss David Boucher’s recent book, Appropriating Hobbes: Legacies in Political, Legal, and International Thought. We began with an introduction to the text by Professor Boucher and a response from Howard Williams. We now have a response from Eleanor Curran (Kent), which focuses on chapter 3 of the book (on Schmitt and Oakeshott). This will be followed by a response by David Dyzenhaus (Toronto) and a reply by David Boucher. Many thanks to Oxford University Press for supporting this colloquium.

Response from Eleanor Curran

I enjoyed reading this chapter which has interesting commentary on the interpretations of Hobbes’s political theory by Carl Schmitt and Michael Oakeshott. I am also sympathetic to Boucher’s point that Hobbes has been subject to many conflicting interpretations and that those interpretations have often seemed to reflect the times and views of the commentators.

In the introduction to Appropriating Hobbes David Boucher says ‘the contention of this book is that interpreters of Hobbes should not be understood as penetrating into the depths of his mind, but instead gazing into a mirror in which they see their own reflections as the shadowy presence of Hobbes looks back.’ (11). And this, Boucher tells us, is to apply the method, broadly characterised as hermeneutics, to the study of Hobbes (12) to show that ‘there is no one perfect context that enables us to get at what Hobbes really meant, because he becomes almost indistinguishable from the context in which he is read’ (2).

In Chapter Three Boucher says that he wants to ‘explore the ideological appropriation of Hobbes, by Oakeshott and Schmitt, in order to demonstrate the capacity that they both display for portraying Hobbes as very much like themselves’ (89).

He discusses first, in some detail, Schmitt and Oakeshott’s own responses to political events and theory including what they both saw as the ‘degeneration in the theory and practice of the modern European state’ (91) and what they regarded as the importance of myth in providing a society with a sense of identity binding individuals together. ‘For each, myths played an essential role in bolstering the state apparatus and sustaining order’ (103). During this substantial part of the chapter (91-109), Hobbes is mentioned only intermittently and usually in the form of biographical asides or isolated remarks such as, ‘for Schmitt, Thomas Hobbes’s genius was to recognise the necessity of myth.’ (103) In the next two sections subtitled ‘Schmitt’s Hobbes’ and ‘Oakeshott’s Hobbes’ Boucher does discuss Schmitt and Oakeshott’s interpretations of Hobbes’ political theory. For reasons of space I will restrict my comments to the section on Schmitt.

Boucher recounts that Schmitt reads Hobbes, at least initially, as the theorist of absolutism par excellence. He sees his own theory of decisionism (according to which the sovereign may decide on the state of exception which allows him to suspend all laws and rights in defence of the state, in a time of emergency) in Hobbes’s theory. And so, Schmitt ‘recognised Hobbes as a potential ally.’ (109) In this early interpretation, Schmitt sees Hobbes as both an ‘anti-individualist’ and someone who thought that the state was ‘by constitution, essentially a dictatorship’ (ibid.). This co-opting of Hobbes’s theory by Schmitt, to support his own theory of sovereignty and the state is fairly well known and certainly seems to support Boucher’s claim of the appropriation of Hobbes by, in this instance, Schmitt. What happens next in the chapter is a little confusing. Boucher outlines Leo Strauss’s criticism of Schmitt’s interpretation as missing the significance of the individual for Hobbes and particularly of the individual’s retention of the right to self-preservation. These elements of Hobbes’s theory support the view that he is a proto-liberal, Strauss argues, rather than the anti-liberal of Schmitt’s reading. Boucher also tells us that Schmitt himself came to regard Hobbes as introducing a fatal flaw into his theory when he allowed freedom of conscience in religious matters. This individualist proviso, according to Schmitt, opened a crack that would later be exploited by Spinoza and which ‘contained the seed of death that destroyed the mighty Leviathan’ (112-113, quoting Schmitt).

