THAT HOBBES WAS one of the begetters of modern individualism is widely asserted. Quite what it was that he thus begat is equally widely disputed. Here I try to show that Hobbes espoused a consistent (though not in all respects persuasive) form of individualism in intellectual, moral, and political matters. I draw on two earlier essays of mine, though I do so in order to advance beyond them, not to rest on them.1 One problem is gestured at by my title: What kind of an individualist was Hobbes? Was he the “economic” individualist and booster for capitalism that C. B. Macpherson described?2 Was he perhaps less a “market-oriented” individualist than the advocate of the self-centered but self-abnegating bourgeois moral style depicted in Leo Strauss’s famous account, or of the “privatized” individualism described in Sheldon Wolin’s Politics and Vision?3 I suggest at the end of this essay that Hobbes’s individualism was moral and intellectual, not economic, a doctrine of moral and intellectual autonomy—in essence, the individualism of the “modern” character described in Michael Oakeshott’s essay On Human Conduct.4
Hobbes was a systematic thinker, and his conviction that he had created a science of man and society raises intriguing questions about the connections between his epistemological and his moral commitments. How does Hobbesian individualism relate to the atomism of Hobbes’s mechanical materialism? Is there a logical tie, a conceptual affinity, or no relationship at all?5 I shall argue that there is a conceptual affinity between his atomism and his intellectual individualism, but something closer to a logical tie between his intellectual individualism and his political individualism.
That Hobbes was in several senses an epistemological individualist is hardly disputable. One of those senses is given by his contempt for intellectual authority. “Goliath defied the host of Israel, and Mr Hobbs defyeth the whole host of learned men,” complained Alexander Ross, and he was echoed by most other critics.6 Yet Hobbes defended the absolute and arbitrary authority of the sovereign, and one might suppose that in a system as tightly constructed as his, all forms of authority must stand or fall together; Hobbes plainly thought not. Were his views at odds with one another or as consistent as he supposed? I try to show their consistency.
In part, my case is that Hobbes was impressed by the self-sufficiency of most individuals in everything other than mere self-preservation. Self-indulgent pride, intellectual or political, was deplorable; self-confidence was not. But this picture is methodologically individualist in implying that all modern, politically governed communities are sustained by individual commitment to the terms of cooperation, and it gives rise to an awkwardness (to put it no more strongly) that I have to defuse in the second section of what follows. Within Hobbes’s political theory, in the narrow sense, there is a tension between his insistence that a man is obligated to obey the sovereign only by some positive act of his own and the utilitarian flavor of his account of the sovereign’s powers and duties. The first is individualistic in asking the question “Why am I obliged to obey?” the second less so in asking, “What overall good is achieved when there exists a sovereign whom everyone obeys?” Within the more individualistic construction, there is also a tension between his insistence that we renounce all our rights in favor of the sovereign and his insistence that it is up to the individual to decide when he would do better to flee or resist rather than obey and submit.
I cannot promise a conclusive resolution of these anxieties, but I hope to provide the apparatus needed for the purpose. It comes in three parts. First, a treatment of Hobbes’s epistemological antiauthoritarianism and individualism; second, a discussion of Hobbes’s theory of obligation and its moral basis; last, a defense of the view that Hobbesian individualism is neither quietist, nor capitalist, nor “bourgeois.”
“He was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men, he should have knowne no more then other men.”7 Aubrey’s tribute to Hobbes’s confidence in the resources of his own mind and his conviction of the absurdity of claims to intellectual authority is echoed by hostile critics: “Mr Hobbes consulted too few Authors and made use of too few Books.”8 They found it hard to believe in Hobbes’s wholesale contempt for Aristotle, for tradition, or for the pretensions of any body of men to lay down the truth about the world; they set it down to brazen pride and a taste for novelties. Yet Hobbes’s position was plain. We could be obliged to say what the sovereign wished, where the point was to express allegiance and not to assert a matter of fact. The sovereign might require us to utter phrases expressing allegiance to God and to worship him in sentences that were literally meaningless but expressively valuable: even if “Spirit Incorporeall” is an unintelligible epithet, it is excusable when they that so call God do so “not Dogmatically, with intention to make the Divine Nature understood; but Piously, to honour him with attributes, of significations, as remote as they can from the grossenesse of Bodies Visible.”9 What no sovereign can do is require us to believe propositions that might not in fact be true. Authority can lay down only what experience cannot decide. It is because the question whether the world has a beginning or not, to take an example from Hobbes himself, is unanswerable by human reason that authority may properly decide it.10
Hobbes’s argument was in part political and defensive: belief is not under the control of the will and cannot be commanded. As subjects, we feel safer if we do not fear that sovereigns may command us to do what is not in our power to do. Political prudence prompts the sovereign too to self-restraint; belief can be dissimulated because the mind of man is not visible to anyone but its owner, and authority would be rash to provoke opposition by trying to discover whether people really believe what they will not avow or disbelieve what they will.
