This online colloquium has been established to discuss Silviya Lechner’s recent book, Hobbesian Internationalism: Anarchy, Authority and the Fate of Political Philosophy. We begin with an introduction to the text by Dr Lechner herself, which will be followed by weekly responses from W. Julian Korab-Karpowicz, Chiayu Chou, and Oliver Eberl, and finally a reply by Silviya Lechner. Many thanks to Palgrave Macmillan for supporting this colloquium.
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The Core Thesis
Hobbesian
Internationalism is an
invitation to rethink three aspects of Hobbes’s philosophy. The first concerns the
grounds of his political philosophy. My main thesis is that ‘anarchy’ (state of
nature) and authority constitute its basic categories. Because the grounds of
politics involve questions of morality and law, the analysis deals primarily
with Hobbes’s moral and legal philosophy, entailing further considerations of reason,
language and mind. With respect to law, Hobbes holds that certain authoritative
determinations of value require a legal form, that they demand the creation of
a civil state as a juridical construct, and therefore an ‘exit’ from the state
of nature as a condition devoid of such authoritative determinations.
It is notable that there are
moral relations within Hobbes’s state of nature—contracts and laws of nature
(precepts of reason). Both of these have a propositional (statement-like) form
and require linguistic reason. A further peculiarity of Hobbes’s moral and
political theory is that it does not begin with obligations; it begins with
rights naturalistically construed (‘rights of nature’). Hobbes views human
beings as agents capable of transforming the world of nature and bending it to
their own purposes. The book suggests that the main reason why Hobbes’s state
of nature is an unpalatable condition is that the presence of other agents
necessarily places constraints on the pursuit of self-chosen purposes by each
individual agent—this is a relational standpoint of the moral universe.
Let us assume with Hobbes that
human beings have weighty reasons to abandon the condition of ‘mere nature’ and
create a civil state. Does the same logic apply to states in the international
sphere? My second major task is thus to reassess Hobbes’s views of
international relations. Hobbes is often enlisted as an emblematic figure in
the tradition of political realism. As used by political realists, the term
‘anarchy’—or state of nature—has grim connotations: it refers to a domain of
ruthless state competition for power and security not governed by normative
limits. Against this, the book outlines a normative theory of international
relations termed ‘Hobbesian internationalism’. Its main argument is that,
internationally, the best analogue of Hobbes’s domestic theory of the state is
Kant’s theory of international right, which puts forward a peaceful
confederation of free states. In light of its commitment to freedom, this
confederation cannot be organised as a super state but exists under conditions
of a normatively modulated state of nature. Hobbesian internationalism is a
theory of an international authority within international anarchy.
The
State of Nature
The third major aspect of
Hobbes’s philosophy tackled in the book is the concept of a state of nature. Like
Robert Nozick, I believe that this concept is more interesting philosophically
than the state, and that we must problematise it rather than take it for
granted. The term ‘anarchy’, once again, is not linked to political realism. Rather,
it stands for any domain of interaction bereft of common, authoritatively
established standards. From this perspective, a primitive market or the
internet represent states of nature or anarchical environments (the two
concepts are used interchangeably). Part II of Hobbesian Internationalism is devoted to Hobbes’s arguments for anarchy
presented in his major works on morality, law, and politics: The Elements (1640/1650), De Cive (1642/1647), and Leviathan (1651).[1]
In general, an anarchical
condition constitutes a social world whose building blocks are agent relations. The problem that each
decision maker faces inside this world is not ‘What should I do, given the
limitations of the environment (e.g. scarcity)?’, but ‘What should I do in relation to you?’. This relational
view is manifest in two-party relations such as promises and contracts which
not accidentally have prominence in Hobbes’s analysis.
Commentators like Michael Oakeshott
and Murray Forsyth have noted that the elementary relation in Hobbes’s state of
nature is physical proximity (Forsyth 1988, 136; Oakeshott 1975, 36–38, 64).
Hobbesian individuals co-exist within a common finite space, and the premise
that they have desires about external objects, or goals, as well as means to
pursue these goals, entails that interaction with others is unavoidable. But if
others cannot be avoided, can interaction be regulated so that, at a minimum,
human life is preserved? Notice that self-preservation is not the point of
Hobbes’s moral system but only its negative limit. Now, we may wonder to what
extent is the plight of Hobbes’s state of nature associated with fears about
one’s survival? In De Cive the state
of nature is such a sphere of existential uncertainty, a ‘state of war’, linked
to anticipatory violence and fear of violent death. In Leviathan uncertainty is explicated differently: it is of a more fundamental,
epistemological sort and comprises uncertainty about future events. In The Elements, the state of nature is
portrayed still differently: as a domain of ceaseless competition among
prideful individuals. The point is that Hobbes does not adhere to a single,
unchanging conception of a state of nature across his works.
