In "Theory of Language" Chapter 4 , Zarka argues that not only is Hobbes's theory of language unified and coherent in its own right, but also that it serves as the foundation on which the unity and coherence of his entire theory depend.
In "The Semiology of Power" Chapter 5 , Zarka examines the ways in which the writing and reading of different types of signs affect human relations. Here, the payoff of the methodological discussion in Chapter 1 becomes clear, as it enables Zarka to distinguish between different kinds of readings that can be applied to Hobbes's philosophy, thereby offering a powerful way out of some of the problems I hinted at earlier. For example, his analysis allows him to acknowledge the important role that physics plays in Hobbes's philosophy without forcing him to commit the common mistake of expecting ethics and politics to be reducible to it Quite helpful in this distinction is the suggestion that human power can be better understood as "within the jurisdiction of semiology" The focus on semiology is also useful in drawing attention not just to the reception of signs, but also to their production and dissemination, in particular the writing of laws.
For Zarka these topics form essential pillars of Hobbes's theory. They also represent areas in which Hobbes made pivotal shifts that bore significant consequences for modernity, up to the end of the eighteenth century. If anything, I think that Zarka is understating Hobbes's impact, as we are still experiencing the effects of his innovations whether we know it or not.
Although Zarka acknowledges that there are other concepts one could examine, I think that a strong candidate for addition to his list is equality, the concept that Hobbes's thought arguably affected the most. Nevertheless, the chapters in this section achieve the goal of demonstrating Hobbes's role as a point of origin and a point of departure, as well as the way in which key pieces of his theory came together.
There are many important insights in these chapters, but Zarka's central focus in describing this process is on the formation of a single will and its central role in engendering and legitimizing the commonwealth. Here, the earlier introduction of semiology pays dividends.
The final two chapters are devoted to examinations of Hobbes alongside Filmer Chapter 11 and Pascal Chapter 12 , respectively. These are good choices. Filmer's assessment of Hobbes's political philosophy was very insightful and his own emphasis on the patrimonial kingdom raises a crucial question regarding Hobbes: why choose an alternative, cumbersome, and doubtful way to legitimize authority when others that appear effectively not so different were available?
Zarka's comparison shows rightly that even though Filmer and Hobbes shared several assumptions, their views were ultimately quite different. In my view, Hobbes's decision was animated by the realization that democracy was on the horizon and that the social contract offered a way to both legitimize and enlist individuals to the common cause. In Pascal's case, Zarka notes that despite a widespread sense that his views are close to Hobbes's, there are in fact not only important divergences in regard to starting points, but also a significant difference in tone, where Pascal's irony feels very different than Hobbes's seriousness.
In his conclusion, Zarka notes once more that his list of topics is not meant to be exhaustive, but rather illustrative of four major contributions that Hobbes made to modern political thought: 1 his theory of the universal individual, 2 his semiology, 3 his "notion of a public political will," and 4 his "juridical theory of political institution" Every individual must also surrender his private opinion about public issues to the sovereign—for to have sufficient power to safeguard the contract, the sovereign must have the authority to decide what is necessary to keep it, and what constitutes a transgression of it.
The relation of the sovereign to the subject is not a contract. Rather, as Hobbes makes clear, the individual must understand his will to be identical with the sovereign will, since one who desires peace must logically will whatever is necessary for peace to be maintained.
Although it is commonly assumed that the Leviathan is a king, Hobbes makes clear that the sovereign power can be composed of one person, several, or many—in other words, the Leviathan can equally well describe a monarchy, an aristocracy, or a democracy. The only requirement that Hobbes sets for sovereignty is that the entity has absolute power to defend the social contract and decide what is necessary for its defense.
One power that Hobbes insists the sovereign must possess is the authority to determine the public observance of religion. Hobbes is concerned both with Church authorities who make spiritual or moral claims with political intent, and also with the appeal to private conscience, which Hobbes argues is essentially the claim that an individual opinion should take priority over the common agreement represented by the political sovereign.
Hobbes attempts to counter the religious threat to public peace by drawing a strict distinction between private belief and public worship, and then attempting to render private belief politically ineffectual while submitting the form of public worship to the decision of the sovereign.
In the meantime, Hobbes insists, we should follow Romans 13 in recognizing that all authority comes from God, and obey the civil sovereign.
Hobbes likens the obedience a subject owes the sovereign to that of a monk to the pope. Yet there is a glaring difference: in the Hobbesian commonwealth, subjects owe only outward obedience to the commands of the sovereign. Subjects must be allowed to believe whatever they want in part because persecution would unnecessarily disturb public peace , as long as they do not try to influence public argument with their personal beliefs.
