The Meaning and Purpose of Thomas Hobbes

Reflections on the use of Hobbes in light of the ravages of Modernity

It’s been too long since I’ve written formally on political theory—some of this can be blamed on the speed with which I have experienced more general shifts in my understanding of political theology and religion more broadly. Nevertheless, as I become more comfortable with things again, and as I trudge forth on my intellectual biography of Paul Gottfried, I know there are things that need my elaboration. Some of how I work things out in my own mind can best be achieved by an essay such as this one.

The question is, as I become more in line with classical European political theory and its relation to the Church in the unfolding of historical drama, how am I to think of a figure like Thomas Hobbes, often pointed to as the source of the modern state? If I declare myself a pre-modernist, what role could I possibly have for Hobbes, aside from a figure to be shattered? And moreover, if my own understanding of the modern age has been affected so strongly by Dr. Gottfried, what must I do about the fact that he claims the influence of a Hobbesian mode of thinking?

My purpose in this essay is to explain how I think about Hobbes, or to express the way in which the debate over Hobbes plays into my understanding of political reality. Ultimately, my purpose in employing Hobbes isn’t to defend the Hobbes of history, or even praise the effects he has had on the development of modern political theory; but rather to take seriously his insights on the importance of power in the stability of the political order.

The Search for the Historical Hobbes

The Strauss-Tönnies Thesis

Most people’s understanding of Hobbes generates from the influence and historical narrative of Leo Strauss—even if they aren’t aware of it. Strauss himself was heavily influenced in his reading of Hobbes by the German scholar Ferdinand Tönnies. In their view, Hobbes is the precursor of the modern liberal state. Hobbes is the political philosopher who, more than anyone (except the Frenchman Jean Bodin), acted as a transitional figure between the pre-modern and the modern nation state.

The role that he played in this transition was to reconstruct the meaning of politics and social order along materialist, nominalist, and naturalist modes of thinking. Abandoning the classical European spirit of Natural Law, transcendent ideals, and classical metaphysics, Hobbes reconstructed a justification of power that would serve the interests of the bourgeoning modernism. In this way, Strauss paints a picture of Hobbes that is characteristic of most present scholars: as a proto-liberal.

With this interpretation of Hobbes, it is quite obvious— even understandable—why the proponents of a classicalism in political theory speak ill of his influence. It cannot be denied, as Tönnies emphasizes, that present day political instincts that emphasize the atomistic individualism of human society can point to the rhetorical framing and vernacular of Thomas Hobbes. His language, his paradigm, his framework employed the popular language of the sciences in his time. But is this the full extent of the meaning of Thomas Hobbes?

The Schmitt-Warrender-Hood Thesis

Gottfried, ever the dissenter from Strauss, understands Hobbes differently than expressed in the Strauss-Tönnies thesis. Rather, he comes to Hobbes through the framework of Carl Schmitt, and through him the English scholars Howard Warrender and Francis Campbell Hood. In their view, Hobbes must be understood as a radical realist; leveraging his role as a sought after voice in English politics in order to solve an actual political crisis. As such, he was keen to drape his solution to the political catastrophe around him in the framing of the ideology of his time— independent of his actual metaphysical convictions.

In other words, Hobbes himself had a Machiavellian character in his defense of English power. To reconstruct a defense of sovereignty within the horizons of classical metaphysics would have been, in this understanding of Hobbes, a decision to offer a solution to the English Civil War that would have been ignored among the political actors seeking to reassert power amidst a coming anarchy. It was not Hobbes’ intention, therefore, to personally abandon medievalism, but rather to engage with political forces that (perhaps disastrously) sought the application of the new sciences.

To elaborate on this view, we can quote from Paul Gottfried (page 44, Carl Schmitt):

Hobbes drew on the new sciences of physics, anatomy, and advanced mathematics, but he also cited Aristotle and other ancient authorities together with modern erudition. Hobbes readily blended inherited modes of thought and religious teachings with the intellectual discoveries of his own time. That he made no attempt to return directly to medieval Christian Aristotelianism suggests his recognition of water passed under the bridge. Nominalist philosophy, which challenged the universality of ideas and the congruence of faith and reason, the Protestant Reformation, Renaissance science, and the age of religious wars had all intervened between the thirteenth century and the working career of Thomas Hobbes. From the past he saved what he could without turning his back on the seventeenth century.

Thus, I shall restate my own sentence above: it was not Hobbes’ intention, therefore, to personally abandon medievalism, but rather to engage with political forces that (perhaps disastrously) were at the time seeking the application of new sciences. Whether Hobbes made a bad decision, for reasons of garnering attention, in doing this will be dealt with below.

This alternative understanding of Hobbes takes seriously Hobbes’ professed commitment to the Christian religion and even his status as a neomedieval thinker as postulated by the Hobbes scholar Wilhelm Dilthey. Carl Schmitt leans on Francis Hood to argue that Hobbes ground his view of human obedience in natural law and Biblical interpretation. Schmitt also praises Warrender’s analysis of Hobbes’ citation of the laws of Nature as “dictates of Reason” which are sourced in God and that for Hobbes “what the Laws of Nature forbid, can never be lawful; what they command can never be unlawful.” And Gottfried elaborates that Hobbes “identifies natural laws as the ‘summer of Moral Philosophy’ and sees them as anchored in the ‘divine law’ manifesting itself in human reason.” Moreover, continues Gottfried:

“Warrender [and Schmitt] takes these assertions as proof that Hobbes measured political actions by a transcendent standard of the Good. Hobbes’ affirmations that laws of nature are now to right reason and consistent with biblical revelation are made to demonstrate his incorporation into his science of politics of large chunks of Christian Aristotelianism.”

