Nasty, Brutish, and Naturally Free: Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and the Social Contract

The political upheavals of 17th century England demanded new answers for old political questions: what is the purpose of government, how is power legitimated, and who may wield it?  Philosophers Thomas Hobbes and John Locke reasoned from the same premises, but arrived at rather different conclusions.  Balancing those conclusions is the primary task of liberal democracies to this day.

Texts:

Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes: https://gutenberg.org/files/3207/3207-h/3207-h.htm

"Second Treatise on Government" by John Locke: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/7370/7370-h/7370-h.htm

Leviathan frontispiece: https://www.worldhistory.org/image/18182/leviathan-frontispiece/

Transcript

Hello, everyone!  Glad you came by!  This is the Classic English Literature Subcast, the show that explores the more tangential and peculiar corners of English literature.  Today, I once again indulge my philosophical dilettantism with the excuse that our little conversation today is rather germane to much that has gone on in the literature of our recent episodes.  Over the last few shows, we’ve looked at the history of the English Civil Wars, the Cavalier Poets, and Milton’s Paradise Lost.  I just did an episode on the early stirrings of science fiction writing in English, which drew heavily from the utopian tradition.  All of this, in one way or another, plays out within  competing political philosophies: questions about the nature of humanity, the origins and purpose of government, and the legitimation of power.  Should we wish to reduce this momentous struggle to a contest of champions . . . 

(crowd noises, wrestling ring bell)

Lllllladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Republic Casino at Caesar’s Palace for tonight’s contest for the Heavyweight Political Philosophy Championship of the World!  To my right, weighing in at 180 pounds, he’s no Leviathan, but a materialist who’s nasty, brutish, and short – it’s the Malmesbury Mauler Thomas Hobbes!

And in the left corner, weighing in at 160 pounds, a tabula rasa in the fight world, an early empiricist and the father of liberalism, it’s Jabbing John Locke!

All right, gentleman.  Put on a good show.  Let’s have a nice clean fight: no biting, no rabbit punches, no drawing conclusions that do not follow inevitably from established premises.  Let’s get ready to rumble!

The turbulence of England’s Caroline and Cromwellian periods – that is, the late 1620s to the 1660s – brought to the fore many questions about the nature of government that had been unnecessary to consider in earlier periods when monarchy had been assumed to be the default setting, based on both Aristotle’s ideas of cosmic symmetry and the Great Chain of Being and the Christian notion of divinely ordained kingship.  Certainly, there had been difficulties to iron out before: The Barons’ War that resulted in Magna Carta being the most consequential.  But Magna Carta was largely transactional, seeking to circumscribe the rights of a monarch, not question the notion of monarchy itself.  Charles Stuart’s trial and execution in 1649 made the abolition of monarchy a reality.  How to replace or restore it became mission critical questions for political thinkers.

Thomas Hobbes believed firmly in monarchical restoration.  He published his magnificent octopus Leviathan or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil in 1651, just after the Civil Wars ended and the republican Commonwealth was getting underway.  Hobbes takes his title from the Biblical sea monster, Leviathan, and its worth going down this allusion’s rabbit hole, because, well, it’s quite interesting.

Leviathan makes five appearances in the King James Version of the Hebrew Bible.  The first is from the Book of Job 41:1: “Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook? or his tongue with a cord which thou lettest down?”  Here, we are to understand the monster’s huge size and power, beyond that of mortals to contain or command.  Next we get Psalm 74:14, in which God has defeated a multi-headed creature and made strong his people by its defeat: “Thou brakest the heads of leviathan in pieces, and gavest him to be meat to the people inhabiting the wilderness.”  That’s kind of badass.  Psalm 104:26 mentions Leviathan again, but only as a creature swimming in the vasty deep.  Finally Isaiah 27:1 provides more badassery visited by God upon Leviathan: “In that day the Lord with his sore and great and strong sword shall punish leviathan the piercing serpent, even leviathan that crooked serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea.”  I should note that there is actually a fifth mention of the monster – a second one from Job 3:8, but while other Bible translations retain Leviathan’s mention, the KJV translates that as the people’s “mourning,” so Hobbes probably would not have had that verse in mind.

Anyway, I’ve given this little Sunday school lesson because I think it peculiar that Hobbes would name his central political metaphor after a horrid Biblical creature whose ass God regularly kicks.  But, if we think about it, Leviathan surely stands as an archetype of power and chaos, and if we think of God’s creation as the ordering of chaos, the title maybe makes more sense.  But maybe even more to the point, in the 17th century a spurious etymology for the name Leviathan floated about that makes Hobbes’ use much more understandable.  Lexicographers at the time thought the name to be something of a compound of Hebrew words, the first being “lavah,” which they understood as “to connect or join” and the second “thannin,” which indicated some kind of sea dragon.  It’s that corporate notion, the idea of Leviathan being a huge sea monster made by the joining of many smaller sea monsters that really seems the heart of Hobbes’ political metaphor.  Umm, by the way, that etymology is wrong.  Scholars now reckon that the “lavah” is probably a Hebrew root for twisting and turning, so, like, a writhing sea monster.