Hobbes nonetheless laid the foundation for the liberal view. Furthermore, Hobbes makes clear that the individual retains his natural right to preserve himself even after entering the commonwealth—he has no obligation to submit himself to capital punishment or likely death in war. Hobbes begins the liberal notion of representative government: government represents but does not rule us; its duty is to make our lives and acquisitions safe, not to form our souls.
Through Locke, Hobbes indirectly influenced the founders of the United States, who, in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, proclaim a new kind of politics based on equality and consent, in which government serves relatively limited and popular aims.
Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey, Chicago: Nonetheless, this does not mean that Hobbes was able to reach a level of scientific certainty in his judgments that had been lacking in all previous reflection on morals and politics. Many interpreters have presented the Hobbesian agent as a self-interested, rationally calculating actor those ideas have been important in modern political philosophy and economic thought, especially in terms of rational choice theories.
It is true that some of the problems that face people like this—rational egoists, as philosophers call them—are similar to the problems Hobbes wants to solve in his political philosophy. And it is also very common for first-time readers of Hobbes to get the impression that he believes we are all basically selfish.
There are good reasons why earlier interpreters and new readers tend to think the Hobbesian agent is ultimately self-interested. Hobbes likes to make bold and even shocking claims to get his point across. What could be clearer? First, quite simply, it represents a false view of human nature. People do all sorts of altruistic things that go against their interests. They also do all sorts of needlessly cruel things that go against self-interest think of the self-defeating lengths that revenge can run to.
So it would be uncharitable to interpret Hobbes this way, if we can find a more plausible account in his work. Second, in any case Hobbes often relies on a more sophisticated view of human nature. He describes or even relies on motives that go beyond or against self-interest, such as pity, a sense of honor or courage, and so on. And he frequently emphasizes that we find it difficult to judge or appreciate just what our interests are anyhow.
The upshot is that Hobbes does not think that we are basically or reliably selfish; and he does not think we are fundamentally or reliably rational in our ideas about what is in our interests. He is rarely surprised to find human beings doing things that go against self-interest: we will cut off our noses to spite our faces, we will torture others for their eternal salvation, we will charge to our deaths for love of country.
In fact, a lot of the problems that befall human beings, according to Hobbes, result from their being too little concerned with self-interest. This weakness as regards our self-interest has even led some to think that Hobbes is advocating a theory known as ethical egoism.
This is to claim that Hobbes bases morality upon self-interest, claiming that we ought to do what it is most in our interest to do. But we shall see that this would over-simplify the conclusions that Hobbes draws from his account of human nature.
We are needy and vulnerable. We are easily led astray in our attempts to know the world around us. Our capacity to reason is as fragile as our capacity to know; it relies upon language and is prone to error and undue influence.
What is the political fate of this rather pathetic sounding creature—that is, of us? Unsurprisingly, Hobbes thinks little happiness can be expected of our lives together. The best we can hope for is peaceful life under an authoritarian-sounding sovereign. He claims that the only authority that naturally exists among human beings is that of a mother over her child, because the child is so very much weaker than the mother and indebted to her for its survival.
Among adult human beings this is invariably not the case. Hobbes concedes an obvious objection, admitting that some of us are much stronger than others. And although he is very sarcastic about the idea that some are wiser than others, he does not have much difficulty with the idea that some are fools and others are dangerously cunning. Nonetheless, it is almost invariably true that every human being is capable of killing any other.
Leviathan , xiii. He is strongly opposing arguments that established monarchs have a natural or God-given right to rule over us. It could occur tomorrow in every modern society, for example, if the police and army suddenly refused to do their jobs on behalf of government. Why should peaceful cooperation be impossible without an overarching authority? Hobbes provides a series of powerful arguments that suggest it is extremely unlikely that human beings will live in security and peaceful cooperation without government.
Anarchism , the thesis that we should live without government, of course disputes these arguments. His most basic argument is threefold. This is a more difficult argument than it might seem. Hobbes does not suppose that we are all selfish, that we are all cowards, or that we are all desperately concerned with how others see us. Two points, though. Moreover, many of these people will be prepared to use violence to attain their ends—especially if there is no government or police to stop them.
In this Hobbes is surely correct. Second, in some situations it makes good sense, at least in the short term, to use violence and to behave selfishly, fearfully or vaingloriously. If our lives seem to be at stake, after all, we are unlikely to have many scruples about stealing a loaf of bread; if we perceive someone as a deadly threat, we may well want to attack first, while his guard is down; if we think that there are lots of potential attackers out there, it is going to make perfect sense to get a reputation as someone who should not be messed with.
Underlying this most basic argument is an important consideration about insecurity. As we shall see Hobbes places great weight on contracts thus some interpreters see Hobbes as heralding a market society dominated by contractual exchanges. In the state of nature such agreements are not going to work. Only the weakest will have good reason to perform the second part of a covenant, and then only if the stronger party is standing over them.
Yet a huge amount of human cooperation relies on trust, that others will return their part of the bargain over time. A similar point can be made about property, most of which we cannot carry about with us and watch over.