What strikes me as puzzling is that the discussion has moved from describing the appropriation of Hobbes to support Schmitt’s own view to something more like an analysis of Hobbes’s arguments and statements and what theoretical viewpoints they either support or don’t support. In other words, this part of the chapter reads more like the usual sort of discussion and debate about what Hobbes actually said and what theoretical implications this has. The judgements about Hobbes’s theory here seem to have a different status from the contextualised interpretations Boucher sets out as his subject matter. For example, Boucher criticises Schmitt’s interpretation of Hobbes as undermining his (Hobbes’s) theory of absolute sovereignty, as above, saying ‘Schmitt may be overreacting . . . Hobbes undermined his theory of sovereignty however, in a different way.’ The politically fatal flaw, according to Boucher, is the retaining by individuals of the right to self-preservation. He then says, ‘this was something that Jean Hampton noticed, and which undermined any claim Hobbes may have to be the philosopher of absolutism.’ (113)

What is the status of this part of the discussion? If Boucher is arguing that, taking something from the text, one can state definitively that Hobbes undermines any claims that he is an absolutist then it sounds very much as though Boucher is providing his own considered view of what Hobbes actually wrote and the implications of what he wrote. And he makes no mention here of the context within which his comments may be evaluated. In other words, the implication is that there is a text, which says one thing rather than another and therefore has some independence from interpretation.

I am puzzled that Boucher does not expand on this. He does, in Chapter Six, finally include himself as an interpreter on the subject matter of international relations but maintains his claim to a position within a context and denies being a ‘free floating’ intellectual ‘above the fray’ beyond accepting ‘current standards of scholarship’ which mean that ‘the argument presented is what the evidence obliges me to believe.’ (187) This latter remark does little to clarify the status of the claims he makes that I refer to above.

If Boucher is right that there is no text independent of its interpreters then it is hard to see, without further argument or explanation, how he can at the same time argue, as he seems to, that particular statements or arguments by Hobbes, preclude a theory of absolutism on his part. It may be that I have taken too literally some of Boucher’s statements about the lack of a text independent of interpretation but some more explanation of how we can still legitimately make judgments about the text itself would have been welcome.

Dr Eleanor Curran (University of Kent)

Online Colloquium (2): Williams on Appropriating Hobbes

This online colloquium has been established to discuss David Boucher’s recent book, Appropriating Hobbes: Legacies in Political, Legal, and International Thought. We began with an introduction to the text by Professor Boucher. We now have a response from Howard Williams (Cardiff), which will be followed by responses from Eleanor Curran (Kent) and David Dyzenhaus (Toronto), and finally a reply by David Boucher. Many thanks to Oxford University Press for supporting this colloquium.

Response from Howard Williams

This is a bold an intriguing book. One of its central claims is that there is no one political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes. Rather there are very many political philosophies by him that emerge in the varying debates that have occurred around his work over the centuries. I find this an appealing thesis since it demonstrates how the work of major philosophers develop over time, as they are read and re-read. One other way of seeing the thesis is to hold that the novelty of the philosophy can be experienced anew by each generation. There is a kind of flexibility built into great texts that makes them apposite in all ages. I’ll now briefly test this thesis, first by looking at how Hobbes saw his own project and then looking at a small number of Boucher’s illuminating claims.

Hobbes was an essentialist philosopher. He believed that the truth about the world was singular and it could be discovered by one single individual. He believed that his works would stand for all time as eternally true. So convinced was he of the truth of Leviathan that he believed that it should be taught in schools and universities to all young people. And he was not immodest about this. He held that his book should be taught rather than all other texts! Hobbes’s essentialism arose from his materialist metaphysics. The world, including the human individuals that inhabited it, was but matter in motion. God for him was nothing other than the final cause that could be followed back from the things around us through a chain of cause and effect relationships. God was in this metaphysics itself no more than matter. Hobbes was a great admirer of the advances in natural science in his day. Two of his heroes were the physician Harvey and the Italian astronomer Galileo (9). Hobbes sought to emulate in the science of man what they had achieved in their chosen fields: he wanted to lay bare the laws that conditioned the activities of human individuals, and like Harvey in medicine he wanted to prescribe sure paths through which society might preserve its health.