More importantly for our purposes, authority stands in the way of the growth of knowledge. Hobbes insists that each man must make up his mind for himself and believe only what he has good reason to believe; otherwise, superstition prevails and science is throttled. We do not know that which we merely take on trust: “He that takes up conclusions on the trust of Authors, and doth not fetch them from the first Items in every Reckoning (which are the significations of names settled by definitions), loses his labour; and does not know any thing; but only beleeveth it.”11 Hobbes was not alone in taking this stand. The admired Bacon, whose amanuensis he had briefly been, had said the same; the disliked Descartes did so too. Hobbes’s opponents recognized the similarity. Condemning Hobbes as a monster of intellectual arrogance, they relied on Descartes’s theological ill repute to discredit Hobbes when they pointed to the similarities between his views and those of the Discourse on Method.12
The difficulty is to give a convincing account of how the various elements in Hobbes’s antiauthoritarian theory of knowledge hang together. The problem is that his most salient view, and the one most loathed by his contemporary critics, is his insistence that the subject’s duty is to take the sentence of the sovereign for his guide to good and evil.13 How, in the light of that, he still insisted on the importance of judging for ourselves in everything else it is not easy to see. It is quite clear that it cannot rest on an individual right to free speech or free thought. Hobbes had no time for what the Dissenters claimed as the “right of private judgment.” The explanation must lie in his epistemology, but it is hard to find. It is not persuasive to assimilate Hobbes’s philosophy of science to Baconian inductivism and empiricism; Hobbes was contemptuous of much empirical experimentation—though not of all experiment—and seems to have had no conception of inductive inference at all.14 It looks equally implausible to suppose that Hobbes was a defender of Popper’s methodology of conjecture and refutation avant la lettre; in Hobbes’s account, true science renders refutation inconceivable. Moreover, one cannot suppose Hobbes a friend to Popper’s program of showing that science and liberal democracy make good bedfellows.15 It is more persuasive to assimilate Hobbes and Galileo. Galileo thought that geometry was the key to celestial mechanics and that experiment illuminated the operation of mechanisms whose modus operandi, once it was spelled out, was a matter of necessity. Hobbes’s view of the relationship between the axiomatic method of geometry and our knowledge of geometry’s applicability to the empirical world remains obscure; but he may well have shared this view, even though he was prone to insist on the arbitrariness of God’s decision to construct his universe at all, and on the variety of means by which he might have produced his effects. But the analogy drawn in Leviathan between the art whereby God created the world and the art whereby man creates both geometry and the state suggests a less dramatic arbitrariness behind the universe.
It is a view that surfaces again in Locke’s Essay.16 Geometry sets out the rules for constructing figures and, therefore, bodies; it is hypothetically certain in the sense that geometry shows that if there are cubes, spheres, or whatever, then such and such are the properties they must have. It is an applied as well as a pure science, because empirical evidence and a priori construction converge to show that we live in a Euclidean space. Locke is as emphatic as Hobbes in stressing the difference between our a priori grasp of geometry and our a posteriori grasp of the laws of empirical science, but they are at one in suggesting that in the eye of God at any rate, all is a priori. We see a posteriori what he constructs a priori.17 Hobbes insisted, famously, that reason cannot tell us the nature of anything other than what we ourselves create and thus that physics could not, strictly speaking, be a science. Yet it is not hard to see how a slightly more relaxed view would close the gap between the rational and the merely empirical while preserving the distinction between geometry and physics. Indeed, Hobbes’s own discussion of the relationship between science and prudence is far from suggesting that science is wholly a priori, and far from ruling out any role for experience in science. It is not their concern for empirical evidence but their lack of concern that Hobbes complains of when he says that those who “love to shew their reading of Politiques and History” generally “study more the reputation of their owne wit, than the successe of anothers businesse.”18
The connection between this view of science and epistemological individualism is indirect, in the sense that Hobbes strongly suggests, but does not try to prove, that each of us is capable of reaching the truths both of geometry and of statecraft if we will only cleave to a good method and avoid obscure speech and obfuscating symbols.19 Here, too, his critics objected, insisting that doctors, lawyers, philosophers, and theologians needed the specialized terminologies of their disciplines and that Hobbes was encouraging the vulgar to set up their limited judgments as a standard to their betters, a charge anticipated and repudiated in his comments on nosce te ipsum (“know thyself”), “which was not meant, as it is now used to countenance, either the barbarous state of men in power towards their inferiors; or to encourage men of low degree, to a sawcie behaviour towards their betters.”20 The rules of good method are indeed simple enough—the avoidance of insignificant speech, the scrupulous distinguishing of words that refer to things from words that refer to words, the analytical disentangling of conceptions into their simplest elements, and extreme care in their recombination. Hobbes’s encounter with Euclid, and with Plato’s demonstration that Meno was capable of proving Pythagoras’s theorem from his own internal resources, would have pressed in the same direction.21
Knowledge, then, is an individual possession, which each of us can secure for himself or herself. Yet Hobbes acknowledges that we need the intellectual services of others to be wholly successful in the quest for it. Each individual is, to a degree, at the mercy of his own idiosyncratic physiology and psychology. What we have hold of is not the world itself, but its impact on our sensory and recording apparatus; our bodies change in the same way as everything else, and with them, the quality of our present grasp on the world and even on our own past thoughts and experiences. The difference between private fantasy and something we might dignify by the name of knowledge lies not only in the quality of our definitions and inferences, but also in the degree to which these are conformable to the definitions and inferences of others. Our thoughts are dictated by what we attend to, and our attention is driven by our passions; out of the company of others, all men are fantasists: “The most sober men, when they walk alone without care and employment of the mind, would be unwilling the vanity and Extravagance of their thoughts at that time should be publicly seen: which is a confession, that Passions unguided, are for the most part meere Madneses.”22 Hobbes remains an epistemological individualist, but recognizes the place of social discipline in epistemic reliability. Unless we are controlled by common standards, we may fly off in all directions. Moreover, just as the passions are implicated in the unreliability of isolated individuals, so the sin of pride appears as a social and an epistemological threat wherever men are excessively self-confident and mistake their own reasoning for the dictates of right reason: “And when men that think themselves wiser than all others, clamor and demand right Reason for judge; yet seek no more, but that things should be determined by no mans reason but their own, it is as intolerable in the society of men, as it is in play after trump is turned, to use for trump on every occasion, that suite whereof they have most in their hand.”23
This mixture of individual achievement and social control means that the establishment of agreement can be a means to achieving a grasp of the truth, but consensus is not the test of truth. Hobbes was disinclined to trust group sentiment in this or any other area; many intellectual communities have a vested interest in teaching their members to talk various sorts of nonsense. Hobbes’s view of the Roman Catholic Church’s vested interest in obscurity is too well known to bear discussion. It seems that a community that can assist its members to search for the truth must have no vested interests, or an interest only in peace, security, and the advancement of humanity through the conquest of nature. Is this not, in spite of everything, leading us back toward an almost Popperian picture of science?
