Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition

"Yes, it’s very influential and it’s a very different kind of book. Whereas the other books that we’ve looked at were written by historians of political thought and, in Collins’s case, by a historian, this one is written by a philosopher. Its aim is not to put Hobbes in historical context, but rather, if you like, to reconstruct the power of Hobbesian philosophy, and in particular Hobbesian political philosophy. That’s really what the strength of this book is. And it’s a very influential attempt to reconstruct Hobbesian political philosophy. Not only does she try to give us a sense of the philosophical structure of his thought, she also tries to give us a sense of the implications for the nature of social contract theory in general. So there’s really a twofold agenda here. Absolutely. And one of the things that she does is that she deploys the techniques of game theory for understanding the logical structure of Hobbes’s account of the state. Game theory is something that some readers might be familiar with. A classic example is the prisoner’s dilemma, where there are these two prisoners. They’ve both committed a crime together, but the police don’t have evidence for the major crime, they only have evidence for a minor crime. And so they offer a deal to each of them. They’re separated, they can’t communicate with each other, and the police say, ‘Look, if neither of you confesses, each of you get will get one year in prison on the minor charge. If you confess, and the other one doesn’t, you’ll go free and the other one will get three years. And if you both confess, then you each get two years.’ So it would be better for both of them if neither of them confesses, because then they’ll each get one year rather than if both of them confess because they’ll each get two years. So, collectively, the rational thing to do would be not to confess. But it turns out that from the individual’s own perspective, what’s rational for me to do is that regardless of what the other person does, it’s better for me to confess, because if the other person does confess, then it’s better for me to confess, because then, in that case, I’ll get two years rather than three. And if the other person doesn’t confess, it’s still better for me to confess, because I’ll get zero rather than one. So, what ends up happening in a prisoner’s dilemma with each of you acting strategically in a rational way, you end up doing something that is worse for all of you. So that’s the prisoner’s dilemma, the classic example of the use of game theory to understand the structure of the kind of payoffs and strategies that we have. What Hampton does is argue, ‘Look, if the state of nature were a prisoner’s dilemma—and some people have thought that Hobbes’s state of nature is a prisoner’s dilemma—you’d never be able to get out of it. It’s not a prisoner’s dilemma. Rather, what it is is a coordination problem.’ Even from our individual perspective, in thinking about what other people will do, we have shared interests. The difficulty is that we have to try and figure out how to coordinate on the same cooperative strategy. For example, imagine you and I wanted to go to a restaurant, and we can’t communicate with each other. There are two restaurants. I really want to go to the Thai restaurant, and you want to go to the Japanese restaurant. I know that, and you know that, and I know that you know, and so on. We can’t communicate, we know that we’re going to meet at a certain time. What do we do? Well, I want to go to the Thai restaurant. So maybe I’ll go to the Thai restaurant, and you’ll go to the Japanese. But the thing is that, regardless of which restaurant we go to, overall what we want is to have dinner together. So yes, I would prefer to go to the Thai restaurant, but I would prefer to go to the Japanese restaurant with you than to the Thai restaurant by myself. And so that is a kind of mixed game in which we both have a conflict, but we also have some shared interest, which is that we do something together and we coordinate. So we need to come to an agreement, because without an agreement, we’re both worse off. But if we come to an agreement, we can both coordinate on something. “I would rather live in a political society with you as a sovereign than to live in the state of nature, which to Hobbes is a state of war” That’s how she thinks of the state of nature. She thinks that in the state of nature, our overriding interest is to end up at the same restaurant, which is to say we end up in a political society together. That’s our overarching interest, to have a sovereign over us. But now we have this conflict about who the sovereign should be. Of course, I would like to be the sovereign and you’d like to be the sovereign. But I would rather live in a political society with you as a sovereign than to live in the state of nature, which is a state of war, because the state of nature is so bad for Hobbes. So there’s a kind of coordination problem that she thinks is solved through an agreement that we can come to about just picking someone as the sovereign. She thinks that by voting, going through iterative voting, we can do this. When we’ve all collected together, we’ll vote and then we’ll see. No one person is going to get all the votes, but some people will get more. And so we gradually whittle it down. That’s I think, how she thinks of it. We gradually coordinate and in the end we have a sovereign. Then, finally, the question is, ‘Okay, now we’ve picked the sovereign, why are we going to obey?’ And she thinks that we will obey in a limited way. We will obey all of the commands of the sovereign to punish other people. I won’t obey the command of the sovereign to punish me, because I wouldn’t agree to that. That’s not rational for me, because punishment basically means capital punishment, I’d be dead. That wasn’t why I entered into political society. But I’ll obey everything else. That’s true of everybody. And that maintains order. So there’s a kind of coordination: she sees this as a strategic interaction, and the kind of coordination problem that is solved through coming to an agreement about who will be sovereign. What’s interesting about this is that she derives a philosophical conclusion, which is that she thinks that Hobbes wants to argue in favour of absolute sovereignty but can’t. And, in fact, at the end of the day, he doesn’t. He wants to argue in favour of absolute sovereignty—where absolute sovereignty is that I’m the sovereign and everybody defers to my judgment about everything and I’m not accountable to anybody else about my judgment about how to organize society. But Hobbes grants an exception, because we enter into political society for a reason, which is that we want to maintain our self-preservation, to leave the state of nature. But that means that in entering political society, we will always reserve the freedom to disobey the sovereign when the sovereign is no longer protecting my self-preservation. That’s the exception that Hobbes grants. What Hampton says is, ‘Well, if Hobbes is granting that, what that means is that the individual actually does not give up the right to judge the commands of the sovereign: the individual continues to exercise judgment about whether or not the sovereign’s commands, overall, are conducive to the protection of my self-preservation.’ And insofar as we do that, and each individual maintains this kind of judgment, that means that there is a threshold after which I would rebel and retain the freedom to do that. On your own. But Hampton’s argument is that, given the strategic structure of Leviathan , if enough people are in that situation, and we know that others are in that situation, then we will band together and conduct revolution without having done wrong. This is not the conclusion that Hobbes wants to draw. Hobbes does not want to draw that. That’s exactly what she’s doing. She’s mounting a critique of Hobbes from within by saying that if you look at the logical structure of his theory, he can’t get the absolutism that he wants. And the argument that she makes is the reason why he can’t get it is because that’s baked into the nature of social contract theory. The nature of social contract theory is such that, according to the social contract theorists, we enter into political society for a particular reason. And that reason for which we enter into political society we will always continue to hold as the basis for our allegiance to that political society. Therefore, we will continue to judge on that basis, our allegiance, and if that reason is no longer being served, then we will turn against, and have the right to turn against, that society. That’s Hampton’s argument about the nature of social contract theory. She claims to be able to find it in the hard case, which is Hobbes, who wants to defend an absolutist theory. I think she sees it as the failure of Hobbes’s political philosophy, yes. She does think that there are tensions within Hobbes’ theory. She thinks that the elements of this “conditional” sovereignty story, are also there in Hobbes, but that they sit in tension with, in contradiction with, the other elements of Hobbes’s account. So even though the main account is absolutist, she claims to find strands of this other one. She thinks that you have to find those other strands, because it’s a social contract theory, so it’s going to be there. That’s her main claim about Hobbes: that the absolutism fails, but that the other aspect of a social contract theory does not fail. And part of the reason why she thinks that the conditional story doesn’t fail is because she thinks that actually it doesn’t depend on a contract at all. Because, notice, the story that she gave was purely in terms of strategic interaction. It’s not because of the moral force of my promise to obey the sovereign that I obey. It’s because of the strategic rationality of obeying that allows me to remain in the Commonwealth. Exactly. So, she’s basically making two main contributions here. First of all, saying, ‘this is the logical structure of Hobbes’s theory, and it fails to produce absolutism.’ Secondly, that logical structure ends up not being a contract theory in the literal sense of the term. Really what it is about is a convention, it’s an agreement. It’s a conventional agreement that we come to in order to coordinate our actions to end up at the same restaurant. That’s the story that she’s giving. I’ve written in both styles, but I would say that my book leans much more towards the philosophical than the historical. But it’s less ahistorical than Hampton’s, in the sense that I’ve also tried to ground it in my historical understanding of what is going on in Hobbes’s time. But that’s not what the focus of the book is. The focus of the book is on Hobbes’s ethics. There is a historical story that it tells, which is that I think that Hobbes stands at a watershed in the history of ethics. Hobbes is a key figure in a movement from the classical eudaimonistic theories of ethics that were inherited from the Greeks, from Aristotle, and so on, according to which the reason for action that we have, the reason why we ought to do things, is ultimately grounded in our own good. Why should you be virtuous? Why should you be just? Why should you be temperate? Why should you be all these things? For the classical Greek theorists, the reason is because these are contributing elements to your happiness, your flourishing, your eudaemonia , as they would call it, which is often translated as ‘well-being’. In Hobbes, we find the eudaemonist, prudential side for sure, which is articulated in the laws of nature, because the laws of nature tell you what you ought to do in order to serve your own good. But he also has this other side, which is emerging in the 17th century—and I think that Hobbes is a watershed figure in this story—which is a new kind of obligation that is not ultimately about reasons of the good for me (what serves my felicity, as they would have said at that point in time), but rather about reasons of the right , which are reasons that I have, that I owe to others, and that others have standing to hold me accountable to. Hobbes is an emergent figure of this notion of obligation—grounded, not in my own good, but in my capacity to be able to contract with others, through these interpersonal relationships that I have with others. This idea of a contractual obligation is quite different than what obligation used to mean, for example, for Aquinas. In classical natural law theory, an obligation just is a thing that I ought to do because it’s conducive to my felicity. But if I do something that is stupid, and not conducive to my own well-being, it would be very odd for you to feel resentful towards me or to punish me, because I don’t owe it to you (unless we have some kind of relationship where you’re dependent on my well-being in some way). Normally, I’m not accountable to other people for my reasons of the good. But with reasons of the right, if I’ve promised something to you, I’ve signed a contract with you, I now owe it to you, and when I violate the contract, you have standing, for example, to sue me in a court of law. You can hold me accountable to my contractual obligation to you. The story I’m telling is that Hobbes has both of these conceptions of obligation. That’s why it’s called Hobbes and The Two Faces of Ethics. On the one side, prudentia or prudence, and on the other side iustitia or justice."