Download Thomas Hobbes: Apologist for Absolutism

Thomas Hobbes: Apologist for Absolutism
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), the most original political philosopher of the 17th
century, turned to reason and empirical observation to find an explanation for
social institutions. Hobbes was an urbane and much-traveled man who
enthusiastically supported the new scientific movement. He visited Paris and
made the acquaintance of Rene Descartes. He spent time in Italy with Galileo,
and he was interested in the work of William Harvey (1578-1657), the man who
discovered that blood circulated through the human body. Hobbes was also a
superb classicist. His translation of the History of the Peloponnesian War by
Thucydides, the first in English, is still read today.
The English Civil War made Hobbes a political philosopher and inspired him to
write Leviathan (1651) – a thoroughly materialistic and mechanical explanation
for human conduct. Hobbes theorized that all psychological processes derive
from bare sensation and that, therefore, all motivations are egotistical. Their
intent is always to increase pleasure and minimize pain. The human power of
reasoning is nothing more than a process of adding and subtracting the
implications of the general names people agree to give to things.
Despite his mechanistic view of human nature, Hobbes believed that people
could progress by using scientific reasoning. Progress was contingent, however,
on the correct and prior use of the greatest of human creations, the
commonwealth. The commonwealth created the conditions that were essential
for rational, civilized life.
The key to Hobbes’s political philosophy is found in a brilliant myth he devised to
explain humanity’s original state. Hobbes claimed that nature inclines people to
a “restless and perpetual desire” for power. Because all people want, and in the
state of nature possess, a right to everything, their equality breeds enmity,
competition, diffidence, and perpetual quarreling—“a way of every man against
every man.” Whereas earlier and later philosophers saw the original human
condition as a paradise from which people had fallen, Hobbes described it as a
corrupt environment from which people could be delivered only by the
establishment of a politically organized society. Unlike Aristotle and Christian
thinkers like Thomas Aquinas, Hobbes did not believe human beings were
naturally sociable. He claimed that they were self-centered beasts who were
utterly without discipline unless it was imposed on them by force.
People escape their terrible natural state by entering a social contract; that is, by
agreeing to live in a commonwealth ruled by law. A desire for “commodious
living” and a fear of death drives them to accept the constraints of communal life.
The social contract obliges every person, for the sake of peace and self-defense,
to agree to set aside his or her right to all things and be content with as much
liberty against others as he or she would allow others against him or herself.
Because words and promises are insufficient to guarantee this agreement, the
social contract also authorizes the coercive use of force to compel compliance.
Believing the dangers of anarchy to be greater than those of tyranny, Hobbes
thought that rulers should have unlimited power. There is little room in Hobbes’s
political philosophy for protest in the name of individual conscience, nor for
resistance to legitimate authority by private individuals. Seventeenth-century
Catholics and Protestants alike criticized these features of the Leviathan, but
Hobbes insisted that loss of rights for some individuals was clearly preferable to
the suffering everyone experienced in a civil war. It mattered little to Hobbes
whether his ruler was Charles the First, Oliver Cromwell, or Charles the Second
(each of whom Hobbes supported), so long as he kept his subjects from reverting
to the chaos that was their natural condition.
But would this matter to you? The English Civil War was long ago? What would
Hobbes think of Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, or Communist China? What
about more recent political crises such as Argentina, Brazil, and Chile during the
1970s and 1980s? What about South Africa under Apartheid? What about
Yugoslavia, Somalia, the Congo, North Korea, Iran, Afghanistan, the West Bank,
and Iraq?