Online Colloquium (3): Rilla on Leviathan on a Leash

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This online colloquium has been established to discuss Sean Fleming’s recent book, Leviathan on a Leash: A Theory of State Responsibility. We began with an introduction to the text by Dr Fleming, followed by a response from Silviya Lechner. We now have a response from Jerónimo Rilla, which will be followed by a response from Philippe Crignon and then a reply by Sean Fleming. Many thanks to Princeton University Press for supporting this colloquium.

***

Sean Fleming’s Leviathan on a Leash is a worthy and lucid work of scholarship. As the author clarifies, he does not seek to find a ‘grand solution to a contemporary problem’ in Thomas Hobbes’ philosophy, but to develop a ‘Hobbesian’ theory of state responsibility (79). This Hobbesian viewpoint allows Fleming to challenge already existing, but flawed, answers—the ‘agential’ and the ‘functional’ theories of state ontology and responsibility—and to embark on a more cogent alternative.[1]

In chapter 2, Fleming reconstructs an interpretation of Hobbes’ notion of the personality of the state. Its main conclusion is that ‘Hobbes’ idea of personhood [is] unique and valuable’ because ‘it decouples personhood from metaphysical conceptions of agency’. Hobbes ‘claim[s] that states are persons … But Hobbesian personhood is metaphysically thin and fairly innocuous … The word “person” is ultimately dispensable’ (67).

To prove this assertion, Fleming sets out an illuminating distinction between two acceptations of ‘person’ that coexist in Hobbes’ texts: person understood as an actor or representative, on the one side, and person understood as a character or representee, on the other (52). ‘A complete understanding of Hobbes’ theory of the state requires both senses of personhood’ (56). Then, he argues that the Hobbesian state is not a person in the former sense, as an actor or agent, but in the latter, as a ‘fictional character’ (62) that is represented by the sovereign. The reason is that ‘the state lacks the defining feature of a corporate agent: a will that is distinct from the wills of its members and representatives’ (62). This Hobbesian conception ‘lays the groundwork’ to overcome the ‘limitations’ (45) of the agential and functional theories.

Although the author presents a plausible and compelling account, ‘tis hard to passe between the points of both unwounded’ (L, Epistle, 4),[2] as Hobbes would put it. In what follows, I will detail a series of points in which I take issue with Fleming’s interpretation. To my mind Hobbes endows the state with personhood precisely because he wants to confer voice and agency to it.

[1] I agree with the claim that the state is like a fictional character. Since it cannot speak and act by itself, the state needs a representative, an actor, to articulate its words and enact its actions. From this, Fleming deduces that the state also lacks will or intentionality, and, therefore, agency.

I think this reasoning fails to notice an important trait of this dramatis persona. As we learn from chapter XXX of Leviathan, the state’s personentails an ‘office’: there are appropriate and inappropriate ways of personating it.[3] Moreover, a set of intentions are attached by default to the person of the state: if a sovereign grants liberties that undermine his or her authority to a subject, ‘it is to be understood it was not his will’ (L, XXI.20, 342). And actions: a sovereign should ‘be careful in his politic person to procure the common interest’ (L, XIX.4, 288). This script of attitudes depends on a representative to be realised, but it is different from his or her natural attitudes. When sovereigns do not conform to the will and action proper to the person of the state, they behave in a non statelike fashion. As Fleming recognises later, if the sovereign provides an unconvincing portrayal, subjects ‘may cease to accept his [or her] actions as acts of state’ (77), that is, as acts of which they are the authors.

To be sure, this intentionality concerns the state as a person by fiction, and not in metaphysical terms, as a mental event of an emergent mind. Consequently, the fact that the state’s will ‘is simultaneously a natural will’ (58) when represented by an individual sovereign does not disqualify the state from the class of agents. Representing the person of the state means willing and acting as the state.

[2] Fleming rightly weighs up the risk of conceiving the state as an actor separated from the sovereign: ‘if the state had a will of its own … [it] could act independently of the sovereign or the subjects could object that the sovereign has misrepresented the will of the state’ (62). But he overlooks the other horn of the dilemma. If the will of the state boils down to the natural will of the sovereign, subjects may feel alienated or disaffected from this person and disavow its actions.