His materialist approach inevitably led to a determinist view of the human individual. Free will was largely a delusion. It was but a name that we adopted for the final step in the series of causes that brought about our actions. We may like to think this final aim as chosen, but it is in fact entirely presaged in the preceding series of causes. Dismissing free will allowed Hobbes to advance a theory of politics which contained natural laws (165) that predetermined how we should act and could be deployed by the skillful political leader to bring about the best results. The Leviathan was born from a dream of a perfectly determined political universe that had its best form to which wise subjects should shape their lives. In Leviathan he adopted an approach which was powerfully psychological. He believed he had examined the main characteristics of human behavior, set them in an order of priority and had established the laws that conditioned our responses to what we encountered in our experience. The main precept he believed that we could conclude from this psychological study is that men would always do what was in their power to avoid a violent death. Fear therefore presented a key emotion that could be invoked in bringing about a more settled polity. As Boucher points out by the time he came to write Leviathan (78-9), Hobbes had drawn the conclusion that, as well as the mechanical laws that determined our behavior, rhetoric might also provide the philosopher with an important weapon in the erecting of a stable and lasting commonwealth. Nevertheless, Hobbes never took his gaze away from the key psychological laws he saw as being in play in human behavior.

In keeping with the theme of the book, Boucher makes the valuable and unusual attempt to set Hobbes’s political philosophy first within the context of Idealist philosophy. By Idealist philosophy Boucher has primarily in mind the British Idealist philosophers of the nineteenth and twentieth century on which he specializes. This is a good antidote to the usual interpretational context in which Hobbes is set of British empiricist philosophy, of which of course Hobbes is an important part. One of the further focusses of the book is the relationship between Hobbes and Carl Schmitt which is, in contrast, a more fashionable area and here again Boucher offers something new in approaching Schmitt from an idealist angle – a background which Schmitt would no doubt himself been aware of from those neo-Kantian philosophers who in the early part of his career were a dominating feature of academic German philosophy.

In the succinct chapter on Hobbes and the philosophical idealists Boucher provides intriguing assessments of the varying reputation Hobbes enjoyed within the school. Kant’s assessment is seen as rather cool and lacking in detail (though Kant struggled throughout his career with the philosophical paradigm Hobbes adopted which he took to be dogmatic.) For Boucher Hegel goes further than Kant in appreciating Hobbes’s worth as a political philosopher. Boucher interprets, with some justice, the master and slave dialectic which figures in Hegel’s earlier Jena writings as a way of moving on from the traditional state of nature model whilst incorporating some Hobbesian insights. Green straightforwardly gets it wrong, seeing too much that is dark in Hobbes’s materialism and political realism. Ritchie and Bosanquet make good some of these deficiencies and some of the less well-known idealist writers (39, Sorley for example) writers begin to give Hobbes a prominent place in the history of political philosophy. Most noteworthy of all in this improving trend is Collingwood’s rehabilitation of Hobbes in the New Leviathan, written at the time of the Second World War. Collingwood realizes the power of Hobbes’s view of language as shaping reality and the precariousness of civilization which always rests on a struggle against barbarism. Instead of opposing barbarism in the manner Hobbes had envisaged the twentieth-century state was advancing its cause under the weight of technological advance and mass democracy. Oakeshott appears throughout as a judicious and fair interpreter of Hobbes who appreciates the true standing of his work. Oakeshott sought to bring out what was of lasting philosophical value in Hobbes’s work in contrast with Skinner’s historical approach which relegated Hobbes to a time-limited political controversy. If anything Boucher comes out more on the side of Oakeshott in this debate, whilst always respecting the intellectual context in which the doctrines arose and were later discussed.

In his interlocutors Hobbes ran into an infinite variety of interpreters from authoritarians to liberals and from the moral to the amoral. None of the interpreters is without his appeal though some approximate more to the vision Hobbes himself had of his enterprise. Boucher briefly takes the essentialist line in presenting Hobbes’s ideas on international relations in advancing his own account. In this one area Boucher seeks to appropriate Hobbes, whilst in all other matters he leaves it in the hands of his interpreters. An unavoidable conclusion of the book is that we must all do political theory for ourselves.

