Hobbes Sovereign Quotes

From Hobbes’s theory of the sovereign ruling by authority to Max Weber 250 years later, defining the state in terms of a monopoly of force is a slow loss of civil sensitivity. The term “democracy” is strictly a constitutional belief about how authority is generated, but today it most commonly commends rather than names a government that serves some particular interest, such as that of “the people.” The drift of these and other confusions of our political talk has always been to transform the subtle and balanced features attributed to the state in the past into an enterprise that facilitates our political preferences. It would be hard to deny that political sophistication has given way to a kind of partisan brutishness, some elements of which Oakeshott thought had already been recognized by Tocqueville in 1848: “… the passions of man, from being political, have now become social.” And this means that men care now far more about “the satisfaction of substantive wants” and the power of government needed to supply them than about freedom and constitutionality.

in a land without a sovereign, Hobbes learned, every man lives in fear and makes war upon his neighbor.

It is a weak sovereign that has weak subjects; and a weak people whose sovereign wanteth power to rule them at his will.

Hobbes believed that people could escape this hellish existence only by surrendering their autonomy to a sovereign person or assembly. He called it a leviathan, the Hebrew word for a monstrous sea creature subdued by Yahweh at the dawn of creation. Much depends on which of these armchair anthropologists is correct.

It is significant that modern believers in power are in complete accord with the philosophy of the only great thinker who ever attempted to derive public good from private interest and who, for the sake of private good, conceived and outlined a Commonwealth whose basis and ultimate end is the accumulation of power. Hobbes, indeed, is the only great philosopher to whom the bourgeoisie can rightly and exclusively lay claim.... .... The consistency of this conclusion is in no way altered by the remarkable fact that for some three hundred years there was neither a sovereign who would "convert this Truth of Speculation into the Utility of Practice," nor a bourgeoisie politically conscious and economically mature enough openly to adopt Hobbes's philosophy of power.

(1) Men are moved by appetites and aversions. (2) The Power of a Man is his present means, to obtain some future apparent Good. (3) Every man must always seek to have some power, although not every man is self-impelled to seek as much power as others have, or to seek more than he now has. (4) Every man's power resists and hinders the effects of other men's power. (5) All acquired power consists in command over some of the powers of other man. (6) Some men's desires are without limits. (7) Everyone, those with moderate as well as those with immoderate desires, is necessarily pulled into a constant competitive struggle for power over others, or at least to resist his powers being commanded by others. He had only to add to it his postulate about men's innate aversion to death, and a further postulate about men's ability to behave with a clearer view of their own long-run interest than they commonly did, to get his prescription for obedience to an all-powerful sovereign.

We have evoked the curious presence, in the empty city, of the armed guards and of the two characters whose identity it is now time to reveal. Francesca Falk has drawn attention to the fact that the two figures standing near the cathedral are wearing the characteristic beaked mask of plague doctors. Horst Bredekamp had spotted the detail, but had not drawn any conclusions from it; Falk instead rightly stresses the political (or biopolitical) significance that the doctors acquired during an epidemic. Their presence in the emblem recalls 'the selection and the exclusion, and the connection between epidemic, health, and sovereignity'. Like the mass of plague victims, the unrepresentable multitude can be represented only through the guards who monitor its obedience and the doctors who treat it. It dwells in the city, but only as the object of the duties and concerns of those who exercise the sovereignity. This is what Hobbes clearly affirms in chapter 13 of De Cive, when, after having recalled that 'all the duties of those who rule are comprised in this single maxim,"the safety of the people is the supreme law"', he felt the need to specify that 'by people we do not understand here a civil person, nor the city itself that governs, but the multitude of citizens who are governed', and that by 'safety' we should understand not only 'the simple preservation of life, but (to the extent that is possible) that of a happy life'. While perfectly illustrating the paradoxical status of the Hobbesian multitude, the emblem of the frontispiece is also a courier that announces the biopolitical turn that sovereign power was preparing to make.