Hobbes thought this was a pressing issue, especially germane to the debate against the Parliamentarians: ‘by all together, they understand them as one person (which person the sovereign bears), then the power of all together, is the same with the soveraigns power… [This] they see well enough when the soveraignty is in an assembly of the people; but in a monarch they see it not’ (L, XVIII.18, 280).

[3] Besides, it is not evident that the ‘monarch is a true representative’ (58) as opposed to an assembly that would be a ‘fictional’ (56) one. The alleged ‘conceptual distinction’ (58) between monarchies and corporate representatives conflicts with Fleming’s subsequent argument. Since Hobbes’ assemblies are ‘actor[s]’ (58) or ‘rudimentary corporate agents’ (63), and not merely passive characters, they share with individual representatives the important feature of being agents. As such they can trulyspeak and act for the state. Stricto sensu, an assembly acts as a natural person because its ‘words and actions are considered… [its] own’ (L, XVI.1, 244).[4] That is to say, a sovereign assembly acts and speaks by itself in representation of the people.

[4] Fleming claims that ‘describing Hobbes’ state as a corporate agent… is anachronistic’ (65). Decoupling agency would be ‘what makes his idea of state personality novel and valuable’. In terms of historical accuracy, however, the assertion might be too bold. To construe the state as a person by fiction, to make it speak and act as if it were a person, is as old as the rhetorical figure of prosopopoeia,[5] and it is a trend that re-emerges in the 16th century.[6] Furthermore, what personification enables is precisely the agentialisation of an abstraction such as the state.[7] Conversely, the model of the representative as principal and the state/populus as a passive character deprived of agency, such as a minor, is not novel, but mainstream in medieval legal thought.[8]

[5] The risk of having a ‘metaphysically … innocuous’ (67) state for Hobbes is to leave it defenceless against other personifications perceived as speaking and acting through rebellious representatives (e.g. Liberty, the Holy Ghost, idols or the People mobilised by the Parliamentarians).[9] Hobbes could choose simply to disabuse the public and show that these are mere ‘figments of the brain’ (L, XLV.10, 1024). But, human beings ‘are enclined to suppose, and feign unto themselves several kinds of powers invisible, and to stand in awe of their own imaginations’ (L, XI.26, 162). Hence, through personification Hobbes intends to create the most powerful of all fictions (at least super terram): a ‘reall unitie of them all in one and the same person … of whose acts … every one [is] the author’ (L, XVII.13, 260, my emphasis).

To conclude, contra Fleming I contend that the Hobbesian state is a ‘fictional agent’ (62). Hobbes attributes personhood and agency to the state because as long as it (and not merely the sovereign) acts, we-the-people act. Either channelled by a monarch or an assembly, it is ‘the action of the people’ (L, XI.20, 158) that is at stake.

In addition, some recognition of state agency would be better suited to Fleming’s ‘crucial’ ‘supposition that states can do good or do wrong’ (105) and his concern with the ‘rational consistency’ (168) of states. Take, for instance, the Argentine state’s admission of blame and the subsequent reparations (both economic and symbolic) to the victims of the last military regime (1976–1983). Instead of alleging ‘misattribution’ due to the unauthorised character of the dictatorship, the democratic government that took office afterwards acknowledged the crimes as acts of ‘state terrorism’. While Fleming considers it untenable (102, 176), a notion of state ‘culpability’ might be helpful in this regard. On the one hand, because the comprehensive disposition of state resources and agencies towards human rights violations manifested a corporate intention attributable to the person of the state. On the other, because once democracy was restored, representatives and subjects of Argentina were willing to rebuild the state’s standing (arguably, its rational and moral ‘consistency’) in the world community.

Independent of this discussion, Fleming’s Hobbesian theory of state responsibility is thorough, persuasive and well argued. His book certainly succeeds in arraigning Leviathan. Whether it remains ‘on a leash’ as a passive character is debatable.

Dr Jerónimo Rilla (University of Buenos Aires, Argentina)

[1]  Incidentally, Fleming’s undertaking fulfils the criteria regarding how to use of the history of political thought for contemporary purposes set by Adrian Blau, ‘How (Not) to Use the History of Political Thought for Contemporary Purposes’. American Journal of Political Science (2020), Early View: https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12545.