Freedom
and the State
Contractatianism supposes a
sequence of three elements: a state of nature, social contract, and a civil
state. Hobbes’s civil state is not an institution that imposes standards of
fairness on individuals engaged in a cooperative enterprise, pace philosophers like John Rawls. A
central thesis of Hobbesian
Internationalism is that Hobbes regards the state as a public realm whose
raison d’être is to enable the conditions of human freedom. The paradox is that
in order to fulfil this task, the Hobbesian state must itself be a coercive or
freedom-limiting mechanism. The difference between a thug who exercises coercive
threats against a non-complying other and the Hobbesian state is that the state
applies a rule of coercion that is general
and omnilateral; its role is to enable the freedom of all by constraining the unbridled
freedom of each. Hobbes is often misread as an absolutist who compares the
state to an all-powerful God: but there is little of this, at least in Leviathan. In The Metaphysics of Morals (1797), Kant adopts Hobbes’s premises of
the state, both its coerciveness as a condition for subjective freedom, and its
publicness and omnilateralism with respect to its subjects. But Kant is equally
concerned with the constitutional structure of the state and thus with safeguards
against the possibility that it might lapse into partiality or favouritism in
the course of its institutional reproduction. Accordingly, Kant elevates the
general will (an idea borrowed from Rousseau) into a regulative limit on the decisions
of the sovereign ruler of a ‘republic’ (a properly constituted, rule-of-law state).
On Kant’s premises, the rules of the game must be impartial between subjects and sovereign. Hobbes imposes no such constraint
on his sovereign because he is occupied with the problem of how the state is to
be set in motion and not with how it ought to be reproduced.
Can we find evidence in
Hobbes’s writings for the hypothesis that the state is a freedom enabling device?
My strategy has been to point out that both the input of Hobbes’s contractarianism
(his premises about the state of nature) and its output (his doctrine of the
civil state) are freedom based. Hobbes begins his account by positing a single
original freedom, the right of nature. This is a freedom to act as one pleases,
and freedom in Leviathan is defined as
the ‘absence of Opposition… or externall Impediments of motion’ (L XXI, 261 [107]). Given proximity, the
exercise of the right of nature by any single individual necessarily constrains
its exercise by any another. The remedy, Hobbes suggests, is to devise common rules
that would enable a multitude of agents to pursue their divergent goals without
being severely harmed or obstructed. The candidate rules are the laws of
nature. Formally, each law of nature is a hypothetical (if… then…) prescriptive
statement advising each individual what to do if this individual wishes to
survive amongst others. Substantively, Hobbes lists prescriptions against reneging
on one’s word, arrogance, revengefulness and so on. But while the object of the
laws of nature is the intersubjective world, their normative force is
subjective because it is up to the subject alone to decide whether to make a
certain (say, non-arrogant) manner of acting a matter of future policy, as
required by a law of nature. The defect of subjective judgement can be overcome
by creating a different kind of rules: civil laws. The latter possess
generality (govern classes of subjects), apply to all subjects within the
relevant class (not merely to some), and are binding on all. Most importantly, they
possess certainty in lieu of the fact that their status as laws is authoritatively
determined by a single and commonly known authority, the sovereign.
The idea that the civil laws
of the state are binding can mean that they are backed up by coercion.
Initially Hobbes thought that coercion suffices to ground obligation and law,
appealing to God’s overwhelming power that compels human beings to obey His
commands. This command theory of law is outlined in De Cive. But it exhibits two errors, as HLA Hart pointed out in The Concept of Law (1961), even though his
target was John Austin’s version of the theory and not Hobbes’s. The first
error is that it conflates obligation (the idea of putting oneself under an obligation) with force (the idea of being
compelled to comply by another by physical means).The second is that a rule
must already exist before it is
enforced, so whence does the rule come? Hobbes’s answer is contained in the twin
concepts of authority and authorisation that are unique to Leviathan. As Hobbes writes at the end of Chapter XV, the sovereign
rules by authority (‘by right’) and not because of superior power.
