Thomas Hobbes and the idea of liberty

There’s a nice, long, fascinating article in The Nation on the ideas of Thomas Hobbes. The writer, Corey Robin, discusses the view posited in Quentin Skinner’s book Hobbes and Republican Liberty that Hobbes was the first counter-revolutionary. What does he mean by that? As he says, the English Civil War of the 1640s, often thought of as a revolution, was not a revolution at all, so what was there to be counter to? Well, Hobbes did think of it as a revolution, in the slightly antiquated sense that the ancients used the word—the cyclical change of a political system. (As an aside, that must surely be the origin of the modern political sense of the word, since when real revolutions started popping up, the word picked up new baggage.) The “revolutionaries” of the time were aiming for a republican system of government, and Hobbes was avowedly against such a thing. Where Hobbes’s genius lay, though, was in coming up with arguments against it that were not utterly terrible.

The kind of defence that most royalists put up was that of the “divine right of kings”, but that argument was beginning to lose its appeal for most people. In any case, it was only brought in surprisingly late: James I was the first to insist on it. (This was late because the tradition as a whole stretches back to ancient times—the Babylonian king Hammurabi proclaimed his right to the throne as being due to the god Marduk.) This lateness must have contributed to its un-convincingness. But for whatever reason, people were not swayed by it, so a more subtle defence was necessary, and this was where Hobbes came in. The central idea he posits in his Leviathan, from which all his conclusions spring, is that man is a wretched animal, whose natural state is war. Without external control, we would all be fighting amongst each other constantly. Therefore, he said, we all unspeakingly sign up with the contract of absolute rule. The king is there to prevent such fighting, and to protect people from outside force, but in taking this great responsibility, his people owe him something in return: namely, their undying allegiance and servitude.

All very well, you might say. How does this connect with the issue at hand? After all, you might vest similar responsibility in a republican or democratic government. His counter here centres on the issue of freedom. Firstly, what is freedom? I would loosely define two kinds of freedom—philosophical and political. Philosophical liberty is the kind that, as long as you grant the existence of free will, everyone has in equal measure. A man in chains is free to wriggle in an infinite number of ways, which is no less than the amount of things a free man can do (who, by the way, is greatly limited by his inability to fly, to make money grow on trees, and so on). Political liberty is the ability to do the things that you should be capable of doing. This “should” is of course defined by the legal constitution, but that’s another matter. When republicans argued that in a monarchy people are less free, Hobbes protested that they are in fact more free. It seems to me that the way in which he meant “more free” is in the philosophical rather than the political one.

In Hobbes’s day it was very fashionable to think that if you do something because of your “base” emotions, you are less free than if you do something because of your enlightened reason. So Hobbes would say that the greater “freedom” afforded in a non-monarchy is not really freedom at all. However, in a monarchy, if you decide to commit or not commit a deed because you fear that the king might have you killed, you are making that decision freely, because you have to use your higher judgement in such a situation. In a monarchy, therefore, there is more opportunity to employ this kind of rational decision-making than otherwise, and so the citizens are freer.

I’m sure that the above is an oversimplification of the matter. But the crux of Hobbes’s argument, and the part of it which has survived in some form to this day, is the idea that government is nothing more than the body which protects people from harm, be it internal or external. It is an enforcer of “negative liberty” (as Isaiah Berlin would later phrase it), rather than of positive liberty. Under it, people are more genuinely free to go about their business however they want, so long as they don’t interfere with the workings of the state. “Submission,” as Robin puts it, “augments our freedom,” because the monarch is the guarantor of that freedom.

As crudely put as that may be, the weaknesses seem quite clear. First off, it’s clear that the modern form of Hobbesian theory is rather whitewashed, and bears little resemblance to its first appearance on Leviathan. Negative liberty is all very well and good, but to go from that to the frankly outrageous conclusion that one is more free in a monarchy is just silly. In the philosophical sense, one is just as free wherever one goes, so creating sophistic arguments around that notion will never get us anywhere, as political systems have no effect on liberty. But in the political sense, it makes a world of difference. Hobbes all but admits that monarchies are repressive when he says that one is free not to obey the king. Philosophically, one is. But not politically—doing so puts you in a situation in which you’re either dead or imprisoned, and in neither do you retain any semblance of political freedom.

To take a priori philosophy, as Hobbes does with the idea of freedom, to the political sphere is always a dangerous thing.