The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes

"This is a book that is, again, written by a historian. It focuses on Hobbes’s religious views, and in particular his ecclesiastical views. Ecclesiology has to do with church government. ‘Ecclesiastical’ just means the authority structures within a religious community. So you can distinguish that from theology, which is what kind of doctrine you believe in about the nature of God and so on. Ecclesiology is what kind of doctrine do you believe in about who has authority over whom within a religious community. Exactly. This is what the controversy was in England during the civil wars, these kinds of ecclesiastical controversies. In fact, this is part of the two overarching claims that Collins makes in his book. First of all, he sets Leviathan within not just the intellectual context, the way that Skinner had done, but also within the larger social and political context as well. It’s really a tremendous magisterial example of historical scholarship that he’s engaged in. His first of two overarching claims concerns the significance of Leviathan as a restatement of Hobbes’s political philosophy. Hobbes has already written it twice, so why does he do it again? And the significance for Collins is that what Hobbes does in Leviathan is he comes out as an extreme Erastian. Erastianism here refers to the view that the state—the secular political authority— should have absolute authority over religion. Religion has to be wholly subordinate to the temporal powers. So he comes out as an extreme Erastian who also—and this is a central piece of his argument—comes out in favour of Independency. Independency here refers to an ecclesiastical view, which is also sometimes called Congregationalism. In context, in England at the time, there were three different rival ecclesiastical views. There’s the traditional Anglican view which is Episcopal—Episcopal here refers to the authority of bishops. It’s a hierarchical church structure that the traditional Church of England is defending, with bishops on top and regular people at the bottom. This is challenged by the Presbyterians, who are Calvinists, largely. They are a tremendous force in Scotland and think that authority ultimately comes from the bottom up, not from the top down, but that there is still an articulated hierarchical structure. You have an authority structure in this Presbyterian mode: there’s a national church. Finally, you have the Independents or the Congregationalists, who think that there is no hierarchical structure, just various different congregations who have their own independence and determine how they’re going to worship with the people that they’ve decided to join. There’s a kind of freedom of religion that’s supposed to be involved in the Independent view, a freedom from hierarchical authority structure. And Collins’s argument is that Hobbes, in Leviathan, comes out as both an extreme Erastian but also endorses Independency, which is what was being defended by the Cromwellian revolutionaries. In a sense, what he’s arguing is that Hobbes, with the publishing of Leviathan , comes out in favour of Cromwell and the regicides. He abandons his royalist allegiance—that’s why it’s called The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes —and he throws in his lot with the Cromwellians. And, interestingly, Hobbes, with the publication of Leviathan, returns to England to live in the interregnum under Cromwell. The second overarching claim Collins makes is about the nature of the English revolution. He argues that the English revolution is not so much driven by theological concerns, which is the traditional view—that it’s driven by Calvinist anti-Arminian views (there’s no freedom of will and so on). Instead, he argues, it’s driven by ecclesiastical concerns about the authority structure of the church. He sees the English revolution as a defence of the Elizabethan church settlement that had been challenged by Archbishop Laud, under Charles I. Archbishop Laud had been defending the divine rights of Episcopacy. He’d been arguing that bishops derive their authority directly from God, and not from the king. And Charles I had been acquiescing to this. “One way to read Leviathan is to see it as implying that whoever is in power at the time, and is capable of maintaining the peace, is who you owe your allegiance to” In a way, what the Erastians like Hobbes are saying, is that no, the sovereign is the sovereign and whatever authority the church has comes from the sovereign. It doesn’t come directly from God; it’s not an independent basis of authority. And so Collins’s argument is that that’s what the English revolution was about—reasserting the Elizabethan church settlement according to which the church is subordinate to the crown. That was what was being shaken by Laud under Charles I. That’s his explanation for why it is that Hobbes is driven towards the Cromwellian revolution: it’s because of the Cromwellians’ Erastianism, their view that the church ought to be subordinate to the state. That’s the crux of his argument. It’s a really interesting argument because, in many ways, it’s counterintuitive. Why would someone like Hobbes—who thinks that disagreement is the source of war with religious pluralism and diversity—be in favour of Independency and Congregationalism, when it looks like the Independents are in favour of freedom of religion, separation of church and state, and so on? Why would you come out in favour of Independency if what you want is to eliminate public disagreement about religion? Why wouldn’t you be in favour of a hierarchical national church like the Anglican church so that you can control disagreement? And Collins’s answer is that it’s because in this period the challenge to undivided sovereignty comes from the corporate power of the church itself, and that Hobbes saw Independency as a way to break up the corporate power of the church. It’s an attempt to weaken the church, because it is now challenging the state and the sovereign through Archbishop Laud. Independency is a way to break up the church. It’s not because of any kind of freedom of religion or anything like that. Absolutely. One way to read what Leviathan is basically about is to see it as implying that whoever is in power at the time, and is capable of maintaining the peace and protecting everybody, is who you owe your allegiance to. So if it looks like it’s Cromwell, then the implication of Hobbes’s political philosophy, even in the Elements of Law , even in De Cive , is that you ought to give your allegiance to whoever holds power. In fact, he never was a royalist in the ‘I will always defend the king’ sense. He was a royalist of the kind who says, ‘Well, we have a monarchy and so I will defend the king. But oh, now that we don’t, maybe the implications are different.’ There’s certainly that in Hobbes. But what Collins argues is that it’s not just that the Cromwellians are in power, but that Hobbes also sees something attractive about what they’re doing, which is why he goes back to England. Yes, for pragmatic reasons. I do think that there is a fundamental coherence to Machiavelli’s two texts as well, though. He does evolve in his ecclesiastical views between the Elements of Law , De Cive and Leviathan . Earlier on, his primary worry, at the religious level, was that if individuals start interpreting the Bible on their own, and on their own authority, then all hell will break loose and so what we need is a nice, hierarchical church structure where people defer to the authority of the bishops and so on. At least in Elements of Law , he is in favour of an Episcopal structure. In Leviathan , there is a passage in chapter 47—which is what a lot of Collins’s argument hinges on— where Hobbes says, ‘Well, you know, perhaps, maybe now, Independency is best.’ It’s like, ‘What just happened? How, why did Hobbes end up here?’ Collins is trying to give you an explanation, basically."