Chapter 2

HOBBES

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1. The principal claims of Hobbes’s Leviathan are deliverances of a thought experiment in which we imagine away the existence of governmental authority and ask what the human condition would be like without it. We suppose, that is, that a state of nature obtains among people, as we know them, as they actually are, and we ask what its character must be. Notice that the qualification that the state of nature concerns people as we know them is extremely important. We are not thinking about presocialized people who are deprived of their political and, perhaps, social institutions. Hobbes must mean the state of nature in this wise, since his mission is to rescue us from its dangers, and they must therefore be the dangers that we would face, not what primitives faced. Why should we care about them?1

Now, the state of nature is a relational concept. The relation it signifies obtains between two people if and only if neither has authority over the other and there is no third person who has authority over both. By extension, a state of nature prevails among a set of people if the stated relation holds between all pairs within the set. So, once again, a state of nature doesn’t have to be like the Flintstones; it can be like the Simpsons, minus TV. Think of it negatively—no one has authority over anyone else. Notice that the state of nature, so conceived, is a perfectly possible state of affairs: there is nothing mythical about it. Exercise of this concept of the state of nature involves no affirmation of any pseudohistory.

Now, everyone agrees that (i) Hobbes’s state of nature is a state of war. As he says in De Cive, where two people are such that neither rules the other and they are not jointly subject to a third, the two people are “enemies.”2 Everyone also agrees that (ii) the fact that the state of nature is a state of war is supposed to prove the legitimacy of governmental authority, and, indeed, of absolute, unlimited government authority.

But those agreements leave open two questions, on which there is disagreement. The disagreement corresponds, naturally enough, to obscurity in Hobbes, not in the sense of obscure sentences or paragraphs: he is a marvelously clear sentence writer; but in the sense that what appear to be distinct and uncombinable doctrines sometimes seem to be on offer in his text.

The first question is: why is the state of nature, the state of no governmental authority, a state of war? And the second is: how does the fact that the state of nature is a state of war justify governmental authority?

2. I deal with the second question at Nos. 15–21 below. Here I turn to the first question.

Every answer to the first question must begin by acknowledging that the state of nature is a state of war because a struggle for power pervades it, and that a struggle for power pervades it because there exists, as “a generall inclination of all mankind, a perpetuall and restlesse desire of Power after power, that ceaseth onely in Death.”3 Disagreement begins when we ask why Hobbes attributes to people so relentless a pursuit of power.

3. Now Hobbes defines power, reasonably enough, at the opening of chapter 10, as the “present means to obtain some future apparent Good.”4 So you might think that the question why, for Hobbes, people seek power resolves itself into: what good do they seek to use it to obtain? But that inference is mistaken. For the fact that something is by definition a means does not imply that when it is wanted it is wanted as a means, because, that is, it is the means that it is. Money is by definition a means of purchase, of storing value, etc., but it does not follow, and it is not true, that whoever wants money wants it because she wants to buy things, store value, etc. Some people want money so as to be admired or envied for having it, or for having succeeded in acquiring it. And the same goes for power, of which money, on Hobbes’s definition of power is, as Hobbes realized, a species.5 “Instrumentall are those Powers, which … are means and Instruments to acquire more: as Riches, Reputation, Friends, and the secret workings of God, which men call good Luck.”6 Money is, indeed, as Karl Marx said, social power in the form of a thing. And power too, in both its money and nonmoney forms, can be wanted other than as a means to achieve what it is by definition a means to achieve. So can any functionally defined thing: a car, a knife, a knitting needle, etc.

Now this is not just an interesting, or boring, conceptual point. That is, it is very important sociologically that this means power need not be desired exclusively as a means. And we can tell a number of Hobbesian-seeming stories about why Hobbesian men—and it is, indeed, within Hobbes, for reasons I’ll give later, men, as heads of families, that we’re talking about—seek power, and in some of the stories they do not want it principally to use it to acquire things, or, better, in some of the stories it is not that reason for wanting power which makes the state of nature a state of war. In some Hobbesian stories war supervenes because men want power in order to shine, in order to relish the glory of being superior to others. They want honor, which is other people believing in and deferring to your power, and glory, which is your own awareness of your power.7 Indeed, that Hobbesian story goes with the traditional sobriquet, or nickname, of the sovereign Leviathan—King of the Proud. According to that sobriquet, it’s because people are proud that they need to be subdued by Leviathan.

4. There is an extensive debate about whether Hobbes is a psychological egoist, that is, whether his men are other than merely self-interested, whether they care about anything beyond their own welfare. The answer to that question obviously bears on the first question at the end of 1. above (that is, why is the state of nature a state of war?). Chapter 2 of Gregory Kavka’s book has an excellent discussion of that question.8 Let us suppose, at least for the moment, that Hobbes indeed is a psychological egoist.

But there is a further question about which there has been less debate than there ought to have been, given the interest and importance of the answer to this further question for answering Q 1 in 1.9 This further question is: suppose that Hobbesian men are egoists who seek what they conceive to be their own good only. Does that good, as they conceive it, encompass what I shall call underivative other-regarding elements? Let me explain “underivative” and “other-regarding.” An underivative element is one that is not derived from some other element: a desideratum is derivative if and only if it is wanted for the sake of some further one, either as a means of getting or as a way of getting that further one. My desire to walk to Sainsbury’s is derivative on my desire to buy orange juice, which is derivative on my desire to obtain nourishment and sensory enjoyment, which may be derivative on nothing, hence, underivative. Or I may desire to walk to Sainsbury’s just as a way of satisfying my desire to take a walk. Then it’s not a (causal) means since it logically entails walking, rather than causally bringing it about, but it’s still derivative.

An other-regarding desideratum is one whose description mentions other people, either referentially (as in I want Sylvia to help me) or existentially (as in I want someone—I don’t care who—to help me). Wanting you to get the orange juice for me is other-regarding, but almost certainly derivatively other-regarding: an exception would be where I enjoy the prospect of the irksomeness to you of having to go and buy it, or where I think you’ll benefit from the exercise, and that figures in my motivation. Wanting to torture you is other-regarding. That is derivative if it is in order to get information from you. It is underivative if it is to relish your (or somebody’s) agony. For then a mention of persons cannot be written out of the fundamental description of what I want.

Do Hobbesian men have underivative other-regarding passions? Or, more germanely, is their possession of such passions central to the genesis of the state of war? We know that Hobbesian men endanger one another, that they are prone to mutual antagonism. Is that because each has a basic desire to put others down? Is it because each basically desires triumph, or only because power over others assures them the security in which to pursue material enjoyment? Hobbes’s men undoubtedly want power over others and they want to be honored by others. They compete for position and prestige and rejoice when they reduce others to an inferior position. But do they want prestige and the esteem of others only because that puts them in a secure position with respect to physical safety and material enjoyment? Or do they find it intrinsically satisfying to defeat and dominate other men, so that pride is an underivative passion and prestige is more than instrumentally valuable? More precisely, do such underivative other-regarding passions play a role, whether exclusive, chief, or partial, in generating the state of war?

5. My own view is that there are a variety of Hobbesian stories about how the state of war is generated, in some of which we must suppose men to be egoistic, in some not, and among the egoistic, some involve underivative other-regarding desires, and some not. These stories are all variants of or full or partial combinations of three stories, which I shall name following what Hobbes calls “the three principal causes of quarrel,”10 which are “competition, diffidence and glory.” In the competition story, people are psychological egoists who lack underivative other-regarding passions; in the diffidence story, they are not psychological egoists and they probably have underivative other-regarding passions of a positive kind; in the glory story, they are psychological egoists and they have underivative other-regarding passions of a negative kind. The glory story is the most colorful and in that sense most interesting, but in another sense, which I think deeper, it is least interesting, because it derives the state of war from the strongest of the three sets of premises about human nature in play here. Correspondingly, the diffidence story is in that sense most interesting, because its human nature premises are strikingly weak and unbelligerent.

The first or competition story sits well with Hobbes as someone who was infatuated by Galilean science, the idea, discerned in his work by many commentators, that the aim of each person is to keep on trucking, that is to maintain his vital motion at a decent velocity. The glory story derives more from Hobbes’s early classical humanism, his study of ancient texts such as Thucydides and Aristotle which are big on the virtues and vices of humanity. The diffidence story places him on neither side of that Galileo/humanism divide.

6. I begin with the competition story. Hobbes says that because men are effectively equal in ability, they have equal hopes of attaining their ends when they both desire the same things, and they consequently fight over it:

From this equality of ability, ariseth equality of hope in the attaining of our ends. And therefore if any two men desire the same thing, which nevertheless they cannot both enjoy, they become enemies; and in the way to their end, (which is principally their own conservation, and sometimes their delectation only) endeavour to destroy, or subdue one another.11

Compare De Cive, 1.6:

But the most frequent reason why men desire to hurt each other, ariseth hence, that many men at the same time have an appetite to the same thing; which yet very often they can neither enjoy in common, nor yet divide; whence it follows that the strongest must have it, and who is strongest must be decided by the sword.12

Notice that the fact that we both desire the same thing betokens a scarcity, and, moreover, what matters here is scarcity in a necessary good, for we principally desire such a good for “conservation” and only sometimes for “delectation”: we’re not talking about scarcity in a luxury good where there might be an abundance in the necessities of life. The goods in contention at least include ones which you have to get, on pain of death. Now one might discern an other-regarding element in the motif in the Leviathan passage of hoping to win. I’m damned if I’m going to share it with him. Who does he think he is? But the parallel De Cive text makes that motif implausible here. It’s clear as noonday there that conflict comes from both wanting an indivisible thing.

