Hobbes's break from the ancients allowed him to pioneer modern social science

#1 Hobbes, Leviathan

Andrew Utman

Thomas Hobbes laid the foundation for the “realist” school of international relations in his assertions that men are motivated by fear to form social convenants, and imbue such convenants with the force of law, backed by the use of coercive force, violent and lethal if necessary. He denies there is any such Universal Truth, and neither also any Universal Morality, except that which he establishes by axiomatic reduction depending on his definitions. 

This precludes the possibility of the validity of positive motives for forming a government, and reduces them exclusively, or at least primarily and fundamentally, to the “negative” state which exists to prevent outcomes, rather than assure or create outcomes, except insofar as physical safety and the integrity of one’s property is a positive attribute. Hobbes however prefers instead to lean heavily on fear and fear’s power to compel people to entrust their safety in a sovereign, instead of in themselves, and to further contract with that sovereign power to do various other things for them, all of which, apparently are protective and driven by fear. 

This would imply men who have no fear, have no need of government, and such things as men value that do not depend on fear cannot or should not be entrusted to a government. Such men would therefore, if they had personal ethics, philosophical values or religious morality that they wished to further, would have to do so entirely privately, unless such great numbers of them feared something in relation to their own collective secular or religious code that they would seek to empower their government to act to prevent against it. So even here, by logical extension, the possibility of “idealism” in foreign policy is also created, although Hobbes himself actively inveighs against it.

Hobbes’ own amorality directly contradicts the aspirations of an idealist foreign policy which would seek to establish good in other lands for the sake of human rights and to alleviate suffering. Hobbesian analysis would be much more realist in that it would directly question the value of any such ventures unless they could be shown to have instrumental, or paradigm reinforcing power, rather than merely moral value, which he clearly denigrates. 

Vladimir Putin seems entirely comfortable with Hobbesian ideas and seems to view his own state as Machiavelli would have, whether it is better to be feared, than loved, if you must choose, and that any action done against sovereign states is a threat to the entire state-based system, hence the need to intervene in Syria to prop up Assad, although that line can also be seen as a self-serving pretext for intervention in the region where larger geopolitical competition is ongoing.

It is Hobbes’ own view of the non-existence of an essence, soul, or its special metaphysical value that seems most at odds with the traditions and morals of the mid-17th century, and well into the present, since a majority of people either believe in a God in some form, or subscribe to one of the world’s majority religious faiths or paths. So, it seems the majority of people’s own sensibilities and beliefs contradict Hobbes amoral assertions of no heaven or hell, and God’s own existence as hypothetical and essentially irrelevant. While I’m personally comfortable with this assertions, many millions around the world, including Westerners, and secular Humanists, would be appalled or at least take issue with such positions. The viability of such a theory of moral and political philosophy might be imperiled or at least limited by such anti- traditional, amoral pronouncements, all the more so in the mid-17th century.

However, Hobbes contribution has definitely stayed, and its legacy endured as it laid ground for thinking about the primacy of ideas about man coming out of a state of nature, through a state of war, into the formation of an organized, political state, or commonwealth. He even presupposes the concept of an artificial man that became a concept foundational to the modern rule of law based on the power and sovereignty of the state. Hobbes’ ideas about the role of consent and the acquisition of power have certainly been challenged by modern ideas about free agency, duress, dissolvability, and the requirements of the state to fulfill a full range of positive, and not only negative functions including but not limited to protection. 

Notwithstanding these evolutions and challenges to Hobbesianism, the Leviathan directly challenges Plato’s idea of the ideal city in the Republic based on the three types of souls men are supposed to have, as well as Aristotle’s perfect city of the Politics where men pursuing the highest goods of life through contemplation naturally rule by virtue of their superior reason, intellect and wisdom. Hobbes instead forces us to consider even more basic reasons for which men organize a government and why they should have allegiance to it, without references to any allegory of the cave, or Platonic Forms-based hierarchies of men and their activities according to relative degrees of perfection. In doing so, Hobbes brings political philosophy out of the territory of metaphysicists, mystics and moralizing traditionalists, and places it alongside natural sciences, thus freeing it to involve into social science.