Professor Howard Williams (University of Cardiff)

Call for papers: ‘Hobbes and Gender’ workshop and special issue

Papers are invited for a workshop on Hobbes and Gender, to be held at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany on 22 and 23 November 2018. Contributions to the workshop will be considered for a special issue of Hobbes Studies, on the same theme, to be published in spring 2020. The guest editors for the special issue are Eva Odzuck (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg) and Alexandra Chadwick (University of Groningen). The workshop will include two keynote speeches from experts in the field: Sharon Lloyd (University of Southern California) and Susanne Sreedhar (Boston University).

Papers may approach the topic from a variety of angles including, for example:

  • Critiques of Hobbes’s arguments from feminist perspectives.
  • Insights from Hobbes’s philosophy for current debates about gender
  • The place of women in Hobbes’s political argument.
  • Body, materialism and human nature in Hobbes.

Please submit abstracts of no more than 500 words to the editors at a.a.f.chadwick@rug.nl and eva.odzuck@fau.de by 5 September 2018.

Financial assistance for travel and accommodation expenses can be provided due to a grant from the Free State of Bavaria (Promotion of Equal Opportunities for Women in Research and Teaching, FFL).

After the workshop, the guest editors will select papers for possible publication in Hobbes Studies.  Selected papers should be no longer than 8,000 words (incl. notes and bibliography) and should be with the editors by 31 May 2019. These will then be sent out to external reviewers, and the final decisions for publication in Hobbes Studies will be made on the basis of their reports.

If you have any questions, please contact the guest editors at a.a.f.chadwick@rug.nl or eva.odzuck@fau.de.

The workshop is held under the aegis of the European Hobbes Society. For a PDF version of the call for papers, click here.

Online Colloquium (1): Introduction to Appropriating Hobbes

This online colloquium has been established to discuss David Boucher’s recent book, Appropriating Hobbes: Legacies in Political, Legal, and International Thought. We begin with an introduction to the text by Professor Boucher himself, which will be followed by weekly responses from Howard Williams (Cardiff), Eleanor Curran (Kent) and David Dyzenhaus (Toronto), and finally a reply by David Boucher. Many thanks to Oxford University Press for supporting this colloquium.

Contextualizations of Hobbes

The aim of Appropriating Hobbes is not to trace the changing fortunes of the interpretation of one of the most sophisticated and famous political philosophers who ever lived, but instead to take soundings here and there to determine his place in different contexts, the manner of his appropriation, and how his interpreters saw their own images reflected in him, or how they defined themselves in contrast to him. The main claim is that there is no Hobbes independent of the interpretations that arise from his appropriation in these various contexts and which serve to present him to the world. There is no one perfect context that enables us to get at what Hobbes ‘really meant’, despite the numerous claims to the contrary. He is almost indistinguishable from the context in which he is read. This contention is justified with reference to hermeneutics, and particularly the theories of Gadamer, Koselleck, and Ricoeur, contending that through a process of ‘distanciation’ Hobbes’s writings have been appropriated and commandeered to do service in divergent contexts such as philosophical idealism; debates over the philosophical versus historical understanding of texts; as well as in ideological disputations. In addition, Hobbes has been particularly prone to emblematic characterisations by various disciplines such as law, politics, and international relations. This book illustrates the capacity of a text to take on the colouration of its surroundings by exploring and explicating the importance of contexts in reading and understanding how and why particular interpretations of Hobbes have emerged, such as those of Carl Schmitt and Michael Oakeshott, or the international jurists of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The methodological thrust of the argument is that text and context are inseparable and that Hobbes takes on the character and persona of those who appropriate him for purposes of exploitation, or denigration. Appropriating Hobbes begins with a brief introduction to Hobbes’s immediate historical context and the controversies to which he responded and to which he contributed. For the justification of the approach I have taken I refer to the body of literature broadly termed hermeneutics. The contention, in brief, is that epistemological hermeneutics does not adequately account for the situatedness of the interpreter and, like Hobbes himself, whose theory of interpretation from the Elements of Law is rarely noticed, holds out the hope of overcoming the difficulties of attaching the meaning a of text to the psychology of the author. Referring to Dewey, Heidegger, Gadamer, his disciple Koselleck, and Ricoeur, it is contended that the inevitable distancing of the text from its author, from its context and from its time, both facilitates appropriation, but also acts as an impediment to retrieving authorial intentions. It is contended that this does not require us to concede a fatal relativism to interpretation. In other words, interpretations are not arbitrary. They have to conform to recognizable conventions that regulate, but not determine, what a community of scholars regard as a contribution to a genre of interpretation.

