“No crime if there ain’t no law.”
— The Damned, “Neat Neat Neat”

The liberal instinct urges me to say that I disagree with it, but this book and its implications are bigger than me. I almost have to laugh at myself for leveling judgement on it, as if it mattered — me: already living in the world of the leviathan. In the bigger sense, I don’t disagree with it, anyway — perhaps in the normative sense, but as an observer of society I see he seems to have his shit together. With my judgement out of the way, it’s obvious that Hobbes didn’t invent authority — he’s just a messenger after all, so no use blaming him for it. He illustrates and details the structure of power, the rationale behind why he would prefer a monarchy to a democracy.

Book one is where it’s at. In a few lines, centuries ago, Hobbes dispenses with the main premises of childish political conceits — the politics of the healthy and unburdened — that still stink up the fringes of the political landscape: anarchism and libertarianism. As the title suggests, without some ultimate bully to enforce contracts between one party and another, there really are no contracts at all. Libertarian theorists invariably find themselves either defending an apocalyptic scenario where contracts are upheld between equal parties by personal or hired force (e.g. having lotsa guns), or they resuscitate the government they tried to bury under some pseudonym like “the courts.” Never mind the fact that still other parties can’t be expected to stagnate on the arms issue, or maintain a fair policy with regard to their neighbors. They will not have started equal, and they won’t remain equal if they can help it. There will always either be governments or warlords.

Hobbes is a pious man, and so prone to getting caught in the tide pool of infinite regresses. What justifies one part of his argument itself needs justification, but none is to be found. Such is the case with the power of his beloved monarchy. Subjects get their rights from the king, the king gets his rights from god, and god, is, well, god (himself justifiable by the Socratic piss-take, the Cosmological Argument). Which is to say the authority of the king can’t be justified at all. In a similar abuse of logic, geography, demographics, and chronology, Hobbes contorts himself to find the consent of the people for the king to do unto them what he argues is their own will. The king, he says, serves the will of the subjects, so whatever he does is, in a Nixonian kind of reasoning, not illegal or against their will. That, by his being king, well, his subjects have obviously agreed that it be so. Except that the majority of his contemporaries weren’t consulted before his coronation; not to mention the generations to follow which didn’t even exist. What he didn’t know was that it doesn’t need to be justified. The subjects don’t merely give up their rights grudgingly cowed into submission by some undeniable justification of divine right; they relinquish their rights and responsibilities deliberately, urgently, because that’s what people do.

One point which surprised me was that Hobbes said the king’s responsibility is to protect his subjects, and where he falters, so should the subjects’ loyalty. This bleeding heart wouldn’t have lasted under eight years of Reagan or Bush.

Last Modified : April 20th, 2009 Filed under : Books Navigate : Previous post / Next post