European Hobbes Society

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

Matthew Hoye

Leiden University

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Response to the Commentators

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

Rosello

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rosler

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

Robison

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Note of Thanks

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

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

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

[3] Hobbes, II:186.

[4] Hobbes, II:184.

[5] Hobbes, II:184.

[6] Hobbes, II:186.