The competition story unrolls on the assumptions of, first, sufficient equality so that you reckon your chances as good as the next man’s; second, scarcity, which means it’s unwise to forgo the opportunity to grab what’s around; and, third, psychological egoism at least to the extent of putting your own survival before everything else. There is here no assumption needed about how you regard other people. They could just be like physical forces, merely in the way. You don’t care to help them, but you also don’t care to hurt them.

To give a rigorous representation to the competition story, suppose that we have a two-person world. That is for simplicity, and the results we get are easily generalized. Let’s also suppose—we shall relax this assumption later, in No. 9, and thereby reinforce, not weaken, our conclusion—that there are no opportunities to produce anything in this world: the scarce goods are all consumption goods as opposed to raw materials and means of production: the fight is for fallen fruit, or for carcasses of beasts which no person killed. Now we are also supposing that the two people are roughly equal, which means that neither has more reason to think that he’ll prevail in the combat than to think that he’ll lose. On all those suppositions, a peaceful sharing of the goods, or, where they are, as Hobbes curiously insists, indivisible, a peaceful 50/50 lottery over them has higher (what is called) expected utility for each person than fighting for them.

I’ll explain what that is in a moment, but first why I say indivisibility is curious. The Hobbesian indivisibility assumption is curious because so few goods are, and because you could take turns, and because you could have a lottery. I think he puts it in to exclude sharing as a way out, but, as just explained, it doesn’t plausibly do that. The real reason why, on his other assumptions, they won’t share doesn’t require his indivisibility assumption, and I’ll henceforth drop that assumption.

Now let me explain what expected utility is. The expected utility of a course of action is the sum of the products of the utility and the probability of each of its possible outcomes. Evidently, as you vary probability and utility, the rational course changes.

When I say that there is higher expected utility for Hobbesian agents in sharing or in a lottery, that is under the assumption that two things determine expected utility here: goods bundles and pain and death from fighting. Expected utility must go down on the given assumptions if, instead of sharing, we fight, since that adds a negative quantum to the output bundles without increasing the utility of the goods. So prospects are better for everybody if everybody shares than if everybody adopts an aggressive posture. It is nevertheless arguable that rationality drives the parties to aggression, because of the egoism assumption. For the parties are in what is called a Prisoners’ Dilemma.13

7. The structure of their situation is called Prisoners’ Dilemma because of the example that is usually used to introduce it. The example itself is rather peculiar, but the application of the point it illustrates is very general. It can explain, or contribute to explaining, the existence of the state, of morality, of the need for intervention in markets, for a law imposing a duty to vote, etc.

The example, then. Two persons are caught in flagrante delicto of a certain crime. Other things equal, conviction for that crime, which is easy for the prosecution to secure, will send each to jail for five years. But other things are not equal. The prosecution rightly suspects, yet cannot prove, that the two criminals previously committed another crime together. They say to each: if you confess and the other does not to that earlier crime, you’ll get four years altogether and he’ll get eight; if you both confess you’ll both get seven, and if neither of you confesses you’ll get five, for the flagrante delicto crime. So we get this matrix:

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Each cares only about how many years he gets, so each has this preference ordering:

1. I confess, he doesn’t confess.

2. I don’t confess, he doesn’t confess.

3. I confess, he confesses.

4. I don’t confess, he confesses.

Each is rational, so each takes the dominant course, which is the course where you’re better-off, where you get a better payoff, no matter what the other one does, and therefore each confesses. Consequently, each gets seven years, when each would have got five had neither confessed. Individual rationality generates a Pareto-suboptimal result: that is, the feasible set contains a state of affairs in which no one is worse-off and at least one person is better-off: indeed, here, in which both are better-off, but, because they behave rationally, the parties cannot secure that state of affairs.

Notice that:

(i) The unfortunate result does not depend on uncertainty about what the other person will do, since, whatever I suppose he will do, confession remains rational for me (and, mutatis mutandis, for him).

(ii) It is of no avail to agree on a strategy in advance, since there will be no motive to keep the agreement. The problem does not depend, as is frequently mistakenly said, on lack of communication. Nor does it depend on lack of trust. There is no motive to keep the agreement, even if you trust the other to do so, or even if you know that he will do so.

(iii) Suppose now that each has different motives from those stipulated. Each cares about the other, that is, cares enough so that a year for him is like an extra half year for me, then, with that degree of mutual concern, not confessing becomes dominant, and each will so choose that they both benefit (not only all things, including their mutual concern, considered, but even) from a narrowly selfish point of view, because each will then get only five years:

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Note that the same result will ensue if they do not care about each other through fellow feeling but believe and act on a morality that dictates that 50 percent way of counting others’ interests.

It is not of course always true that mutual concern or morality will make not confessing dominant. That will depend on the extent of the concern or moral conviction and on the alternative sizes of sentences. Sometimes the PD will persist. Sometimes neither confessing nor not confessing will be dominant, and a different decision rule will have to be employed.

(iv) Each is thus better-off from a selfish point of view, because he gets fewer years in jail, only if they each act with regard to the other’s condition. If, for each, the only aim is to maximize his own welfare, then the welfare of neither will be maximized.

(v) But to get that private benefit, they really have to have the mutual concern or moral conviction. They can’t decide to care or to be moral in order to get the private benefit. They can’t argue: if we were moral, or cared about each other, we’d both be better-off: so let’s care, or be moral. For although the premise is true, the inference is absurd. It belongs to the nature of morality that you cannot decide for selfish reasons to be moral. And if you don’t actually care, you can’t simulate caring, for the sake of getting the benefits: that simulation won’t change the motivating payoffs.

(vi) Note that the solution of mutual concern and/or morality does not require that each knows or believes that the other has any concern for him.

(vii) One could say that the prisoners have both too many options, and also preferences they have reason to regret having. They have reason to want not to be able to confess, and they have reason to prefer not to confess, when they are able to confess. So, to anticipate, what a Hobbesian sovereign does, conceiving that sovereign within the framework of the competition story, is to perform the service of benignly reducing options by (sometimes) removing the noncooperative option and (more often) degrading it through attaching a penalty to it, and thereby rendering it dispreferred. The sovereign makes some destructive actions impossible but, more often, he makes such actions rationally ineligible.

8. In order to present the Hobbesian state of nature, conceived along the lines of the competition story, as a Prisoners’ Dilemma, let us take a representative state of nature situation. Two men are equidistant from a deer carcass and each has the choice of adopting a sharing or a grabbing posture with respect to it. First let’s pretend that there is no disutility in pain or in the danger of death. If they both adopt the sharing posture each will get half a deer. If one grabs he’ll get all and the other none. If both grab each has a 50/50 chance of getting the carcass, because of their rough equality. So the expected value, in carcass terms, for each if both grab is half a carcass. Each is a totally self-regarding egoist. Consequently each has this preference ordering, if we leave out of account the pain and danger of death:

1. I grab, he shares;

2. = I share, he shares;

2. = I grab, he grabs (half a carcass is worth the same as 50-percent chance of the lot);

4. I share, he grabs.

Still leaving out the pain and danger of death, the payoff matrix is as follows, with payoffs expressed as (expected) amounts of carcass:

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Clearly we will both grab, because that is dominant, but there is as yet an element of Prisoners’ Dilemma missing: the outcome is not Pareto suboptimal. So a state of war supervenes, but we lack the basic element in the argument for governmental legitimacy. This state of nature is not Pareto suboptimal.14

Now add the disvalue of pain and of danger of death, which we’ll call −x. Enter it in modification of the payoffs in the grab/grab cell, so that they become .5−x in each case. (The remaining payoffs don’t change.) What will the parties now do? That depends, of course, on how large x is. To be precise, grabbing remains dominant as long as x is less than .5, so that the expectation under joint grabbing remains positive. But now the result is suboptimal, however small x may be, because .5 − x, which is what they can expect to get if they both grab, is less than .5, which is what they get if they both share.

Of course, the figures won’t stack up that way every time. In some encounters the carcass will be very small, or the opponent will be very big, and x, the pain plus death danger, will exceed half the carcass’s value. Hobbes doesn’t say that every encounter in the state of nature is a battle. (Hence his invocation of the rainy weather analogy.)15 But x will fall short of .5 often enough to make the state of nature a state of war.

9. So much, then, in exposition of the Hobbesian state of nature, under the assumption of universal egoism and no underivative other-regarding interests, the exposition which I call the competition story, and which is structurally a Prisoners’ Dilemma.

I turn to the diffidence story, where the prevailing game is not Prisoners’ Dilemma but the assurance game. The two games differ in that the order of the top two preferences in the Prisoners’ Dilemma is reversed in the assurance game (with the third and fourth preferences unchanged). Thus, for the original story about the prisoners, their game is an assurance game if their preferences are as follows:

1. I don’t confess, he doesn’t confess

2. I confess, he doesn’t confess

3. I confess, he confesses

4. I don’t confess, he confesses.

More generally, here is the preference ordering in the assurance game, where “defect” just means “doesn’t cooperate”:

1. I co-op, he co-ops

2. I defect, he co-ops

3. I defect, he defects

4. I co-op, he defects.

Here I am not (fully) egoistic, since, if I know that he will cooperate, then I will cooperate, even though I would benefit from a selfish point of view from defecting: I wouldn’t do that because I have a sense of fair play; I don’t want to be a free rider. (Yet it seems a curiously limited one, for why do I prefer exploitation [second preference] to nonproduction? I suppose I would prefer that if the stakes are high enough.) Note that I will not cooperate no matter what: if I expect him to defect, then I will defect: my third preference is better than my fourth. I don’t want to be a “sucker”; I am not a Kantian who will do whatever I would will all to do regardless of whether I expect others to do it. The Kantian preference orderings:

Sane Kantian

Insane Kantian

1. I co-op, he co-ops

1. = I co-op, he co-ops

2. I co-op, he defects

1. = I co-op, he defects

3. I defect, he co-ops

3. = I defect, he co-ops

4. I defect, he defects

3. = I defect, he defects (Insane because all I care about is being moral).

