Leviathan

"That’s the one-liner. I read it not because it was one of the founding texts of Western philosophical thought but because a couple of Nigerians said it was a good book to read in Lagos. There were parallels between this book, written in the middle of England’s 17th-century civil war, and Nigeria, in particular the jockeying of various competing interests. There are some long digressions in it on the nature of man which look dated now, but at its heart it does still have an important, timeless message: it helps explain why in a society where all hope of law and order and stability have broken down, decent people end up doing awful things to each other. This idea of ‘the war of all against all’, when there’s no law, and what a man can win through his strength is what he gets, definitely has parallels in modern Nigeria. It also helps you understand another aspect of demagoguery: why dictators can be genuinely popular, if only for a while, and why, for example, fundamentalist religious movements have such appeal. You surrender your freedoms to Leviathan, the all-powerful sovereign, in exchange for being guaranteed a certain level of stability. Exactly. In Nigeria, you see that in the administration of Muhammadu Buhari, the dictator who introduced all these extraordinary measures after coming to power. Compulsory street-cleaning days. People say those caught peeing in public were made to hop down the street like frogs. Public horsewhippings. In one sense, barbaric stuff, but some Nigerians do look back and say: ‘That was a time when we had a measure of public order.’ An author friend of mine said: ‘Nigerians respond well to the whip. We must like it.’ I think what he meant by that was the kind of message you see in Leviathan, that someone, however insincere or self-interested, can genuinely attract a lot of support if they come to power promising that stability. I remember going to an all-night service in a Pentecostal church in a hangar-like building on the outskirts of Lagos. Tens of thousands of people spent the night in fervour, the pastor delivered his message, and all around, there was order. Chairs were in neat rows, there were litter bins – where else in Lagos did I ever see a litter bin? It was intense and passionate, but in a very structured way. I could see how, if you lived in a crowded slum, coming for one night into that environment of control and order would have felt like a tremendous relief. Certainly, surrendering an element of power to the Leviathan in exchange for it would seem worthwhile. I think a lot of Nigerians do look outside for explanations. It is a hard place to get to grips with, and we’re all searching for the analogies and parallels to help us. It’s certainly more honest. The abuses of power, the exploitation is there for all to see; they sometimes aren’t in a place that is only half screwed-up. You had that great phrase in your Zaire book – ‘the quality of negative excellence’. I was very angry you used it, as it meant I couldn’t. It’s what frightens people about a place, but also what makes it so compelling."

"I didn’t choose Hobbes because of the doctrines that he endorses. In fact I’m strongly opposed to virtually everything he says by way of conclusion. Hobbes is brilliant in two ways. One is his style of writing: he is a phrasemaker with very memorable quotations. There are things I’ve read just once that stuck in my head. He’s also analytically brilliant. He is an analytical philosopher, even though the term didn’t exist at the time. He builds things up, he defines his terms, he defines new terms out of the previous terms he’s already defined. You get this incredibly methodical approach. He’s not just interested in the nature of politics, he wants to understand the nature of human beings before he understands politics. To understand the nature of human beings, you have to understand the nature of matter, because human beings are made out of matter. So, you get this incredibly ambitious reductive project. Hobbes is one of the most exciting political philosophers to read. Having said that, I have to confess that I’ve probably only read half of Leviathan . It’s in four books and I was just looking at my copy to see where I stopped making marginal notes. I’ve definitely read through his first two books many times but I’ve only ever skimmed through the third and the fourth. I think this is true for most people that have read Hobbes — although, of course, there are people who tell you the most important parts are at the end. The book is in four parts. The first one is “Of Man”, the second: “Of Commonwealth.” Most of the famous political writing is in part two, “Of Commonwealth.” But there are important sections in part one that you must read. That’s around 150 pages, picking out the relevant sections. To get a good overview of Leviathan , you probably need to read two to three hundred pages out of five or six hundred. That’s true. Hobbes was hugely influenced by the England of his day, which was falling into civil war. His view was that nothing could be worse than a civil war, and he may be right about that. Think about recent civil wars, with members of the same family finding themselves on different sides of the same struggle — not knowing who your friends are, who your enemies are, not knowing where to turn, not knowing where is safe. And, in times of civil war, there is mass emigration. In Hobbes’s own time, it was similar. Hobbes left England before the civil war. It’s because he was absolutely terrified of the prospect of civil war that he argued in favour of the absolute sovereign. He thought only the absolute sovereign could guarantee that we wouldn’t fall into civil war. As civil war