This online colloquium has been established to discuss A.P. Martinich’s recent book, Hobbes’s Political Philosophy: Interpretation and Interpretations. We began with an introduction to the text, followed by responses from Michael Byron, Andrew Day and Gabriella Slomp. We conclude this week with a reply by A. P. Martinich. Many thanks to Oxford University Press for supporting this colloquium.
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My
thanks to the critics for their comments. I will reply to Michael Byron, Andrew
Day, and Gabriella Slomp in that order.
Michael
Byron’s comments are incisive and give me the opportunity to clarify points
that are easy to misunderstand. The first point concerns my explanation of the
laws of nature as laws consisting of two parts, one part that expresses a
proposition that describes what is to be done, such as “You lay down your right
to all things,” and a performative part, which for the laws of nature, is
always “I, God, command.” The propositional part specifies what the addressee
is to do; and the performative part specifies the authority who issues the
command. Byron objects that my interpretation “saddles Hobbes with a speech act
theory.” But that misconstrues how speech act theory is functioning here. It is
an expository device and as such is intended to make Hobbes’s view clear to
twenty-first century readers. Although Hobbes did not have anything like the
detailed understanding of language that J. L. Austin and John Searle do, he did
have some sense of the difference between a proposition and the force with
which the speaker expresses the proposition, as we see in his explanation of
the difference between a command and counsel in Leviathan, chapter 25. In
short, the goal is to render Hobbes’s ideas in terms that a current-day reader
can understand. If someone exclaims that my method is anachronistic, I say that
it is impossible for readers today to understand a seventeenth-century author
without a semantic bridge to cross.
About
the way the laws of nature are genuine laws, Byron thinks that he has a simpler
and better explanation than mine. He says that “Hobbes can leverage the
distinct normative statuses of counsel and command to do the work … The ‘dictates
of reason’ have the normative force of counsel, and depend for their
application on our desiring the end specified.” One objection to this position
is that Hobbes does not think that counsel is normative; the laws of nature as
dictates of reason are prudential, not obligatory. They acquire the force of
law because of a belief that God, whose authority is grounded in irresistible
power, commands them. If one balks at the idea that the legal force of the laws
of nature depends on a belief in God, one should consider that the prospective
subjects of a human sovereign have to believe that the people constituting the
sovereign will protect them.
Byron
goes on to say that the status of the laws of nature “as law, however, depends
not merely on their being commanded, but also on a prior obligation of those
commanded to do the commander’s bidding (Hobbes 1651, 26.2/137).” My reply is to deny that human beings in the
state of nature have authority over other human beings and hence cannot command
the latter. Lacking authority, no one has the right to be obeyed. That
authority depends on the artificial device of a covenant. But God’s sovereignty
by nature is, well, natural and not artificial and involves no covenant. As
soon as a person believes that God exists, they understand that that fact makes
them his subjects; submission would be superfluous. So, I think Byron’s
comment, “The difference between being God’s natural subject and God’s enemy is
that the subjects have submitted, which is a voluntary act,” is untrue.
I
turn now to sovereignty by acquisition, which I think is confused or at least
confusing, in Hobbes’s text. A problematic passage is “the vanquished
covenanteth either in express words or by other sufficient signs of the will
that so long as his life and liberty of his body is allowed to him, the victor
shall have the use thereof at his pleasure” (Hobbes 1651, 20.10/104).[1] The
suggestion is that the covenant is with the conqueror. However, the condition
of the supposed covenant, “the victor shall have the use… [of the body of the vanquished]at his pleasure,” is so oppressive that it is between hard and impossible
to believe that the victor is giving up a right, as a covenant requires. It led
Gauthier to describe it as a “degenerate covenant” (The Logic of Leviathan,
p. 125).
Sovereignty
by acquisition need not have been a difficult concept for Hobbes to incorporate
into his theory. Here are two clear ways that the vanquished or victor could return
to being subjects of a commonwealth: (a) the vanquished covenants with the
subjects of the sovereign who is represented in war by the victor—the victor
could be identical with the sovereign—or (b) the vanquished covenant with each
other and make an artificial person, specified by the victor, to be their
sovereign. Byron objects that my interpretation “does not capture the point …
that the vanquished are submitting to the victor whose sword is at their
throats, not to those back home whom he represents qua artificial person.” Distance
poses no problem. Whether the victor is the sovereign or the sovereign’s
representative, say, the commander of the sovereign’s armies, the subjects are
represented. In today’s world, an American president, ambassador or other
representative can sign a treaty and bind the American people who are thousands
of miles away.
