Hobbes, Law, Violence and Fear

Thomas Hobbes was born in 1588, the year of the Spanish Armada. He used to say

that his mother started her labour when she heard the Armada was coming, ‘so that

fear and I were born twins together’ (Tuck 2002: 2). The Armada was an incident in a

series of wars in the later sixteenth century that included the savage civil wars of the

Wars of Religion in France, which lasted from 1562 to 1598, some thirty-six years; and

the period of the formation of Hobbes’ philosophy was the latter stages of the Thirty

Years’ War in Europe, of which a military historian wrote ‘The physical devastation

of this war, and the loss of life among civilians, were the most severe in Europe since

the Mongol invasion’ (Dupuy and Dupuy 1970: 533). William Harvey, the discoverer

of the circulation of blood and an important influence on Hobbes, visiting Germany

in 1636, wrote: ‘The necessity they have here is of making peace on any condition,

where there is no more means of making war and scarce of subsistence .… This

warfare in Germany … threatens, in the end, anarchy and confusion’ (Parker 2015).

Europe was devastated with religious and civil war; and England’s own civil wars

were to last from 1642 to 1651, the year of the publication of Hobbes’ book Leviathan

(Hobbes and Tuck 1996). The English king, Charles I, was executed in 1649 for treason

against his own people. Not only was this a period of extremely destructive civil war;

it was also, arguably, the first modern Revolution.

It is in this world that we find in Hobbes’ political works a philosophy of violence and

fear, in which peace is the highest value and a single supreme political authority the

way to achieve it. He takes a very bleak view of human nature. Against Aristotle, he

does not consider men to be naturally social. In On the Citizen (Hobbes, Tuck et al.

1998: 22) he argues against there being any tendency in men to love one another, or

any such thing as disinterested friendship. He holds that all men are equal, but the

primary reason he gives is that however weak a man may be, he can creep up behind

you and kill you (Hobbes and Tuck 1996: 87). I say “men”, following the text; of course

that was the usage; but it is true that women are mostly, but not entirely, invisible in

Hobbes’ work. Men are not born with any tendency to society; society is entirely a

construction of reason, founded on fear, under the shadow of man’s potential for

violence. In the state of nature, man is competitive, mistrustful, and vainglorious:

The first, maketh men invade for Gain; the second, for Safety; and the third, for Reputation.

The first use Violence, to make themselves Masters of other mens persons, wives, children,

and cattell; the second, to defend them; the third, for trifles, as a word, a smile, a different

opinion, and any other signe of undervalue …. (Hobbes and Tuck 1996: 88).

So life in the state of nature is a brutish war of all against all. As is well known, the

solution for Hobbes is that such men will make a contract with one another to give up

sufficient of their freedom to a Sovereign power or commonwealth to ensure that they

can live in peace and safety.

It has been suggested that Hobbes did not actually think that men lived originally in

a state of nature; but it is clear that this is not simply a thought-experiment, and that

he does think that some men live in this state at the time of writing, either because no

such contract has ever been made or because it has broken down as a result of civil

war. He gives as an example the Americans:

For the savage people in many places of America, except the government of small Families,

the concord whereof dependeth on naturall lust, have no government at all; and live at this

day in that brutish manner, as I said before (Hobbes and Tuck 1996: 89).

Even family groups exist only because of natural lust.

Hobbes is a truly radical philosopher in many ways. He is also very much a

philosopher of mercantile capitalism. His complete rejection of traditional sources of

authority, his individualism, and his reliance on contract are all fundamental features

of what will become liberalism. A second reason he gives for the equality of men, in

his ninth law of nature, is that acknowledgement of men’s equality is necessary to

persuade them to make contracts; and in his third law he reasons that the old ideas of

commutative justice (the equality of value of the things contracted for) and

distributive justice (value being distributed according to merit) are wrong because

they interfere with freedom of contract (‘The value of all things contracted for, is

measured by the Appetite of the Contractors: and therefore the just value, is that

which they be contented to give’ (Hobbes and Tuck 1996: 105)). The principles of

contract law and agency are set out in full legal detail as laws of nature in Chapters 14

and 16 of Leviathan. His figure of human nature is the ancestor of the homo

economicus of liberal economics.

