Taming Leviathan: Reflections on Some Recent Work on HobbesHobbes and the Social Contract Tradition. Jean HamptonHobbesian Moral and Political Theory. Gregory S. Kavka

Abstract

Everyone seems to agree that one of the most distinctive things about Hobbes's argument for the state is that it is an argument for an state. And yet when one looks carefully at the secondary literature, one sees almost no agreement at all on what would make a state (or a sovereign) for Hobbes. Indeed, most writers appear to think that what Hobbes had in mind in this connection is not in need of explication, apparently believing either that it is obvious what Hobbesian is or that it simply does not matter, for purposes of learning whatever lessons Hobbes has to offer, that no consensus has ever been reached about just what sort of absolutism Hobbes actually had in mind. The really important questions, one is led to believe, are why Hobbes favored some form of absolutism and how his arguments for absolutism in fact go wrong. One of the many virtues of two recent and very fine books on Hobbes's moral and political thought is that each of them, in its own way, attempts to show exactly what Hobbes's commitment to political absolutism involved. Jean Hampton, for example, in Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition, argues that the essential element in Hobbesian absolutism is the fact that the subjects of an absolute sovereign are assumed to have given up, irrevocably, their right to decide for themselves whether or not their interests are being served by that sovereign. Gregory Kavka, by contrast, in Hobbesian Moral and Political Theory, locates the essence of Hobbes's absolutism not in an alienation of the right to decide whether or not one's interests are being served, but in the fact that, in Hobbes's civil state, there is by definition nothing the sovereign cannot rightly do. There are, as we shall see, all sorts of interesting and quite controversial contentions in these books. I want to begin, though, by focusing on the issue of what they have to tell us about what Hobbes's commitment to absolutism really involves. For one thing, this is an issue on which we are badly in need of instruction, as I have already observed. For another thing, at least one of these books makes the question of the tenability of political absolutism the central question so far as our interest in the plausibility of Hobbes's social and political philosophy is concerned. I shall begin with this recently rather neglected issue, therefore, and then turn later to some of the other issues these works raise.