Byron
thinks that I have been misled by my term, “conquering sovereign,” which he
claims is an “oxymoron for Hobbes,” because “[i]f you conquer me, you are not
my sovereign; if you are my sovereign, you cannot conquer me.” I suppose that
also holds for “conquered sovereign,”mutatis mutandis. So when a total
war results between two sovereigns, neither ends up a conquering or a conquered
sovereign. (The intended and a straightforward meaning of a “conquering
sovereign” is a sovereign which conquers people other than its
subjects.) William the Conqueror of England and Henry V (conqueror of
France) were conquering sovereigns because they led their armies. My guess is
that Hobbes was thinking of such sovereigns. Also, conquering sovereigns can be
victorious through the mediation of a representative, as Franklin Delano
Roosevelt was through the actions of his representative General Dwight
Eisenhower.
Byron
thinks that “the consent of the vanquished that confers dominion on the victor
(and thus constitutes him or the sovereign he represents as the new sovereign
of the vanquished),” means that the victor, who is “the natural person who
vanquished them on the battlefield,”
becomes the new sovereign of the
vanquished. He thinks that a covenant is made “between two natural persons, the
victor and the vanquished, even when the natural person of the victor happens
to coincide with the artificial person of a sovereign.” If Mr. Eisenhower had
made bold to become the sovereign of Germany in 1945, surely President Roosevelt
would have disabused him of his delusion.
Byron
thinks that my term, “sovereignty by substitution” is unnecessary because
Hobbes already has the idea, which Byron calls “commonwealth as succession.”
But substitution is different from succession. In succession, the sovereign S
of commonwealth C designates the person or persons P who will
constitute S of C at the demise of the current holder of the
sovereignty. In substitution, S of C designates the person or
persons P1 who will constitute a new sovereign S1 of a new commonwealth
C1. The vanquished person intimidated by the person with the sword makes
their sovereign S1, who may not intimidate the vanquished at all. This
situation is different from either of the two situations that Hobbes thought
exhausted the possibilities: “men who choose their sovereign do it for fear of
one another … [or choose] him they are afraid of.” But the sovereign by
substitution satisfies neither description.
Byron
denies this latter point—”When the English submit to the victor, they
submit to William. For however short a time, he is their sovereign”—but
his denial is made contrary to the stipulated facts. The phrase he quotes from
Hobbes, “the present possessor [of sovereignty]” applies to succession, but not
to substitution because in the latter, stateless persons go from the state of
nature immediately to a sovereign other than the person who destroyed their
sovereign. One upshot is that Hobbes’s
geometric political philosophy is descriptively inadequate to the contingencies
of political reality.
*
Andrew
Day thinks that my l-meaning, s-meaning, and c-meaning correspond respectively
to Quentin Skinner’s lexical meaning, meaning to us, and what an author meant. To
give me a reason to agree with him, Day would have had to provide evidence for
his claim. But “meaning to us” and “what an author meant” do not appear in
“Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” and he does not explain
where and in what way I misinterpreted Skinner. In chapter 5 of Hobbes’s
Political Philosophy, I gave grammatical criteria for four senses of ‘mean’
and argued that certain passages in “Meaning and Understanding” sometimes
confused them. The upshot of my article is that historians of ideas or
philosophy can be interested in different kinds of meaning; and it is important
to understand what kind of meaning is of interest.
Skinner’s
achievement needs to be described in more detail than the one Day provided:
[Skinner] ‘shift[ed] the focus from saying to doing.” Too many
different kinds of things count as doings—producing sounds or ink marks,
speaking a language, making a request, insulting the host, currying favor,
wasting time, practicing—for that one word to be helpful in understanding
Skinner’s theory.
I
agree with Day’s comments about the importance of “discursive conventions and
social context” and with Day’s explanation of why on Hobbes’s theory the
sovereign “cannot be party to the sovereign-making covenant.”
In
my opinion, Day should not say that a subject acquires a sovereign by
acquisition “in exchange” [my italics] for “deliver[ing] … immediately
the life and corporal liberty of his new subjects,” because that at least
suggests that a contract has been effected between the sovereign giving life
and the subject giving obedience. I agree that Hobbes should never have said or
implied that “the sovereign makes no assurances, express or otherwise;” but
Hobbes was not always consistent.
