the liberalism of horror (social research 81.4, winter 2014)

social research Vol. 81 : No. 4 : Winter 2014 795

Elisabeth AnkerThe Liberalism of Horror

“Horror stories…are dramas of proving the existence of the

monster.”

—Noel Carroll (1991, 182)

LiberaLism, as a set of ideas and practices for promoting individuaL

freedom and limiting state power, is often defined in contradistinction

to fear. In constructing individuals as rights-bearing subjects governed

by a social contract, liberal theories aim to limit the fearsome power

of state coercion. One of the most famous articles on liberal theory in

the last quarter-century, “The Liberalism of Fear” (1998 [1989]) by noted

political theorist Judith Shklar, argues that liberalism reduces individu-

als’ fear of dominating power by limiting state force and cruelty. For

Shklar, the defining difference between liberal and illiberal societies

is the amount of fear experienced by their inhabitants. Shklar’s essay

exemplifies the conceptualization of liberalism in much of liberal

theory as well as contemporary politics over the last 25 years (Margalit

1998; Mueller 2008; Rorty 1989). Indeed, the War on Terror, which gains

legitimacy because “freedom and fear are at war” (Bush 2001) could

plausibly be read as an extension of the liberalism of fear into American

foreign policy. Yet the counterpart of liberalism is not merely fear, but

more robustly horror.

Horror is a genre form known for mobilizing and intensifying

fear through narratives of terror and scenes of violence. Its conven-

tions depict an ever-present threat of social disintegration through

vivid images of gruesome monstrosity, and emphasize “energies that

might burst out or intrude on everyday life” (Wisker 2005, 8). Horror

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stories often contain monsters that can stand in for the insecurities

lurking underneath ostensibly stable social orders, and its storylines

frequently conclude by expurgating monsters to restabilize social

norms. Whereas fear is a nebulous affect that anticipates an undesired

yet unactualized future situation, horror channels fear into a more in-

tense experience of terror and even disgust. Horror often occurs after

something terrifying is known and revealed. Key liberal political theo-

ries, I argue, draw upon the genre form of horror to secure consent to

liberal governance rhetorically. They position liberalism as a solution

to horrific social orders. Indeed, they even legitimate extensive state

power as a way to prevent monsters from destroying society. The lib-

eralism of fear thus paints only a partial picture of liberalism’s rela-

tionship to state power. Horror offers a more complex and ambivalent

story, which foregrounds not merely individual freedom and limited

governing power but also expansive state power and intervention.

Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (1996 [1651]) is the prototype for the

liberalism of horror. Leviathan arguably inaugurates modern Western

political thought by constructing the legitimacy of political orders in

individual choice and consent, rather than in religion or tradition. The

text draws on horror to argue for its main goal, “that great Leviathan

called a commonwealth,” which is a sovereign power that can en-

able otherwise violent, self-interested, and terrified individuals to live

peaceably with each other. In Leviathan, people’s monstrous ferocity

will be tamed once they consent with others to live under sovereign

governing structures. To make these claims, Leviathan mobilizes fear

through the vivid intensity of horror to win the assent of its readers

to potent state power. Leviathan paints the natural conditions of hu-

mankind as a nightmarish scenario of constant murder and terror in

which life is famously “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” (84).

Rather than mitigating fear, Leviathan capitalizes on the horrors of the

state of nature to legitimate consent to a sovereign governing order.

Hobbesian deployments of horror will go on to inflect subsequent lib-

eral claims of equality and freedom, for many of these same horror

conventions are later found in the canonical liberal texts of John Locke

The Liberalism of Horror 797

and J. S. Mill. They echo Hobbes’ use of horror to legitimate expansive

state power within treatises on individual liberty.

Leviathan legitimates absolutist governing structures through a

horror story of a life without them, and the use of horror to dimin-

ish political freedom continues through Locke’s and Mill’s versions of

liberalism to reverberate in the present. For instance, in a recent and

widely read column in The New York Times, noted liberal intellectual

Thomas Friedman legitimated the start of the Iraq war by first detail-

ing the skulls of people that Saddam Hussein had previously beheaded,

and then arguing “it would be idiotic to even ask Iraqis here how they

felt about politics. They are in a pre-political, primordial state of na-

ture. For the moment, Saddam has been replaced by Hobbes, not Bush”

(2003). Rhetorical deployments of horror direct feelings of disgust and

terror toward “illiberal” societies, and they combine with a narrative

promise to reduce monstrosity in order to legitimate the imposition

of liberal principles on those societies. I am not making a claim about

all historical iterations of the multifaceted ideas grouped under the

term “liberalism,” but rather identifying how certain liberal texts and

ideas legitimate state power and violence through the conventions of

horror. Hobbes’ horror story is continually utilized to describe places

deemed illiberal and in need of liberal governance.

In highlighting the role of state expansion and intervention in

liberal thought, the liberalism of horror emphasizes aspects of liberal-

ism’s legacy and core values that contemporary liberals might other-

wise diminish or repudiate. Shklar, for one, excises Hobbes from the

subsequent development of liberal theory. Hobbes, she argues, deploys

fear instead of challenging it, and he is too authoritarian, too cozy

with monarchical sovereignty, to be “even remotely liberal” (1998, 6).

Shklar’s refusal to grant Hobbes proximity to liberal theory is a symp-

tom of a larger problem in contemporary liberalism. It is, in part, a

disavowal of the tradition of horror and monstrous power in liberal

thought and politics—a tradition that continues to the present. It is

part of a larger desire to see liberalism solely as the promotion of in-

dividual freedom, rather than in its more tangled and contradictory

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modes as also a legitimating rhetoric for expansive, violent, and anti-

democratic state power.

