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Discussing Hobbes’s Leviathan, Chapters 13-15.
Have we implicitly signed a social contract whereby our native right to punch other people in the face is given to the President? Hobbes does things that eventually result in the U.S. Constitution and makes Wes nauseous. Plus: Star Trek and the Bible!
You can get the reading from http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/hobbes/leviathan-c.html
End song: “The Villa” by Mark Lint and the Fake Johnson Trio (1998).
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#1 by Justin on May 2, 2011 - 11:00 pm
I don’t buy hobbes’s argument on the face of it. A social contract depends on the fact that the contractors are moral, if they are moral no contract was needed in the first place, except to judge disputes. Not a inevitable dispute, but an honest dispute.
#2 by Seth Paskin on May 3, 2011 - 10:54 am
Justin–
Thanks for listening! I think Hobbes’ position is that in the state of nature, actors are not moral. His only criteria is that they be rational as this is what is required to enter into contracts with each other. You have to know what you are getting into but you aren’t trusted or expected to honor it. The judge or authority then needs to be present to enforce the contracts – precisely because you can’t trust the individual actors to fulfill their sides of the contract, even though they know exactly what they are doing and say they will.
It’s a bleak view of human nature, which is opposed by both Rousseau and Locke, who we’ve done podcasts on as well (Locke to be posted shortly).
–seth
#3 by Jason on November 7, 2011 - 9:11 pm
Firstly, I’ve been enjoying your podcasts on my daily walk–thanks.
Secondly, I think you guys did a decent jobs of analyzing elements of Hobbes, but you miss the elephant in the room. That elephant is historical context. Hobbes’ motivations were almost purely to defend monarchic status quo of Charles I. He writes Leviathan during the English Civil War, a series of battles in which the parliamentarians overthrow the royalist forces, leading to the Commonwealth era.
Hobbes is exiled and watching his royalist ideals go down to defeat. To say that he’s the genesis of the ideals of the American Revolution is only tangentially true in that he arrives at the idea of the social contract, something Locke will use in 1690 (after being influenced by the Glorious Revolution and the abdication of James II, really the final triumph of parliamentary dominance in England and the end of the Stuart line on the throne).
You’re too gentle in your interpretation–Hobbes views the Leviathan as the ONLY way to actually enforce a social contract since in a state of war man is not capable of assenting to a willing compact of any meaning.
This is a case where the historical motivations of the writer are crucial to understanding his philosophy. You guys didn’t have that. In fact, one of you actually states that Queen Eliz. comes after Hobbes, when in reality she was crowned almost a full century before the ECW.
Anyway, keep up the generally good work.
#4 by Mark Linsenmayer on November 10, 2011 - 1:24 pm
Thanks much, Jason, for clarifying the history. I was familiar with his unrepentant defense of the monarchy but appreciated Seth’s reading of it as, most important from a history-of-ideas perspective, providing (even if inadvertently) some progress on the cause of liberalism: i.e. the idea that we’re all, for practical purposes, created equal, in that even the most glaring natural advantages of strength, intelligence, etc. are easily overcome if people gang up against you.
#5 by Andrew on January 16, 2012 - 7:37 am
Regarding your conversation about style at the start of the podcast – Hobbes was a mathematician as well as a philosopher (a fairly well-regarded one, at least up to the point where he got into a pig-headed row with an Oxford professor about whether or not he had squared the circle). There’s a story that he was visiting a friend who had Euclid open at one of the more complex proofs, said “this cannot be possible”, and then sat down and followed the proofs all the way back to the axioms to discover that provided you accept a few simple and indubitable ideas, the apparently impossible complex proofs follow as a matter of inexorable logic. So in his philosophical writings, he was consciously trying to follow the same method – it seems geometric and mathematical because that’s what he was aiming at.