We need to belong to a community with an interest in truth; it must exercise a certain restraint on its members’ fantasies, but it must not exercise a dogmatic authority over them. It is this last antiauthoritarian requirement that makes this an individualist philosophy of science, whether in Hobbesian or Popperian form. Progress demands individual boldness tempered by respect for the opinions of others. What of my earlier claim that it was implausible to assimilate Hobbes’s philosophy of science to Popper’s? We must distinguish the tactics of scientific progress from our view of what science achieves when it is successful. We may reject Popper’s description of the findings of science as no more than “conjectures” that have thus far escaped refutation, yet see some role for his conception of the ideal scientific community in which every individual is encouraged in intellectual boldness.
If science is defined in the rationalist terms of Hobbes’s account, it is still plausible to suggest that the inner resources on which the individual draws in constructing a theory are decisive, but can adequately be exploited only with the help of others. The detection of contradiction and ambiguity can be managed single-handed, but is best managed by like-minded groups. A proper appreciation of the “social” character of the creation of scientific knowledge still leaves Hobbes free to adopt the arrogant and violently antitraditionalist approach that so distressed his contemporaries—though he is surely condemned out of his own mouth as a man who could not accurately distinguish between confidence and pride and who thus failed to live up to his own standards.
This antitraditionalist view of knowledge is, in strictly logical terms, independent of the mechanical materialism to which he also subscribed. Once again, the mere mention of Popper suffices to show that epistemological individualism (in the sense of an imperative to think for ourselves) is consistent with an antireductive willingness to believe in minds as well as matter and even with a belief in a Hegelian third world of objective mind.24 Nonetheless, there is an affinity between the two things in Hobbes’s work. The bridge between mechanical materialism and epistemological individualism is provided by the view that men are a species of self-regulating automata. If the natural order contains self-maintaining bodies that preserve a complicated internal organization and that manage complex interactions with the outside world for the sake of self-preservation, we best explain knowledge of the outside world as a component of this self-maintenance. Hobbes is innocent of evolutionary speculations about just why such entities must have reliable information about the outside world, let alone of any speculations about the value of seeing such creatures as mapmakers interested in continuously sophisticating their maps. Hobbes is not Karl Popper, nor even Jean-Jacques Rousseau.25 All the same, Hobbes espoused a naturalistic and therefore an individualistic epistemology; it is individuals, in sensory interaction with the world, who are the bearers of knowledge of the world. This is the vision Hobbes shared with orthodox empiricism.26
Critics may by now feel that I have diluted Hobbes by first making him a precursor of Popper on the sociological front and now making him a quasi empiricist on the epistemological, and that the bare “affinity” suggested is too slender a basis for any very satisfying analysis. But one can certainly say that Hobbes’s vision is individualistic enough to be distinctively anti Hegelian and anti-Wittgensteinian; it is naturalistic enough to be decidedly anti-Kantian in spite of Kant’s professedly individualist Copernican revolution. Hobbes supposes that the interactive process between the individual and the material world provokes the conceptualizations by way of which we make sense of that world; but he is a naturalist in supposing that there are no privileged categories, whether built into the individual mind or given by “forms of life,” that we impose upon the world. The affinity with mechanism gives a distinctive content to Hobbesian epistemological individualism of a kind that sustains the earlier suggestion that Hobbes believed that membership of an intellectual community was causally important in keeping our thinking on the rails, but not in providing the conceptual possibility of all thinking whatever.
Hobbes’s account of political obligation has been so thoroughly analyzed in recent years that one might reasonably despair of adding anything new to the discussion. This section sticks pretty narrowly to the “individualist” aspect of Hobbes’s theory. There are two ways in which Hobbes’s account of obligation is contentious; both involve a seeming conflict between Hobbes’s insistence that nobody can be under an obligation to obey another except by virtue of some previous agreement to do so, which is a piece of moral individualism par excellence, and his claims, on the one hand, that we are under an obligation to obey the law of nature with no suggestion of our having consented to do so, and, on the other, that “a sure and irresistible power confers the right of Dominion, and ruling over those who cannot resist.”27 In pursuing this issue, I take it for granted that Hobbes’s understanding of obligation is that obligation is a moral, and not simply a prudential, matter.28 That is to say, the proposition “I am obliged to do x” is not reducible to “I am forced to do x,” and “I ought” does not reduce to “I had better.” The question is whether we have obligations only after imposing them upon ourselves, not whether Hobbes has a peculiar view of what obligations are. What I shall do is first show that our relations with God are so different from our relations with any earthly creature that a proper attention to that difference may resolve both of the problems just stated, though I have some anxieties about the resolution. Then I revert to the question that underlies this entire section: whether Hobbes’s insistence that each of us alone is responsible for his or her own allegiance and obedience represents a distinctive moral individualism.