Anyway, we’re not going to let a bit of etymology screw up a perfectly good analogy, so let’s explore that analogy.  To do so, we must bear in mind the execution of Charles Stuart, first of his name.  When Parliament executed the king in 1649, Royalists – and supporters of monarchy in general – found themselves with a grounding problem.  That is, upon what foundation could they ground a theory of monarchy as the preferred form of government?  The old “divine right” appeal had lost much of its force, since God didn’t see fit to keep Charles’ head upon the royal shoulders.  Now, in the previous episode on early English science-fiction literature, I offered a sketch of the Scientific Revolution – that period in the 1600s when Galileo and Descartes were really doing their best work.  Thomas Hobbes was much taken with this new philosophy and so appealed to natural law and the natural order as a means by which to ground a theory of royal absolutism.

Leviathan is, do pardon the pun, a whale of a book, and since this is really a literature podcast and not a philosophy one, I’ll only cover the greatest hits here, the ones that have the clearest impact on the evolution of English and European thought and culture.  To that end, let’s begin our discussion with chapter 13, “Of the Natural Condition of Mankind as Concerning Their Felicity and Misery.”  The first line declares to what first principles Hobbes will appeal:

NATURE hath made men so equal in the faculties of body and mind as that, though there be found one man sometimes manifestly stronger in body or of quicker mind than another, yet when all is reckoned together the difference between man and man is not so considerable as that one man can thereupon claim to himself any benefit to which another may not pretend as well as he. 

Hobbes opens by recognizing what more liberal or progressive political thinkers would assert: human beings are basically equal.  Hobbes is less concerned with moral or spiritual value than others – he’s not saying everyone is a precious snowflake.  Rather, he’s arguing that, within certain narrow variations of physical strength or intellectual capacity, people are basically people and, because of that, we naturally reckon that no one is better than us, and that we needn’t put up with anyone else’s ordering us about or whining.  Hobbes writes, “From this equality of ability ariseth equality of hope in the attaining of our ends.”  I have as much right to anything in the world I want as the next guy.  Now, dear listener, don’t be lulled by a sneaking sense of blissful, life-affirming anarchism.  Hobbes is not the fella you turn to if you want to self-actualize.  Because he argues that this equality is a problem: 

And therefore if any two men desire the same thing, which nevertheless they cannot both enjoy, they become enemies; and in the way to their end (which is principally their own conservation, and sometimes their delectation only) endeavour to destroy or subdue one another. 

This is, for Hobbes, the state of nature – the type of existence prior to any organizing political force.  People asserting their individual natural rights to anything they have the muscle or the cunning to take, damn all others.  This, says Hobbes, is the definition and condition of war: “it is manifest that during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war as is of every man against every man.”  All fighting all.  In such a state of existence, civilization cannot germinate, much less thrive.  Defending ourselves against the rapine of all others denies us the ability to cultivate crops, to develop industry, to pursue science, to develop the arts.  Here is where we get maybe the most famous line in Leviathan.  Living in the state of nature is to experience “continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Why must it be so, Happy Tom?  Because things like justice, equity, modesty, mercy, and compassion “contrary to our natural passions . . . covenants, without the sword, are but words and of no strength to secure a man at all.”  And who shall wield that sword, to command that terror of power?  Leviathan.

Now, remember my little spur trail on the etymology of that word, especially as the early modern world used it, that “leviathan’s” Hebrew roots meant something like a big thing made up of a bunch of little things.  Because that’s how Hobbes defines a commonwealth.  When we use that term, we generally think of a democratic republic, or of a coalition of willing states working together to some mutually beneficial purpose.  But Hobbes has a rather authoritarian spin on it.  

He does say that a commonwealth derives its legitimacy from mandate from the masses, sort of.  Again, we’re not talking Vermont town-meeting style direct democracy here.  Hobbes says that to escape the ravages of the state of nature, humans must

confer all their power and strength upon one man, or upon one assembly of men, that may reduce all their wills, by plurality of voices, unto one will…. every man should say to every man: I authorize and give up my right of governing myself to this man, or to this assembly of men, on this condition; that you give up, your right to him, and authorize all his actions in like manner. The multitude so united in one person is called a COMMONWEALTH; in Latin, CIVITAS.

That is Hobbes’ conception of a social contract, that people consent to surrender their natural rights to a single entity, imbuing that entity with supreme power.  That is Leviathan, the absolute ruler who subsumes all the people.  The frontispiece to the 1651 edition, by French artist Abraham Bosse, renders the allegory visually.  A king towers over a landscape, wielding a sword and crosier – signs of political and ecclesiastical authority – wearing what appears to be scale armor.  But upon closer inspection, we see that the armor (the body and arms of the king) are actually made up of the bodies of thousands of smaller men.  It’s a really remarkable image – I’ll post a link in the show notes.  It is indeed, as Hobbes would say, the portrait of a “mortal god.”