[2]  L = Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. N. Malcolm (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2012).

[3]  To assume a persona is to simultaneously assume an office, as explained by Conal Condren, Argument and Authority in Early Modern England: The Presupposition of Oaths and Offices (Cambridge: CUP, 2006), 6.

[4]  See Laurens van Apeldoorn, ‘On the person and office of the sovereign in Hobbes’ Leviathan’. British Journal for the History of Philosophy 28:1 (2019), 49–68, at 60.

[5]  See Quentin Skinner, From Humanism to Hobbes: Studies in Rhetoric and Politics (Cambridge: CUP, 2018), 16.

[6]  See Thomas Maissen, Die Bedeutung der christlichen Bildsprache für die Legitimation frühneuzeitlicher Staatlichkeit, in Religions-Politik, Vol.I, eds. G. Pfleiderer and A. Heit, 75-192 (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2013), 75–192, at 90–2, 116, and 172–3.

[7]  See Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Princeton: PUP, 2012), 25, who claims: ‘Personified abstractions are probably the most obvious allegorical agents’.

[8]  See Joseph Canning, The Political Thought of Baldus de Ubaldis (Cambridge: CUP, 1987), 193.

[9]  I discuss this issue in Jerónimo Rilla, ‘Hobbes and prosopopoeia’, Intellectual History Review (2021), Online First: https://doi.org/10.1080/17496977.2020.1853991.

New piece on Hobbes and prosopopoeia

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Rilla, Jerónimo (2021): Hobbes and prosopopoeia, in: Intellectual History Review, https://doi.org/10.1080/17496977.2020.1853991

Abstract
With this paper, we intend to contribute to the debate concerning Hobbes’ conception of the person of the State. To be more precise, we shall argue that the philosopher’s notion of the State draws influence from what classic rhetoricians called prosopopoeia. Although this similarity has been identified by some contemporary interpreters, its chief characteristics remain underexplored. This viewpoint will allow us, on the one hand, to delve into the creative role of Hobbesian representatives in the process of actively conforming the person of the State; on the other, it will enable a novel understanding of the enemies of the State as personifications or allegories conjured up by rebellious agents.

New article: A Hobbesian approach to collective action

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Evrigenis, Ioannis D. (2021): In praise of dystopias: a Hobbesian approach to collective action, in: Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1080/13698230.2021.1893249

Abstract
Long before Prospect Theory and Loss Aversion Theory, Thomas Hobbes’s account of self-interest and risk assessment formed the basis of a powerful argument for the benefits of negative appeals. Dismissing the pursuit of highest and final goods as inherently incapable of yielding collective action, Hobbes proposed a method focusing instead on the highest evil, something that individuals with different goals could agree on as a barrier to their respective pursuits. In his own theory, that evil was violent death in the dystopian setting of his notorious state of nature. The staying power of Hobbes’s memorable image itself validates Hobbes’s rationale and offers important reminders regarding the limits of utopian appeals to collective action.

Online Colloquium (1): Introduction to Leviathan on a Leash

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This online colloquium has been established to discuss Sean Fleming’s recent book, Leviathan on a Leash: A Theory of State Responsibility. We begin with an introduction to the text by Dr Fleming himself, which will be followed by weekly responses from Silviya Lechner, Jerónimo Rilla, and Philippe Crignon, and finally a reply by Sean Fleming. Many thanks to Princeton University Press for supporting this colloquium.

***

Attributions of responsibility to states are ubiquitous in contemporary politics. It is commonly said, for instance, that the United Kingdom signed a trade agreement; that Lebanon is heavily indebted; that Iran is being punished with sanctions; and that the United States owes reparations for slavery. But what does it mean to hold a state responsible, as opposed to a nation, a government, or a leader? And when should responsibilities be assigned to whole states rather than to their individual members?

Leviathan on a Leash develops answers to these questions using theoretical resources drawn from Thomas Hobbes’s political thought. The theory of state responsibility that I construct is ‘Hobbesian’ in the sense that Hobbes’s theory of personhood is its point of departure. It makes sense to hold states responsible because they are distinct persons that are capable of acting via their authorized representatives. Actions performed by these authorized representatives—waging war, signing a treaty, borrowing money—are attributable to the state, and the state as a whole is therefore responsible for them. The central claim of the book is that thinking about state responsibility in these Hobbesian terms sheds new light on the problems posed by sovereign debts, reparations, treaty obligations, and economic sanctions.

