Hobbes

Life

• England in the 17th Century
  • Between the renaissance and the reformation of monarchy in England
  • Little Ice Age period led to increased diseases
  • English Civil War 1642-`651
  • Monarchy is restored in 1660 with King Charles II
• Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679)
  • Everything he is known for today was written when after he was 60 (he lived to be 91)
  • The English Civil war was extremely influential on him
  • It lasted a decade, pitted the King and parliament against each other, and led tot he deaths of 200,000 people
  • Hobbes was a cautious and violence-overt man (due to his father’s fight and subsequent abandonment of his family)
• Early Life
  • Born in Malmesbury, Wiltshire, England, about 30 miles east of Bristol
  • His father was a disreputable local clergyman
  • His father leaves Malmesbury after a fight with another clergyman
  • Nothing is really known about his mother
• Education
  • In 1602 or 1603, Hobbes leaves Malmesbury to study in Magdalene Hall, Oxford
  • His studies were supported by his Uncle
  • He studied Greek and Roman literature
  • He graduates from Oxford in 1608

• Career

  • After graduating, he worked for the Cavendish family, initially tutoring William Cavendish (1590–1628), later second earl of Devonshire
  • He works for the same family for most of his life
  • His work with the family gave him access to books, and connections to other philosophers and scientists
  • He worked for a time as secretary to Francis Bacon
  • In his travels he met Marin Mersenne in Paris and supposedly Galileo Galilei
  • He had a series of interactions with Descartes, critiquing and commenting on his work
  • Descartes thought Hobbes was out of his field, but there was some mutual respect
  • He lived in exile in Paris due to the civil war and wrote his works there

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Philosophy

Language and the Mind: The Elements of Law, Elements of Philosophy, and *Leviathan*

• Explore philosophy from questions about mind and language
  • One must understand how individuals work to understand how groups work
  • Did not insist it was necessary to work through all the issues about individuals to understand groups, but thought it was helpful
• Sense
  • He believed in the empirical view that all our views are derived directly or indirectly from sensation
  • Believed that sensation was a chain of emotions, biologically mechanical in nature:
  • An object causes (immediately or mediately) pressure on an organ of sense, triggering internal motion to the brain and heart
  • There this motion causes “a resistance, or counter-pressure, or endeavour of the heart to deliver itself; which endeavour, because outward, seemeth to be some matter without. And this seeming, or fancy, is that which men call sense
  • Sensation is identical or grounding in internal motions
• Imagination
  • Our sensations remain after the act of sensing, but in a weaker way
  • We can visual something we have seen, but not as well as if it was in front of us
  • Ideas are formed by being able to retain an image of something and create something with it
  • He connects the faculty of imagination and imagination with memory and understanding
  • Writes that imagination and memory are the same, pointing to different aspects of the phenomenon of decaying sense
  • If we want to point to the idea or image itself, we use ‘imagination’, but if we want to point to the decay, we use ‘memory’
  • Understanding is also a sort of imagination
  • It is the work of faculty of imagination and crucially involves language
  • the mind contains sense, imagination, and the workings of language, and no further rational faculty
• Language
  • Signification is central
  • A NAME or APPELLATION therefore is the voice of a man, arbitrarily imposed, for a mark to bring to his mind some conception concerning the thing on which it is imposed. Things named are either the objects themselves, as man; or the conception itself that we have of man, as shape or motion; or some privation, which is when we conceive that there is something which we conceive, not in him
  • The only universal things are names, such as “tree”, but there is no universal tree
  • What Hobbes calls common names, those words which apply to multiple things, are applied because of similarities, not because of any relation to a universal thing or idea
  • A counterargument was the it was possible to express the same idea in different languages, using different works
• Reasoning
  • Describes reasoning as computation
  • to compute is to collect the sum of many things added together at the same time, or to know the remainder when one thing has been taken from another. To reason therefore is the same as to add or to subtract

Government

• At this time, people begin to question obedience to their rulers, what makes them legitimate
  • The divine mandate had been the answer to that previously
  • The idea of rule by the ordinary people becomes more prevalent, leading to social contract theory
  • Hobbes realized that the divine mandate would no longer hold but was concerned about the social contract theory
  • He feared people would be too quick to depose their rulers
  • He witnessed the beheading of king Charles I, and did not what this type of action to be repeated
  • He tries to reconcile social contract theory and obedience to traditional authority
  • He explains why one should obey gov authority (even imperfect kinds) to avoid chaos