Leviathan explains how we come to have an obligation to obey the sovereign because of the terms of our having promised to obey. In the unusual event of our jointly instituting a sovereign, we promise one another to obey the person or body of persons so nominated; in the more usual case of the sovereign by acquisition, we submit to the person or body of persons who could, without injustice, take our life, receiving our lives in return for submission. Hobbes insists that it is submission that creates the obligation, not merely the threat of death, nor merely defeat in battle: “Nor is he obliged because he is Conquered; that is to say, beaten, and taken, or put to flight; but because he commeth in, and submitteth to the Victor.”29 This is the point of his claim that nobody is obliged but by some act of his or her own. The promises involved are odd in the sense that when a sovereign is instituted, the sovereign is not a party to the covenant and therefore does not stand in any reciprocal relation of obligation to the subject; conversely, although we do covenant with the sovereign in the case of sovereignty by acquisition, the sovereign immediately performs his side of the bargain by refraining from killing us, and thereafter is under no further obligation to us. So curious is this doctrine that one can suppose only that Hobbes was drawn to it by a thought he very much did not wish to give up, namely, that we really have put ourselves under an obligation that we ought to keep except where our lives would be endangered by the attempt—or more weakly, except where we fear that they would be so endangered. The polemical thrust of Leviathan in the interregnum context is presumably that since the gentlemen whose minds Hobbes wishes to frame to a conscientious obedience have already as good as promised to obey the Protectorate government, they would be foolish not to make that promise articulate when asked to do so—whence Clarendon’s assertion that Leviathan was backed by thirty legions.30
There is no analogous process in the case of our obligation to obey the law of nature. There are some interesting difficulties posed by Hobbes himself. The laws of nature are precepts or general rules “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”;31 but he also describes them as being more properly theorems, an understanding of which is, so to speak, programmed into the self-maintaining entities that Hobbes considers us to be.32 Under some conditions, the attempt to preserve ourselves leads to the war of all against all, and reflection on the causes and miseries of that state leads to our seeing the need for some power able to overawe us all. It leads to the injunction that we should seek peace whenever possible, and to the permission to use all helps and advantages of war if we cannot safely seek peace. The obligatoriness of the law of nature has not bothered most critics of Hobbes, the one serious exception being Brian Barry.33 Critics interested in the problem of obligation have since the late 1960s worried away instead at the question of how individuals who are trying to maximize their own utilities can subscribe either to Hobbes’s laws of nature or to the dictates of the sovereign. Their problem is this. Hobbes requires us to keep the laws of nature unless it is too dangerous to do so; it is this law-of-nature obligation that underlies our duty to obey the sovereign. But the maximizer of his or her own returns will surely obey only when it is maximally advantageous to do so, and will disobey if it is not.34 I do not think this was the problem that faced Hobbes. Though Hobbes indeed describes the mechanisms of desire and motivation in terms that suggest that each person is indeed bent on maximizing his or her own enjoyment, it emerges on closer inspection that Hobbes readily envisaged us “satisficing.” The twentieth-century obsession with the prisoner’s dilemma and with the temptation to be a “free rider” presupposes a theory of motivation that Hobbes did not believe in. What Hobbes’s individuals maximize in the state of nature is power. They do not do so because they like power, nor because they want to maximize the enjoyment of anything positive. They are forced to maximize their power even though they would be content with a moderate living.35 This is because isolated individuals have no other means of security; they are not utility-maximizing but danger-of-death-minimizing creatures. Risk aversion is built into their physical constitution and, if they understand themselves, into their psychical constitution too. The prisoner’s dilemma is thus a red herring.
Our question is not whether egoists can meet their obligations, but how “theorems found out by reason” can impose obligations. Hobbes was always careful to distinguish counsel or advice that we may take or leave at our peril from law or command.36 Hobbes’s answer to the puzzle is well known: if the laws of nature are considered as the commands of God, who by right commandeth all things, they are laws and they oblige.37 This shuffles off the problem to a different area of Hobbes’s philosophy, namely, the sense in which we are obliged to obey God even though we have not given our consents. Brian Barry has suggested that Hobbes ought not to have said that we have an obligation to obey the law of nature. We ought to obey, but the duty to obey the law of nature derives from its content, not from our obligation to obey its promulgator. This seems to me to be wrong, though accurate enough as an account of how we should view the duty to take notice of the laws of nature considered as theorems, which are counsel, not commands. Hobbes offers two possibilities; they are, I think, alternative and mutually inconsistent. Both rest on a further consideration of some interest, even if it hardly removes the inconsistency.
The first possibility Hobbes opens is one that denies the assumption we have thus far been working on, namely, that we do not consent to the government of God. In Leviathan, Hobbes seems to say that those and those only who consent to the government of God are properly under an obligation to obey him.