For realists, the state is the main actor and sovereignty is its distinguishing trait. The meaning of the sovereign state is inextricably bound up with the use of force. In terms of its internal dimension, to illustrate this relationship between violence and the state we need to look no further than Max Weber’s famous definition of the state as ‘the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory’(M. J. Smith 1986: 23).3 Within this territorial space, sovereignty means that the state has supreme authority to make and enforce laws. This is the basis of the unwritten contract between individuals and the state. According to Hobbes, for example, we trade our liberty in return for a guarantee of security. Once security has been established, civil society can begin. But in the absence of security, there can be no art, no culture, no society. The first move, then, for the realist is to organize power domestically. Only after power has been organized, can community begin.

Going further than Hobbes, who relied on the general convergence of interests between the Many and the One who rules, some of the Physiocrats invented institutional arrangements specifically designed to make the despot truly “legal.” On the one hand, they elaborated a system of judicial control that would see to it that the laws issued by the sovereign and his council are not contrary to the “natural order” that is to be reflected in the fundamental constitution of the state.43 But an even more important safeguard was the idea that the sovereign should be given a real stake in the prosperity of his commonwealth. This was the purpose of the institution of co-property that Le Mercier de la Rivière proposed in his Ordre naturel et essentiel des sociétés politiques (1767).44 According to his plan, the sovereign would be co-owner, in a set and unchangeable proportion, of all the productive resources and of the produit net: as a result, any conflict of interests between him and the country at large would be inconceivable, and the Hobbesian identity of interests would be transparent even to the most obtuse and wicked despot.

We have continued to frame our politics in such a self-defeating terms simply because these are the only ones that make sense to us. Capitalism, according to common understanding, means free markets, and socialism means state central planning. If you want more socialism, you have to add more state, and if you want more capitalism, you need to extend markets. Yet the defining feature of capitalism is not the presence or absence of 'free markets', any more than the defining feature of socialism is the centralized planning of the economy. Markets existed long before the emergence of capitalism, and state planning existed long before the emergence of socialism. Aside from the fact that it's wrong and it doesn't work, there's an even more fundamental reason to avoid pitching leftist politics as one of the state versus market: it's disempowering. There is a big difference between approaching people with an offer of protection and approaching them with an offer of empowerment. The former encourages people to alienate their sense of political agency to a group of unaccountable representatives and bureaucrats who, at best, pay attention to their needs only once every four years. When these electoral promises are broken, people fall into despair and disillusionment, often giving up on politics altogether because 'politicians are all the same.' But when we frame our political project in terms of collective empowerment, we show that politics can't be reduced to elections -it's something we all do every day. Organizing with your colleagues to demand higher wages is politics, protesting climate breakdown in politics, even fighting alongside your neighbors to keep your local library open is politics. Socialism should not be based on asking people to trust politicians -it should be based on asking people to trust each other. The significance of the Lucas Plan is that it showed in very concrete terms exactly how people could work together to build a better world. People do not need to surrender their power to state institutions that can control and protect them. Nor do they need to surrender control to a market that is dominated by the powerful. Instead, we can work together to create the kind of world we want to live in. In place of domination, we can build society based on cocreation. In this chapter, we'll look at then real-world examples of attempts to do just this. Such a perspective might sound naive to those who are convinced that humans are naturally competitive beasts who need to be tamed by authoritarian social institutions. Liberal philosophy stretching all the way back to Hobbes has been grounded on the premise that without an all-powerful sovereign to control their competitive instincts, people would tear each other apart. There's just one problem with this argument: it's demonstrably untrue.