Authority
Authority is conventionally
defined as a political concept or a
right to rule. Hobbes however wants to know what grounds political authority. Political
authority is grounded in (simple) authority, which Hobbes defines as ‘the right
of doing any action’ (L XVI, 218
[81]). ‘Authority’, then, designates a capacity for agency which can be
delegated to another agent, and which forms the basis of Hobbes’s theory of
authorising the sovereign introduced in Chap. XVI of Leviathan. The new concept of authorisation—the act of granting
authority to another—entails corresponding changes in Hobbes’s conception of civil
law, the relationship between ruler and ruled, and elucidates the naturalistic
roots of Hobbes’s moral philosophy. In De
Cive law is defined as ‘the command of that person (whether man or court)
whose precept contains in it the reason of obedience’ (DC 14.1). Laws are the ‘precepts’ of God in relation to human
agents, of magistrates in respect of their subjects, and ‘universally of all
the powerful in respect of them who cannot resist’ (DC 14.1). In contrast, in Leviathan
law is a command ‘only of him, whose Command is addressed to one formerly
obliged to obey him’ (L XXVI, 312
[137]). The result is a transformed, bottom-up account of political authority
and political obligation. But in a deeper sense, Hobbes’s concept of authority,
as power of agency, reflects a naturalist worldview inside which human beings
represent bundles of natural physical and mental capacities, and where the
right of nature is a capacity to act intentionally by overcoming obstacles in a
physical sense.
Methodology
In terms of interpretive
methodology, Hobbesian Internationalism adopts
a procedure of analytical hermeneutics. ‘Analytical’ since its aim is to test the
coherence of arguments and not to engage in exegesis. But also ‘analytical’ in
the sense that Hobbes’s philosophy is viewed as a stock of ideas that are
recognisable as a system, bracketing considerations of historical or political
context. This constitutes a departure from Quentin Skinner’s methodological quest
for disclosing the ‘ideologies’ that may have motivated Hobbes to write what he
did (Skinner 1996). At the same time, the adopted methodology is
‘hermeneutical’ in that it attempts to understand Hobbes’s philosophy as a
whole before any attempt is made to understand its ‘parts’, betraying my
indebtedness to the idealist tradition and to Oakeshott’s reading of Hobbes. As
Oakeshott wrote, ‘reality has no parts … and everything asserted of reality is
asserted of it as a whole’ (1975, 130). To settle interpretive uncertainties, analytical
hermeneutics locates particular arguments that Hobbes advanced within the
context of his philosophical system, seen as a totality. To be sure, an
interpreter, in seeking to understand a whole, is only able to generate a
partial representation of that whole. But not all interpretations are equally
good or equally bad (see also Boucher 2018). An interpretation must pass an
internal test of coherence operating on the principle of self-correction (e.g.,
it should be possible to show that certain premises lead to a given
conclusion), which is public: the reader can ascertain whether the provided
interpretation bears scrutiny.
My interpretive strategy
rejects the approach of indiscriminately borrowing textual evidence from
Hobbes’s corpus. In Part II of Hobbesian
Internationalism it is argued that Hobbes presents different accounts of the
state of nature in The Elements, De Cive, and Leviathan. The philosophically significant break occurs in Leviathan, opening up an avenue for a Hobbesian
theory of international relations, but this does not relegate the pre-1651
works to mere drafts of Hobbes’s masterpiece. Each constitutes a system of
ideas that can stand on its own, and each produces a different (though not
logically disconnected) moral, legal and political theory.
Models
The book identifies various analytical
maps or models that Hobbes uses to spell out his arguments. With respect to the
state of nature, the basic model in The
Elements is competition (‘race’) fuelled by a desire for glory. De Cive lacks a clear model, but an
appropriate reconstruction identifies a special uncertainty model where two
groups of agents, moderates and glory seekers, are engaged in anticipatory
violence (state of war). Leviathan contains
three distinct models of the state of nature: (1) a generalised uncertainty
model (epistemological and linguistic uncertainty); (2) a special uncertainty
model (state of war); and (3) a mutual frustration (‘infelicity’) model where
agents are obstructing each other, similar to drivers on a congested road.
Chapter 5 of Hobbesian Internationalism presents a
structuralist reading of the infelicity model. It asks, what happens when free
and equal individuals are confined to an unregulated, finite space of
interaction? The proposed reading counts as structuralist because it factors
out the differentiating properties of the Hobbesian agents (their motives) and employs
only isomorphic properties (freedom and equality) plus environmental
constraints. In Leviathan the equality
of agents is understood as equal vulnerability to death, and freedom is absence
of external impediments to one’s intended action. In terms of environmental
constraints, the interaction space is assumed to be finite and bounded and the
agents are similarly taken to be finite, physically bounded units. This model has
freedom of action as its main concern as opposed to security: the problem is
not how to avoid grave bodily harm or violent death but how to prevent collision
among agents pursuing freely chosen and potentially conflictual goals. In this
case, the role of the sovereign is not to provide security by virtue of wielding
overwhelming power over the subjects but to generate a system of rules binding on them all. And even though these rules
must be coercively enforceable—or must be civil laws—they are nonetheless freedom
enabling devices. In Chapter XXX of Leviathan
Hobbes compares them to ‘hedges’ that allow a multitude of travellers to reach
their destination without obstructing one another. In Part III of Hobbesian Internationalism, this
structuralist insight is used to illuminate the normative structure of the
current international realm.