This essay explores the role of horror in Hobbes and its traces

in Locke and Mill to examine some of the legitimating strategies of

horror in liberal theory. It attends to the ways that narratives, genres,

and affective claims are always at work in the legitimation processes

of state power.1 Horror cultivates legitimacy for governing strategies

that contemporary liberals often dismiss as part of the complex in-

heritance of liberalism, including fearsome state power and imperial-

ism. Yet there is a growing body of scholarship showing how different

modes of liberal thought support robust state power in various itera-

tions (Brown 1995; Foucault 2010; U. Mehta 1999; Morefield 2014; Pitts

2005; Wolin 1989), and horror is one way this support takes shape.

This mode of liberal theory justifies a liberal political order that can

eradicate monstrosity by expanding antidemocratic power and weak-

ening political freedom.

LeviaTHan: a TaLe of Two MonsTersLeviathan paints a terrifying world that can be characterized by the

conventions of horror. The genre conventions of horror are f luid across

different media and historical moments—they differ in eighteenth-

century Gothic fiction and twenty-first century Hollywood slasher

films, for instance—but they also refer to a recognizable set of charac-

teristics that define central tenets and make horror identifiable across

eras and platforms. These characteristics include bodily spectacles of

violence that can produce affects of terror in audiences (Williams 1991);

explorations of a culture’s deepest fears (Jancovich 2001); gruesome

portrayals of people that aim to scare and disgust (Halberstam 1995);

depictions of the very thin line between everyday life and terrible night-

marish scenarios—and thus an emphasis on the constant potential

for the collapse of familiar social formations (Wells 2000); monstrous

figures, with scenarios that can also blur the boundary between self

and monster (Carroll 1991); and the disruption of felt senses of social

and personal security (Twitchell 1987). Horror often involves a violent


narrative in which monstrosity is eventually overcome and the social

order it disrupted is reestablished on new ground. Leviathan’s horror

story draws on many of these tropes. Book One, “Of Man,” depicts the

natural and prepolitical condition of humankind through horrific

scenarios of murder and terror, full of scary monsters that display the

most vile characteristics and kill each other with impunity. Book Two,

“Of Commonwealth,” concludes the horror story when an overarching

sovereign power garners consent to tame monsters and bring peace to

society. In Leviathan, the sovereign is the only power awesome enough to

keep a lid on the ever-present threat that monstrosity will reappear and

return the social order to bloody chaos.

Hobbes’ argument is shaped by the time period in which he

writes, and the Thirty Years War in Europe and the Civil War in Eng-

land provide the backdrop for his claims about societies that tear

themselves apart. Yet the rhetorical form in which Hobbes emplots his

views on the human condition, and the affective resonances that make

them sensible, legitimate state sovereignty not only because of the his-

tory that precedes the essay but also because of the horror conven-

tions in which key aspects of the argument take shape. David Johnston

(1989) argues for the importance of rhetoric in Leviathan, and Quentin

Skinner finds that “the highly ornamental style of Leviathan” and its

images of terror and violence “serve to underline the overwhelming

scale and force of state authority” (1997, 363, 389). Skinner notes the

way that Hobbes’ ornamental style is often tied to representations of

death, fear, and monstrosity, and thus it is plausible to investigate if

horror—the genre that most emphasizes violence, fear, death, and

monstrosity—is one form this “highly ornamental style” takes. While

horror is sometimes dated to the eighteenth century, other lines of

scholarship trace horror back to Beowulf and even the Bible (Wisker

2005).2 There is a robust discourse in the early modern era on mon-

strosity, when monsters varyingly signify horror, wonder, and social

transgression within works of philosophy and science (Daston 2001;

Huet 1993) and it seems reasonable to suggest that Leviathan would be

influenced by or contextualized within this discourse. What political

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theorists have noted as Hobbes’ “rhetorical excess” (Ellis 2010, 495) is

partly, I would suggest, “the rhetorics of horror” (Gelder 2000, 5), es-

pecially as horror is defined as a key genre of “excess” in literary and

film studies.

Much of the horror in Leviathan comes from Hobbes’ reconcep-

tualization of human sociality, which then grounds his vision of vi-

able political orders. He constructs the idea of a “state of nature”—a

world without order and control, a world without a central power to

determine law and justice—to examine what human nature and ac-

tion would look like without authoritative political power. It is a state

where no singular entity governs the whole and there is no way to

ensure security for anyone. It produces a “continual fear, and danger

of violent death” (84). Hobbes describes human nature in this violent

state as “a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that

ceaseth only in death” (66). This ceaseless desire for power is not an

end in and of itself, as later thinkers like Nietzsche will argue, but is

a means to secure one’s safety against the uncontrollable predations

of others. It stems from a desire for survival and security. Individuals’

clashing attempts to satisfy their own desires for power are so violent

that it makes them “endeavor to destroy, or subdue one another” (84).

The only way to ensure one’s own safety is through the constant ac-

quisition of more power, and the ability to dominate all others. “There

is no way for any man to secure himself so much, as anticipation; that

is, by force, or wiles, to master the persons of all men he can” (83). The

desire for power is distilled to its essence as a desire for self-preserva-

tion. Hobbes denies that humans have an inherent desire for sociality

or collective life unless it serves their individual desires for safety and

protection, and thus he instantiates self-preservation and security at

the core of the human.

What makes the individual’s desire dangerous is Hobbes’ second

presupposition: that all people are equal. For Hobbes, equality means

an equal capacity for one human to kill another, an equal vulnerability

to being destroyed by others. It produces a state of anarchy populated

by atomized and terrified individuals in relentless competition over


resources; “If one plant, sow, build or possess a convenient seat, oth-

ers may probably be expected to come prepared with forces united, to

dispossess, and deprive him, not only of the fruit of his labor, but also

of his life, or liberty. And the invader again is in the like danger of an-

other” (83). Equality produces the desire to acquire what others have,

and is actually the cause of violence. Hobbes’ reading of equality in

the state of nature thus does not lead to a view of a cooperative society

of people who share power, but instead accentuates the dangers of so-

cial chaos. Without clear hierarchies of power, or an authority figure

to keep people’s acquisitive desires in check, natural equality breeds

frightening cycles of violence as its effect. Horror stories often draw

on what Brigid Cherry calls “appeals to fears that base instincts may

emerge” (2009, 45). In the state of nature, conflicts and desires lead to

the most base of instincts: pillage, slaughter, and war. No person gives

up the right to take anything because that “were to expose himself to

prey” (87), a phrase that links people both to animal prey and to the

base terror of being targeted by predators. Predators, in Leviathan, are

all other people. In this distressing state, “every man is enemy to every

man” (84).