Subjects therefore in the Kingdome of God are not Bodies Inanimate, nor creatures Irrationall; because they understand no Precepts as his; Nor Atheists; nor they that believe not that God has any care for the actions of mankind; because they acknowledge no Word for his, nor have hope of his rewards, or fear of his threatenings. They, therefore, that believe there is a God that governeth the world, and hath given Praecepts, and propounded Rewards, and Punishments to mankind are God’s subjects; all the rest are to be understood as Enemies.38
Believers alone sin when they violate the law of nature, though atheists are also accused of treason to the Almighty because they deny his authority when they deny his existence.39 There is another awkward question, however. In what sense do those who believe in God consent to his government? It seems that it must be, but cannot be, in the same sense as the subject consents to the government of his earthly sovereign. The motivation for submission is the same as ever—fear of death—and the believer has the added incentive that God grants and withholds eternal life, so there is a better argument for submission to God than to any earthly sovereign. On the other hand, God does not make us an offer of life upon terms that we may accept or reject, so submission does not amount to contract.
As to the atheist who is shut out by this argument, Hobbes insists that an atheist is rightly described by the Old Testament as a “fool” rather than a sinner or, more exactly, as one guilty of a sin of imprudence, not of injustice.40 It is rash not to believe that there probably exists a God who brought the world into existence and who can exercise alarming sanctions. To be on the safe side, we should believe and obey. How far we can believe in this prudential fashion is a moot point, as is its consistency with Hobbes’s insistence on thinking for ourselves, and I should hesitate to go much further than suggesting that Hobbes recommended what one might call hypothetical belief—we should conform ourselves in the way belief and submission would dictate. But this account, which derives obedience from submission, is not the only one Hobbes offers. The other account derives God’s legislative authority from his power: in the first place by a route that has earthly analogies, and in the background by a route that has none.
Each of us comes into the world with a right to all things. This is a useless right because we lack the power to do anything with it; we therefore renounce it and leave the sovereign alone in possession of this initial right and, through our submission, with the power to make use of it. If any of us had sufficient power to rely on his own resources and thus to have no incentive to renounce his natural right to all things, he could become sovereign. God is uniquely in the position of requiring no earthly assistance to exercise his rights. He has no reason to renounce any of his rights; therefore, he retains the right to all things, including the right to rule us as our sovereign: “They therefore whose power cannot be resisted, and by consequence God Almighty, derives his Right of Soveraignty from the power it selfe.”41
But as soon as we articulate this account, we can see two alternative criteria for the existence of obligation running into head-on conflict. On the one criterion, we infer the existence of an obligation from the existence of law, and the existence of law from the existence of a lawmaker. It is God’s right to rule that explains our obligation, and our submission appears not to play much role in the story. We are all born with the right to rule, that is, with authority; for human beings, it is a perfectly useless right, since everyone else has the right to take no notice and we have no power to make them take notice. But God is differently situated, and can and does exercise that right. On the other criterion, the authority of any lawmaker is to be traced back to the submission of those subject to the law. What makes law law is certainly the fact that it is the word of him that, by right, has command, but what gives him that right is our submission; he has authority only because each of us authorizes him. The two criteria have very different implications for the concerns of this essay. When Hobbes begins with the thought that everyone has a right to all things, the notions of submission, consent, and authorization are only weakly present, and the account only weakly individualist; acts of submission do not so much transfer to another rights over our conduct that he could not otherwise possess as offer him reassurance that we shall not resist the exercise of rights he already has. When Hobbes plays down this (exceedingly counterintuitive) account of what a “transfer” of right really means, his theory of obligation remains strikingly individualistic. We have those obligations that we impose on ourselves, and no others. Sovereigns have authority because they are given it. Each man is by nature the author of his own actions only; for the sovereign to be able to be the author of the acts of all his subjects, his subjects must authorize him.
Which reading of Hobbes ought we to prefer? It is hard to tell, but a case for supposing that Hobbes is anxious to take the second route can be drawn from considering how different the earthly sovereign and God really are. Hobbes was always impressed with the story of Job. Job finally turned and reproached God, pointing out, and not before time either, that he had done all that God commanded, and what he had got out of it was bankruptcy, skin diseases, and the death of most of his household. God did not reply that Job was being sacrificed in a good cause or that he had really behaved badly by being so proud of his own righteousness. Those utilitarian or Kantian responses are strikingly absent, especially in Hobbes’s interpretation of the story. What God replied was “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?” which, as Hobbes justly observed, was not an argument drawn from his goodness or from Job’s sin, but from his power.42
How should we understand it? What kind of argument is it? Merely to point out to Job that if God chose to behave atrociously there was little Job could do about it would have been both otiose and intellectually and morally feeble. The only answer that makes adequate sense is that God pointed out to Job that since he had created Job, ex nihilo, Job was wholly and entirely his to do as he chose with. Hobbes says that the right of nature whereby God reigns over men and punishes those that break his laws is not derived from the fact of his having created them. This, however, is not in conflict with my account, for what Hobbes is concerned to deny is any thought that “he required obedience, as of Gratitude for his benefits,” and my account is at one with Hobbes’s in relying on God’s power, not his subjects’ gratitude.43 So far as earthly sovereigns go, we have to authorize them because we are, by nature, the authors of our own actions and responsible for them, and sovereigns can claim authorship of our actions only when we have granted them that right over us. God, on the other hand, made us; he is the author of our being and therefore, without further ado, the author of our actions. He cannot commit an injustice against us any more than I can commit an injustice against the clay pot that I throw on the wheel and then break up because it is ill made. As Hobbes’s critics pointed out, this makes God the author of our sins and is theologically exceedingly unorthodox—but it is a point in favor of my interpretation that they should have so latched on to one of its implications.44