But, as an assurance game person, I prefer cooperating to free riding. (Notice that none of the 4 Schelling conditions—footnote 14 above—now hold.)

Now the assurance game is so called because I need to be assured that you will cooperate for cooperation to be my unambiguously preferred option. If I believe you will, then so will I. If I believe you won’t, then I won’t. And if I just don’t know, then I’m thrown into a quandary; it’s hard for me to figure out what to do.

Here, unlike what’s true in the Prisoners’ Dilemma, trust makes all the difference. It is no longer true that defecting is dominant, regardless of what I think you’ll do, for, if I can be assured that you’ll cooperate, then so will I. But, according to Hobbes, I cannot be so assured, on a regular basis, in the state of nature. I cannot be sure that you will always be disposed to cooperate even if I do, and the cost of wrongly reckoning on your cooperation is often so great that it would be irrational to gamble on your being cooperative. Accordingly, I will act, often enough, just as I do in Prisoners’ Dilemma. I will do the uncooperative thing; I will set myself to grab the carcass, not to share it, and so will you, often enough: we will, that is, do so often enough for the state of nature to degenerate into a state of war even if we relax the egoism assumption and construe the state of nature not as competition Prisoners’ Dilemma, but as diffidence assurance game.

That ends my exposition of the second story of breakdown into war, the diffidence story, relying not on a desire to have more than others, but on a desire to have enough to live on, together with diffidence with respect to whether others will allow us that. We don’t all have to be rapacious for the diffidence story to work. We only have to be uncertain about others not being rapacious. Or, as one Hobbesian text suggests, we only have to believe that some men go beyond desire for secure competence, and be uncertain who they are:

[T]here be some, that taking pleasure in contemplating their own power in the acts of conquest, which they pursue further than their security requires; if others, that otherwise would be glad to be at ease within modest bounds, should not by invasion increase their power, they would not be able, long time, by standing only on their defence, to subsist.16

Perhaps that text doesn’t establish the assurance game as opposed to the Prisoners’ Dilemma. Perhaps Rob Shaver is right, in his excellent “Leviathan, King of the Proud.” He leaves open the possibility that we might both prefer mutual nonanticipation to anticipation without counter-anticipation. He is neutral between supposing that we face a Prisoners’ Dilemma or an assurance game. In either case, conflict is likely. And in either case, the rationality of anticipation is founded on the empirical point that, in circumstances of scarcity and equality, offense is the best defense.17

I told these stories with respect to the grabbing of a deer carcass. But the war will be worse for the fact that people who have managed to secure goods to themselves, who have taken their carcasses home, will have good reason to fear that others will try to wrest them from them. And if we add that in the resulting pervasively uncertain conditions people cannot cooperatively produce anything, any more than they can be confident of retaining anything that they produce individually, then the state of nature is seen to be more parlous still.

Having expounded the competition story, I remarked that the sovereign solves the Prisoners’ Dilemma partly by making defection impossible but mainly by attaching such a cost to defection as to make cooperation dominant. To the extent that Hobbes relies not on competition but on diffidence, the role of the sovereign is somewhat different: because I know that he will deter potential offenders, I can behave cooperatively with confidence that others will. The penalty is needed not to deter people whose first preference is predatory, but to assure me that others, whatever their motives may be, will not predate.18

10. In the competition story people are egoistic, in the diffidence story they are not, but in neither do they, in the mass,19 display a lust for power over others as something which they desire as such, as opposed to for reasons of safety and comfort. They have no negative underivative other-regarding passion, which is what a lust for power, properly speaking, is. It is a desire to do others down, and oneself up, for no further reason.

The first two stories ignore the picturesque side of Hobbes, his picture of humans as prideful beings bent on honor and glory. Glory is delight in one’s own power, and, you will recall, it is the third of the “principal causes of quarrel”20 after competition and diffidence. I turn now to a story of breakdown into war which turns on the glory motivation.

In a pure glory story, and by pure glory story I mean a glory story bereft of competition and diffidence elements, people fight not for payoffs describable independently of their contest but for the sake of victory as such. In competition and diffidence stories, and mixtures thereof, no one cares about the amount of goods that others get, except insofar as that might affect his own power in future contests, and he cares about that only because he cares about keeping his goods. There is no underivative interest in superiority over others. In pure glory, by contrast, the point of fighting is to achieve and display victory, not to obtain or secure the material spoils of victory, and the chief value of those spoils is that their display is proof of your prowess. (Why would being opulent be something you could show off to others unless it was desirable in itself? How could a palace be valuable only as impressing others? Perhaps there’s this answer: it’s valuable because of the power inter alia to command labor that it betokens, like a pyramid. Anyway, even if it has first to be desirable in itself, that need not falsify the statement about what is its chief value.)

Stylizing things a bit, let us say that in state of nature encounters on pure glory assumptions about motivation each party can either go forth aggressively or stand off. The matrix below gives the four possible upshots of those choices:

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Here, analogously to the competition story where grabbing was dominant, aggressing is dominant: it is better for me to be aggressive whether or not he is. So we get a state of war. But, unlike what’s true in the competition story, the structure is not by its very nature Prisoners’ Dilemma, since, for Prisoners’ Dilemma, the lower right outcome has to be worse for both than the upper left is, and, on the motives we’ve thus far imputed, we cannot yet say that. Insert now the pain and danger of fighting, as a subtrahend which reduces the expected value to each of the upper left outcome, and, if that reduction is high enough, we do get Prisoners’ Dilemma and the associated rationale for an omnipotent ruler.

However, and, as we shall see in 12, where I discuss Strauss’s Hobbes, some commentators so emphasize the prideful side of Hobbes and so play down fear of death as such and aversion to pain in Hobbesian men that those motives don’t amount to enough to make the state of war suboptimal, so that the glory story, in their hands, fails to provide a rationale for a sovereign. In other words: massively glory-oriented people who don’t care much about pain and death as such might not welcome the creation of a state and settled society, because, in such a condition, they must rein themselves in, and thereby they lose the opportunity for supreme honor and glory, which for them outweighs any advantages that peace brings. Many Mafia people, at least as they are depicted in the movies, would disprefer peace and legal jobs even with a guarantee of more cash.

It is interesting to note, against the background of the stories of descent into war that I have distinguished, that, in the run-up to the Gulf War, it was said, sometimes by one and the same commentator, that Saddam Hussein would not heed the allies’ warnings, he would go to war, because he did not realize that the allies’ warnings were serious, and because he did not care about, he even relished, destruction. Those were incompatible explanations of his intransigence. If he relished combat, he should have gone to war if and because he thought the allies were serious.

I promised an explanation of why I always refer to men when expounding Hobbes. That is because in the competition and diffidence stories we’re talking about heads of families, providers of deer carcasses, whom Hobbes would certainly regard as men: after all, somebody has to stay home and look after the kids; and in the glory story we’re talking about strutting cocks of the walk and women will readily agree that the heads of families must be men.21

11. There can, of course, be various kinds of mixed stories. There can be a mixture through mere conjunction of motives in every person, so that everyone cares underivatively both about material goods and about honor and reputation, and has some sense of fair play, in which case all three stories apply, in different circumstances, or even sometimes in the same circumstances. Or there can be a story with a mixture of people, like a polymorphous species, as in Kavka’s picture of breakdown into war, according to which some people are what he calls “dominators,” and there have to be such people, who relish power over others as such, to get the game-theoretical ball rolling toward war. I don’t think Hobbes needs dominators for his competition story, or even (though here it’s less clear) for his diffidence story, but he certainly says (as we saw in Section 9 above) that some people are dominators,22 and also see the very population-partitioning De Cive 1.4.23

There can also be more organic structurings of the elements I’ve distinguished, such as a Marxoid story in which the desire for glory is superstructural on the security preoccupation—if others acknowledge your power they won’t threaten you and you’ll be safe. I do not mean that then glory is derivative in the defined sense: the point is not that it’s here wanted just as a means. Rather, the preoccupation with honor and glory causally derives, in some subtle way, from material considerations. The person aims underivatively at power, but the genesis of the prevalence of such aims is in some way economic. (Think of two quite different reasons why a Mafioso brandishes his power: to impress in order to subdue, where subduing is his conscious aim; and to impress, period, where it’s nevertheless plausible that such impressing goes on in some way because of its tendency to subdue: it is, that is to say, functionally explained.)

(I have also already implicitly mentioned a reverse structure, in Section 10, where the struggle to get and keep goods is other-regarding at its root, because it’s an insult to your pride if others think you’re too weak to secure lots of goods for yourself. Here, unlike above, derivativity, as defined, appears.)

Within these elementary motivational differences, we can set out crucially different views about competitiveness, which is a type of motivation, and competition, which is a process. I call the views crucially different because they affect how much an aspiration like socialism is or is not a pipe dream. On a left view, competitiveness is superstructural on a competitively structured economy, and an argument against such a structure. On one right view competitiveness is in human nature and unless you allow its expression through a competitive structure, you’ll get either anarchy or coercion. (John Major said that capitalism goes with the grain of human nature.) On a different right view, it indeed supervenes on the structure, but, although not innate, it should be promoted, because of its productivity.

12. Commentators differ in their interpretations of Hobbes, along the axes that I have distinguished. You might think that, whatever other differences in interpretation are possible, nobody could claim that Hobbes offers a pure glory story. Even if you think there’s a glory element, glory, you might think, is surely accompanied by one or both of the other elements (since people care re eating and staying alive), even if not actually superstructural on them. But one famous commentator thinks that Hobbes goes all the way with glory. For Strauss, the very fear of death exists only in an other-regarding form. A refutation of his view will provide the occasion for a better understanding of Hobbes.