Hobbes uses grotesque imagery to depict the effects of continu-

al terror upon the self: “For as Prometheus . . . an eagle feeding on his

liver, devoured in the day, as much as was repaired in the night: so that

Man, which looks too far before him, in the care of future time, hath

his heart all the day long, gnawed on by fear of death, poverty, or other

calamity; and has no repose, nor pause of his anxiety, but in sleep”

(72). This ceaseless gnawing of the heart proffers a horrific image of a

human body that devours its own organs each day by its fears of sur-

vival. Without a stable social order, mortal fears run wild and intensify

our suspicions of others. They increase people’s willingness to act on

base instincts and harm others when their self-preservation appears

threatened. Some men will use “violence to make themselves masters

of other men’s persons, wives, children, and cattle,” while others will

use violence “for trifles, as a word, a smile, a different opinion, or any

other sign of undervalue” (83–84). Horror’s focus on the ever-present

802 social research

possibility of disorder, and on the way that terrifying situations stimu-

late predatory behavior, propels Leviathan’s claims that natural social

situations lead to domination and destruction.

Hobbes wants readers to find the state of nature terrifying. He

calls it the state of war, and vividly describes it in one of the most fa-

mous passages in political theory:

In such condition there is no place for industry, because

the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently no culture

of the earth, no navigation nor use of the commodities that

may be imported by sea, no commodious building, no in-

struments of moving and removing such things as require

much force, no knowledge of the face of the earth; no ac-

count of time, no arts, no letters, no society, and, which is

worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and

the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short (84).

This vision of the world is destitute of all things that make life pleasur-

able. It is a barren soil unable to nourish human culture, rife with hatred

and fear in which “men have no pleasure” (83). None of the singular

achievements of the early modern age—navigation, philosophy, indus-

try, even society—are possible in a world comprised of little human

monsters careening from fight to f light at the mercy of their fears of

death. If horror stories articulate the “potential disruption to our secu-

rity of self, of place, and of relationships” (Wisker 2005, 26), Leviathan

intensifies the fear of disruption. It insists that the state of nature is not

a theoretical construct but a real condition that exists in the present

and can erupt at any time to destabilize social orders.3 It exists in indig-

enous societies as in America, in international relations between politi-

cal orders, and in any condition of civil war, including England’s recent

history.4 Leviathan even emphasizes the savagery underneath the veneer

of contemporaneous English civil society. Fears of human monstrosity

are a daily occurrence that lurk within the habituated processes of daily

life for the average person: “what opinion has he of his fellow-subjects,

when he rides armed; of his fellow citizens, when he locks his house;


and of his children and servants, when he locks his chests. Does he not

accuse mankind by his actions, as I do by my words?” (84–5) Hobbes

locates an underlying fear of others skulking in our familiar relation-

ships with family, friends, and fellow citizens.

If every horror story has a monster, as Noel Carroll argues, hu-

manity is the monster in Hobbes’ state of nature. Carroll argues that

the work of horror is to identify monsters, who often signify the dark

and dangerous aspects of a society, and to purge the monster from the

community in a quest to establish order and security. In the state of

nature people act monstrously. Yet it is not that humans are always

and inherently monstrous; rather that life without sovereign power

is chaotic, frightening, and insecure, and this conditions people—al-

ready burdened by fears of mortality and desires for power—to act

like monsters. Horror often depicts the fear and revulsion of monstros-

ity at the fraying edges of culture, where boundaries break between

self and other, and terror resides—precisely the space that the state

of nature cultivates. Leviathan aims to rhetorically secure consent to

Hobbes’ authoritative governing schema through the fear of the mon-

ster humanity.

Monsters, Hobbes insists, are even lurking within ourselves. In

horror stories “monsters are typically aberrant versions of ourselves

. . . something we are terrified of because it is quite close to us. They

are horrors who prey upon and emerge from ourselves, and which

must ultimately be destroyed so that a kind of normality can contin-

ue” (Wisker 2005, 219). All humans become monsters in the state of

nature; Hobbes is clear that this is a universal potential and no one is

excluded from its claims. Hobbes thus makes not only other people

into monsters, but also our own selves. He explicitly petitions his read-

ers to recognize themselves in his text, asking in the introduction that

the role of the reader will be “to consider, if he also not find the same

in himself” (10). He performs the horror trope of defamiliarizing our

own selves by turning us all into potential monsters given the right

circumstances. It is a startling claim, and is part of how Hobbes aims

to win over his readers to absolutism.

804 social research

Only a force that provides security and “overawes them all”

can reign in the monstrosity the state of nature cultivates. It requires

the human construction of a sovereign power—what Hobbes terms

an “artificial person”—which demands unquestioning obedience to

all rules and regulations it makes unless its laws clearly violate indi-

vidual self-preservation. Leviathan’s horror story legitimates the type

of governance that Hobbes sees as the only worthy one: one that is

based on individual consent between all men, and that has as its sole

aim the peace and preservation of the populace.5 The sovereign can be

a single monarch or an assembly of officials, though Hobbes prefers

the former, and it requires virtually unquestionable obedience to its

dictates. The law is created by the sovereign and becomes the authori-

tative source for good and evil, justice and injustice. It is “a coercive

power to tie their hands from rapine and revenge” (122). Through the

law and the sovereign decree, the sovereign identifies and judges dan-

gers to the self-preservation of all.