This means we must rely on others respecting our possessions over extended periods of time. One can reasonably object to such points: Surely there are basic duties to reciprocate fairly and to behave in a trustworthy manner?
Even if there is no government providing a framework of law, judgment and punishment, do not most people have a reasonable sense of what is right and wrong, which will prevent the sort of contract-breaking and generalized insecurity that Hobbes is concerned with? Indeed, should not our basic sense of morality prevent much of the greed, pre-emptive attack and reputation-seeking that Hobbes stressed in the first place? He makes two claims. The second follows from this, and is less often noticed: it concerns the danger posed by our different and variable judgments of what is right and wrong.
Naturally speaking—that is, outside of civil society — we have a right to do whatever we think will ensure our self-preservation. The worst that can happen to us is violent death at the hands of others. If we have any rights at all, if as we might put it nature has given us any rights whatsoever, then the first is surely this: the right to prevent violent death befalling us. But Hobbes says more than this, and it is this point that makes his argument so powerful. We do not just have a right to ensure our self-preservation: we each have a right to judge what will ensure our self-preservation.
Hobbes has given us good reasons to think that human beings rarely judge wisely. Yet in the state of nature no one is in a position to successfully define what is good judgment. Others might judge the matter differently, of course. Almost certainly you will have quite a different view of things perhaps you were just stretching your arms, not raising a musket to shoot me.
Because we are all insecure, because trust is more-or-less absent, there is little chance of our sorting out misunderstandings peacefully, nor can we rely on some trusted third party to decide whose judgment is right. We all have to be judges in our own causes, and the stakes are very high indeed: life or death. For this reason Hobbes makes very bold claims that sound totally amoral. Hobbes is dramatizing his point, but the core is defensible. New readers of Hobbes often suppose that the state of nature would be a much nicer place, if only he were to picture human beings with some basic moral ideas.
Some think that Hobbes is imagining human beings who have no idea of social interaction and therefore no ideas about right and wrong. In this case, the natural condition would be a purely theoretical construction, and would demonstrate what both government and society do for human beings. A famous statement about the state of nature in De Cive viii. Others suppose that Hobbes has a much more complex picture of human motivation, so that there is no reason to think moral ideas are absent in the state of nature.
The problem here is not a lack of moral ideas—far from it — rather that moral ideas and judgments differ enormously. This means for example that two people who are fighting tooth and nail over a cow or a gun can both think they are perfectly entitled to the object and both think they are perfectly right to kill the other—a point Hobbes makes explicitly and often.
It also enables us to see that many Hobbesian conflicts are about religious ideas or political ideals as well as self-preservation and so on —as in the British Civil War raging while Hobbes wrote Leviathan , and in the many violent sectarian conflicts throughout the world today. But what sort of ought is this? There are two basic ways of interpreting Hobbes here. This line of thought fits well with an egoistic reading of Hobbes, but it faces serious problems, as will be seen. The other way of interpreting Hobbes is not without problems either.
This takes Hobbes to be saying that we ought, morally speaking, to avoid the state of nature. We have a duty to do what we can to avoid this situation arising, and a duty to end it, if at all possible.
Hobbes often makes his view clear, that we have such moral obligations. But then two difficult questions arise: Why these obligations? And why are they obligatory? Hobbes frames the issues in terms of an older vocabulary, using the idea of natural law that many ancient and medieval philosophers had relied on. Like them, he thinks that human reason can discern some eternal principles to govern our conduct. These principles are independent of though also complementary to whatever moral instruction we might get from God or religion.
In other words, they are laws given by nature rather than revealed by God. But Hobbes makes radical changes to the content of these so-called laws of nature. In particular, he does not think that natural law provides any scope whatsoever to criticize or disobey the actual laws made by a government. He thus disagrees with those Protestants who thought that religious conscience might sanction disobedience of immoral laws, and with Catholics who thought that the commandments of the Pope have primacy over those of national political authorities.
Although he sets out nineteen laws of nature, it is the first two that are politically crucial. The remaining sixteen can be quite simply encapsulated in the formula, do as you would be done by. While the details are important for scholars of Hobbes, they do not affect the overall theory and will be ignored here. Every man ought to endeavor peace, as far as he has hope of obtaining it, and when he cannot obtain it, that he may seek and use all helps and advantages of war.
Leviathan , xiv. This repeats the points we have already seen about our right of nature , so long as peace does not appear to be a realistic prospect. The second law of nature is more complicated:.
That a man be willing, when others are so too, as far-forth as for peace and defense of himself he shall think it necessary, to lay down this right to all things, and be contented with so much liberty against other men, as he would allow other men against himself.
What Hobbes tries to tackle here is the transition from the state of nature to civil society. But how he does this is misleading and has generated much confusion and disagreement.
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