Very interesting piece on Thomas Hobbes in The Nation, all the more interesting for being a blend of fairly astute political philosophy and a hard-left political agenda. I’ve been intending to read up on the Hobbes literature — in the past few weeks I’ve acquired Hobbes on Civil Association (Oakeshott), Hobbes and Republican Liberty (Skinner, the book under review in The Nation), and The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes (Schmitt). It’ll be months, at least, before I have a chance to digest all of that.

You can see from this passage in Corey Robin’s review some of the intriguing avenues for Hobbes research:

And that, in Skinner’s suspenseful retelling of how Hobbes came to this understanding of freedom, is the purpose of Hobbes’s effort: to separate the status of our personal liberty from the state of public affairs. Freedom is dependent on the presence of government but not on the form that government takes; whether we live under a king, a republic or a democracy does not change the quantity or quality of the freedom we enjoy. This separation had the dramatic effect of making freedom seem both less present and more present under a king than Hobbes’s republican and royalist antagonists had allowed.

… it’s also clear from Hobbes and Republican Liberty and Skinner’s other writings that he believes the Hobbesian view of liberty has persisted in the writings of Constant, Isaiah Berlin and the tradition of what is now called negative or minimal liberalism. Unlike the robust liberalism of John Dewey, which suggests that anything less than complete democracy in the public and private spheres poses a threat to individual freedom, negative liberalism focuses on a narrower range of abridgments: being “prevented by other persons from doing what I want,” as Berlin puts it, when there is “deliberate interference of other human beings within the area in which I wish to act.” Freedom, to Berlin, is the absence of interference, and, in a nod to Hobbes, he writes that it “is not incompatible with some kinds of autocracy, or at any rate with the absence of self-government.”

Skinner also has suggested that the republican account of liberty has lived on in the democratic movements of the nineteenth century, the Marxist critique of wage slavery, feminism and “other pleas on behalf of the dependent and oppressed.” Where the negative liberal believes that the state should ensure “that its citizens do not suffer any unjust or unnecessary interference in the pursuit of their chosen goals”–most notably at the hands of the state–the radical, writes Skinner, “maintains that this can never be sufficient.” The state must also “liberate its citizens from…personal exploitation and dependence.”

…If we read Skinner’s footnotes more carefully, we see that the Hobbesian spirit also haunts the contemporary right. Hobbes’s idea of freedom pervades libertarian discourse, and Leviathan casts a long shadow over the conservative vision of a night watchman state–where the government’s primary purpose is to protect the citizenry from foreign attack and criminal trespass; where people are free to go about their business so long as they do not interfere with the movements of others; where contracts are enforced and security is ensured.

Hobbes as liberal, or even libertarian, is not a new idea. If anything, it has become conventional wisdom on the Left (thanks to C.B. Macpherson) and the Right (thanks to Leo Strauss). But there are still angles to be explored, and I’m less interested in Hobbes as authoritarian liberal than in Hobbes as critic of republican-democratic power.

Professor Robin tries to embarrass libertarians by dredging up Milton Friedman and F.A. Hayek’s association with Augusto Pinochet as an example of Hobbes in action. But ask yourself this question: bloody as Pinochet’s repressions were, were they bloodier than a republican/democratic civil war or revolution would have been? That’s Hobbes’s test. Lately I’ve been thinking about the philosophical connection between conservatism and peace, and questions about authority, power, liberty, civil war, and peace always seem to involve Hobbes, no matter how un-Hobbesian a point one starts from. But again, I don’t see all of this as a sign that Hobbes’s Leviathan is a friend of liberty, rather I’m led to the negative point that radical democrats/republicans are potentially the most murderous and illiberal bunch of all. You can see a bit of that in “Every Man a God-King.”

Filed under: Books, Conservatism, Liberty, Philosophy