Strauss disdains the view that Hobbesian men are in combat because of natural scarcity. He thinks men fight in the state of nature because of an underivative desire to excel over one another, and that the reason why the state is necessary is that their pride needs to be subdued. As I said, Strauss explains even the fear of death in an other-regarding way. What men fear, Strauss believes, is not death as such but violent death, which is death at the hands of another man, because it is the ultimate insult, indignity, or proof of lack of power. “When he says of an agonizing death that it is the greatest evil, he thinks exclusively of violent death at the hand of other men.”24 “Hobbes reduces man’s natural appetite to vanity, he cannot but recognize the fear of a violent death—not the fear of a painful death, and certainly not the striving after self-preservation—as the principle of morality … The ever-greater triumph over others … is the aim and happiness of natural man.”25 Men fear death only because it is a massive humiliation.26

Strauss must be wrong about this. Even if there is an underivative lust for honor, it is wholly ridiculous to say that fear of death, as such, that is, non-other-regardingly, does not operate at all in Hobbes.

You can see that Strauss is wrong, that men care about things other than avoiding death, let alone just violent death, as Strauss interprets that, where violence implies violation, by looking at the most famous passage in Leviathan, his description of what’s bad about the state of nature:

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 Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.27

Locke said that God put men under strong obligations of necessity, convenience, and inclination to drive them into society.28 By this I take him to have meant, respectively, that men join society because outside it life is precarious (hence “necessity”), lacking in comfort (hence “convenience”), and lacking in fellowship (hence “inclination”). Hobbes’s catalog of state of nature infirmities certainly includes the danger of death, but it also includes absence of comforts and commodities possession of which cannot naturally here be construed as sought for other-regarding reasons. And if they seek Lockean convenience for self-regarding reasons, it is a fortiori plausible that they non-other-regardingly shun death, simply because it would deprive them of the comforts they seek, and not only because it means humiliation. So Strauss is doubly wrong: avoiding death isn’t their only aim, and, to the extent that they do avoid death, it’s not just because it’s a dishonor.

Thus far I’ve discerned in the famous catalog a non-other-regarding desire for commodities, while allowing an other-regarding element in aversion to insecurity and death. But the catalog seems even to contain something belonging to what Locke called the “inclination” reason for joining society, because one of the things we lack in the state of nature is “society,” which, so I take it, means companionship, which you might well think means that people actually like each other, unless we interpret Leviathan here in the light of De Cive, which says that “all society … is either for gain, or for glory; that is, not so much for love of our fellows, as for love of ourselves.”29 On that view, society, apart from enabling economies of scale and gains from trade, which is the gain bit, is good because it’s a field in which you can show off. (Compare Ambrose Bierce’s definition of a “bore,” in The Devil’s Dictionary: someone who speaks when you want him to listen.)30 But whether or not even Locke’s inclination plays a role, and if so, in a friendly form, Hobbes is plainly concerned in his depiction of the lacks in the state of nature not only with the “being” but with the “well-being” of mankind, to use a distinction he himself employs.31

Strauss may have been misled, as I am sure other commentators have been, by such statements as that all Sovereignty was ordained for the safety of preserving a man’s body.32 But this needs to be read with the passage which says that “by Safety here, is not meant a bare Preservation, but also all the other Contentments of life.”33 Hobbes is explicit that “the Passions that encline men to Peace are Feare of Death; Desire of such things as are necessary to commodious living; and a hope by their Industry to attain them.”34

In resisting Strauss, I have not been trying to show that men lack underived other-regarding passions, but to cast doubt on his curious idea that they alone explain the impulsion to enter society.35

Do underivative other-regarding passions play any part in generating war? Clearly honor, pride, glory play a part in generating war, but are they underivative?

Hobbes so emphasizes the desire for honor, for others’ having a high opinion of one’s power, that one might think it must be underivative. But there is a rather important passage which points contrariwise. Hobbes speaks of “Desire of Power, of Riches, of Knowledge and of Honour.” And then he says: “All which may be reduced to … Desire of Power. For Riches Knowledge and Honour are but severall sorts of Power.”36 Now this is an interesting non sequitur. It is a non sequitur because the fact that A is a kind of B does not mean that a desire for A reduces to a desire for B. My desire for a banana does not reduce to a desire for some fruit, as if an apple would also necessarily do. And the non sequitur is interesting because Hobbes’s making it strongly suggests the derivativity of honor on power. That is, the best explanation of Hobbes’s fallaciously inferring the conclusion is that he believes it, independently. Note the relevant parallel. If I want a banana just because it is a piece of fruit, then I want a banana derivatively, after the second form of derivativity distinguished at 4 above, the derivativity of way, not means.

The passage suggests, then, that men want the kind of power that honor is because they want power as such. How does honor give power? Through a bandwagon effect. Honor is belief in another’s power, and “Reputation of power is Power; because it draweth with it the adherence of those that need protection.”37

13. Strauss is wrong that the desire for power is wholly underivatively other-regarding. But is the restless desire for power at least in part underivatively other-regarding? That factors into two questions. Is it at all other-regarding? If it is, is it, to any extent, underivatively so?

The first question’s answer is clearly yes. To be sure, desire for power is not other-regarding just as the desire for present means to future good. But it is other-regarding in that men always want more power than others have and glory in such superiority of power. This is expressed in what indeed looks like an underivative way in the Elements of Law, pt. 1, chap. 7, para. 7:

[A]s men attain to more riches, honours, or other power; so their appetite groweth more and more; and when they are come to the utmost degree of one kind of power, they pursue some other, as long as in any kind they think themselves behind any other. (emphasis added)38

To put it like that, in terms of growth of appetite, makes it look underivative. But in Leviathan there is reason for ceaseless power acquisition which doesn’t involve a lust for power as such but relates to the precariousness of any accumulation of power in the state of nature. Thus, right before he imputes the perpetual and restless desire of power after power, Hobbes importantly adds: “And the cause of this, is not alwayes that a man hopes for a more intensive delight, than he has already attained to; or that he cannot be content with a moderate power: but because he cannot assure the power and means to live well, which he hath present, without the acquisition of more.”39 There is nothing underivatively other-regarding in that, any more than there is something underivatively other-regarding in the squirrel’s undoubtedly other-regarding heaping up of as many nuts as he can.

The Leviathan passage certainly gives the desire for power an extensively if not entirely derivative basis, since power is by implication here seen as a means to live well;40 here they are never content with what they have not because they cannot be content with a moderate power but because a moderate amount means possibly less than others have and that means possibly not enough: power differences to a large extent determine net power amounts.

The diagnostic problem I’ve been discussing is parallel to the problem of diagnosing the motives of capitalists in a highly competitive capitalist economy. Is their unlimited profit drive a discontent with any given mass of profit because they want to be top dog as such, or does it reflect the permanent possibility of being outplayed in the future?

14. In 13 I was showing how other-regarding passions might be interpreted as derivative, but I want to close this part of the lectures by showing that they are not always so, even if they are not the central part of the story. I give three text-based arguments to that end.

(i) The first, and perhaps the most interesting one, is in chapter 17, where Hobbes deals with an objection to his claim that men cannot live peaceably save under an awesome power. The objection points out that bees and ants do so and asks why men therefore could not as well. He answers thus:

First, that men are continually in competition for Honour and Dignity, which these creatures are not; and consequently amongst men there ariseth on that ground, Envy and Hatred, and finally Warre; but amongst these not so.41

This says that we have other-regarding destructive passions which they lack. And the next paragraph makes it seem that it is only such passions and no other which govern us:

Secondly, that amongst these creatures, the Common good differeth not from the Private; and being by nature enclined to their private, they procure thereby the common benefit. But man, whose Joy consisteth in comparing himselfe with other men, can relish nothing but what is eminent [i.e. superior].42

This pretty well establishes underivative other-regarding passions as figuring in the breakdown to war. Indeed, he seems to go so far as to suggest that men care about nothing but prevailing against others.

Still, there are two things that might be said by way of an attempt to diminish the force of the reply to the bees problem as evidence that all people care about is doing others down and themselves up. The first is to suggest, boringly, that Hobbes is carelessly overreacting to the bees problem. The second and more cunning move is to draw a contrast between, on the one hand, sources of “joy,” that is, things we “relish,” and other things that we want. We may get no wonderful relishable joy from life and physical comfort, but it doesn’t follow that it’s false that we want them, and that that desire figures as part of the genesis of war. You might think these diminishing strategies are cast in doubt, however, by two powerful statements in De Cive, which are not responses to a bees counterexample and which don’t restrict their ambit to special pleasure:

[A]ll the pleasure and jollity of the mind consists in this, even to get some [people], with whom comparing, it may find somewhat wherein to triumph and vaunt itself. (emphasis added)43

[M]an scarce esteems anything good which hath not somewhat of eminence in the enjoyment, more than that which others do possess. (emphasis added)44

But again, pleasure and jollity of mind may not be all that one wants, and the second passage does say “scarce esteems anything good.”

I have no doubt that there are competition and diffidence elements in Hobbes which do not reduce to glory, for all that he fails to invoke them in his response re the bees. He is an implicit game theorist, but he did not realize that he was. (To use an Althusserian contrast, there is game theory in Hobbes, but in a practical, untheorized, not made explicit state.) He should have said, in addition to invoking pride in rebutting the bees counterexample, that bees collaborate instinctively, whereas our reason makes us prey to Prisoners’ Dilemmas and assurance games. He was insufficiently conscious of his own innovation to say that, so he sometimes lapses into too heavy a use of the picturesque passions, and he sees men’s passions as making them shortsighted, as if the problem were short-term versus long-term interest, rather than the Prisoners’ Dilemma or the assurance game. (We shall see that Hume too misrepresents what is in fact a Prisoners’ Dilemma problem as a matter of short-term versus long-term interest.)

(ii) Back now to the second text-based argument for saying that the glory-centered other-regarding passions are not derivative.