On this model of Hobbesianism, Hobbes took seriously the model of England as a Christian commonwealth and recognized in the state the necessity to maintain order by standing above the Church of England (as had been the traditionalist view since Cranmer and Hooker). Gottfried observes that on this reading, “Hobbes saw his country as threatened on two sides, by the Catholic Church’s eagerness to interfere in English political affairs and by antimonarchical Protestant sects.” The response advocated to maintain order in light of particularistic threats was for the monarch to act as the sovereign and make judgements about what enemies were existential challenges to the character of England.

That is to say, Hobbes had no aspect of his thinking that would have secularized the English state, or depoliticalized (liberalized) the role of religion in English society. Reading liberalism into Hobbes, on this anti-Straussian view, is a trick that depends on those who later abandoned Hobbes and Scholasticism both, but used Hobbesian paradigms for their own objectives. We will elaborate on this in the conclusion.

Excursus on the Historical Hobbes

The objection against the Schmittian view of Hobbes may be something to the extent that even if he was not actually a nominalist deep down, by framing his argument along these lines, he actually moved the ball further down our dark path. And this is where all of us can agree. Carl Schmitt believed that the consequences of Hobbes’ framing were unintentional, and now we all have to deal with them. While trying to go elsewhere, argues Gottfried, “Hobbes as depicted by Schmitt took a fateful step toward the twentieth century.”

The point of the above is not to take a side on the “real Hobbes” debate —though being familiar with Strauss’ universalist narratives and cynicism toward the Christian character of Western political philosophy¹ and my familiarity with the Strauss-Gottfried debate, I tend toward Schmitt’s interpretation. Rather than seeking to argue that my Hobbes is a more faithful understanding than Hobbes-as-proto-liberal, I instead want to use this simply to explain the possible use of Hobbes in the political strategies of Paleoconservatives.

The value that Schmitt and Gottfried find in Hobbes is not dependent on whether Hobbes was truly a Believer in modernism or a medievalist operating in Machiavellian ways. I don’t really seek to convince anyone of my instincts here, but rather to explain what role I could possibly have for Hobbes as we sit deep in the wretched mires of Modernity. Hobbes for me shouldn’t be cited as freeing us from the dark times of medieval Europe and paving a way for a glorious secularism—and he would be mortified to see what his contributions had done. This is where characterizing me as a Hobbesian is not accurate.

I too place my inner adherence and deep loyalties in the experiences of historical Christian Europe that rightly warned against the tide of liberalism and secularism. I too have an historicist (over against Strauss), Burkean, and Hookerite fealty to Christian Natural Law, as guided, discovered, and expressed by the particularist development of custom and tradition.

But what do we do now that our beloved classical Christian Europe has been torn apart? What do we do now, strangled in the depths of the modern age?

Hobbes as Political Realist

It is often claimed by proponents of the liberal democratic order that we are a nation of laws, not rulers; that is, the law is supreme and oversees even the activities of political actors. We largely operate under the myth of a “legalist” political theory; that liberalism is characterized by a common subsumption of the entire society under universal legal standards. The law is sovereign, the President is not. Lex Rex, right?

What Schmitt and Gottfried take from Hobbes is that this is a political myth. There is always a human actor, or human institutions, even if we don’t admit it, behind the veil sanctioning the legal order, interpreting it, applying it, determining its meaning, and its exceptions. This what Schmitt meant when he elaborates on the “challenge of the exception.” No matter how brilliantly exposited or constructed, the legal order cannot account for all situations and there is always a human element upholding the order based on judgement, interests, calculations, and a complex network of myriad factors. The legal order is not a machine that works itself out. Men do not obey laws because they are written, but because there is someone behind the law determining whether actions meet the criteria for punishment and political response.

It is not, for Hobbes, that adherence to the Christian medieval conception of Natural Law is somehow bad; rather, the elucidation and integration of these laws were decided upon (to the wondrous blessing of Europe) by political actors, over centuries. All laws must be filtered through politics; through humans with their complex of varying interests, conflicting claims of power, their distortions, their depravities, and the nature of real-world enemies.

The trouble in seventeenth century England was that the political commitment to classical natural law was breaking down; it was therefore the function of the sovereign to shore up the integrity of the order, even if it meant assuming a power transcending the legal order itself. The political possibility of adherence to European formulations of natural law is a blessing indeed; it leads to Burke’s praise of “power gentle and obedience liberal.” But one cannot blame Hobbes for tearing down this world so much as we learn lessons from him about the necessity of political responses to its breakdown.

Thus, the role that Hobbes plays for me has nothing to do with his alleged nominalism or materialism, but rather in his understanding of the role of the sovereign and the relationship between the political and the legal. If I cite observations made by Hobbes about the realism of power, it is not because I can be accused of being nominalistic.

It is true, as even Schmitt admits, that Hobbes is a transitional figure between two worlds. But he is not the cause of the crisis that undermined the legitimacy of Natural Law and tradition in England. Hobbes perhaps made a fatal mistake in couching his advice and guidance for the English Royalty in the framework of his time, but my employment of Hobbes’ lessons about the realities of power and the unavoidable presence of a sovereign do not depend on adopting that framework as some sort of ideal.

Let it not be said that I am a Hobbesian, so much as I think he rightly would call balderdash on the present hubris of those who think we can move into the future by transcending the Political. And it is precisely on the topic of the unavoidability of politics that I have learned from Gottfried as an interpreter of Hobbes, and also wrote my essay on the Triumph of the Political (linked below).

My next post will be on my integration of Hobbes’ lessons with Richard Hooker’s political theory, so as to shore up any accusation, that I make more of Hobbes than I actually do. and additionally, I want to elaborate on previous comments I made about the dynamic between Rex and Lex.

1. See Grant Havers’ Leo Strauss and Anglo-American Democracy: A Conservative Critique