The book begins with an exploration of philosophical idealism, which rejected the fundamental principles of that tradition of thought that claimed Hobbes as one of its most significant progenitors, utilitarianism. Philosophical idealism came to dominate British philosophy in the latter part of the nineteenth century and still held considerable sway in the early part of the twentieth. Idealists provided an important corrective to interpretations, especially in the 1930s, that Hobbes was both an absolutist and a proto totalitarian.

Hegel identified clear deficiencies in Hobbes’s ‘scientific empiricism’, but he admired his logic and emphasis on the subjective power of the will. In Hegel’s own characterisation of individual self-consciousness the importance of the master/slave relationship owes a great deal to Hobbes. He was, for Hegel, an original perceptive thinker who tried, but ultimately failed to raise ‘scientific empiricism’ to the level of philosophy. We cannot hold Hegel responsible for the relative lack of interest and hostility to Hobbes among the early British Idealists. It was in fact Green’s almost wholly negative assessment that led such thinkers as Bradley and Seth more or less to ignore Hobbes. We find in Bosanquet, however, an altogether more qualitative nuanced assessment. His famous characterization was that in Hobbes we find a will that is actual, but not general. The reassessment by idealism of Hobbes culminates in R. G. Collingwood’s appreciation. He claims that Hobbes’s greatest discovery was that language was not the device by which we communicate pre-existing knowledge, but was prior to it and without which knowledge could never come into existence. Collingwood reformulated Hobbes’s argument, but he is also responsible for establishing the autonomy of historical knowledge, along with Oakeshott, in the English-speaking world, against the proprietorial claims of positivism. Collingwood not only inspired Gadamer, but also Quentin Skinner, one of the foremost interpreters of Hobbes over the last fifty years. Skinner distances himself from philosophical idealism, but not from the philosophy of history of Collingwood. Skinner’s contextual history is Collingwoodian in origin.

Oakeshott and Skinner are both concerned to emphasise the importance of context in the interpretation of Hobbes. What is at issue is the appropriate context for work such as that of Hobbes. Skinner wishes to deny any special character to political philosophy that differentiates it from written interventions of other genres. They are, in his view, all ideological, and require for their elucidation the reconstruction of political debates, such as those surrounding the Engagement Controversy; the importance of rhetoric in persuasive argument; and, the extent to which citizens are free under an absolute monarch. The immediate historical context, Skinner claims, is the most important context if we are to achieve an adequate understanding of what Hobbes was doing in writing his tracts of political philosophy. Their character as works of political philosophy is irrelevant to such an endeavour. Oakeshott does not deny that placing Hobbes in his historical context may illuminate aspects of his thought that may otherwise remain obscure or unintelligible. Political interventions, or attempts to influence political outcomes, are nevertheless, in his view, incidental to philosophy, which is an enterprise released from considerations of conduct, and which has no practical bearing when it is consistent with its character as philosophy. Philosophy operates at a different and higher level of discourse from ideology, and requires a more inclusive context for its elucidation, and this is nothing less than the history of political philosophy as a whole, philosophically conceived.