If desire for honor were derivative, why would it continue so powerfully in a well-ordered state (which has tamed the struggle for power) that it needs to be very nicely regulated. Why must the sovereign bestow titles of honor; why are “Lawes of honour … necessary”?45 And compare De Cive: “ambition and greediness of honours cannot be rooted out of the minds of men.”46 This is the unbourgeois side of Hobbes’s theory of human nature and political philosophy:

Of the Passions that most frequently are the causes of Crime, one is Vain-glory, or a foolish over-rating of their own worth; as if difference of worth were an effect of their wit, or riches, or bloud, or some other natural quality, not depending on the Will of those that have the Soveraign Authority. From whence proceedeth a Presumption that the punishments ordained by the Lawes, and extended generally to all Subjects, ought not to be inflicted on them, with the same rigour they are inflicted on poore, obscure, and simple men, comprehended under the name of the Vulgar.47

(iii) Finally, he puts Pride first in a summary passage when he says that Man’s Pride and other Passions have compelled him to submit himself to government, and he calls that government “Leviathan, King of the Proud.”48 If anything, De Cive is gloomier about how much men want to lord it sadistically over others: Hobbes vigorously denies “that man is a creature born fit for society.” He denies that “by nature one man … love[s] another”;49 he speaks of a “mutual will of hurting,”50 and of “this natural proclivity of men, to hurt each other, which they derive from their passions, but chiefly from a vain esteem of themselves.”51

The right conclusion is that there are two kinds of stories in Hobbes, competition and diffidence on the one hand, glory on the other, one excluding and the other including antagonistic underivative other-regarding passions, two kinds of stories that he did not disentangle from each other. Hobbes occurs, historically, amid an age of transition from an aristocratic to a bourgeois outlook, and he tells stories reflecting each of them, with little consciousness of his own transitional and therefore ambiguous status.

HOW DOES HOBBES JUSTIFY POLITICAL OBLIGATION?

15. So far I’ve discussed why the state of nature is a state of war. Now I turn to the second question I promised to address, which (see Section 1) is: how does the fact that the state of nature is a state of war justify governmental authority, according to Hobbes? Let me generalize that question a little: how does Hobbes justify governmental authority? The point of the generalization is that there are, as far as I can see, four more or less distinct answers to the more general question, and they do not rely equally on the fact that the state of nature is a state of war. The first two answers clearly do: they are, moreover, quite distinct from each other, and I shall call them the consequentialist and contractarian answers. The third and fourth answers are very closely connected, and not so evidently dependent on the thesis that the state of nature is a state of war. I shall call them the consent and authorization answers.

I’ll now expound the four answers, and then comment on the first three of them.

(i) The first answer is consequentialist. Government extinguishes the Prisoners’ Dilemmas, and/or renders the assurance game benign, and thereby facilitates peace, cooperation, and industry. The two conditions, of nature and civil society, are compared, and, so it is urged, the condition of society and government being conducive to peace, cooperation, and industry, instead of uncontrolled competition and war, anyone must regard the former as superior, whatever standard for judging conditions he uses. He is driven to that judgment if, in particular, he is an expected utility maximizer, or a maximinizer, or what Kavka calls a disaster avoider.52 A maximinizer says: choose the alternative with the best worst outcome, that is, whose outcome, on a worst-case scenario, is better than the worst outcome of any available alternative. A disaster-avoider chooses the course of action that maximizes the chances of avoiding all disastrous outcomes. An expected utility maximizer and a maximinizer will choose B and a disaster-avoider will choose A:

img

(Note: 5 and below are disasters)

Some say risk-aversion, as counterposed to expected utility maximization, is irrational; others say it is properly expressed in an extremely negative payoff value for the outcome you are averse to.

The Hobbesian claim is that society scores over nature on all these criteria. It is unclear which criterion Hobbes intended to invoke, but he scores on all three, if, of course, his description of the contrast between nature and governmental society is correct.

The basic and simple idea is that when there’s a state capable of enforcing cooperative behavior, through making defecting behavior impossible or too expensive, then collective action problems are overcome, because it becomes each person’s rational self-interest, on any reasonable principle of the latter, to play the sharing, cooperative game. The endless frantic accumulating can stop because you can be sure that the police will protect your stock.

Every man indeed out of the state of civil government hath a most entire, but unfruitful liberty; because that he who by reason of his own liberty acts all at his own will, must also by reason of the same liberty in others suffer all at another’s will. But in a constituted city, every subject retains to himself as much freedom as suffices him to live well and quietly, and there is so much taken away from others, as may make them not to be feared. Out of this state, every man has a right to all, as yet he can enjoy nothing; in it, each one securely enjoys his limited right. Out of it, any man may rightly spoil or kill another; in it, none but one. Out of it, we are protected by our own forces; in it by the power of all. Out of it, no man is sure of the fruit of his labours; in it, all men are. Lastly, out of it, there is a dominion of passions, war, fear, poverty, slovenliness, solitude, barbarism, ignorance, cruelty; in it, the dominion of reason, peace, security, riches, decency, society, elegancy, science, and benevolence.53

Note that this is not a contractarian justification. The idea is not that, the state of nature being so bad, men do or would contract into society under government. It’s just that, the state of nature being so bad, men are better-off under government. You can see that it’s not contractarian by reflecting that it’s consistent with thinking (whether or not this is correct) that the contractarian justification is defeated by the consideration that, however bad the state of nature is, collective action problems would prevent people from contracting out of it. Prisoners’ Dilemma and assurance problems, and problems of communication and coordination, are irrelevant to the comparison of the two conditions but dead relevant to a claim that people would contract out of the worse of the two.54

(ii) The second and contractarian justification of obedience says that so parlous is the state of nature that those in it would mutually covenant to surrender themselves to a sovereign and thereby be bound by promise to obey him. But, the question naturally arises, does this justification apply to people who never gave such a promise because they never were in a state of nature? A widely favored Hobbes interpretation says yes, because if you were in a state of nature, that’s what you’d do.

There’s an objection to the logic of this answer which is popular but which I think mistaken. But there’s also an objection to it as an interpretation of Hobbes, which I think is correct.

The objection to the logic, raised, for example by Dworkin in his critique of Rawlsian contractarianism, is that a hypothetical contract can’t bind: if I would have paid you £100 for this, how does that show that I’m committed to doing so?55 A hypothetical contract, one might say, isn’t worth the paper it’s not written on. But to that there is a reply. Unlike, for example, the Rawlsian hypothetical contract, the Hobbesian one is one you’d make, if you’re rational, in any circumstance other than that of the unlimited sovereignty into which you’d then contract yourself. Unlike what holds for the Rawlsian contract, it’s not just in special circumstances that you’d make it: X and Y will make it whenever neither rules the other and no Z rules both. To that one might counterreply that it’s then hard to see how such a hypothetical contract differs from the first consequentialist justification. But the acid test is how the proponent of the justification would respond to the challenge that collective action problems might stymie a contemplated contract. If she regards them as irrelevant, she is consequentializing. If they worry her, she is contractarianizing. And, anyway, justification by what you would will is not identical with justification by your welfare. Under the best interpretation of Rawls his contract doesn’t bind because if you were in the veil of ignorance you’d make it, so you’re bound by your hypothetical promise. Rather, his claim is that what folk in the veil of ignorance would choose are principles of justice, so you are bound by what they choose not directly because they choose it but because what they choose must be just.

But however that may be, whatever, that is, you may think the force of the hypothetical contract argument is, and whether or not you think that, if it lacks force, then Hobbes couldn’t have intended it, it seems to me a powerful argument against thinking that Hobbes rests justification on such a contract that there is no hint of such a suggestion in the text, and Hobbes is pretty explicit in his claims.

(iii) Now, that skepticism regarding the presence of a hypothetical contract argument in Hobbes makes most interesting the presence in Hobbes of a not much discussed third justification of the state. It’s interesting because it looks more needed. And here I mean an argument of actual consent. Actual consent is of course present in an actual contract in the state of nature, when a commonwealth is, in Hobbes’s terms, instituted; but it also figures in the case of submission to a conqueror in what Hobbes calls commonwealth by acquisition; and, most interestingly, he construes it as offered in effect by anyone who peaceably goes about his business in ordinary society. (I’ll expound this at length in a moment, in Section 16.)

(iv) Finally, there is the motif of authorization, connected with but not identical with the actual consent justification. Hobbes argues that “the Subject is Author of every act the Soveraign doth”56 and it is therefore absurd for him to disobey a law. To oppose the sovereign’s law is, absurdly, to complain about what you have yourself authored.57

16. More on (iii): Hobbes explains Commonwealth by acquisition, or what he differently calls, in De Cive, “natural power”58 as follows:

A Common-wealth by Acquisition, is that, where the Soveraign Power is acquired by Force; And it is acquired by force, when men singly, or many together by plurality of voices, for fear of death, or bonds, do authorise all the actions of that Man, or Assembly, that hath their lives and liberty in his Power.59

So it’s typically a culmination of war. Now Hobbes’s rebuttal of the objection that the duress or fear which drives the submitter to his “authorisation” deprives it of validity is extremely important:

And this kind of Dominion, or Soveraignty, differeth from Soveraignty by Institution, onely in this, That men who choose their Soveraign, do it for fear of one another, and not of him who they Institute: But in this case, they subject themselves to him they are afraid of. In both cases they do it for fear: which is to be noted by them, that hold all such Covenants, as proceed from fear of death, or violence, voyd: which if it were true, no man in any kind of Common-wealth, could be obliged to Obedience.60

I shall not stop to consider whether Hobbes’s rebuttal of the duress objection is telling.61 What I do want you to note is the closing emphasis of the rebuttal in the passage just quoted. He says that since in both “voluntary” institution and coerced acquisition men submit from fear, if fear voided the submission to coercion in the acquisition case then in no kind of commonwealth could there be an obligation to obey. Notice for Hobbes it is extremely important that, in commonwealth by acquisition, it is his own actual agreement that binds the subject:

Dominion acquired by Conquest, or Victory in war, is that which some Writers call DESPOTICALL … and is the Dominion of the Master over his Servant. And this Dominion is then acquired to the Victor, when the Vanquished, to avoyd the present stroke of death, covenanteth either in expresse words, or by other sufficient signes of the Will, that so long as his life, and the liberty of his body is allowed him, the Victor shall have the use thereof, at his pleasure. And after such Covenant made, the Vanquished is a SERVANT, and not before: for by the word Servant … is not meant a Captive, which is kept in prison, or bonds, till the owner of him that took him, or bought him of one that did, shall consider what to do with him: (for such men (commonly called Slaves,) have no obligation at all; but may break their bonds, or the prison; and kill, or carry away captive their Master justly:) but one, that being taken, hath corporall liberty allowed him; and upon promise not to run away, nor to do violence to his Master, is trusted by him.