He comes next to a consideration of the passions. 'Endeavour' may be defined as a small beginning of motion; if towards something, it is desire, and if away from something it is aversion. Love is the same as desire, and hate is the same as aversion. We call a thing 'good' when it is an object of desire, and 'bad' when it is an object of aversion. (It will be observed that these definitions give no objectivity to 'good' and 'bad'; if men differ in their desires, there is no theoretical method of adjusting their differences.) There are definitions of various passions, mostly based on a competitive view of life; for instance, laughter is sudden glory. Fear of invisible power, if publicly allowed, is religion; if not allowed, superstition. Thus the decision as to what is religion and what superstition rests with the legislator. Felicity involves continual progress; it consists in prospering, not in having prospered; there is no such thing as a static happiness—excepting, of course, the joys of heaven, which surpass our comprehension. Will is nothing but the last appetite or aversion remaining in deliberation. That is to say, will is not something different from desire and aversion, but merely the strongest in a case of conflict. This is connected, obviously, with Hobbes's denial of free will. Unlike most defenders of despotic government, Hobbes holds that all men are naturally equal. In a state of nature, before there is any government, every man desires to preserve his own liberty, but to acquire dominion over others; both these desires are dictated by the impulse to self-preservation. From their conflict arises a war of all against all, which makes life 'nasty, brutish, and short'. In a state of nature, there is no property, no justice or injustice; there is only war, and 'force and fraud are, in war, the two cardinal virtues'. The second part tells how men escape from these evils by combining into communities each subject to a central authority. This is represented as happening by means of a social contract. It is supposed that a number of people come together and agree to choose a sovereign, or a sovereign body, which shall exercise authority over them and put an end to the universal war.

Hobbes is not an absolutist precisely because he is an authoritarian. His scepticism about the power of reasoning, which applied no less to the ‘artificial reason’ of the Sovereign than to the reasoning of the natural man, together with the rest of his individualism, separate him from the rationalist dictators of his or any age. Indeed, Hobbes, without being himself a liberal, had in him more of the philosophy of liberalism than most of its professed defenders

Back during the McCarthy years, institutions like UMass — and outside academia as well; in Hollywood and other parts of the culture industry, and throughout the economy as a whole — were run by nervous administrators and managers and CEOs who wanted to be in compliance with the government. I’m not talking about the true believer anticommunists; just run-of-the-mill, apolitical or even liberal, apparatchiks whose first duty, they felt, was to their job and their institution. Uncertain about the law and the rules, fearful that if they broke them their institutions would suffer, these administrators turned to outside consultants — often, lawyers — for “advice.” Except that the advice industry was itself stacked with two types: either true-believing anticommunists, who had a vested interest in purging the country of reds and leftists and liberals and more, or bottom-liners (and bottom-feeders) whose livelihood depended upon institutions like UMass needing their “advice.” The combination of this advice industry and nervous administrators was lethal: through some elaborate dance of advice and consent, repressive policies were propounded. Not by force, not by threat, but voluntarily, consensually. It wasn’t simply the state that was the problem; it was the relay system of coercion that private actors in civil society set up, that radiated power far beyond what it was capable of, that made the whole system of repression as widespread as it was. This, incidentally, was precisely the kind of society Hobbes envisioned in Leviathan: not simply an all-powerful sovereign, but an army of preachers and teachers, working in churches and — wait for it: universities — who would extend the power of the sovereign far beyond what it could muster.

A state absolutely sovereign as Thomas Hobbes saw it—accepting no infringements on its rights, confined in a geographic boundary, beset by enemies equally sovereign, equally ambitious and presumably equally well or better armed—could only be at war or preparing for war.

Hobbes puts the blame squarely on Aristotle, who he said led men to connect liberty with democracy and goaded them into “loving tumults” and disorder, believing those were the way to secure liberty when they did just the opposite. Instead, Hobbes argued, nothing was safe unless we obey the sovereign;

Twenty-first-century states are becoming Leviathans, spawn of the biblical sea-monster mentioned in the Book of Job, which the seventeenth-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes used to picture the sovereign power that alone could bring peace to unruly humankind.

In 1625, in his book On the Law of War and Peace, Hugo Grotius asserted that human beings would have obligations ‘even if we should concede that which cannot be conceded without the utmost wickedness, that there is no God, or that the affairs of men are of no concern to Him’.2 But two of his followers, Thomas Hobbes and Samuel Pufendorf, thought that Grotius was wrong.3 However socially useful moral conduct might be, they argued, it is not really obligatory unless some sovereign authority, backed by the power of sanctions, lays it down as the law. Others in turn disagreed with them, and so the argument began.