The twentieth century was defined by an endless stream of books claiming that European Civilisation was in crisis, and the First and Second World Wars were seen to be symptomatic of these crises. Hobbes in relation to the twentieth-century crisis of civilisation is explored through the writings of Schmitt and Oakeshott. The nature of the crisis as they see it is explored, and it becomes evident that the pernicious elements that one perceives as the contributory factors in the decline, are what the other claims are the strengths which are being undermined by the crisis. Both Oakeshott and Schmitt are critics of liberalism, but whereas Schmitt sees parliamentary democracy as a weakness emanating from liberalism, Oakeshott believes that parliamentary democracy predates modern liberalism, and is one of the strengths of contemporary politics with the potential to resist the decline of civilisation. Individuality, pluralism, the secret ballot, and the rule of law are for Schmitt unnecessary constraints contributory to the depoliticization of the political, undermining the capacity of the sovereign to determine, or decide who are friends and enemies. Schmitt is the prophet of homogeneity, collectivism and power, whereas Oakeshott recoils at the very idea that the mentality of the masses may subdue that of individuality. The rule of law, authority and individuality provides the bulwark against the type of collectivist state Schmitt advocates. Both Oakeshott and Schmitt make much of the power of myth, and each presents anti-Pelagian remedies for their diagnoses. Each has a radically different conception of politics, and each a resolution to the problems of civilisation at odds with each other.

The classic foundational status that Hobbes has been afforded by contemporary international relations theorists is largely the work of Hans Morgenthau, Martin Wight and Hedley Bull. They were not unaware that they were to some extent creating a convenient fiction, an emblematic realist, a shorthand for all of the features encapsulated in the term. The detachment of international law from the law of nature by nineteenth century positivists opened Hobbes up, even among international jurists, to be portrayed as almost exclusively a mechanistic theorist of absolute state sovereignty. If we are to endow him with a foundational place at all it is not because he was an uncompromising realist equating might with right, on the analogy of the state of nature, but instead to his complete identification of natural law with the law of nations. It was simply subject-matter that distinguished them, the individual for natural law and the state for the law of nations. Anachronistic assumptions constantly permeate our understanding of ‘classic’ thinkers. Because international jurists do not figure prominently in contemporary histories of political thought, that does not mean that they were never of any significance, nor had anything of importance to contribute to the understanding of politics.

Hobbes, of course, has been identified as an important legal theorist and was a prominent interlocutor in debates on the source of obligation in the common law, and while customary international law was not capable of attracting sovereign authority, it did not mean that that there could be no moral constraints in relations among states. While justice and injustice are the creation of the sovereign, Hobbes narrowly confined those terms to the honouring of contracts. The content of the law does not determine our obligation to obey it, nor our judgment about justice and injustice, but instead it is whether we have broken faith with a covenant that determines injustices. Natural law has intrinsic to it moral concepts which differ from those of justice and injustice, namely equity and reason, which impose obligations upon the sovereign. Furthermore, the sovereign is not at liberty to enact superfluous laws. Whereas the definition of law is that it is the will of the sovereign is authoritative to those who are formerly obliged, the justification of particular laws has to be with reference to the common good. Here is a clear understanding in Hobbes between the problems of obligation and compliance. The positivists in international law, in partial conformity with naturalists, made obligation in international law dependent up the consent of the community, or society, of sovereign states, rejecting Hobbes’s reliance on the conflation of the law of nature with the law of nations.

Among philosophers and historians of political thought Hobbes has little or nothing to say about relations among states. For modern Realists and representatives of the English School in contemporary international relations theory, however, caricatures of Hobbes abound. There is a tendency to take him too literally, referring to what I have called the unmodified philosophical state of nature, ignoring what he has to say about both the modified state of nature and the historical pre-civil condition. They extrapolate from the predicament of the individual conclusions claimed to be pertinent to international relations, and on the whole find his conclusions unconvincing. There is, however, a much more restrained and cautious Hobbes, consistent with his timid nature, in which he gives carefully weighed views on a variety of international issues, recommending moderation consistent with the duties of sovereignty.  Hobbes’s detractors among Idealists (in the international relations sense), and admirers among Realists (not in the philosophical sense), in international relations, take what Hobbes has to say about the ideas of justice and injustice too narrowly. Justice and injustice relate only to the making and breaking of contracts, and as earlier indicated, the principles of equity and reason constitute moral constraints in addition to honouring compacts, including desisting from gratuitous violence.