The monster thus shifts halfway through Leviathan. In Book

One’s description of the state of nature the monster is the human self,

but by Book Two, once people covenant together to create the “artifi-

cial person” of the sovereign, the monster becomes “personated” in

the awesome and terrifying figure of the sovereign. The state Hobbes

envisions thus does not so much eradicate monstrosity as transfer it

from many individuals to the singular sovereign. “There must be some

coercive power, to compel men equally to the performance of their

covenant, by the terror of some punishment, greater than the ben-

efit they expect by the breach of their covenant” (95–6). The covenant

creates the new monster: Leviathan. Leviathan is the name given to

the sea monster in the biblical story of Job, whose terrifying power

is spoken of directly by God, replete with gory details, in a passage

that penultimately ends with the description: “There is no one on land

who can dominate him, Made as he is without fear” (Job 41: 25; Tanakh

1985: 1402). Hobbes describes his sovereign Leviathan as such: “He

hath the use of so much power and strength conferred on him, that

by terror thereof, he is enabled to conform the wills of them all, to


peace at home, and mutual aid against their enemies abroad” (114).

The Leviathan ensures peace and obedience through its monstrosity.

It is a “visible power . . . to keep them in awe, and tie them by fear of

punishment to the performance of their covenants” (111). Leviathan’s

visible power combines terror and awe in its artificial person, thereby

compelling people to follow the law.

As Hobbes insists, contra Shklar, fear is never banished from

politics but is its constituting ground. In assuring that people will not

break their covenant, “The passion to be reckoned on is fear” (94). The

authorization of the sovereign aims to diminish horror, not fear. Levia-

than shifts the affects of political subjects from the chaotic terror in

Part One’s description of a world without sovereign power, to empha-

size a more orderly fear in Part Two that explains why the monster Le-

viathan can bring peace and stability. The sovereign absorbs individual

monstrosities within his own person and magnifies it within himself.

This stabilizes the social order and makes the desire to harm others in

the pursuit of power untenable by the fear of sovereign retribution—a

retribution based on law that gives it an expected and predictive qual-

ity. Unlike the destabilizing terror in the state of nature, fear in the

commonwealth is effective because it is combined with the trust that

the sovereign can provide security, and it offers expected consequenc-

es if one breaks the law. This is why the monster Leviathan becomes

desirable, why individuals will band together with their enemies (that

is, all other people) to willingly create a monstrous sovereign author-

ity. In binding themselves, they ensure that their enemies are equally

bound.

Yet consent to the sovereign is not made by a preexisting politi-

cal subject. Rather, the act of consent begins the transformation from

monster to peaceable subject of the political order. When an individu-

al chooses to give up the power to kill another—including the power

to determine what is right and what is wrong, to punish, and to obey

only himself—to the sovereign, he simultaneously transforms himself

into the hands-tied subject of politics. People are ductile in this way:

they are monstrous because the (lack of) government they live under

806 social research

cannot mitigate their fear of others. When they choose a sovereign

form of governance their monstrosity is diminished both by that gov-

erning form and in the choosing of it. The very act of consent interpel-

lates them into obedient political subjects. Government can remake

individual behavior through the act of binding; anyone, therefore,

can be subject to its principles. The liberalism that will later develop

out of this understanding of consent is in part a disciplinary form in

which political orders can reform individual sociality to make people

into subjects who obey the law. As William Connolly writes of Hobbes,

“The Hobbesian ideal of the self-interested individual . . . is first and

foremost a self shaped into form suitable to civil society . . . an artifice

made fit for society” (1988, 28). Hobbes is not making a claim for an

ontology of a rational consenting subject, but is understanding the

subject in more productive ways.

In Leviathan, people can exist together peacefully only when

freedom is bracketed in the state of nature. Freedom, in this horror

story, is thus severely restricted. It is found not in politics but only at

the founding of political orders, and then again only outside of politics

where the law is silent. Individuals have no influence over sovereign

decisions once they have consented to its power. The governing power

legitimated in Leviathan exempts the sovereign from the law and ex-

empts subjects from political decision-making. Freedom in the com-

monwealth mainly involves “the liberty to buy, and sell, and otherwise

contract with one another; to choose their own abode, their own diet,

their own trade of life, and institute their children as they themselves

think fit” (141). Freedom is practiced in domestic and economic work,

not in political participation in governing decisions save the initial act

of consent. In this governing schema, political freedom for individuals

is found only in consent. After consent, the sovereign command must

be followed, and nothing the sovereign does can be considered unjust

because every individual subject—by authorizing the sovereign—is

considered the author of every sovereign act. Freedom is the freedom

of the sovereign to make decisions for the commonwealth. This, for

Hobbes, is political freedom, not the freedom of individuals to partici-


pate in politics or make their own governing decisions. What is hor-

rifying in Leviathan is a world of freedom without sovereign power. For

Hobbes, the most miserable condition of mankind is not oppression,

but insecurity (Bobbio 1993, 29), so he prioritizes the latter over the

former. We could go so far as to say that individual consent is the abro-

gation of political freedom. In return, one gets social concord, material

well-being, and the personal liberty to buy, sell, and contract. Freedom

is linked with savagery, violence, immiseration, lack of art and com-

merce, and terror. Horror in the text works to make widespread free-

dom abhorrent.

Obedience to the sovereign thus finds justification through a

horror story depicting life without sovereign state power as brutish

and isolated, evacuated of the possibility of industry or art, and bur-

dened by the constant fear of death. It solicits a desire not only to

form or join a commonwealth, but to grant a sovereign entity uncon-

strained power to make all political decisions unless one’s own self-

preservation is unquestionably at stake. Connolly argues,

The state of nature is shock therapy. It helps subjects to get

their priorities straight by teaching them what life would

be like without sovereignty. It domesticates by eliciting the

vicarious fear of violent death . . . [and] one becomes willing

to regulate oneself and accept external regulations that will

secure life against its dangers (1988, 29).