International
Authority within International Anarchy: Kant meets Hobbes
Chapter 7 of the bookadvances the thesis that free and equal
agents, states, would form an international authority that persists in an
international state of nature. Two qualifications apply. The first is that the
state of nature is normatively modulated. The second is that the envisaged international
authority must be organised as a loose confederation of states, which each
state is free to join or leave at will. Both premises are endorsed by Kant in
his late writings: Perpetual Peace (1795)
and The Metaphysics of Morals (1797).
The proposed model of an international authority within international anarchy
is a half-house between the ‘bare’ international anarchy model endorsed by
political realism, and the utopian model of a super state.
Kant’s doctrine of an international
authority composed of free states is based on a principle of international
right, where right (Recht) is translated into English as
‘law’ or ‘justice’. My contention is that this principle has its pedigree in
Hobbes’s domestic theory of the state, a point that remains poorly understood
even among specialists given the tendency to focus on questions of morality.
Kant and Hobbes might adhere to different conceptions of morality (depending on
how they are read), but they share a theory of law and state. According to this
theory, law and order require the creation of a state (public realm), whereas outside
of the state, in the domain of the state of nature, lawlessness and disorder
reign—in this respect political realists are correct in appropriating Hobbes. However,
realism ignores the differentia of states as artificial persons who are (arguably)
better placed than natural persons to ratify common rules of the game and to grant
each other equal freedom. That is, the international state of nature is less
harsh for states than the domestic state of nature is for human beings. This is
because, as Hedley Bull has noted, it is relatively easy to kill a human being
but very difficult to kill a state. Kant has another argument—that a ‘republic’
protects the rights of its subjects, and Hobbes will add, their security and
well-being. This means that well-ordered states will not be pressed to build a super
state—a state made of states—with the view of securing rights or well-being,
for these things already exist inside their borders. But this is at most an instrumental
justification of international authority. To provide a non-instrumental
justification for it requires that we see the state as a legal person who has a
moral personality (rights and duties
of its own): a sort of moral sovereignty. This, on my interpretation, which
links Hobbes to Kant and Kant back to Hobbes, motivates states to preserve a
free, unencumbered interaction space among themselves based on shared rules of
the game: a ‘thin’ international morality. If this space is to remain free, it should
be anarchical: an insistence on a super state or comparable institutional
structures, as in current projects of cosmopolitanism, is not only impractical:
it militates against the idea of freedom which Hobbes understood so well.
Dr
Silviya Lechner (King’s College, London)
References
Boucher, David (2018) Appropriating
Hobbes. Legacies in Political,
Legal and International Thought.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Forsyth, Murray (1988). Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan. In M. Forsyth and M. Keens-Soper, eds., A Guide to the Political Classics: Plato to Rousseau, 120–146. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hart, HLA (1961) The Concept of Law. Oxford: Clarendon
Press.
Hobbes, Thomas. (1949 [1651]) De Cive or the Citizen, ed. Sterling P. Lamprecht. New York: Appleton-Century Crofts.
Hobbes, Thomas. (1968
[1651]) Leviathan, ed. C.B. Macpherson. London: Penguin.
Hobbes, Thomas. (1969. [1650]) The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic, 2nd ed., ed. Ferdinand Tönnies. London: Frank Cass.
Kant, Immanuel (1991 [1795]) Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch,
in Kant’s Political Writings ed. Hans
Reiss, trans. H. B. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kant, Immanuel (1996 [1797]) The Metaphysics of Morals, ed. Mary
Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Oakeshott, Michael (1933) Experience and Its Modes. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Oakeshott, Michael (1975) Introduction to Leviathan. In Hobbes on Civil Association, 1–79. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.
Skinner, Quentin (1996) Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[1] Leviathan is cited by chapter and page
number of the 1968 MacPherson edition, the original pagination of the 1651
‘Head’ edition is shown in square brackets. De
Cive is cited by chapter and section number.