In conclusion, the contention is that Hobbes is constituted by the interpretation imposed on him, making text and interpretation inseparable. That is not to say, again agreeing with Gadamer and Ricoeur, that we are compelled to accept that one interpretation is as good as another. We belong to a tradition of interpretation, and have no option but to begin with certain prejudices which we may modify, but not so completely that no one recognises the activity in which we are engaged. There are limits to what, as an intellectual community compelled to adhere to some standards, we are willing to accept as an interpretation, rather than a fabrication. There are contestations of interpretation and the possibility through them of the equivalent of Karl Popper’s refutations.

Professor David Boucher (Cardiff University and the University of Johannesburg)

New book: Hobbes on Politics and Religion

Van Apeldoorn, Laurens / Douglass, Robin (2018) (eds.): Hobbes on Politics and Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

This volume marks the culmination of the inaugural research project of the Euroepan Hobbes Society. The majority of chapters in this volume were presented at two workshops in 2015, the first at King’s College London and the Second at Leiden University.

Description: Thomas Hobbes, one of the most important figures in the history of political philosophy, is still widely regarded as a predominantly secular thinker. Yet a great deal of his political thought was motivated by the need to address problems of a distinctively religious nature. This is the first collection of essays dedicated to the complex and rich intersections between Hobbes’s political and religious thought. Written by experts in the field, the volume opens up new directions for thinking about his treatment of religion as a political phenomenon and the political dimensions of his engagement with Christian doctrines and their history. The chapters investigate his strategies for showing how his provocative political positions could be accepted by different religious audiences for whom fidelity to religious texts was of crucial importance, while also considering the legacy of his ideas and examining their relevance for contemporary concerns. Some chapters do so by pursuing mainly historical inquiries about the motives and circumstances of Hobbes’s writings, while others reconstruct the logic of his arguments and test their philosophical coherence. They thus offer wide-ranging and sometimes conflicting assessments of Hobbes’s ideas, yet they all demonstrate how closely intertwined his political and religious preoccupations are and thereby showcase how this perspective can help us to better understand his thought.

Table of contents:

Introduction, Laurens van Apeldoorn and Robin Douglass
1: The Theocratic Leviathan: Hobbes’s Arguments for the Identity of Church and State, Johan Olsthoorn
2: Natural Sovereignty and Omnipotence in Hobbes’s Leviathan, A. P. Martinich
3: First Impressions: Hobbes on Religion, Education, and the Metaphor of Imprinting, Teresa M. Bejan
4: Tolerance as a Dimension of Hobbes’s Absolutism, Franck Lessay
5: Hobbes on the Motives of Martyrs, Alexandra Chadwick
6: Hobbes, Calvinism, and Determinism, Alan Cromartie
7: Mosaic Leviathan: Religion and Rhetoric in Hobbes’s Political Thought, Alison McQueen
8: Devil in the Details: Hobbes’s Use and Abuse of Scripture, Paul B. Davis
9: The Politics of Hobbes’s Historia Ecclesiastica, Patricia Springborg
10: A Profile in Cowardice? Hobbes, Personation, and the Trinity, Glen Newey
11: Hobbes and the Future of Religion, Jon Parkin
12: Hobbes and Early English Deism, Elad Carmel
13: All the Wars of Christendom: Hobbes’s Account of Religious Conflict, Jeffrey Collins
14: Religious Conflict and Moral Consensus: Hobbes, Rawls, and Two Types of Moral Justification, Daniel Eggers
15: Hobbes on the Duty Not to Act on Conscience, S. A. Lloyd

French Hobbes scholarship: New book on Leibniz and Hobbes

Leibniz lecteur critique de Hobbes (E. Marquer & P. Rateau eds), Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal-Vrin, 2017.

A new volume edited by Éric Marquer and Paul Rateau analyzes Hobbes’s influence on Leibniz, shows that Leibniz “knew his Hobbes” and how he engages with Hobbes’s philosophy in his teachings on physics, theory of knowledge, morals, law and, of course, politics. An appendix includes the two letters from Leibniz to Hobbes (1670 et 1674), translated in French.