Horror is shock therapy for sovereign governance. What will come to

form the core qualities of the liberal subject—a rights-bearing indi-

vidual who consents to state power and generally practices freedom

outside direct political participation—comes into being in part through

the act of consent to a monstrous sovereign power that promises to end

the horrific insecurity of the state of nature/war. Like any description,

Hobbes’ argument both describes and produces the world it claims only

to observe. Horror encourages readers to realize why they must choose

the sovereign: obedience to Leviathan’s decree is the only escape from

uncontrollable horror.

808 social research

Horror and THe LiberaLisM of expansive sTaTe powerLeviathan’s horror story inaugurates a tradition that will later resonate

in liberal thought, which justifies expansive state powers through the

values of individual freedom and the rhetorics of horror. Part of liberal-

ism’s debt to Hobbes includes not only his work on individual consent,

the social contract, personal freedom and rights, but also in some quar-

ters his justification for expansive state power and the horrors used to

justify them. Various liberal thinkers inherit the horror story developed

in Hobbes, in which the inherent and universal desire to escape the

state of nature only seems viable through a strong governing system,

one that requires significantly more coercive state power than a rhetoric

of limited government conveys. In two of the most important liberal

thinkers—Locke and Mill—we can find the sovereign Leviathan and his

horrors lurking in the shadows of arguments for individual freedom.

While Locke’s horror story propels claims for authoritative state power,

Mill’s horror story turns the Hobbesian argument on the universal

potential for human monstrosity into a civilizational claim that justifies

sovereign power over colonized peoples. Hobbes is typically not a key

figure in studies of imperialism, and his involvement in the colonial-

ism of his time is limited. But in depicting societies without sovereign

governance as horrifying and in need of authoritative power, Leviathan’s

horror stories can be seen to prefigure certain liberal texts that legiti-

mate imperialism.

Locke’s The Second Treatise of Government (1980 [1690]), which is

most famous for its elaboration of individual rights and limited gov-

ernment, also spends a chapter on prerogative power. With royal pre-

rogative, the king or executive has the power to make extralegal im-

peratives, to act outside or against the law when he determines it to be

necessary. In these moments, legislative power is rendered untenable

and emergency powers grant the executive a sovereign prerogative.

Prerogative power marks the state’s capacity to enact extralegal de-

mands, refuse democratic participation, and command key decisions in

war, violence, regulation, and other matters on its own determination.


Locke’s prerogative power fundamentally challenges the claim that

he accorded limited power to governing institutions, even as much of

his criticism is directed against Hobbes’ authoritative governing order.

Locke’s creation of prerogative power undermines his own argument

for limited and representative governance (Arnold 2007; Brown 1995;

Wolin 2004). While some theorists suggest that prerogative power is

an illiberal instance in an overall liberal theory of limited state power,

or merely skip over the role of prerogative power in Locke’s social con-

tract, prerogative power can also be understood as a grounding liberal

tenet in the way it draws from yet dissimulates Hobbesian state power

within claims for individual freedom.

Locke’s language is not as dramatic or intense as Hobbes, yet

Locke cleverly draws on horror in multiple texts when constructing

some of the key tenets of liberalism, including limited governing pow-

er and toleration. He emphasizes in A Letter Concerning Toleration (1796

[1689]) that the governing order he champions is meant to overcome

the wars of religion by disciplining subjects in toleration, and he de-

scribes the wars with a rhetoric that aligns with horror, especially the

detailed emphasis on gruesome violence, death, and fear, as well as the

claim that different governing structures can help transform monsters

into proper political subjects. He asks, as one example, about religious

wars:

When I shall see those fiery zealots . . . persecute with fire

and sword the members of their own communion that are

tainted with enormous vices and without amendment are

in danger of eternal perdition; and when I shall see them

thus express their love and desire of the salvation of their

souls by the infliction of torments and exercise of all man-

ner of cruelties. For if it be out of a principle of charity,

as they pretend, and love to men’s souls that they deprive

them of their estates, maim them with corporal punish-

ments, starve and torment them in noisome prisons, and

in the end even take away their lives—I say, if all this be

810 social research

done merely to make men Christians and procure their sal-

vation, why then do they suffer whoredom, fraud, malice,

and such-like enormities. . . (6–7).

Locke’s justification for tolerance and the separation of religion and

government relies on the vivid intensity of his descriptions of torture,

base instinct, and murder. They emphasize the hypocrisy of a social

condition in which human monsters pretend they are doing the work

of God by torturing others, even as they too suffer “whoredom, fraud,

malice.” And, as in The Second Treatise, Locke again lays the groundwork

for more expansive state action within a treatise on limited govern-

ing power (Brown 2006). Here he argues that governing orders can be

disciplinary forms that cultivate toleration to generate a new and less

monstrous political subjectivity (Scherer 2013; Toender 2013). This is not

to claim that the wars of religion were not terrifying, or that Locke did

not genuinely want to end their violence, but to argue that Locke’s push

for toleration also legitimates a disciplinary form of state power, and is

most compelling when horror conventions depict the reasons for it.

While Locke’s state of nature proffered in The Second Treatise is

somewhat benign, his description of the real wars on religion in The

Letter closely mirrors Hobbes’ state of nature. Locke argues that zealots

would do well to consider with themselves how pernicious

a seed of discord and war, how powerful a provocation to

endless hatreds, rapines, and slaughters they thereby fur-

nish unto mankind. No peace and security, no, not so much

as common friendship, can ever be established or preserved

amongst men so long as this opinion prevails, that domin-

ion is founded in grace and that religion is to be propagated

by force of arms (23–4).