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Social Contract Theory

• The state or civil society is created through a contract or mutual agreement among men
  • the “Social Contract” empowers a man or a group of men to represent the supreme authority over society.
  • It comes into creation with the consent of the people.
  • There is a single contract that created the sovereign, therefore the sovereign is not a part of the contract. The sovereign is born due to the contract; therefore, he is not a party to it.
  • All are parties of the contract
  • No one within a state can be sovereign, because there cannot be more than one sovereign power
  • Every man surrenders his natural rights and powers to a common sovereign who will “keep them in awe” and provide them with life security.
  • The natural rights are surrendered to the sovereign under the contract once and for all. The contract cannot be revoked or withdrawn, if men can reverse the contract and revive natural rights, then they can go back to the state of nature and exit civil society
• The State of Nature
  • The state of nature is one of violence, death, and insecurity.
  • Hobbes conceived the situation of the people in the state of nature as one of solitude, poverty, which is brutish and terrible
  • In the state of nature the life of man is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”
  • Man is a threat to man
  • Competition, distrust, and glory lead to conflict
  • It is the state of international Relations
  • Thus, need for the state
  • Even if a few decide to go back to the state of nature, it will put the lives of everyone in danger and must therefore be forbidden.
  • In the state of nature, there can be no distinction between right and wrong and no property rights.
  • Humans, without the state, will have no authority to keep them in check
• Government
  • Governments, he believed, are formed willingly out of fear of chaos, flocking to the arms of strong authority
  • They have the obligation to obey, and only direct threats for their lives should warrant protest
  • There were few circumstances in which people would be justified in demanding a change in gov
  • He believed civil war was worse than the tyranny of a leader
  • A wicked leader should still be obeyed, since life just has some inconveniences
  • Men are not capable of leading themselves
• Qualities of the Social Contract
  • There is no scope for revolt and rebellion
  • Created by both the society and state, a reversal or withdrawal of the contract will mean the end of not only the state but of the society as well
  • The laws of nature are not really laws, but counsels of reason and have no compulsive force.
  • To protect society from chaos the sovereign must be absolute, indivisible, and inalienable and with limitless political obligations and power
  • The Hobbes Leviathan: has absolute powers over the individual.
  • Sovereignty is an undeniable fact of political life
  • The powers enjoyed by a sovereign:
  • Power to determine: on behalf of the entire community, should be done to maintain peace and general welfare
  • Absoluteness : to make laws that are not limited by any human authority, superior or inferior, there is no rival in authority
  • Distinction between good and bad : Only society creates morals, the sovereign creates those conditions under which moral distinctions acquire significance and importance, sovereign is above morality
  • Property : Sovereign is the creator of property, legal property rights and their protection exist only with the establishment of sovereign authority, and the sovereign can take it away whenever he likes. Taxation is not theft
  • Justice : Source of justice and has the power to make and declare war, is the leader of the military and determine what is and is not allowed (sovereign has legislative, and judicial power)
  • indivisibility, inseparability, and incommunicability : Sovereign authority cannot be separated from any aspect of sovereignty without destroying it, nor can it be shared.

Conclusions

• Absoluteness
  • This is a recipe for a tyranny
  • Consent is non-existent, the people have no power in the sovereign, nor can they judge it or alter their lives, if they have no power over there lives this is slavery and not a contract
  • Flawless only if a perfect and infallible person or assembly could be found and established as a sovereign
  • Based on the belief that men are not capable of leading themselves
  • revolutions in search of liberty can be very violent and turn out worse
  • There is a mutual relationship between protection and obedience
• Solipsism
  • The only certainty is that you exist
  • A movement that likely influenced Hobbes
  • Contributes to his cynical approach to humanity

British Political History

• Incredibly influential on other systems

  • Not necessarily adopted in full
  • Considered by Fukuyama to (early on) be a great system

• Historically, there is a struggle between the monarch and parliament

  • The result was the triumph of the parliament
  • Britain is considered a parliamentary constitutional government

• Feudal system

  • 1066: William the Conqueror establishes the feudal system
  • Creates a very hierarchical society
  • England is divided so that it is easier to govern
  • The King lends land to a vassal that rules over the land in return for loyalty and military support
  • Vassals can further divide the land
  • The king has immense power, but a council already exists constituting of lords, barons and the clergy

• 1215: the Magna Carta

  • Earlier example of a constitution, the power of the king is limited and the rights of citizens put into law
  • The start of the rule of law
  • Power had to be shared with the aristocrats
  • in the 14th century, parliament is formed consisting of the House of Commons and the House of Lords
  • There was a division of class between the nobility that served in the two chambers
  • Over time, the House of Commons gains more powerful

• 1642

  • Tension between King and Parliament
  • Increased taxation and ability to wage war was limited by Parliament
  • Charles I hunted down those that were disloyal
  • Boils into a civil war between the Royals (loyalists) and Parliament
  • Hobbes was a loyalist
  • He was tried and sentenced to death for committing treason against his country

• Cromwell and the Restoration

  • Establishes a military dictatorship
  • He was a strong leader but was very unpopular
  • After his death, it was clear he tried to put his son in power
  • With this power vacuum, there is the Restoration in which Charles II (who Hobbes tutored) was made King
  • James II takes over after Charles II and converts to Catholicism, very scandalous. He remarries, leading to fears of a Catholic King
  • The people find William of Orange III from the Netherlands, who married Mary, the daughter of James
  • 1688: William of Orange invades England to little resistance
  • They give him the crown, but create the Bill of Rights to further diminish the power of the King (called “the Glorious Revolution”
  • Protected freedom of speech in parliament
  • Prevented King from interfering in parliament
  • William II’s rule was not very popular, he fell off a horse and died. The horse was honored in statues
  • 1701: New constitution was made that further reduced the power of the King
  • Outlawed the King being Catholic
  • Judicial independence
  • Military action needed to be approved by Parliament
  • King could not leave England without permission of Parliament
  • Parliament was the highest authority
  • England was a forerunner for this type of system
  • They were not exactly a democracy, the parliamentary system was corrupt and voting was restricted to a small portion of the population
  • District system create a power imbalance since there was voter suppression in the boroughs
  • Bribery was an issue
  • 1832: Representation of the People Act
  • 1928: Introduction of universal suffrage