It is not therefore the Victory, that giveth the right of Dominion over the Vanquished, but his own Covenant. Nor is he obliged because he is Conqurered; that is to say, beaten, and taken, or put to flight; but because he commeth in, and submitteth to the Victor.62

There is a contrast, with captive slaves.

The first quoted passage says that that all submission is out of fear, and it suggests, ex silentio, that commonwealths by institution and by acquisition exhaust the possibilities, a suggestion which is confirmed by De Cive, 8.1:63 the third case, right by generation, isn’t exactly a commonwealth. But that raises an acute problem about citizens who neither participated in instituting a commonwealth nor submitted out of fear to a conqueror. The answer, which I shall presently document textually, is that every citizen who has not participated in instituting a commonwealth is moved by fear to submit either expressly or tacitly, if not to a conqueror properly so called, then at any rate to a ruler. People divide without remainder into those who submit and a minority who, not doing so, make themselves outlaws, in a state of nature vis-à-vis others, and, consequently, noncitizens without political obligation. Everyone else at least tacitly consents to governmental authority, presumably for fear of being in a state of nature vis-à-vis that authority, and therefore losing its protection against others and possibly also suffering its active enmity. Let me now substantiate this interpretation textually.

Hobbes is anxious to insist that there exist “signs of contract by inference,”64 where the base of the inference may be not only words but also silence or actions or forbearances, indeed, “whatsoever sufficiently argues the will of the contractor.” And other texts show Hobbes exploiting the concept of tacit consent to argue for obedience.

Hobbes says that there is no law over natural fools, children, and madmen, “no more than over brute beasts”:65 vis-à-vis everyone they are in a state of nature. And the reason why is that:

they had never power to make any covenant, or to understand the consequences thereof; and consequently never took upon them to authorise the actions of any Soveraign, as they must do that make to themselves a Common-wealth.66

They are in commonwealth with no one because they have not authorized the actions of any sovereign. That suggests67 that all others, all those who are nonfools, nonchildren, and nonmadmen do consent to government. And that suggestion is explicit where he says that “[t]he Author, or Legislator is supposed in every Common-wealth to be evident, because he is the Soveraign, who [has] been Constituted by the consent of every one” (emphasis added).68 And what does he think proves or shows that consent? That each man “hath himself demanded, or [N.B., GAC] wittingly received against others” the Sovereign’s “protection.”69

That “wittingly received” is Lockean tacit consent. And it is further evident in this passage from the “Review and Conclusion” that Hobbes relies on tacit consent:

But this promise may be either Expresse, by Promise: Tacite, by other signes. As for example, a man that hath not been called to make such an expresse Promise, (because he is one whose power perhaps is not considerable;) yet if he live under their Protection openly, hee is understood to submit himselfe to the Government.70

And the rest of the passage, which you can read for yourself, makes clear that tacit consent to an established government is equivalent to express consent to a conqueror, with respect to its obligation-creating significance. And that Hobbes requires actual consent is further confirmed in De Cive, chap. 14, para. 12:

The right of making laws could not be conferred on any man without his own consent and covenant, either expressed or supposed; expressed, when from the beginning the citizens do themselves constitute a form of governing the city, or when by promise they submit themselves to the dominion of any one; or supposed at least, as when they make use of the benefit of the realm and laws for their protection and conservation against others.71

17. To summarize the position, as I understand it: Hobbes, in his nonconsequentialist manifestation, goes for sovereignty being justified by covenant and consent, knows full well that in most cases a government enjoys authority over a citizen neither because he participated in its original institution nor because he bowed to it as conqueror (which is commonwealth by acquisition), and he is therefore driven to an anticipation of Locke on tacit consent, because there has to be consent. And, as we shall (retrospectively) see when we come to Locke, Hobbes rests more on tacit consent than Locke does, for in Locke it only binds you for the nonce, whereas in Hobbes it binds no less than express consent does.

Into the bargain Hobbes in effect anticipates and rebuts one of the Hume criticisms of tacit consent doctrine, to wit, that you can hardly regard it as consent when it is forced.72 On the contrary, it is precisely the fact that they have no rational choice but to consent, are, that is, forced to, which makes Hobbes sure that in effect they do.

18. As for evaluation of these three lines of justification of obedience, the third (actual consent)—I’ll look at in subsequent chapters in the context of Locke and of Hume. I’ll say a very little about the first (consequentialist) justification and a bit more about the second (hypothetical contract) justification and the fourth.

A question often raised with respect to the first or consequentialist justification is: how can we be sure that so comprehensive a sovereign will not misuse its power?73

An answer imputable to Hobbes is that the sovereign may to a degree abuse his power, but, if he is rational, then he will not abuse it so much as to make himself an encumbrance rather than a benefit, for then his subjects would rise, peaceful coexistence would go, and in the ensuing chaos the man or men who constitute Leviathan will share in the dire consequences.74

Now this is a bit swift, as Kavka shows.75 But something like it will suffice as an answer to Locke, who, I think, missed the point when he claimed it to be absurd on Hobbes’s part to tell men to entrust themselves to lions in order to escape polecats and foxes.76 For a good Hobbesian reply to Locke is that the real choice is between being surrounded by polecats each of whom has reason to be hostile to you and to exert his force against you and submitting to one lion who indeed could finish you off tout de suite but who may reasonably be expected to have better things to do.

19. I think the standard criticism of the second pattern of justification, the multilateral covenant, is pretty compelling. It says, in brief, that if the state of nature is really as bad as Hobbes says, then it cannot be exited from in the way that Hobbes says. The very lack of trust among people which makes the state essential makes forming it impossible. One sees why these men would like to exchange subsequently acted on promises. But, if they can achieve that, why are they in such a mess in the first place? Someone who thinks that world government is necessary because individual states are unrelentingly rapacious thereby concedes that world government is also impossible. He could not expect the states he describes to agree to it, for, if they could, then why could they not agree to lesser restrictions on their rapacity, which would make world government unnecessary? Pressure by citizenries as an alternative is here irrelevant because we’re analogizing states with individuals in the state of nature. Anyway, citizenries could also press for reduction in rapacity. In 1961 I heard Otto Nathan, who was secretary to Albert Einstein, say: “All my life I told Einstein: ‘World government will only be possible when it is no longer necessary.’ But now the situation is so grave that I change my mind.”

In Prisoners’ Dilemma terms, why should disobedience not remain dominant? Think of the covenant as throwing away one’s sword if others do. Then either they will or they won’t. If they will I’m better-off keeping mine. If they won’t I’d better keep mine. If, being more assurance oriented, I gamble on trusting them, and others are similarly disposed, then why can’t we ameliorate the state of nature through bits of trust and wary cooperative behavior? Why do we need a comprehensive Leviathan?

Kavka says that the contractors negotiate under an “awareness that they have a realistic opportunity, if they conduct themselves properly, to trade in the insecurities of the state of nature for the lasting security of civil society.”77 But it’s also true that, in the state of nature itself, they’d make big gains if they conducted themselves properly.

If a Covenant be made, wherein neither of the parties perform presently, but trust one another; in the condition of meer Nature, (which is a condition of Warre of every man against every man,) upon any reasonable suspition, it is Voyd: But if there be a common Power set over them both, with right and force sufficient to compel performance; it is not Voyd. For he that performeth first, has no assurance the other will performe after; because the bonds of words are too weak to bridle mens ambition, avarice, anger and other Passions, without the feare of some coerceive Power; which in the condition of meer Nature, where all men are equall, and judges of the justnesse of their own fears cannot possibly be supposed. And therefore he which performeth first, does but betray himselfe to his enemy; contrary to the Right (he can never abandon) of defending his life and means of living.78

Doesn’t that make it impossible to pass from “meer Nature” to there being such a “common Power”? Well, you might think you could pass that way through acquisition. But sovereigns by acquisition preexist that acquisition. How, given rough equality, did they get to be sovereigns in the first place? If “the validity of covenants begins not but with the constitution of a civil power, sufficient to compel men to keep them,”79 how can covenants purportedly establishing such a power be valid? Are they validated retroactively? Is making them irrational at the time but rational retroactively?