And later: “For it will be very difficult to persuade men of sense that he

who with dry eyes and satisfaction of mind can deliver his brother to

the executioner to be burnt alive, does sincerely and heartily concern


himself to save that brother from the f lames of hell in the world

to come” (26–7). Locke and Hobbes both insist on the monstrosity of

human violence, and emphasize that they depict real conditions, not

mythic constructs. Both authors are horrified by the civil wars and reli-

gious conflicts in recent history, and by the acts of monstrosity people

commit against each other in wartime. And for both thinkers, the excess

of violence that people bring upon one another, and the affective sense

of horror these descriptions summon, craft legitimacy for the political

orders the authors desire. Locke’s use of horrifying imagery is not neces-

sarily unjust or historically inaccurate, but his use of it points to the

different ways that deployments of horror can justify claims for expan-

sive governing strategies.

Hobbes’ horror story reverberates differently in Mill’s work.

Mill takes up the rhetorics of horror in the mid-nineteenth century as

part of the civilizing mission that justifies empire. Bruno Latour (1993)

argues that Hobbes’ new definition of the state of nature, which itself

presumes the equality of all people and is not invested in making hier-

archical distinctions between different cultures, becomes the founda-

tion for later liberal theories that praise the superiority of European

civilization. Mill owes a debt to Hobbes not only for his methodologi-

cal individualism but also for his subtle reliance on horror to argue for

expansive governance in the British colonies. Mill’s argument for state

sovereignty is not made for the British mainland, for which he argues

strenuously for limited state power. He insists, however, on sovereign

forms of state power over the colonized spaces in the British Empire,

and indeed over all non-European people living in colonial spaces who,

he argues, are not yet prepared for limited governance (U. Mehta 1999;

Pitts 2005). For Mill, the strong hand of a sovereign is necessary to

guide colonized people until they are ready for liberal state structures.

Horror in Hobbes marks all humans as potential monsters, and

legitimates sovereign governing systems that can ensure order and sta-

bility through monstrous power. Mill inherits Hobbesian horror and

its attendant claims for strong state power, but relocates them onto

colonized peoples. Mill’s essay “Civilization” (1977 [1836]) undergirds

812 social research

his reasoning as to why colonies require imperial governance. It de-

scribes non-European people in a way that virtually parallels Hobbes’

frightening description of the state of nature:

In savage life there is no commerce, no manufactures, no

agriculture, or next to none. . . . In savage communities

each person shifts for himself: except in war (and even then

very imperfectly) we seldom see any joint operations car-

ried on by the union of many; nor do savages in general

find much pleasure in each other’s society. . . . In savage

life there is little or no law, or administration of justice; no

systematic employment of collective strength of society, to

protect individuals from one another: everyone trusts to his

own strength or cunning, and where that fails, he is gener-

ally without resource (120).

Mill leaves out the nasty, brutish, and short claims, but his description of

“savage life” resonates deeply with Hobbes’ horror in the state of nature.

It also leads to a similar narrative conclusion—a sovereign government,

this time without grounding in individual consent, to pacify the popula-

tion and generate stability and authority for its inhabitants.

In On Liberty (1989 [1859]), Mill famously asserts, “over him-

self, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign” (13).

Yet immediately after, he claims “despotism is a legitimate mode of

government in dealing with barbarians provided that the end be their

improvement. . . . [T]here is nothing for them but implicit obedience

to an Akhbar or a Charlemagne, if they are so fortunate to find one”

(14). For Mill, different national characters require different govern-

ing orders depending on the “civilized” development of a territory’s

inhabitants (P. Mehta 2012) — whereby mainland Britain requires a

government of limited power that only intervenes to protect the lib-

erty of individuals, but the “barbarians” native to the colonies require

a despotic government and nonliberal, nondemocratic system of gov-

ernance to first prepare them to desire individual freedom.


The genre conventions of horror in Mill’s argument are also

found in an indirect location: his father James Mill’s influential book,

The History of British India (1968 [1817–1818]). The elder Mill was a po-

litical theorist of utilitarianism and imperialism, and the History of

British India, which influenced not only his son whom he tutored but

generations of Britons on the necessity of imperialism, secured him a

high-ranking position in British colonial governance. In it he described

India and China (which he had never visited) as

to nearly an equal degree tainted with the vices of insin-

cerity; dissembling, treacherous, mendacious, to an excess

which surpasses even the usual measure of uncultivated

society. Both are disposed to excessive exaggeration with

regard to every thing relating to themselves. Both are cow-

ardly and unfeeling. . . . Both are, in the physical sense, dis-

gustingly unclean in their persons and houses” (Vol. II, 155).

His depiction of “barbarians” emphasizes the repulsiveness of monstros-

ity to a greater degree than Hobbes does, and places monstrosity not

on all peoples but only on non-European peoples whose “uncultivated”

and “disgustingly unclean” persons justify imperial management. Mill’s

deployment of disgust emphasizes the repellent and loathsome quali-

ties of the inhabitants of India and China, while also situating them

downward on a developmental continuum of bodily integrity. Horror

scholar Ken Gelder argues, “horror is often where the archaic meets the

modern, where the archaic (the ‘primal,’ the ‘primitive,’ the ‘frenzied

subject of excess’) and the modern (the ‘struggling moral subject,’ ratio-

nal, technological) suddenly find themselves occupying the same territory”

(2000, 3). Similarly, in James Mill’s text, the problem with non-Europeans

is that their particular cultural traditions are deemed primitive and infe-

rior and therefore seem terrifying. James Mill argued that Indian society

was “built upon the most enormous and tormenting superstition that

ever harassed and degraded any portion of mankind, their minds were

enchained more intolerably than their bodies. . . . [T]he Hindus, in mind

and body, were the most enslaved portion of the human race” (Vol. II, 132).