It should already be clear that Leviathan on a Leash is more a work of contemporary political theory than of history of political thought. The book does engage with debates in Hobbes scholarship about Hobbes’s ideas of authority, representation, and personhood. But the primary aim of the book is to use these ideas to rethink the contemporary political phenomenon of state responsibility. This is not meant to be a hedge: the fact that my primary concern is with present-day politics does not immunize my interpretations of Hobbes from criticism. If anything, it raises the stakes and makes it more important to get Hobbes right. Throughout the book, I try to maintain a clear demarcation between intellectual-historical analysis and philosophical argument—between my interpretation of Hobbes and the Hobbesian theory of state responsibility that I develop. My theory of state responsibility stands on my interpretation of Hobbes, but my interpretation of Hobbes stands (or falls) on its own.

Leviathan on a Leash is a work of political theory in the realist tradition. Although the theory of state responsibility that I develop is abstract and general, it is not an ‘ideal’ theory. In my view, an ideal theory of state responsibility would be nonsensical—like an ideal theory of imprisonment—because the practice of holding states responsible would have no place in an ideally (or even ‘reasonably’) just world. It is inherently tragic and lamentable. State responsibility is, if anything, even more ‘non-ideal’ than imprisonment. While it might be argued that most prisoners deserve what they get, the people who bear the burdens of sovereign debts, reparations, and sanctions have often done nothing to deserve them. Why should a whole generation of young Greeks be seriously disadvantaged simply because governments elected by past generations incurred unsustainable debts? Why should Iraqis have been made to pay for a war waged by a dictator who terrorized them? State responsibility cannot be justified according to the standards of interpersonal morality. By those standards, holding the whole state responsible for the actions of its representatives looks like a ghastly form of guilt-by-association. Yet, under certain conditions (which I delineate in the book), state responsibility is legitimate according to the standards of political ethics. The practice of holding states responsible can be ‘justified’ in the political vocabulary of authorization and representation even though it is not ‘just’ in a moral vocabulary.

To frame this colloquium, let me summarize the three arguments of the book that I believe are of most interest to Hobbes scholars. This summary would be different if it were written for one the other target audiences—political philosophers, IR scholars, or international lawyers.

Hobbes’s concept of personhood is double-sided.[1] There is an underappreciated ambivalence in Hobbes’s concept of personhood. On one side, as Hobbes says in Chapter 16 of Leviathan, ‘a Person, is the same that an Actor is, both on the stage and in common Conversation’—that is, a ‘Representer of speech and action’.[2] On the other side, as Hobbes says in Chapter 42 of Leviathan, a person is ‘he that is Represented’, or ‘that which is Represented by another’—in terms of his theatrical metaphor, a ‘character’ rather than an ‘actor’.[3] To make this more concrete, consider a lawyer-client relationship. Which is the person? By the Chapter 16 definition, the person is the lawyer. By the Chapter 42 definition, the person is the client. Hobbes’s definitions of ‘person’ in Leviathan are plainly inconsistent.

In Chapter 2 of the book, I show that this inconsistency runs throughout Hobbes’s political works, and that it affects his usage as well as his definitions. Hobbes sometimes uses ‘person’ to refer to a representative (or actor), other times to refer to a representee (or character). I therefore argue that it is a mistake to try to pin Hobbes to one definition of personhood, as much of the secondary literature has done. Understanding Hobbes’s concept of personhood requires us to recognize and embrace the ambivalence.

Hobbes’s state is a ‘character’, not an ‘actor’. Recognizing the ambivalence of Hobbes’s concept of personhood is crucial for understanding his theory of the state. In each of his major political works, Hobbes says that the state, or ‘commonwealth’, is a person.[4] But what this means depends on which side of personhood is operative.