If this is right, a familiar tension in Hobbes’s account of the sovereign’s duties appears in a new light. When an earthly sovereign is instituted, it is entirely on the consent of his subjects that his authority depends. Each subject has a choice between staying in the state of nature and thereby risking the enmity of the sovereign and, on the other hand, submitting to the authority of the sovereign. One might suppose that Hobbes thought that only a madman would risk staying outside the covenant and risk death by refusing to acknowledge an existing sovereign’s authority or by refusing to submit on the battlefield. Hobbes did not quite say that. If someone refuses to submit because he is sincerely convinced that God will avenge the slight done to him by earthly submission to an illicit sovereign, he may be rash in drawing down death on himself—he could, after all, submit with mental reservation—but Hobbes does not suggest that the Christian martyrs were simply silly, though he does suggest that anyone so intent on attracting death without an explicit commission from God must be more or less deranged. Again, a man might scruple to break an oath freely made in the past. So far from describing him as mad, Hobbes is quite clear that a sense of honor is an estimable character trait and useful for society. Fear may be the motive to rely on, but it is not as admirable a motive as a sense of honor or disinterested love of others.45
If the ordinary view of human motivation is not much damaged by Hobbes’s materialism, and his insistence that each person is bound only by his own decisions is taken seriously, there remains a tension between Hobbes’s insistence that subjects have no rights against their sovereigns and his insistence that subjects retain the right to decide whether the covenant is off. It is not simply that there is a tension between the utilitarian, public-interest-oriented prescriptions for the sovereign’s conduct of government and the individualism of the story of the covenant. Certainly, recent philosophers would insist on that tension, and John Rawls’s Theory of Justice is founded on the need to prevent individuals from being sacrificed in the public interest. But just as Hobbes does not, when scrutinized, turn out to believe that individuals seek to maximize their own utilities, so, when scrutinized, he turns out not to believe that sovereigns ought to maximize the sum of the utilities of their subjects, even if this entails sacrificing some of them. It is individual safety that plays the most important role, then the promotion of opportunities for individual advancement, or “commodious living.”46 The sovereign must above all else maintain the rule of law; what has aptly been called Hobbes’s “moral constitutionalism” is a very obvious feature of the theory.47 But although this means that there is no tension between a utilitarian perspective and an individualist one, there is a tension between the individualism that underpins Hobbes’s prescriptions about fair trials, scrupulousness about retrospective legislation, and so on, on the one hand, and the insistence that the subject has no rights against the sovereign on the other.
It is a tension that Hobbes does his best to defuse. The sovereign has a duty to observe the laws of nature, a duty that falls on him as a private person rather than a public one; he can do more good than anyone else by so doing because he has more power than anyone else. It may therefore be that his duty is more exacting because he has less excuse for nonobservance than anyone else, being generally less at risk than anyone else. This account allows Hobbes to insist that none of his subjects can call the sovereign to account for a breach of the law of nature; the sovereign is answerable to God and his conscience alone. Conversely, this means that we have no right to have the sovereign behave in this way; it is simply that he ought to do so. If he has an obligation to do so, it is an obligation of natural law, not positive law.
Nonetheless, what remains firmly in the hands of the individual subject is the right to decide whether obedience is worth it. There is no right of revolution in Hobbes; but private individuals do not promise to stop thinking about their own preservation and that of their families and friends. They are obliged to obey because they have promised, but if things turn out too dangerously, they have the right to break their promises too. This has some faintly comic effects; one familiar one is the way in which Hobbes insists that the unusually timid should be allowed to pay for someone else to go and fight in their place and ought not to be expected to fight themselves. The noncomic effect is that creatures as forward-looking and anxious as Hobbesian men cannot be supposed to wait until the knife is at their throat until they raise the question whether obedience is too unsafe. They must surely spend much of their time watching the performance of the government in crucial respects. Certainly, “every man is bound by Nature, as much as in him lieth, to protect in Warre, the Authority, by which he is himself protected in time of Peace,” but once they have discharged that duty, it is their right to consider their own safety.48 To us, this seems perhaps only a small concession in a generally authoritarian scheme; to some of Hobbes’s contemporaries, it was tantamount to denying the sovereign’s authority altogether. For anyone deriving sovereignty from divine right, Hobbes’s account is trebly obnoxious: the story of Job marks an absolute breach between divine power and earthly power; the sovereign is created only by the voices of the people; the sovereign’s power has strict and easily recognized limits. Those who thought of the sovereign as a simulacrum of God must have thought Hobbes’s “mortall God” much too mortal and quite insufficiently godlike.49
This essay has been thus far engaged in arguing two cases not exactly at odds with each other, but not usually found in company. The first is that Hobbes’s view of human motivation is, at an empirical level, not particularly surprising, though it is novel at the analytical level because of its entrenchment in a mechanistic psychology. In the same vein, I have tried to show that Hobbes’s “epistemological individualism,” as I have called it, is not at odds with many of the commonplaces of the sociology of science, though again it has distinctive features because of the underlying mechanical psychology and Hobbes’s obsession with geometry. But in the second place, I have been trying to suggest that Hobbes’s contemporaries often found him alarming, not because of the authoritarianism and defense of despotism that his twentieth-century readers notice, but because of an individualism that was both like and unlike other individualisms of the time, but in being a form of individualism at all, was hostile to an emphasis on community, tradition, ecclesiastical authority, and the derivation of political authority from a Christian view of the world.
