Happy Birthday, Hobbes

Today is the birthday of Thomas Hobbes, born in Westport, England in 1588. He was born prematurely because his mother was so frightened about the approaching Spanish Armada, and Hobbes said, "She brought forth twins, myself and fear." Hobbes was a timid boy, but a good student, and he went on to Oxford. He became a tutor for a rich family, and through them he met a number of great thinkers — Galileo, Francis Bacon, Descartes, and Ben Jonson. He became increasingly interested in philosophy, and he started publishing. His masterpiece was Leviathan (1651). Hobbes wrote it in the midst of the English Civil War, arguing for an authoritarian central government and introducing the social contract theory — the idea that those of us who are governed agree to participate in a system of laws and punishments.

According to Hobbes, the state of nature was one in which self-interest and the absence of rights and contracts prevented the "social", or society. Life was "anarchic" (without leadership or the concept of sovereignty). Individuals in the state of nature were apolitical and asocial. This state of nature is followed by the social contract.

The social contract was seen as an "occurrence" during which individuals came together and ceded some of their individual rights so that others would cede theirs. This resulted in the establishment of the state, a sovereign entity like the individuals now under its rule used to be, which would create laws to regulate social interactions. Human life was thus no longer "a war of all against all". This is why the frontispiece of the Leviathan depicts a king (who looks suspiciously like Charles I) whose body is composed of all his subjects.

Perhaps inevitably, given the times and chaotic circumstances of the English Civil Wars, Hobbes argued for near absolute power in the sovereign, and viewed rights as something granted to citizens by the ruler.

Without this governor who could keep peace, he described a state of constant war, in which there were "no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." A pretty fair description of the Civil Wars.

The US Constitution is in part based on social contract theory, most explicitly articulated in the Declaration of Independence, but it is not the Hobbes version. Notice how power is seen as flowing from the people to the government rather than from the government to the people:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident . . .That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it . . ."

This version of the social contract is that articulated by John Locke. His version differed from Hobbes' in several fundamental ways, retaining only the central notion that persons in a state of nature would willingly come together to form a state. Locke believed that individuals in a state of nature would be bound reciprocally, by the Law of Nature, not to harm each other in their lives or possessions. Without government to defend them against those seeking to injure or enslave them, he believed people would have no security in their rights and would live in fear. Individuals would only agree to form a state that would provide, in part, a "neutral judge", acting to protect the lives, liberty, and property of those who lived within it.

While Hobbes argued for near-absolute authority, Locke argued for inviolate freedom under law in his Second Treatise of Government. He argued that a government's legitimacy comes from the citizens' delegation to the government of their absolute right of violence (reserving the inalienable right of self-defense or "self-preservation"), along with elements of other rights (e.g. property will be liable to taxation) as necessary to achieve the goal of security.

Back to Hobbes. His book was controversial, in large part because its author was skeptical of Christianity. In 1666, the House of Commons discussed reviving the writ De Heretico Comburendo, which allowed heretics to be burned at the stake. A bill was passed through the House of Commons to investigate "such books as tend to atheism, blasphemy, and profaneness, or against the essence and attributes of God, and in particular ... the book of Mr. Hobbes called the Leviathan." The bill failed to make it through the House of Lords. Hobbes was terrified of being labeled a heretic, and burned some of his compromising papers.

At the same time, he examined the actual state of the law of heresy. The results of his investigation were first announced in three short Dialogues added as an Appendix to his Latin translation of Leviathan, published in Amsterdam in 1668. In this appendix, Hobbes aimed to show that, since the High Court of Commission had been put down, there remained no court of heresy at all to which he was amenable, and that nothing could be heresy except opposing the Nicene Creed, which, he maintained, Leviathan did not do.

The only consequence that came of the bill was that Hobbes could never thereafter publish anything in England on subjects relating to human conduct. The 1668 edition of his works was printed in Amsterdam because he could not obtain the censor's license for its publication in England. Other writings were not made public until after his death, including Behemoth: the History of the Causes of the Civil Wars of England and of the Counsels and Artifices by which they were carried on from the year 1640 to the year 1662.