If the first sense of personhood applies, and ‘a Person, is the same that an Actor is’, then Hobbes’s state is an actor. Many political theorists and Hobbes scholars read him this way. Philip Pettit and Deborah Baumgold, among others, describe Hobbes’s state as a ‘group agent’ or ‘corporate agent’—much like the agents that populate contemporary International Relations theory. According to this interpretation, Hobbes’s idea of state personality is a primitive ancestor of contemporary theories of corporate agency, such as Pettit’s.

I argue that Hobbes’s state is not a person in the ‘actor’ sense. As he repeatedly insists throughout Leviathan, ‘the Common-wealth is no Person, nor has capacity to doe any thing, but by the Representative’.[5] The state needs a sovereign to speak and act in its name precisely because it cannot speak or act on its own. In this way, Hobbes’s state is like the things ‘represented by Fiction’ that he describes in Chapter 16 of Leviathan. Although ‘Inanimate things, as a Church, an Hospital, a Bridge’ have no agency, they ‘may be Personated by a Rector, Master, or Overseer’. The bridge can be a ‘character’ on the social stage, complete with rights and obligations, provided that an ‘actor’ is authorized to play its role. Similarly, since the state has no more agency than a bridge does, its ‘character’ has to played by a sovereign. The sovereign is a person in the representative sense, while the state is a person only in the representee sense. In other words, the sovereign is the actor (the performer of actions), while the state is the character (the thing in the name of which actions are performed).

The upshot of this interpretation is that Hobbes’s state is not a rudimentary corporate agent after all. It is something far more interesting than that. Hobbes gives us an ingenious account of how actions, rights, and responsibilities can be attributed to non-agents—to entities that have no intrinsic capacity for will, speech, or action. Anything can be a Hobbesian person (in the character sense) as long as it has an authorized representative who speaks and acts in its name. Hobbes thus explains how the state can ‘wage war’, ‘sign treaties’, and ‘borrow money’ without the metaphysical baggage of corporate agency.[6]

Hobbes’s theory of the state is of enduring relevance for political theory. Leviathan on a Leash sorts through Hobbes’s political thought and tries to separate the parts that are still theoretically useful from the parts that are mainly of historical interest. The parts that are worth retaining, I argue, are Hobbes’s theory of representation and his idea of state personality.

Hobbes captures the complexity of political representation much better than do most of his successors. Contemporary theories of representation and popular understandings of representation tend to compress political representation into a ‘dyadic’ relationship: the people authorize representatives, and those representatives act in the name of the people. Authorization goes in one direction; representation goes in the other. For Hobbes, political representation is ‘triadic’. It is not a simple two-way relation, but a complex set of three relations: (1) between subjects and their representatives; (2) between these representatives and the state; and (3) between the state and its subjects. Subjects authorize representatives; those representatives act in the name of the state; and the state distributes the benefits and burdens of membership—peace, protection, taxation, military service—to its subjects. As David Runciman has argued before me, something like Hobbes’s ‘triangular’ model is necessary to make sense of how political representation works in present-day democracies.[7]

What is missing from the common dyadic understanding of political representation is the idea of state personality. That is the second of Hobbes’s ideas that I believe is of enduring relevance for political theory: Political representatives act not in the names of the people who authorize them, but in the name of a corporate person—the state. Our common ways of speaking and writing about the state assume as much. When a head of state signs a treaty, for example, we say that ‘the state’ signed it. If treaty obligations did not attach to the state, but instead to the government or the citizenry, then treaties would cease to be binding whenever there is a change in government or a generational turnover in the state’s citizenship. The idea of state personality is necessary to explain how obligations can persist over time and through generations.

Hobbes has much in common with proponents of the ‘fiction theory’ of corporate personhood, which holds that corporate entities are made-up. The state is a fictional character, not unlike Robin Hood, whose role has to be played by an actor. But what distinguishes Hobbes from present-day proponents of the fiction theory is that he has a well-developed theory of personhood that explains how fictional persons are made and who can legitimately make them. Authorization is the process that determines who has the right to conjure up persons, while representation is the process by which persons are conjured up: ‘A Multitude of men, are made One Person, when they are by one man, or one Person, Represented; so that it be done with the consent of every one of that Multitude in particular’.[8]

Of course, many parts of Hobbes’s theory of the state are no longer theoretically useful. In particular, I argue, his understanding of authority can be jettisoned, along with the absolutist idea of sovereignty that it implies. It is no longer plausible, if it ever was, to think of political authorization as unanimous, unlimited, or irrevocable. Hobbes’s understanding of political authority leaves little room for state responsibility. If states are ‘Absolute, and Independent, subject to none but their own Representative’,[9] then they can have, at most, only weak obligations to other states or to their own subjects. But if we lop off Hobbes’s idea of authority and retain his theory of representation, then it becomes possible to theorize state responsibility in Hobbesian terms. This is the thought that Leviathan on a Leash develops.