is so bad, the cure for it is acceptable even if there would necessarily be limitations to liberty. Yes, Hobbes says that one of the defects in the book is his failure to prove that the absolute sovereign has to be a monarch. It could be a group of people. He regrets not being able to finalise that argument. In fact, though, you might think he has — because as soon as there is a group of people, there are potential quarrels and the possibility of civil war breaking out again. So you could say that actually, in Hobbes, there is an argument that we should have an absolute, single sovereign. This is what he is most famous for: depicting the state of nature. This is a situation, as you say, outside of society, with no government. Hobbes thinks that without government everyone would be at war with everyone else — not necessarily fighting all the time but hugely suspicious and quite likely defending themselves first before they are attacked. Hobbes depicts this world of mutual suspicion where everyone is so afraid of everyone else that they may well attack. So, there is a war of all against all in self-defence — possibly. The consequence of this, Hobbes famously says, is that life in the state of nature is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” He contrasts this with life in civil society, which he depicts as one of great pleasure, flourishing production, developed technology, trade, commerce, travel, and civilisation. He thinks the glories of civilisation are only possible if we have an absolute monarch who stops us descending into the state of nature. “Imagine how you would design society if your enemy were to decide your place in it” You may feel that his argument is exaggerated — because in the modern world we seem to have avoided the state of nature without having an absolute sovereign — but Hobbes has an intriguing argument to say that that is not possible. We’re used to the idea of a government with limited power, but Hobbes has an argument that suggests it is a problematic idea. He claims, quite plausibly, that the only way of limiting a power is by having a greater power. How can you limit a power unless you’re more powerful? Therefore there must always be the most powerful power, and what can that be except the sovereign? Hobbes has set us an interesting intellectual puzzle here, because we’re used to the notion of the separation of powers, the split between the judiciary, the executive, and the legislature. This is a commonplace in modern constitutionalism. Hobbes’s view is that that’s a myth. One of those powers must be the greatest. And, actually, when we see regimes crumble, the military seems to take over. That seems to suggest there is a most powerful power in any country, it’s just it may not be used at any moment. He has an engraving of the sovereign, but when you look closely, the sovereign’s coat and jacket are made up of other human beings. The idea is the sovereign is made up, it’s a unity of the individuals that make it up. And you’re absolutely right — I can’t think of another political philosopher who’s chosen an illustration themselves for their position. That’s very plausible. It would be an amazing illustrator who had read the book, understood the key message, and turned it into an engraving. Hobbes must have had an influence."

"Let’s focus on Leviathan , which is my first book choice (in the Oxford Clarendon edition edited by Noel Malcolm). One way to read Hobbes, as you say, is to say that human beings are naturally selfish, and that resources are scarce. Above all, what they want is their own survival or self-preservation. Then, in a state of nature without a sovereign to hold them in check, what’s going to happen is they’re going to compete over these scarce resources and they will fight with each other. Then you need a sovereign to give them a law that will keep them away from each other’s throats. And that’s why a state of nature is necessarily a state of war. The difficulty with that way of interpreting things is a couple of things. There’s actually not any evidence that Hobbes thought that scarcity of material resources is a universal feature of the state of nature. So, while there may be local scarcity… Right, but it’s a premise that’s required for that argument. You might be selfish, but if there’s abundance, there’s no reason to fight anybody, because fighting is dangerous. So, the only reason why you would fight somebody, if you’re selfish in that way, is because you want something, and they want the same thing, and you can’t both have it because there’s scarcity. Ah, okay, well, that might be the case. But the problem is that this reading usually presupposes that you’re scared for your own life, because what really matters to you is self-preservation. Fighting others carries a great deal of risk to your own life, so it wouldn’t necessarily to be the most reasonable thing for you to do. Hobbes also doesn’t necessarily think that people are universally selfish, in the sense that all they care about is their own good and not others’. It is true that Hobbes thinks that whatever it is that we do, we do because we desire to do it, and we desire to do things, because we think that they’re good for ourselves. The thing is, that doesn’t tell us what the content of our desires is. Hobbes thinks that the content of people’s desires varies tremendously depending on their constitution, on their education. So, one thing that might happen is that you might desire other people’s good. It might be that what you desire, for example, is the glory of your kin, or a collective. That’s also possible in Hobbes’s psychology. “One way to read Hobbes, is to say that human beings are naturally selfish” What