In conclusion, I should, without exaggerating the novelty of my position, distinguish it from some others that could also make these two claims. In particular, I should briefly suggest why the individualism outlined is usefully described as moral and epistemological and not as capitalist, bourgeois, or privatized. The notion that Hobbes was writing to defend or even merely to express the worldview of capitalism is implausible. The most famous argument to this effect, offered by C. B. Macpherson, is essentially circular. It starts from the assumption that Hobbes was living in a market society, either nascent or full-fledged, and from the companion assumption that political theories reflect the economic conditions associated with their production. So Hobbes’s picture of human nature is not a picture of human nature, only that of market-oriented man; the undoubted contrast between Hobbes’s methodology and Aristotle’s has to be reinterpreted as a contrast between the outlook of a market society and the outlook of a classical, nonmarket society. Once these assumptions are firmly in place, everything in Hobbes’s theory that is friendly to capitalism becomes an argument in their favor. The circularity involved is evidently that the interpretation of Hobbes’s text that supports the premises is reached only by scrutinizing the text on the assumption that those premises are correct.50
Still, there is something to be said for the interpretation. Hobbes does argue for something close to laissez-faire in some economic areas; the sovereign ought to define property rights as clearly as possible, remove uncertainty about title—for example by establishing a land register so that it would be clear who owned what—refrain from unpredictable or sudden alterations in the rules, and avoid sudden and unpredictable taxes; given that, the sovereign could leave the population to get on with their economic life more or less unimpeded. Is this a positive argument for capitalism, however? There seems no reason to think that it is; Hobbes does not admire merchants and does not admire most employers, who, he thinks, are interested in driving people to work at the lowest possible wages. Moreover, he is explicit about the need to create some sort of welfare arrangements for those who are too old or ill to work. Equally, and entirely at odds with the ethos of capitalism, he advocates sumptuary legislation to diminish class antagonisms. The belief in the virtues of unlimited accumulation that Macpherson puts at the heart of a defense of capitalism is very far from being a belief shared by Hobbes. Hobbes sees the accumulation of wealth as a threat to social harmony. People who accumulate do so to get power, to drive down wages, or to flaunt their wealth in ways that merely irritate their inferiors, an argument that Strauss struggles vainly to defuse.51 It is this last misuse of wealth that he particularly deplores and that he relies on sumptuary laws to stop. Of course, a last-ditch defense of an interpretation of Hobbes as an apologist for capitalism could perhaps claim that this assault on the flaunting of wealth is capitalist inasmuch as it implies that investment or some other virtuous wealth-increasing employment of funds is harmless and useful. This will not do, however. In the first place, Hobbes does not say anything of the sort. Moreover, it is essential to the picture of Hobbes as a capitalist apologist that he should assume that “human nature” is suited to the operation of a capitalist economy. That is just what he does not seem to do; harmless, moderate persons may need no more than security and opportunity to make themselves prosperous and happy, which is an argument for a relatively laissez-faire policy, but they need protecting also against the arrogance, greed, and acquisitiveness of the rich.
Now that the whole idea of a “bourgeois revolution” in seventeenth-century England has been so thoroughly discredited, it is no argument against Hobbes as capitalist apologist to show that Hobbes was both the friend and devoted employee of an aristocratic household, and that when his enemies assailed him, it was for corrupting the brisk wits at Charles II’s court rather than for the espousing of bourgeois and antiaristocratic attitudes.52 For it is equally true that the Devonshire family was an investing and improving family as well as a landed family of great house builders, and true, too, that those whose aristocratic pretensions amounted to pride in their descent rather than their abilities did not care for Hobbes’s reminder that the sovereign was the fount of honor and that honor was a sort of price.
Still, Hobbes’s defense of industry, prosperity, and science-propelled social advance was not distinctively or interestingly capitalist. It was modernizing, no doubt, and revealed a distinctively modern belief that history might be an indefinite upward path rather than a cyclical and repetitive course. It was individualistic, certainly, in its acceptance of the fact that individual intelligence and energy might take a man away from his social and geographical roots. But to have been an articulate defender of capitalism, Hobbes would have had to have a much more calculating, accounting outlook than he actually possessed.
The same point disposes of the “bourgeois” Hobbes and equally of the “privatized” Hobbes. Hobbes’s bourgeois image is drawn by Leo Strauss from Hobbes’s assault both on pride, or “vainglory,” as the great threat to civil order, and, as Strauss thinks, on the aristocratic sense of honor in consequence. Hobbes’s theory of human nature gave him every reason to be insistent on this point; in his account of the condition of nature, the three great causes of war are competition, diffidence, and vainglory. Now, competition for the resources for survival or for a commodious living can be deflated by prosperity. If there is plenty for each of us, the only reason to struggle for a monopoly is fear that the current abundance will be cut off by physical attack. This, though, is just what the cure for diffidence also cures; once the sovereign is able to impose his will on us all, we need neither fear immediate theft nor accumulate power in order to insure ourselves against future predations. Thus, curing diffidence provides for prosperity, which provides the cure for competition.