814 social research

J. S. Mill describes his father’s History of British India as a “book

which contributed largely to my education.” He emphasizes “the

number of new ideas I received from this remarkable book,” including

“guidance given to my thoughts by its disquisitions on society and civi-

lization in the Hindoo part” (1909 [1873], 21). The elder Mill’s descrip-

tion of horrific non-European peoples, especially those living under the

yoke of British governance, lays the groundwork for the younger Mill’s

less colorful but just as forceful claims that non-European peoples

live in horrifying conditions and need colonial governance to become

proper political subjects who value individual freedom. For both Mills,

pere et fils, the monstrosity of non-European peoples stems from their

supposed “primitiveness” created in part by living in a land governed

without the norms of British cultural and political structures. The

remedy is a government that reshapes primitive monsters into liberal

subjects. Resonant with Hobbes, horror for the Mills could be tamed by

the right governing institutions. Through proper institutions, barbar-

ians can be taught to desire liberal governance—even though they do

not qualify for its citizenship responsibilities (Jahn 2005; Levin 2004).

The Mills thus shift the identification of monstrosity from a

universal claim to a civilizational one, and relocate expansive state

power to the vast edges of the empire. Whereas for Hobbes horror is al-

ways lurking within our own subjectivity, as social orders are unstable

and the state of nature can erupt unpredictably, Millian liberalism de-

nies this more ambivalent subjectivity to identify monstrosity primar-

ily with the people who seem to exist in the “primitive” space of the

state of nature—not those Europeans engaged in civil war, or people

living in the metropole, but those in barbarous societies who do not

yet have the trappings of European civilization. In both Mills, horror

is disarticulated from abstract universalism and placed upon specific

human societies constructed by racialized and national boundaries of

otherness. J. S. Mill thus argues for a Hobbesian form of sovereign

authority over non-European people in colonial spaces, who require

monstrous forms of state power to prepare them for the responsibili-

ties of liberal subjectivity.


In this form of liberal horror, monstrosity is not about defa-

miliarizing the self, but marking the unfamiliarity of strangers. As

many literary scholars have noted about the links between gothic hor-

ror and imperialism, gothic horror became an aperture to view the

strangers that Britain came in contact with during imperial travels

abroad (Brantlinger 1990; Malchow 1996). The link between horror

and empire also plays out in Mill’s contemporaneous political theory.

As British subjects were forced to deal with foreigners, horror became

one genre form through which to process and manage this encounter.

Horror made unfamiliar societies familiar through the monstrosities

of horror, and thus offered a programmatic response to strangeness by

marking it as monstrous, and by justifying monstrous state power in

response. For Judith Halberstam, for instance, gothic monsters help to

mark who should be removed from the community by making distinc-

tions based on sexual and racialized differences (1995). Yet when hor-

ror circulates in Mill’s political theory the designation of monstrosity

works a bit differently, as it also helps to decide who must become

part of the extended colonial community. Designations of civilized and

uncivilized mark which people are living under such monstrous con-

ditions that they must, as Hobbes states, “have their hands tied from

rapine and revenge” by the power of the commonwealth (122).

Hobbesian state power is thus not overcome with the estab-

lishment of liberalism, but is often reallocated to other territories or

cloaked in caveats and exceptions. Srinivas Aravamudan argues that

“Hobbes’ political philosophy looks forward to empire . . . and demon-

strates the close links leading from national to imperial sovereignty”

(2009, 40, 43). I would add that these links are foregrounded and inten-

sified through the genre conventions of horror. Even though Hobbes

views human nature as equal and universal in its capacities, some key

parts of his arguments enable the prefiguration of colonialism. Hobbes

insists that the horror of the state of nature exists in the present, and

includes not only Europeans in tumultuous governing structures but

also the “savages” in America. Pat Moloney argues that Hobbes amal-

gamates all non-Europeans in the figure of the savage American, and

816 social research

that this figure lays the justificatory groundwork for colonial gover-

nance over many indigenous peoples (2011). Locke makes a similar

move in his own description of Americans (Arniel 1996). And impor-

tantly for Hobbes, individual consent can occur to a sovereign power

that has vanquished one’s own society in war or occupation. Conquest

does not eliminate the possibility that an individual can freely consent

to sovereignty, but in certain cases enables the conditions for consent.

There is, for Hobbes, no fundamental difference between consent by

institutional formation or by takeover from a hostile force. Both can

involve free choice, and the only difference is whether consent is pro-

pelled by the fear of other human monsters or by fear of the monster

sovereign that has conquered him. Escaping horror is thus possible,

and even desirable, under intervention and imperialism. These as-

sumptions lead Leviathan to anticipate aspects of liberal imperialism,

in which all people can escape horrific conditions through proper gov-

ernance, and can freely consent even after they are conquered by others.

For Hobbes all people are equal, none are superior, and one of

the causes of war is that so many believe they are superior to oth-

ers. The Mills do not see people as equal but as on a developmental

continuum, and thus they become part of the very problem Hobbes

rails against. Yet in also ascribing to Hobbes’ view that political orders

are disciplinary forms, the Mills justify colonial tutelage as the place

where people might become equal—they just aren’t there yet. This is

where colonial governance comes in. If liberalism is not an ontology

but a political order that cultivates a consenting and tolerant subjec-

tivity through disciplinary institutions, this cycle justifies invasion

because of its capacity to promote progress from barbaric to civilized

peoples—from archaic subjects of horror and excess to modern sub-

jects of rationality and order.