Dr Sean Fleming (Christ’s College, University of Cambridge)

[1]  I first made this argument in ‘The Two Faces of Personhood: Hobbes, Corporate Agency and the Personality of the State’, European Journal of Political Theory 20, no. 1 (2021), pp. 5–26, first published in October 2017.

[2]  Leviathan XVI. p. 244. I cite Hobbes’s Leviathan according to the chapter numbers and the page numbers from the 2012 Clarendon edition, edited by Noel Malcolm.

[3]  Leviathan XLII. p. 776.

[4]  Leviathan, XVII. p. 260; De cive, V.9, X.5; The Elements of Law, XX.1, XIX.8. I cite De cive and The Elements according to the chapter and paragraph numbers.

[5]  Leviathan, XXVI. p. 416; see also XXI. p. 332, XXIV. p. 388, XXXI. p. 554.

[6]  I develop this thought in an earlier article. Sean Fleming, ‘Artificial Persons and Attributed Actions: How to Interpret Action-Sentences about States’, European Journal of International Relations 23, no. 4 (2017), pp. 930–50.

[7]  David Runciman, ‘Hobbes’s Theory of Representation: Anti-Democratic or Proto-Democratic?’, in Political Representation, eds. Ian Shapiro et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 15–34.

[8]  Leviathan, XVI. p. 248.

[9]  Leviathan, XXII. p. 348.

New book contrasting Hobbes with Rousseau, Kant, Hegel and Marx

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James, David (2021): Practical Necessity, Freedom, and History. From Hobbes to Marx, OUP

Description
By means of careful analysis of relevant writings by Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, and Marx, David James argues that the concept of practical necessity is key to understanding the nature and extent of human freedom. Practical necessity means being, or believing oneself to be, constrained to perform certain actions in the absence (whether real or imagined) of other, more attractive options, or by the high costs involved in pursuing other options. Agents become subject to practical necessity as a result of economic, social, and historical forces over which they have, or appear to have, no effective control, and the extent to which they are subject to it varies according to the amount of economic and social power that one agent possesses relative to other agents. The concept of practical necessity is also shown to take into account how the beliefs and attitudes of social agents are in large part determined by social and historical processes in which they are caught up, and that the type of motivation that we attribute to agents must recognize this. Practical Necessity, Freedom, and History: From Hobbes to Marx shows how Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, and Marx, in contrast to Hobbes, explain the emergence of the conditions of a free society in terms of a historical process that is initially governed by practical necessity. The role that this form of necessity plays in explaining history necessity invites the following question: to what extent are historical agents genuinely subject to both practical and historical necessity?

New Article asking: How natural is Hobbes’s Natural Person?

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Rilla, Jeronimo (2020): How natural is Hobbes’s Natural Person?, in: History of Political Thought, Vol. 41, No. 4, 559-585

Abstract
This paper deals with Hobbes’s category of ‘natural person’. Although this notion could be interpreted in purely natural terms, namely as referring to the human body and its specific accidents (sensation, passions, speech and reason), it will become clear that its main trait is artificiality. To be more precise, we will show that a natural person is analogous to an actor performing on a stage. Since elaborating a character that acts in accordance with the expectations of an audience involves several tools of artifice, the title of the paper acquires greater significance and calls for a recasting: is Hobbes’s natural person natural at all? With the purpose of giving a definite answer we will demonstrate that its genuinely natural feature is the human body, understood not as a physio-biological object, but as the ultimate responsibility locus of the person’s performance. In other words, natural persons are natural insomuch as their bodies may be held accountable for their misdeeds.