In Leviathan Hobbes tries to do two incompatible things at the same time; to describe

the world as it actually is and to assert what it ought to be. Hobbes seeks, not only to

establish the rationality of the contract surrendering freedom to a sovereign power,

but also to give moral force and legitimacy to the resulting state. He does this by

means of the consent given in the original contract coupled with the idea of natural

law and right. Every man, he says, has a natural right to self-preservation, and to all

acts that tend to that self-preservation. By couching the desire to survive in terms of

right, Hobbes is enabled to give a normative force to the social contract. The tendency

to form the contract itself is said to be a natural law; that is to say, ‘a Precept, or general

Rule, found out by Reason, by which a man is forbidden to do, that, which is

destructive of his life, or taketh away the means of preserving the same; and to omit,

that, by which he thinketh it may be best preserved’ (Hobbes and Tuck 1996: 91).

Hobbes’ state in all its detail is thus prescribed by natural law. It is a project entirely

governed by the fear of violence and the desire for peace, the touchstone for each of

his prescriptions.

The legitimating effect of the contract itself is in my view undermined almost

completely by Hobbes’ division of states into those founded by an original contract

and those founded by conquest. In the second case the contract is made by men

agreeing, not amongst themselves but with the invading sovereign, to obey rather

than to be killed (Hobbes and Tuck 1996: chapter 20). To say that this is agreement or

consent is to empty those words of most of their meaning and all of their legitimating

effect. But the reasoning, as before, is for peace; the peace of the conquered, for

Hobbes, is still better than the war of all against all.

Some of the most attractive aspects of Hobbes’ argument are driven by the same

imperative. The sovereign should take all the steps necessary to keep the population

safe, including the provision of ‘public charity’, a proto-welfare state (Hobbes and

Tuck 1996: 239). Among the natural laws he elaborates, the sixth and seventh require

us to forgive where appropriate and not to bear grudges; all following from ‘the first

and Fundamentall Law of Nature, which commandeth men to Seek Peace’ (Hobbes

and Tuck 1996: 105-6). And most interestingly of all, he discusses one case where you

are entitled to resist the Commonwealth. He argues that if a large group of men have

taken up arms against the Commonwealth, then whereas doing so in the first place

was wrong, for them to continue to defend themselves is justifiable ‘For they but

defend their lives, which the guilty man may as well do, as the Innocent. … But the

offer of Pardon taketh from them, to whom it is offered, the plea of self-defence, and

maketh their perseverance in assisting, or defending the rest, unlawfull’ (Hobbes and

Tuck 1996: 152). If the sovereign offers pardon and they refuse they are no longer

justified. This is a most practical expression of Hobbes’ desire for peace after a civil

war.

Hobbes in Leviathan, after a short discussion of the state of nature, is dealing with

existing states, or commonwealths, and seeks to lay out laws that will bolster them

against dissolution and the prospect of the war of all against all. So what are the

dangers that Hobbes fears for his Commonwealth? What are the particular matters

and people that he fears may break it up and lead to civil war and the return of the

state of nature? What, for Hobbes, creates the risk of revolution and regicide?

Here let us turn to Jacques Rancière. In his 1992 book The Names of History his topic is

the practice of historians; their ‘poetics of knowledge’ which he defines as ‘a study of

the set of literary procedures by which a discourse escapes literature, gives itself the

status of a science, and signifies this status’ (Rancière 1994: 8). He deals with a number

of different ways of writing history, but perhaps his main target is the ‘new history’,

the enormously influential Annales school of historians. In place of the old history, an

account of events as they happened to kings and ambassadors, these historians

substituted the masses and the ‘longue durée’, long spans of time and the great

regularities of history. Rancière looks particularly to what he calls the exemplary work