ConCLusionReading horror in Hobbes’ Leviathan and tracing its reverberations in

some traditions of liberal theory can help to highlight both how genre

investments encourage the legitimation of political orders and, more


specifically, how liberal governance can be positioned through horror

as a way to diminish the horrors of illiberal societies. Pitting liberalism

against horror has justified expansive state power, conquest, and impe-

rialism in canonical treatises on limited government and individual free-

dom. My aim has not been to challenge the claim that people can act

monstrously or live in horrifying conditions, nor has it been to argue

that all liberal thinkers draw from horror—horror would be harder to

find in the different liberalisms of David Hume, Alexis de Tocqueville,

or John Dewey, for example—but it is to examine how horror has been

deployed by certain thinkers to justify claims for expansive governance,

including war, in the service of individual freedom. The question now

becomes: How does liberalism, and even its institutionalization by force,

still come to seem the solution to horror? How does horror—especially

a horror that seems eradicable by liberal political orders—continue to

be a legitimating rhetoric for expansive state power? Leviathan’s horror

story, I would suggest, still circulates in strands of liberal thought. Its

horror story reinforces liberal understandings of political institutions

as disciplinary mechanisms for producing proper political subjects,

and sanctions the invasion of other peoples to ameliorate their horrific

governing conditions.

Might even “The Liberalism of Fear” be influenced by the con-

ventions of horror? Shklar could be read to mobilize aspects of horror

when justifying the liberalism of fear: she often references horrific

events as the monstrous actions that liberalism aims to countermand,

emphasizing “the horror of modern warfare” (9), “threats of more se-

vere cruelty and fear from private criminals” (13), “orgies of xenopho-

bia” (16), and the ways that liberal states compensate victims from the

criminals who “did injure, terrify, and abuse a human being first and

foremost” (18). Shklar positions liberalism against different horror

scenarios, which while not as drawn out or “excessive” as Hobbes, are

still depicted as terrifying situations that liberal governing strategies

alone can mitigate. Shklar, in fact, explicitly states that liberalism is

“born in horror.” She writes: “liberalism’s deep grounding is in place

from the first, in the conventions of the earliest defenders of tolera-

818 social research

tion born in horror, that cruelty is an absolute evil” (5). If liberalism is

“born in horror,” why does Shklar then diminish the intensity of that

birth by arguing for a liberalism not of mobilized horror but of eradi-

cated fear? To insist, as Shklar does, that “Hobbes is not the father of

liberalism” (6) because he couples human equality and individual con-

sent with authoritative state power, is to deny concepts and ideas that

have been intimately connected up to the present. If horror’s monsters

have the capacity to reestablish the boundaries between self and other,

perhaps Shklar turns Hobbes into a monster in order to push away

the ambiguous boundaries between Hobbes and liberal theory. With

Hobbes condemned as illiberal, then more acceptable liberal political

norms, such as limited state power and individual freedom, can re-

main unproblematic, and the uncomfortable work of examining one’s

own terrifying inheritances and investments can be pushed away.

When Shklar claims that Hobbes is not the father of liberalism, she

thus may be performing an Oedipal killing. Perhaps she murders the

father to disable his power over his children (including herself), only

to have them reclaim that power for themselves by incorporating his

ideas yet disavowing their deed.

Addressing the workings of horror in different moments of lib-

eralism attends to the way that many of liberal society’s most central

political ideals—equality, freedom, consent, collective authorization

of power—can be coupled to, and mobilized by, monstrous violence,

coercion, demonization, imperialism, and fear. A liberalism that

claims a lineage of extinguished fear through unqualified opposition

to expansive state power—be it the sovereign monarch, the executive’s

prerogative, imperial governance, or neoimperial warfare—is a liberal-

ism that has rarely existed.6 It is therefore vital, I would argue, to grap-

ple with liberalism’s conflicted legacy by attending to the connections

some of its key thinkers develop between consent and horror, freedom

and imperialism, equality and terror. Hobbes confronted those com-

plexities and asked his readers to do the same. Perhaps if contempo-

rary liberalism addressed the role of horror as a legitimation strategy,

it could better contend with the buried-alive investments in expansive


power and the monstrosity of illiberal societies that continue to haunt

its more palatable ideals.

aCknowLedgeMenTsThe author would like to thank Ingrid Creppell, Arien Mack, Emily

Nacol, Matthew Scherer, and the DC feminist studies group—Attiya

Ahmad, Ivy Ken, Jennifer Nash, Dara Orenstein and Samantha Pinto—

for their comments on earlier drafts of this essay.

noTes

1. For extended arguments on the role of genre forms in political theory

and state legitimacy, see Anker (2012 and 2014).

2. My reading of horror in Leviathan also expands horror’s medium of

expression beyond the novel to political theory — even as both can

plausibly considered “fiction.”

3. On the realness of the state of nature see Ian Shapiro (2010). Charles

Mills (1999) argues that the state of nature is deployed as a rhetori-

cal construct when it comes to describing white Europeans, but is

depicted as a real political condition when describing non-European

people of color. Tommy Lott (2002) convincingly responds that both

Europeans and non-Europeans, whites and people of color, are at risk

for entering the state of nature at all times.

4. Hobbes even argues that without a right of succession for sovereign

monarchs, “Men should return into a condition of war at every age”

(128). In a parliamentary system the commonwealth is dissolved into

a state of nature during every election cycle until new leadership is

elected.

5. Hobbes reduces many different political forms to a binary of sover-

eignty or state of nature; most governing forms end up falling onto

one of these two opposed forms (Shapiro 2010).

6. Shklar even admits this point: she divulges that “to speak of a liberal

era is not to refer to anything that actually happened, except possibly

by comparison to what came after 1914” (4).

820 social research

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The conference will consider the history of sanctions and divestment as tools to achieve political ends and their impact on human rights. Sessions will also be devoted to contemporary applications of sanctions and divestment targeting specific conflicts (e.g., Israel/Palestine or Zimbabwe), and to the use of these economic tools in relation to global issues such as climate change or nuclear disarmament. All speakers will be asked to reflect on conditions under which sanctions and divestment succeed or fail and at what cost. (The conference is partially based on a forthcoming special issue of Social Research.)

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