This sets up what can easily be read as an excoriation of Parliament's catastrophic decision in 1649.  Chapter 18, “The Rights of Sovereigns by Institution,” enumerates ten postulates concerning the monarch, each of which forms a predicate for the ones that follow.  For instance, the populace cannot disavow the contract and return to the state of Nature once they have made the social contract.  Therefore, a sovereign cannot possibly be found in breach of the social contract because they have given him supreme power, and furthermore, cannot be charged with injustice, because justice is, by the contract, his will.  It need not be said, then, that no one has the power to execute a king.  Of course, the power of the judiciary and the power to make war are also the sovereign’s prerogatives.

So, Hobbes has reasoned from natural law that a monarch should be regarded as at least semi-divine.  He has used the principles of the new scientific worldview to establish an ancient political institution.  Our other major political philosopher, John Locke, will appeal to the same worldview to propose a radically different polity.

Locke comes along decades after Hobbes, and the political situation in England had altered.  Hobbes wrote in the aftermath of the civil wars and the onset of the Cromwellian republic.  By the time Locke puts quill to paper, the monarchy had been restored – in 1660 with Charles II – and then hamstrung with the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688, with the deposition of Charles’ brother James II (for being a nasty Catholic) and the ascension of James’ daughter Mary and her Dutch husband William, the Duke of Orange, effectively establishing a constitutional monarchy and cementing the supremacy of Parliament.  

Locke produces the highly influential “Second Treatise on Government” in 1690.  Like Hobbes, he appeals to natural law in order to ground his political theory.  In fact, much of Locke’s grounding could be mistaken for Hobbes, so much in agreement are they on so many points.  To wit: Locke describes the state of nature as one of “perfect freedom to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and persons, as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of nature, without asking leave, or depending upon the will of any other man.  A state also of equality, wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another.”  Locke also agrees that 

Men being, as has been said, by nature, all free, equal, and independent, no one can be put out of this estate, and subjected to the political power of another, without his own consent. The only way whereby any one divests himself of his natural liberty, and puts on the bonds of civil society, is by agreeing with other men to join and unite into a community for their comfortable, safe, and peaceable living.

So, Locke, too, ponies up the idea of the commonwealth built upon a social compact.  Why would somebody give up their freedom to the restrictions imposed by a commonwealth?  Here, too, Locke agrees with Hobbes.  The state of nature is: 

very uncertain, and constantly exposed to the invasion of others: for all being kings as much as he, every man his equal, and the greater part no strict observers of equity and justice, the enjoyment of the property he has in this state is very unsafe, very unsecure. This makes him willing to quit a condition, which, however free, is full of fears and continual dangers.

However, Locke sees the commonwealth as one in which the consenters subject their liberty to the majority, not to a single sovereign.  Locke rests so much of his theory on the notion of property and the right of the individual to enjoy her property peacefully.  Locke’s use of this term means not only material possession, but also one’s life, liberty, and work.  Individuals cannot be melted into a gigantic leviathan and preserve such rights of property, and so Locke advances an argument that places the legislature, not the executive, as the supreme authority in government.  Yet, the legislature is still subject to the people, who still retain a “supreme power to remove or alter the legislative when they find the legislative act contrary to the trust reposed in them.”  So while lawmakers are politically supreme, they cannot be arbitrary or function at the will of any individual.  They may act only according to “promulgated standing laws and known authorized judges.”  

This is very anti-Hobbesian, who maintains that it is impossible for a commonwealth’s ruler to be arbitrary or unjust, almost by definition.  Locke differs in that he sees natural law not just the preservation of the self – to which Hobbes would agree – but the preservation of the rest of mankind, which plays little role in the Hobbesian conception.  I’m not sure Locke is being altruistic here – I think he sees cooperation as a necessary adjunct of private property and flourishing.  Any ruler or ruling body that interferes with that is, Locke argues, tyrannical.

This is where Locke’s philosophy may be best known to a general audience, as it formed the backbone of Thomas Jefferson’s rather hyperbolic IMHO Declaration of Independence, a document which established a democratic republic with a separation of powers based, ostensibly, on the consent of the governed.  Locke argues that “tyranny is the exercise of power beyond right, which no body can have a right to. And this is making use of the power any one has in his hands, not for the good of those who are under it, but for his own private separate advantage.”  Hobbes’ philosophy has no conception of tyranny – again, by definition, the sovereign cannot be a tyrant because the people have invested him with sole power.  Anything he does thereby has their implicit consent.  Ergo, no tyranny.  It’s a neat little argument poor George III may have tried during his bouts with lucidity.

So, to sum up, the most prominent figures of English political theory in the 17th century both responded to the same intellectual zeitgeist, both appealed to Baconian scientific observation, tested hypotheses, and logical appeals to a supposed natural state in order to justify their visions of a just civil state: Hobbes used the Scientific Revolution to look back, to return to basic principles.  Locke looked forward to imagine new ways of social formation.  Political liberalism (with a small “L”) still seeks to perfect Lockean politics while recognizing the reality of the Hobbesian critique.

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