of this type of history, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip

II by Fernand Braudel (Braudel and Reynolds 1972), written in 1949. In Braudel’s

preface he finds a reference to the flood of new documentary material that becomes

available to the historian from the Renaissance on, from ‘the poor, the humble, eager

to write, to talk of themselves and of others’; but this, says Braudel, assumes a false

importance, leading the historian to a world of strong passions but blindness to ‘the

deeper realities of history, of the running waters on which our frail barks are tossed

like cockleshells’ (quoted in Rancière 1994: 17). We are to know nothing of this

cumbersome mass of paper, says Rancière, except its noplace.

The poor speak falsely because they have no place to speak. The poor, in the allegory of the

science of historical study, represent the obverse of the ‘good’ object of knowledge, the

masses. The masses pervert themselves by moving outside their place, by leaving the great

regularities of their objectification in order to fragment and dissolve themselves into subjects

who speak … (Rancière 1994: 18)

How to understand this exclusion? In order to do so Rancière turns to the work of

Thomas Hobbes, and the particular aspect he is interested in is precisely Hobbes’

account of the dangers that a Commonwealth faces. Such accounts were a traditional

part of works of political philosophy, from Aristotle to Bacon (Foucault analyses

Bacon’s version in his lecture series Security, Territory, Population (Foucault and

Senellart 2007), finding in it early signs of governmentality and raison d’état). But

unlike these accounts, which focus on the balance of social forces (a concept foreign to

his argument), Hobbes concentrates on opinions, poorly used words, unwarranted

phrases. Some of these words are the names tyrant and despot; Hobbes says these

have no referent (Hobbes and Tuck 1996: 130) as a king is always lawful by virtue of

the contract; they are just names used by those who dislike the monarchy. The sources

of these mischievous names and phrases are twofold; first, the preachers who hold

that individual conscience is more important than sovereign edict and who call

sovereigns opposed to their religion tyrants; these preachers afflict the body of the

Commonwealth like epilepsy; and second, those who read the texts of the ancients

and of their imitators, filled with stories of despots and their just overthrow, people

who are likened by Hobbes to mad dogs causing hydrophobia (Rancière 1994: 20,

Hobbes and Tuck 1996: chapter 29 et al). For Hobbes the body of the sovereign is the

People unified in their compact; but these excessive words and speakers invade and

infect the body and dissolve it into people, anyone at all, endangering political

authority, ‘the proliferation of speakers who are outside their place and outside the

truth’ (Rancière loc. cit.). Throughout Hobbes’ work his commitment to equality is

contravened by his distrust of the poor, the unlearned, those who read ancient texts

without the proper training in what the texts mean.

The theoretical and political evil, for Hobbes and the tradition he opens, may be identified in

this way: the proliferation of borrowed names, of names that do not resemble any reality, and

that kill [kings] because they are poorly used, used by people who should not handle them ….

(Rancière 1994: 21).

The tradition in theory and historiography that Hobbes opens is called by Rancière

the ‘royal-empiricist’ tradition. It combines the exclusion of the voices of the poor from

the proper history of kings and commonwealths with an empiricist distrust of ‘the

proliferation of borrowed names’, such as Edmund Burke’s distrust of the

‘metaphysical’ rights of man, a distrust that nourishes more recently an entire

tradition of social science and is perhaps reflected in the contemporary attacks on

another of the names of history, ‘human rights’, described in slightly different

terminology as a ‘surplus subject’ in one of Rancière’s more recent pieces, Who is the

Subject of the Rights of Man (Ranciere 2010). For Braudel these same voices threaten his

grand new subjects of history, masses and classes, dissolving them again into people,

threatening history’s claims to scientific status.

At the end of The Names of History Rancière suggests that a new form of historiography

is possible, a heretical history, that uses a new kind of subject. He instances E.P.

Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (Thompson 1980: 20), which opens

with the formation of the London Corresponding Society in 1792 by nine working men

(Rancière 1994: 92 et seq.). Three propositions, he says, define the rupture of the

symbolic markers in the political order that is at work in the constitution of this

hitherto unknown subject of speech. First, one man counts as much as another.

Second, the Society’s first rule was that the number of its members be unlimited; the

pure denial of exclusion. Third, the mode of speech is correspondence, pure address

to everyone else without being or subjection. This is the modern social movement, a

class that is the dissolution of all classes. Such a subject is first situated empirically, ‘in

the profusion of deviating religions and heterodox forms of knowledge that provoked

and accompanied the emergence of the modern social movements’(Rancière 1994: 93),

in the intersection of the Rights of Man with biblical prophesies and the injunctions of

The Pilgrim’s Progress, woven of names borrowed from and taken out of language. But

secondly it initiates the singular mode of being of the subjects of history in the

democratic age. Rancière rejects the attempts of social and cultural historians to

chronicle such movements, claiming that in trying to describe them they lose sight of

their essence; and he challenges contemporary history to ‘draw the figure of the

historicity that belongs to its age’ (Rancière 1994: 100).

I suggest that the disruptive figures of Hobbes’ fears also had the characteristics of the

new subjects of history of the democratic age, and that in what Rancière calls the birth

of the age of revolution there were groupings as entitled to that description as the

London Corresponding Society.

In 1641, Parliament abolished the previous strict censorship that had hitherto

restrained expression of opinions in print. What followed was a flood of pamphlets,

broadsides, poetry and sermons that represented an enormous outflowing of the

disorderly voices of the poor and initiated a remarkable debate on all aspects of

religious and political life. To quote from the historian Christopher Hill, it “was a

period of glorious flux and intellectual excitement” (Hill 1975: 14).

I shall take the Diggers and their spokesperson, Gerrard Winstanley, as my example

organisation. When they began to dig up, manure and plant some waste common land

in Surrey on 01/04/1649, they made a declaration in the form of a pamphlet entitled

‘The True Leveller’s Standard Advanced: or, the State of Community opened, and

Presented to the Sons of Men.’ (Winstanley and Hill 1973: 76 et seq.) They declared

that they were the ‘Common People of England’, and explained that

In the beginning of time, the great creator Reason made the earth to be a common treasury,

to preserve beasts, birds, fishes, and man, the lord that was to govern this creation … but not

one word was spoken in the beginning, that one branch of mankind should rule over another.

And the reason is this, every single man, male and female, is a perfect creature of himself; and

the same spirit that made the globe dwells in man to govern the Globe; so that the flesh of

man being subject to reason, his maker, hath him to be his teacher and ruler within himself,

therefore needs not run abroad after any teacher and ruler without him …. (Winstanley and

Hill 1973: 77) (Emphasis added).

As in Rancière’s example, in the declaration that founds the movement one man (or

woman – women are visible here as they are not in Hobbes or in the constitution of

the Corresponding Society) counts as much as another; the political subject formed is

unlimited, the Common People and everyone on the Earth – they hoped and expected

that the landlords would join them as well once reason showed them the rightness of

their cause; and in this case, the mode of action that suits this new mode of political

subjectification is not correspondence, but a form of pure praxis, digging the soil, that

again admits no subjection. They drew their rousing language from scripture and, via

the Putney debates, from those who drew on the words of the ancients. They opened

the modern democratic age and were the enemy of Hobbes and similar theorists, of

whom Winstanley said:

Here is disorder, therefore this subtle spirit of darkness … tells the people, You must make

one man king over you all and let him make laws, and let everyone be obedient thereunto.

(quoted in Hill 1975: 387)

In other words, such thinkers use fear to justify absolutism. The Diggers and their like

disappeared from view as the revolutionary moment ended and censorship was re-

imposed in 1660, but the words and names from that period were alive and well in the

men that formed the London Corresponding Society. If Hobbes’ thought in many

ways began the modern liberal capitalist world, those he feared were at the same time

initiating its other, what Rancière calls the subject of history in the democratic age.

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