Day
says that my distinction between primary and secondary states of nature seems
“inconsistent” with some passages of Leviathan. It is. But Hobbes’s
texts about the state of nature are even more perplexing without the
distinction. Like my use of speech act theory mentioned in my comments to
Byron, my distinction between the two states of nature is an interpretive
device that has the purpose of explaining how Hobbes could say in one place
that there are no laws in the state of nature and in another place describe the
laws of nature as existing in the state of nature. If one takes Hobbes’s
geometrical model of constructing complex things from simple things, such as
plane figures from lines, one can understand the primary state of nature as the
state of nature minus laws of nature and the secondary state of nature as the
state of nature plus the laws of nature.
Day
thinks another problem with the distinction between two states of nature is
that it “implies that humanity itself is prior to God.” Not so, no more than
that a geometer who begins with points implies that the geometer is prior to
lines and plane figures. On the background assumption that God exists, that he
is prior to humanity would be a fact about reality. That the laws of nature do
not exist in the primary state of nature is a fact about how Hobbes develops
his theory.
Day
is right to hold that the distinction is “unnecessary to account for the
bellicose horrors of man’s natural state.” It is not supposed to.
I
think that in Leviathan, Hobbes’s text suggests and his political
philosophy needs God to command the laws of nature in order for them to be
obligatory. If the laws of nature do not genuinely oblige, I think Hobbes’s
comment that obligations arise from laying down one’s rights does not ground
the force that obligation requires.
Day’s
last point, that Hobbes was motivated by “the inherited duties, born of local
attachment, and constitutive of belonging, … duties we did not choose” and so
on is probably true. There is a disconnect, I think, between the stuff of a
person’s life lived among other people and Hobbes’s abstract political theory.
*
Gabriella
Slomp helpfully summarized my book’s content.
Her
question about the relative helpfulness of interpretations stimulated by political
context of an interpreter directly relates to her own scholarly work, e.g.,
“The Liberal Slip of Thomas Hobbes’s Authoritarian Pen,” Critical Review of International
Social and Political Philosophy (2010), in which she argues that Carl
Schmitt was right to hold that Hobbes’s individualism undermines his argument
for an absolute state, but not for the reason Schmitt gave. Many political
theorists are interested in Schmitt’s political theory and his interpretation
of Hobbes; their work on these topics often results in some judgment about
Hobbes’s political philosophy. I do not deny that
an “examination of historical context” of commentators who are centuries
removed from Hobbes may sometimes yield helpful perspectives. But I think that
studying Hobbes in his actual historical context is a more efficient and
reliable way of coming to understand his views. Philosophia longa; vita
brevis.
Every
method of interpretation has dangers. One danger in privileging someone like
Schmitt is using his misleading terminology to describe Hobbes’s views. I think
Slomp does so when she says that, “in Hobbes’s argument, the individual (and
not the state) is sovereign,” because sovereignty indicates political authority,
and subjects as subjects have no political authority according to Hobbes.
Concerning
the extent to which “Strauss’s context shed light on his interpretation of
Hobbes,” an informative answer would require detailed knowledge of Strauss and
his context, neither of which I have. The same applies to Schmitt and possibly
Taylor and their contexts. I have read most of Strauss’s works on Hobbes and
some of Schmitt’s and have not found them helpful. Reading those theorists may
be the occasion for becoming clear about Hobbes’s thought, but it rarely is the
reason for clarity.
As
for “evidence that the rise of fundamentalism in contemporary politics has
contributed to the recent increase of interest in Hobbes’s views on religion
and Christianity,” I don’t think the influence is important either directly or indirectly.
I doubt that many evangelical Christians read philosophy and have seen little
evidence that contemporary Hobbes scholars care much about evangelical views. I
think that Hobbes scholars should care about Hobbes’s religious views because
he undoubtedly cared about religion. A more intense study of the religious
thinkers in Hobbes’s context is time better spent.
I am not sure that all times of crisis produce innovative political philosophy. Western Europe between 450 CE and 1200 CE included times of crisis but did not produce any innovative political philosophy. It is true that “we wouldn’t have the Leviathan (at least in its present form) if there hadn’t been an English civil war” whether we take “a Voegelian perspective” or not.I think reading Hobbes’s texts closely within the political, religious, scientific, and literary contexts that affected him is the best way to interpret him.
Al Martinich (University of Texas at Austin)
[1] Andrew
Day writes, “I disagree with Martinich that Hobbes ever said, or appeared to
say, that the sovereign by acquisition is party to the sovereign-making
covenant.” For the sake of discussion, I conceded to Bernard Gert, David
Gauthier, Gregory Kavka, S. A. Lloyd, and others that Hobbes’s thought or
language is perplexing.