New article on Hobbes and the Modern Business Corporation

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Claassen, R.J.G. (2020): Hobbes Meets the Modern Business Corporation, in: Polity, https://doi.org/10.1086/712231

Abstract

Political theory today has expanded its scope to debate business corporations, conceiving of them as political actors, not (just) private actors in the market place. This article shows the continuing relevance of Thomas Hobbes’s work for this debate. Hobbes is commonly treated as a defender of the so-called concession theory, which traces the legitimacy of corporations to their being chartered by sovereign state authorities for public purposes. This theory is widely judged to be anachronistic for contemporary business corporations, because these can now be freely formed, on the basis of private initiative. However, a close reading of the crucial passages in Hobbes’s work reveals a more subtle view, which rejects this private/public dualism. Hobbes’s reflections on the companies of merchants of his day provide room for business corporations’ pursuit of private purposes, while keeping them embedded in a public framework of authority. Moreover, by criticizing the monopoly status of these companies, he opens up a way to integrate market failure arguments from modern economics into concession theory. The “neo-Hobbesian concession theory” emerging from this analysis shows how concession theory can accommodate private initiative and economic analysis, and thus be a relevant position in the debate about the modern business corporation.

Latest issue of Hobbes Studies

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Hobbes Studies, Volume 33, Issue 2 (Nov 2020)

Articles

Book Reviews

  • John Marshall: Collins, Jeffrey. In the Shadow of Leviathan: John Locke and the Politics of Conscience 177
  • Vladimir Milisavljević: Courtland, Shane D., ed. Hobbesian Applied Ethics and Public Policy 182
  • Enzo Rossi McQueen, Alison. Political Realism in Apocalyptic Times 188
  • David Johnston: Raylor, Timothy. Philosophy, Rhetoric, and Thomas Hobbes 192
  • Jeffrey Collins: Fukuoka, Atsuko. The Sovereign and the Prophets: Spinoza on Grotian and Hobbesian Biblical Argumentation 196

Time to rethink Hobbes on the Passions

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Bobier, Christopher (2020): Rethinking Thomas Hobbes on the Passions, in: Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, https://doi.org/10.1111/papq.12322

Abstract

There is widespread scholarly disagreement whether Hobbesian passions are or involve a type of cognition (i.e., imagination). This largely overlooked disagreement has implications for our understanding of Hobbesian deliberation. If passions are intrinsically cognitive, then, because Hobbesian deliberation is a series of alternating passions, deliberation would appear to be intrinsically cognitive as well. In this paper, I bring to light this overlooked disagreement and argue for a non‐cognitive reading of Hobbesian passions, according to which, a passion is an appetite or aversion caused by, but distinct from, an imagination of a future good or harm.

New book on Hobbes and Spinoza on Power and Popular Politics

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Field, Sandra Leonie (2020): Potentia. Hobbes and Spinoza on Power and Popular Politics, OUP.

We live in an age of growing dissatisfaction with the standard operations of representative democracy. The solution, according to a long radical democratic tradition, is the unmediated power of the people. Mass plebiscites and mass protest movements are celebrated as the quintessential expression of popular power, and this power promises to transcend ordinary institutional politics. But the outcomes of mass political phenomena can be just as disappointing as the ordinary politics they sought to overcome, breeding skepticism about democratic politics in all its forms.

Potentia argues that the very meaning of popular power needs to be rethought. It offers a detailed study of the political philosophies of Thomas Hobbes and Benedict de Spinoza, focusing on their concept of power as potentia, concrete power, rather than power as potestas, authorized power. Specifically, the book’s argument turns on a new interpretation of potentia as a capacity that is dynamically constituted in a web of actual human relations. This means that a group’s potentia reflects any hostility or hierarchy present in the relations between its members. There is nothing spontaneously egalitarian or good about human collective existence; a group’s power deserves to be called popular only if it avoids oligarchy and instead durably establishes its members’ equality. Where radical democrats interpret Hobbes’ “sleeping sovereign” or Spinoza’s “multitude” as the classic formulations of unmediated popular power, Sandra Leonie Field argues that for both Hobbes and Spinoza, conscious institutional design is required in order for true popular power to be achieved. Between Hobbes’ commitment to repressing private power and Spinoza’s exploration of civic strengthening, Field draws on early modern understandings of popular power to provide a new lens for thinking about the risks and promise of democracy.