We can put the problem in yet a different way, drawing on the vocabulary of traditional, i.e., medieval, contract theory. In that tradition there are distinct contracts of society and of government, first a pactum unionis and then a pactum subjectionis. In the first, previously independent people (say peasants) join up in an exchange of promises, perhaps agreeing to common rules for regulating their interactions. In the second the thus united community agrees to submit to a ruler, in exchange for protection: that actually happened in the formation of feudalism. Hobbes wants a kind of pactum subjectionis without a pactum unionis. And, indeed, we can say, given Hobbes’s account of what makes a pactum subjectionis necessary, that if a pactum unionis were possible then a pactum subjectionis would not be necessary, would serve no purpose. And yet how can there be a pactum subjectionis without a pactum unionis? “If we could suppose a great multitude of men … there would be peace without subjection.”80 That is all very well, but, as I said, how can there be anything like a pactum subjectionis without some sort of pactum unionis? I say “anything like” a pactum subjectionis because strictly in Hobbes there is no pactum subjectionis either, since the Hobbesian sovereign, unlike the medieval prince, promises nothing. He makes covenants with nobody. Not with the whole multitude, because they have no sort of unity and therefore no capacity for willing a contract that preexists his institution.81 And not with each man singly, because, if there’s a promise, there must be such a thing as breaking it, but anything the sovereign qua sovereign does is authorized by each man and so could not count as the breaking of a promise to any such man.82 (We’ll look at that curious authorization doctrine later.)

To complicate matters further, one might conjecture two stages of contracting from Hobbes:

A Common-wealth is said to be Instituted, when a Multitude of men do Agree, and Covenant, every one, with every one, that to whatsover Man, or Assembly of Men, shall be given by the major part, the Right to Present the Person of them all, (that is to say, to be their Representative;) every one, as well he that Voted for it, as he that Voted against it, shall Authorise all the Actions and Judgements, of that Man, or Assembly of men, in the same manner, as if they were his own, to the end, to live peaceably amongst themselves, and be protected against other men.83

But perhaps he is there misexpressing the logically quite different formulation:

I Authorise and give up my Right of Governing my selfe, to this Man, or to this Assembly of men, on this condition, that thou give up thy Right to him, and Authorise all his Actions in like manner.84

(The big difference is between “this man” in the latter passage and “whatsoever man” in the former.)

20. It might be said that the foregoing criticism supposes that Hobbes’s construction requires an actual covenanting to institute a sovereign, whereas, in fact, a hypothetical contract will do. I have three replies. (i) Hobbes thinks there have been states of nature from which commonwealths have emerged: “the state of equality is the state of war, and … therefore inequality [of sovereign and subject] was introduced by a general consent.”85 And that text suggests that all states start through contract.86 (ii) Nor is there any hint of hypothetical contract as a kind of fallback position, as I said before. (iii) And even if there were, or if someone tries so to rehabilitate Hobbes, my argument does not conclude just that there was no such contract, but that such a contract is impossible. The hypothetical interpretation says: if you were thus placed, you would submit: therefore you should submit. My argument answers, surely appositely: no, if we were thus placed, we’d have no reason to submit. So, it’s false that we would contract if. …

21. Associated with this problem about the rationality of the procedure and the absence of pactum unionis is what is (perhaps only inter alia, because also sociological) a legal doctrine about what can constitute unity in multitude. Thus Hobbes says:

A Multitude of men, are made One person, when they are by one man, or one Person, Represented; so that it be done with the consent of every one of that Multitude in particular. For it is the Unity of the Representer, not the Unity of the Represented, that maketh the Person One. And it is the Representer that beareth the Person, and but one Person: And Unity, cannot otherwise be understood in Multitude.87

And in De Cive, he says, “But the people is not in being before the constitution of government, as not being any person, but a multitude of single persons.”88 So, one might say, the pactum unionis is a consequence of, comes pari passu with, the pactum subjectionis: this seems a reasonable gloss on what the people say when they make the covenant,89 though it is in seeming tension with the two-stage process quoted above concerning the institution of the Common-wealth.90 It is a curious doctrine because there must be some presovereign instituting coordinative unity if they’re to converge on the same sovereign in their individual authorizings.

22.91 I come now to the fourth justification of obedience, the authorization doctrine, canvassed at length by Gauthier in chapter 4 of his Logic of Leviathan.

Hobbes’s subjects have no right to disobey a law laid down by their sovereign. They may, it is true, resist arrest, for reasons that I shall not discuss, but that entitlement forms no exception to the above statement: it means, rather, that no law can be made making resisting arrest a crime. By contrast, the sovereign is himself not subject to the law he lays down: he is not obliged to obey it. I now want to suggest that the reason Hobbes gives for the law’s failure to bind the sovereign is flatly inconsistent with the fourth reason he gives for the claim that he binds his subjects, a reason to which he attaches great importance.

This fourth reason is tied up with the idea that the sovereign can do no wrong to his subject. One reason why that is so is that the sovereign has covenanted nothing to the subject,92 and you can do wrong to someone only by breaking faith with him. But the present reason is different. It is that every act of the sovereign is to be regarded as an act of each person, since the sovereign is his representative, and “every man gives their common representer authority from himself in particular; and owning all the actions the representer doth, in case they give him authority without stint,”93 and there is, of course, no stint in the authority Hobbesian people give their sovereign. Because he is their representative, every act of the sovereign is an act of every one of his subjects. “Of the act of the sovereign every one is author, because he is their representative unlimited.”94 Consider also:

The law is made by the sovereign power, and all that is done by such power is warranted and owned by every one of the people; and that which every man will have so, no man can say is unjust. It is in the laws of a commonwealth as in the laws of gaming; whatsoever all the gamesters all agree on, is injustice to none of them.95

Or again, consider:

he that doth any thing by authority from another, doth therein no injury to him by whose authority he acteth: But by this institution of a Commonwealth, every particular man is author of all the sovereign doth; and consequently he that complaineth of injury from his sovereign, complaineth of that whereof he is himself author; and therefore ought not to accuse any man but himself; no nor himself of injury, because to do injury to oneself is impossible.96

I discern two arguments in these texts, issuing in the same final conclusion:

What the sovereign does, I do.

But

The sovereign makes the law.

So

I make the law.

Now,

It is absurd to object to what I myself do.

So

I cannot object to the law.

So

I must obey the law (because I made it).

In a different version of the argument, which Hobbes also gives, the first premise is, again, that I do whatever the sovereign does, but now the further operative premise is not that I cannot object to what I myself do but that I cannot “injure” (that is, do an injustice to) myself. The argument then runs as follows:

What the sovereign does, I do.

But,

A man cannot injure himself.

So

The sovereign does not injure me.

So

I cannot object to what the sovereign requires of me.

So

I must obey the sovereign.

In a word, the sovereign has no obligation to the subject, since its acts are their acts. Therefore, when he makes the law, they must obey, since, if they violate the law, they contradict their own will.

In line with this, Hobbes says that “the subject is author of every act the Sovereign doth,”97 and he here infers that this gives the sovereign the right to put a man to death.98 He can breach no obligation to the subject when he does so, even if it is a breach of the law of nature, in which case, though not an injury to the man, it is an injury to God, an iniquity, because against the law of nature (the subject then also, presumably, violates, as author of the sovereign’s act, the law of nature, but Hobbes doesn’t actually draw that ridiculous but required—by his doctrine—conclusion). By contrast, the subject cannot punish the sovereign, nor, a fortiori, put him to death, because “seeing every Subject is the Author of the actions of his Sovereigne; he punisheth another, for the actions committed by himselfe.”99

Now you might think that, if I am subject to the law because I make it, not, albeit, directly, but through my representative, then that representative himself, the sovereign, is equally or even a fortiori subject to the law, because he makes it, and, indeed, makes it more directly than I do. But that is not Hobbes’s inference. Not only does Hobbes not infer, using the same reasoning that he used in the case of the citizen, which should, it seems, also apply to the sovereign, that the latter is subject to the law he makes; but Hobbes concludes, oppositely, that the sovereign is not subject to the law. And the reason that Hobbes gives for that conclusion is the very same one as the reason that he gives for concluding that the citizen is subject to the law, to wit that he, the sovereign, makes the law. Here is what Hobbes says:

A fourth opinion, repugnant to the nature of a Common-wealth, is this, That he that hath the Soveraign Power, is subject to the Civill Lawes. It is true, that Soveraigns are all subjects to the Lawes of Nature; because such lawes be Divine, and cannot by any man, or Common-wealth be abrogated. But to those Lawes which the Soveraign himselfe, that is, which the Common-wealth maketh, he is not subject. For to be subject to Lawes, is to be subject to the Common-wealth, that is to the Soveraign Representative, that is to himselfe; which is not subjection, but freedome from the Lawes.100

The soveraign of a Common-wealth, be it an Assembly, or one Man, is not Subject to the Civill Lawes. For having power to make, and repeale lawes, he may when he pleaseth, free himselfe from that subjection, by repealing those Lawes that trouble him, and making of new; and consequently he was free before. For he is free, that can be free when he will: Nor is it possible for any person to be bound to himselfe; because he that can bind, can release; and therefore he that is bound to himselfe onely, is not bound.101

This argument says (in the fuller version of it to be found in the second quoted passage, and very slightly reconstructed):

The sovereign makes the law.

So

The sovereign can unmake the law.

So

The sovereign is not bound by the law that he makes.

The inconsistency I promised to expose may now be apparent. The subject is bound by the law because he made it. When the citizen violates the law, he contradicts his own will: he, in the person of the sovereign, made the law, and therefore cannot without absurdity violate it. Yet it is precisely because the sovereign makes the law (and, therefore, can unmake it—this lagniappe in the argument occurs within the second passage) that he is not bound by it: according to Hobbes, it is conceptually impossible for him to violate it.

The difficulty is not that two are said to make the one law. Given the authorization doctrine, that is not an inconsistency: one makes as author what the other makes as agent. Nor is the difficulty that of saying both that the people are subject to the law and the sovereign is not: these claims are plainly consistent. The difficulty, the contradiction, is, rather, that it cannot follow from “X makes the law” both that X is subject to it and that X is not subject to it. The conclusions being inconsistent, they cannot both be validly derived. Either the sovereign too is subject to the law, because he made it. Or the subject too is free of it, because he made it, and therefore can unmake it. You cannot say both:

You made the law. Therefore you cannot not obey it.

And:

You made the law. Therefore you need not obey it.