Pride is unamenable to such treatment. To be proud is to wish to emerge on top of whatever competition is at issue, to wish to have more of any good thing than anyone else; it is essentially incurable because abundance cannot choke it. There cannot be more than one summit. Hobbes’s insistence on the subjective nature of value puts a distinctive extra gloss on the reasons for fearing pride; the only test of success is the envy of others. Pride demands the simultaneous abasement of others. It is therefore intrinsically antisocial and must be stamped out.
Is this a “bourgeois” view? There seems no particular reason to think so. The truth seems rather that in Hobbes’s view, anyone might display pride and anyone might be decently sociable and amenable to the discipline demanded by social coexistence. The lowborn fanatic insisting on the truth of his idiosyncratic illumination displayed an antisocial pride in wishing the world to bow to his truth and being unwilling to learn from its views. Hobbes’s opponents certainly did not think of pride as a peculiarly aristocratic vice from which the bourgeois were naturally free; all rounded on Hobbes and denounced him as a monster of intellectual pride. Thomas Tenison taunted him with doing everything “in a way peculiar to himself” and “with such a confidence as becometh only a Prophet or Apostle.”53 Of course, aristocrats are prone to one form of pride that nobody else is so prone to, namely, pride of ancestry. The general point, however, is wholly classless; it is that we should try to purge ourselves of all those passions that are essentially antisocial, and antisocial passions are understood as those that not only set us at odds but also have a zero-sum quality about them. Nor did Hobbes’s opponents associate the pride he denounced with any particular social class. They thought he was absurdly hypocritical in denouncing a vice to which he was himself so prone. What they attacked was his inordinate vanity over his own originality and cleverness. As for social allegiance, they took it for granted that the people he tried to impress were “gentlemen” and that among the disagreeable sorts of pride that Hobbes himself displayed in the course of attacking that vice, boasting of his connections with the court and the aristocracy was pretty salient.
We can finally turn to “privatization.” As will be evident, if Hobbes were the defender of the worldview of the capitalist bourgeoisie, he would also be a defender of a privatized worldview. That is, he would hold that our interest in government is instrumental and that the purpose of government is to enable us to pursue private economic goals in peace; the goals would be understood in terms familiar to twentieth-century social theorists, that is, they would be inwardly directed, concerned with the welfare of the nuclear family, and it would be taken for granted that the way to achieve that welfare is by work as an employee or by profitably employing others. In Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition and Sheldon Wolin’s Politics and Vision, Hobbes is seen as one of the founders of the liberal worldview, and the liberal worldview as essentially self-centered and apolitical.54 Without challenging Wolin’s association of liberalism with anxiety, which certainly seems plausible enough in Hobbes’s case, I should like to enter a note of caution about the too-quick move from the thought that Hobbes espoused a self-centered politics to the thought that he espoused an apolitical politics.
The caution is a double one. In the first place, Arendt’s vision of the politics-centered world of classical antiquity may be challenged; it is not true that Aristotle offers a particularly exuberant picture of life in the agora, and the undeniable zest with which Machiavelli writes of ruses, wiles, stratagems, and battles won and lost is neither based on, nor the basis of, a political theory of public man. So the contrast between a classical, publicly oriented vision of politics and a modern, privatized vision has to be treated cautiously. In the second place, Hobbes resembles Machiavelli in writing with great zest of a grim business. Hobbes’s opponents never forgave him his mastery of a prose style that relied on innuendo, analogy, and metaphor to achieve what bald argument could not, but whose felicities were simply too obvious to be denied. His stylistic enthusiasms certainly encourage the “privatized” interpretation, too. By the time Hobbes has finished suggesting that men are wolves, lions, tigers, wild cats, and whatever, we might be forgiven for thinking that Hobbes supposes we should all become bons petits bourgeois and leave public life alone.
In fact, there is nothing to be said for such a view. Certainly, Hobbes is hostile to “ancient prudence” and to the view that only under democracy or some form of popular republic is there freedom; but a belief in negative liberty is no argument for or against active participation in public life. Hobbes is no liberal, but his argument is a pluralist one. Generous spirits will participate in public affairs; nobody should force the timid to join in if they do not wish to. Again, participation is subordinate to order. Sovereigns will, if they are wise, take the best advice than can get; if they do not, we have no right to insist that they should. But then again, they should recall that whatever their rights and our obligations, they cannot expect an ill-governed state to survive as long as a well-governed one. Politics in the twentieth-century sense is an optional activity in the good life, but a well-run Hobbesian state may have quite a lot of it so long as politicians remember that they are only the sovereign’s advisers.
Hobbes’s individualism is “private” only in the sense that Michael Oakeshott’s account of the modern individual implies.55 Mankind does not need to be told what ends to pursue, what the good life is, or how private life is to be conducted; certainly, we need the company of others to get anywhere with pursuing our own intimations of the good life, but we do not need to be forced, to be legislated at, or to have others legislated at in order to get on with it. Private life is not, however, “privatized” life—it is eminently sociable, outward looking, friendly, and spontaneously cooperative. What it demands from the res publica, however, is not aid or instruction in how to live it, but only a shelter within which we can pursue it. It may be that a society that understands its politics in that way will organize its economic life in a “capitalist” fashion; it may create a social grouping properly termed “bourgeois”; by ill luck, it may go through periods of narrowly self-centered and “privatized” existence—but all this is contingent. What is not contingent is that distanced, self-reliant, self-conscious stance that is so distinctively Hobbesian.