really matters about Hobbes’s account of human nature—and this is one of the things that Richard Tuck’s book emphasizes, which we’ll talk about in a minute—is that it’s not so much a conflict between selfish individuals, competing over these resources—though that’s also a part of Hobbes’s argument. The real emphasis is on the fact that people end up fighting because they disagree with each other. It’s ideological disagreement that does a lot of the work. In particular, the problem is people’s ethical evaluations—which are driven by their desires, and what gives them pleasure. People are inclined to call those things good that they desire, and that they think gives them pleasure in this way, which they then see as pleasant, because that’s how we use evaluative terms. Psychologically, that’s what we end up doing: we end up disagreeing about what to praise and what to blame and that leads us to have these evaluative disagreements. And Hobbes thinks, above all, that human beings are rather prickly. When somebody disagrees with you, you’re inclined to interpret them as implying that you’re an idiot. Exactly. What Hobbes is thinking about is ideological disagreement here, where you have disagreement, and you take other people’s disagreement with you as a sign of their contempt for you. What he is really concerned about is religious and political disagreement. Religious disagreement is very dangerous, because not only is the person saying that you’re an idiot when they worship God in a different way than you do. They’re saying you’re so much of an idiot that you’ve put your entire salvation at stake—like you’re really getting it wrong. That is very insulting for a Hobbesian person, in the way that he characterizes their psychological makeup. And the reason why is because fundamental to human beings’ psychological makeup are pleasure and pain. We’re driven, in a way, by this dynamic of pleasure and pain. “Hobbes identifies three different psychological grounds for why it is that the state of nature is a state of war; he calls these competition, diffidence, and glory” There are two kinds of pleasure for Hobbes, a sensory pleasure or pleasure of satisfaction, which arises when your desires are satisfied: you’re drinking the glass and it titillates your throat, that satisfies your desire, and there’s a pleasure in that. But really what matters are pleasures of the mind, where, for example, you anticipate the future satisfaction of your desires. That anticipatory pleasure is pleasure of the mind. You only fully enjoy these when you have a kind of hope that you will be able to satisfy your desires in the future, and you imagine, ‘oh, yes, I can see that in the future, I will satisfy this.’ That requires you to think of yourself as powerful—you have the power to satisfy your desires. This contemplation of your power to satisfy desires gives you a pleasure which Hobbes calls ‘glory’. And so when people don’t honour you, or they insult you, or they just have contempt for you, they don’t recognize you as being as powerful and as good as you yourself think that you are, you’re insulted, and that is an affront to your glory, which is a fundamental element of Hobbesian psychology. And when that happens, that’s painful, and you get angry and desire revenge. So there’s a kind of Hobbesian, psychological mechanism that is really important for understanding why it is that he thinks that the state of nature, given the way that human beings are by nature, is a state of war. Largely it’s driven by these concerns about the potential for evaluative ethical disagreement, which plays out above all in religious and political disagreements. Yes, it’s central to Hobbes’s account. There are other elements, there are structural elements as well. In Leviathan he identifies three different psychological grounds for why it is that the state of nature is a state of war, and he calls these competition, diffidence, and glory. I’ve been giving you the details of the glory argument. The competition argument is that when there is a desire for the same object, people will come to blows. And the question is, why would they come to blows if, for example, there isn’t scarcity, or if you could go and get the thing somewhere else. Part of it is because if you defer to the other person, you’ve acknowledged that you’re not very powerful. And that’s an affront to your own glory. So the glory argument does some work in the competition argument. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The diffidence argument is that if you have people who don’t know what others’ motives are, and they’re afraid for their own life, and they don’t know whether you’re a friend or a foe, or just neutral, then a rational strategy may be just pre-emptively to strike in order to subdue the people that you encounter. We just don’t know what other people are up to and so we pre-emptively strike out. And everybody’s in the same position. I know that you’re going to pre-emptively strike if you get the chance; and you know that I will, and I know that you know that I will; and so on. This leads to a kind of structural exacerbation of whatever other forces are leading people to fight. Exactly. Diffidence is this insecurity that you have. Yes, it’s a landmark in Hobbes scholarship. It’s edited by Noel Malcolm, with an incredible level of scholarship. It’s in three volumes and very elaborate. The first volume is the introduction by Noel Malcolm. Noel Malcolm is one of the great Hobbes scholars of our time, and it sets Leviathan in context. It gives you a sense of when it was written, how it was written, and so on. Then the other two volumes are the text of the English Leviathan , face to face with Hobbes’s Latin