In that pair of arguments mutually contradictory conclusions are drawn from the self-same premise, the premise that you make the law. So at least one of the arguments is invalid. You cannot say both: because you make the law, you must obey it; and: because you make the law, it has no authority over you, so you need not obey it. The inference of the argument about the citizen requires the principle that, if I make the law, then I am bound by it. The inference of the argument about the sovereign requires the principle that, if I make the law, then I am not bound by it. At least one of those principles must be wrong.

Which argument should Hobbes give up? Pretty clearly, the one about the sovereign, since he’ll still then have the political obligation he desiderates. And the one about the sovereign is in any case pretty patently invalid. It is true that he can unmake the law, but why should it follow that, before he does so, he is not subject to it? Failing another argument, he should be subject to it, just as citizens are. Hobbes should retain tight authorization, and the doctrine that you cannot resist what you yourself do, and give up the sovereign’s freedom from the sway of the law.102

1 See Vallentyne, “Review of Kraus,” p. 193.

2 Hobbes, De Cive, 1.14, p. 30.

3 Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 161.

4 Ibid., p. 150.

5 See ibid., p. 161.

6 Ibid., p. 150.

7 Ibid., pp. 152–53.

8 Kavka, Hobbesian Moral and Political Theory.

9 I do not mean that commentators supply no answer to this question. They supply opposed answers, which each side tends rather to take for granted as true. But there is, as I say, little debate about the question.

10 Ibid., p. 185.

11 Ibid., p. 184

12 Hobbes, De Cive, 1.6, p. 26.

13 On the Prisoners’ Dilemma, see Elster, Logic and Society, or McLean, Public Choice, chap. 7.

14 The Prisoners’ Dilemma has essentially four characteristics, and the fourth is absent here (source: Schelling, Strategy of Conflict, p. 214):

i.

Each has an unconditional preference: the same choice is preferred, irrespective of which choice the other person makes. [Dominance]

ii.

Each has an unconditional preference with respect to the other’s choice: this preference for the other person’s action is unaffected by the choice one makes for oneself.

iii.

These two preferences go in opposite directions: the choice that each prefers to make is not the choice he prefers the other to make.

iv.

The strengths of these preferences (= the payoffs comparisons) are such that both are better-off making their unpreferred choices than if both make their preferred choices. [Pareto Suboptimality]

15 [This is a reference to Hobbes’s contention “For as the nature of Foule weather, lyeth not in a showre or two of rain; but in an inclination thereto of many dayes together: So the nature of War, consisteth not in actuall fighting; but in the known disposition thereto, during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary.” Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 186.—Ed.]

16 Hobbes, Leviathan, pp. 184–85.

17 Shaver, “Leviathan, King of the Proud,” p. 58.

18 [At this point the text says: [Digression on Rawls and assurance]. No further details are given. Rawls discusses the assurance game as well as the Prisoners’ Dilemma in sec. 42 of A Theory of Justice, p. 238.—Ed.]

19 See, again, Hobbes Leviathan, p. 184.

20 Ibid., p. 185.

21 [The text at this point continues: “[OMIT, BECAUSE OF HOBBES’S VIEWS ABOUT THE FAMILY AS SUCH, WHICH I IGNORE: indeed the political philosophy of Hobbes will begin to get into difficulty if we bring women and the family explicitly into the picture. For then we have ties of affection, which could extend, tribally, thereby diminishing the necessity of a sovereign].”—Ed.]

22 Hobbes, Leviathan, pp. 184–85, quoted above in Section 9.

23 Hobbes, De Cive, 1.4, p. 25.

24 Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, p. 17.

25 Ibid., p. 18.

26 Ibid., p. 165.

27 Ibid., p. 186.

28 Locke, Two Treatises of Government, 2.77, p. 318.

29 Hobbes, De Cive, 1.2, p. 24.

30 Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary, p. 28.

31 Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 104.

32 Ibid., p. 337.

33 Ibid., p. 376.

34 Ibid., p. 188.

35 See, further, on the desire for glory and the fear of death, Murphy, “Was Hobbes a Legal Positivist?,” pp. 866–67. But note his failure to report Strauss correctly in the long footnote. He cites Strauss, p. 15: but see Strauss, pp. 16–17.

36 Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 139.

37 Ibid., p. 150.

38 Hobbes, The Elements of Law, p. 30.

39 Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 161.

40 [Here the text adds: [IS THIS RIGHT?: and living well couldn’t here include wanting more power over others, since then the contrast with “cannot be content with a moderate power” would fail. So]—Ed.]

41 Hobbes, Leviathan, pp. 225–26.

42 Ibid., p. 226.

43 Hobbes, De Cive, 1.5, p. 26.

44 Ibid., 5.5, p. 66.

45 Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 235.

46 Hobbes, De Cive, 13.12, p. 149.

47 Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 341.

48 Ibid., p. 362.

49 Hobbes, De Cive, 1.2, pp. 21–22.

50 Ibid., 1.3, p. 25.

51 Ibid., 1.12, p. 29. Yet how do we reconcile those texts with this one from Leviathan, which might be thought to reject negative underivative other-regarding passions? “Contempt, or little sense of the calamity of others, is that which men call CRUELTY; proceeding from Security of their own fortune. For, that any man should take pleasure in other mens great harmes, without other end of his own, I do not conceive it possible” (p. 126). Yes: reconciliation is available, by insisting that only “great harms” are in question.

52 Kavka, Hobbesian Moral and Political Theory, p. 142.

53 Hobbes, De Cive, 10.1, p. 114.

54 Compare Joshua Cohen, “Structure, Choice and Legitimacy,” pp. 311–12, though note his point is slightly different: see p. 312.

55 Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously, p. 151.

56 Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 265, cf. pp. 221, 232, 276, 388.

57 For a treatment of this justification see below, at 22, and section 1 of my “Reason, Humanity, and the Moral Law,” reprinted as Chapter 12 in this volume.

58 Hobbes, De Cive, 5.12, pp. 68–69; 8.1, p. 100.

59 Hobbes, Leviathan, pp. 251–52.

60 Ibid., p. 252. Cf. De Cive, 2.16, pp. 38–39.

61 For critique of the rebuttal, see Kavka, Hobbesian Moral and Political Theory, p. 396. “Unfortunately for Hobbes, these arguments fail. To see this, it suffices to distinguish between promises made under two types of duress. A promise is coerced when the promisee threatens the promisor with some evil should the promise not be made, with the purpose of obtaining the promise. A promise is forced, by contrast, when the promisor enters into it to avoid some evil or danger not created by the promisee, or at least not created by the promisee with the intention of producing the promise. Coerced promised are not morally binding. Many, though not all, forced promises are morally binding.”

62 Hobbes, Leviathan, pp. 255–56.

63 Hobbes, De Cive, 8.1, p. 100.

64 Hobbes, Leviathan, pp. 193–94.

65 Ibid., p. 317.

66 Ibid.

67 No more than that. It certainly doesn’t imply it.

68 Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 320.

69 Ibid.

70 Ibid., pp. 720–21.

71 Hobbes, De Cive, 14.12, p. 162.

72 Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 252.

73 Kavka’s trimming response is to claim that so comprehensive a sovereign as Hobbes depicts is not required to transcend the state of nature, and that a government with a balance of powers and limited (vis-à-vis rights of subjects) power is a better bet. Kavka, Hobbesian Moral and Political Theory, pp. 225–31. But is this wrong, on logical grounds? For Hobbes, is it not a matter of logic that sovereignty is undivided and unlimited?

74 See, for extended reasoning to this effect, Hobbes, De Cive, 10.2, pp. 114–15.

75 Kavka, Hobbesian Moral and Political Theory, pp. 254–66.

76 Locke, Two Treatises of Government, 2.93, p. 328.

77 Kavka, Hobbesian Moral and Political Theory, p. 237, and cf. p. 387.

78 Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 196; cf. Hobbes, De Cive, 2.11, pp. 32–33.

79 Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 203.

80 Ibid., p. 225.

81 Ibid., p. 230.

82 Ibid.

83 Ibid., pp. 288–89.

84 Ibid., p. 287.

85 Hobbes, De Cive, 10.4, p. 117.

86 Cf. the end of ibid., 1.2, p. 24, which suggests the same.

87 Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 220.

88 Hobbes, De Cive, 7.7, p. 91.

89 Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 227.

90 Ibid., pp. 228–29.

91 [Attached to this section is the comment: “It probably needs editing down, because of repetition.” However, the section has been left as it appears in the manuscript.—Ed.]

92 Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 230.

93 Ibid., p. 221.

94 Ibid., p. 276.

95 Ibid., p. 388.

96 Ibid., p. 232.

97 Ibid., p. 265.

98 This would seem to have the curious consequence that a man can put himself to death. At ibid., pp. 353–54, by contrast with p. 265, Hobbes flinches from asserting what has that consequence and grounds the sovereign’s right to punish not on authorization but on his retaining the one he had in the state of nature. Gauthier notes this lapse from the authorization doctrine: The Logic of Leviathan, pp. 146–49, p. 158.

99 Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 232.

100 Ibid., p. 367.

101 Ibid., p. 313. Or, as Hobbes says at De Cive, 12.4, p. 132: “It is evident, that he is not tied to his own laws, because no man is bound to himself.” Cf. ibid., 6.14, pp. 79–80: “Neither can any man give somewhat to himself; for he is already supposed to have what he can give himself. Nor can he be obliged to himself; for the same party being both the obliged and the obliger, and the obliger having the power to release the obliged, it were merely in vain for a man to be obliged to himself, because he can release himself at his own pleasure; and he that can do this, is already actually free.”

102 For a fuller assessment of the two arguments, independently of which one Hobbes should stick to, see my “Reason, Humanity, and the Moral Law,” pp. 169–70, reprinted as Chapter 12 of this volume.