translation of Leviathan . So you get both texts, and he has this tremendous editorial apparatus that allows you to compare the similarities and differences between the two of them. It’s an incredible service to the scholarly community. He doesn’t give you so much commentary, just editorial apparatus. For example, he will translate the passages in Leviathan that are different from the English one, so that if someone doesn’t read Latin, they can see what those are. He highlights where they’re different from each other in a way that is not obtrusive, so if you don’t care about the Latin, you can just read the English and go forward. He’s checked all the various different manuscripts and the published editions of Leviathan to check for variants and so on. There are also guides to key words whose 17th century meaning would be different from 21st century English. It’s a tremendous achievement. There are several. It depends on what you want. There are editions that preserve the 17th century spelling and punctuation. That makes it more difficult for the student to read, but there are times when the original punctuation is relevant for the meaning of what’s happening, it helps you to understand. If that’s what you want, there’s a great edition by Richard Tuck for students that he edited as part of the Cambridge History of Political Thought series. There’s also an edition with modernized spelling that was done by Edwin Curley with Hackett. That’s also a very good edition. And there’s another edition that’s recently come out by David Johnston, with Norton, which also has lightly modernized the spellings to make it easier for a contemporary reader. Those three editions are all very, very good. It depends what your interests are. It’s such a long book. If someone is interested in international politics, often they’ll just read chapter 13, which is where he gives you his theory of war . If they’re interested in his political philosophy often what people do is they read Books I and II, and leave Books III and IV aside—that’s where he deals with religion at length. But if you’re interested in his religious, theological and ecclesiastical thought—which is not irrelevant for his political thought and, in fact, there’s a great deal of interest in Hobbes’s religious thought in contemporary scholarship—then books III and IV are indispensable. Even if you want to skip Books III and IV, often people will read I and II plus the Review and Conclusion. So that’s one way to do it. It’s a rich text, so it depends on what your purposes are. Absolutely. We continue to read Hobbes’s Leviathan because it very powerfully articulates a particular worldview. It’s an incredible philosophical system that he articulates, that continues to have power in our thinking today. It’s one of the articulations of a theory of sovereignty, for example, that continues to be the key ideology of our interstate global system. There are these systematic philosophical elements that make him a philosopher. But he’s also engaged in the politics of his time and making very particular observations about his own time, his own society, his own culture. There are all of these things that are going on in this text, which is partly why it’s such a rich text. It’s the combination of somebody who is a systematic philosopher, an astute observer of history and society, and who is writing at a time in history that is full of tumult and great transformations. It’s an exciting time and he is an exciting thinker. That’s quite a combination."

"He was concerned with exactly the same problem, yes. He certainly believed that law was there to curb the tyranny of violence, but he believed that the only way to curb the tyranny of violence was to have an absolute ruler—it didn’t have to be a monarch, but obviously Hobbes thought in those terms, because in the seventeenth century most societies were monarchies. Hobbes was saying that law is the instrument of government, and government’s purpose is to defend us against anarchy. He was an apologist for absolute government. He believed the law was a creation of human societies, and not some kind of eternal moral truth. Societies were composed of people who had surrendered their liberty to an absolute ruler in return for security and protection from arbitrary violence. So the law was whatever the sovereign commanded in order to achieve that. The best reason for reading Hobbes is that no other philosopher has ever used the English language to such powerful effect. It is a really remarkable feat of dialectic. You find yourself agreeing with him at each stage of the reasoning as he builds up his case then, quite suddenly, you find that you’ve arrived at a conclusion which seems intolerable. You say to yourself, “Goodness, how did I end up here?” I read Hobbes as a first year student at Oxford. I had never read him before, although I had vaguely heard of him. I rejected his conclusion root and branch, but I was completely bowled over by the power of his deductive reasoning and the seductive force his language. The intolerable conclusion is that there is no alternative to absolute government, that you have to have total surrender to government because nothing short of that can be guaranteed to produce civil peace. He actually recognized only one limitation on the power of government, which is that the sovereign was not entitled to do something which would require his subjects to end their own lives, because the whole purpose of the sovereign’s powers was to avoid that result. Hobbes needed God to provide a moral rule. We now have the problem of devising moral rules without external authorities like God, but that was a refinement that Hobbes did not have to grapple with."