HOBBES's CONTRIBUTIONS

At the end of this journey which sought to recapture Hobbesian conceptual work in the field of political thought, we can retain four essential contributions of Hobbes to the definition of the modern concept of the political. Let us clarify, first of all, that the modern concept of the political does not consist of a single and homogeneous theoretical orientation: it is crossed by fractures and antinomies. To determine Hobbes's contributions does not in any way imply the idea that these contributions must be generally shared or taken up again by subsequent thinkers: it is a question only of freeing someone from the decisive modifications or innovations introduced by Hobbes within the construction of the intellectual categories of modern political thought through his fractures and his antinomies. Let us clarify, next, that the determination of the four contributions is not intended to be exhaustive. There are indeed whole sections of Hobbes's political thought that we have not approached, in particular the relationship between politics and religion where the three non-superimposable relations between state and Church, temporal and spiritual, reason and revelation is redistributed.

Hobbes's first contribution concerns the theory of the universal individual. Certainly, the relationship between the concept of the individual and the modern theory of the state is a classical place for commentary. We have however wanted to take account of his range by way of a new angle: that by which the universalisable concept of the individual again puts into question the vision of the world and of politics linked to the definition of the heroic singularity described by Gracián. Hobbes's individual is universal in the same way as his essential ethico-political attribute: natural right. Negatively, we can say that the concept of the individual dissolves every natural social hierarchy and every organic conception of the people. The correlate of the individual is the multitude from which must be thought an institution of the people, indissociable from the institution of the state. Positively, we can say that Hobbes elaborates his ethical concept of the individual in re-elaborating the doctrine of the constitution and of the deployment of man's cognitive and affective life. It is around this ethics that the theories of right and of contract [contrat] are organised and reinterpreted.

LEVELS OF READING FOR THE ETHICO-POLITICAL SYSTEM

Hobbes's ethical and political philosophy can be the target of a reading at different levels. This situation essentially stems from this: that Hobbes did not always keep, in the elaboration of his doctrine, to the principles that he however articulates as being before those of science, namely, the use of a language the nominal definitions of which must assure the univocity of significations. So that I am better understood: I am not at all saying that Hobbes does not put science's procedures to work in the ethical and political domain. On the contrary, the power [puissance] of his doctrine stems precisely from his broad overall consistency. I am only saying is that this consistency is studded with analogies that are sometimes presented as schemes of intelligibility. We are thinking, for example, of the analogy present in chapter 10 of Leviathan where man's tendency to increase his power [puissance] is compared with ‘the motion of heavy bodies, which the further they go, make still the more haste’. These are the analogies that have given rise to readings of the whole of the doctrine in terms of mechanistic physics. Certainly, physics very much constitutes the basis starting from which ethics and politics are deployed, but these cannot be reduced to that. The theory of the passions, the relational dynamics that lead to the state of war, the institution and the juridical function of the state cannot be explained in terms of movement and of composition of movements. Thus, the effects of a man's power [puissance] or of political power [pouvoir] are defined according to a notion that can have no place in physics, that of the sign. The ethics of a man's power [puissance] as much as the theory of political power [pouvoir] involve at different levels a specific modality of a semiological relationship between a signifier and a signified. This relationship, which it is possible to locate from The Elements of Law up to De Homine, takes on a frankly systematic character in Leviathan.

This work is constituted from studies each of which, in a first version, was to be given as a lecture or in a separate publication in France or abroad. We have, however, reshaped and rethought them in order to integrate them in this volume, which arranges the results of several years of reflection on Hobbes's oeuvre. This ordering and the reshuffling that it implies makes it possible to draw out issues which were only implicit in the texts’ first versions. Also, it clearly appeared that these are at the same time the fundamental problems and concepts of modern political thought, which were analysed from the different angles under which Hobbes's philosophy is considered. Some studies aiming to confront the English philosopher's positions with those of some of his contemporaries (Gracián, Filmer, Pascal, etc.) will also emphasise the displacements and ruptures which run across modern thought.

PROPERTY AND POWER [POUVOIR]

Property does not seem, at first glance, to figure among the fundamental questions aroused so much by the doctrine of natural right as by Hobbes's theory of politics. We find in it nothing comparable with, for example, the admirable chapter 5, ‘Of Property’, from Locke's Second Treatise of Government. Certain recent studies on the history of natural right and of property in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries give him neither a particular chapter nor even an attentive consideration. This situation is not without some objective foundation: the question of property is entirely subordinated in Hobbes to the political problem. It is in fact the existence of political power [pouvoir] that must take account of the origin, foundation and effectiveness of property. The state does not content itself with giving positive rules to property. It more radically founds the possibility of an appropriation of things:

The same passage in the Latin version of Leviathan states in a more suggestive manner:

If property is implemented, it is not primarily the work of labour upon nature, but the work of the power that founds it through law. More precisely, the first work is conditional on the second: political power [pouvoir] does not give to property its material, but its juridical effectiveness. We could say in this sense that Hobbes operates a political reduction of the problem of property in subordinating the appropriation of goods to the solution of the major political problem of the constitution of a sovereign power [pouvoir].

However, this political reduction of the problem of property risks masking another, perhaps more fundamental, operation, namely, the resurgence of property at the very heart of political theory. Indeed, is not the loss of property's autonomy had at the cost of an underlying reinterpretation of the political in terms of property?

THE RIGHT TO PUNISH AS A PROBLEM

In this text by Max Weber, the definition of the state and the questions that it raises are evidence of the repercussion of problems opened by Hobbes's political thought through sociology at the beginning of the twentieth century and, beyond that, to our own. Certainly, the perspective and the speculative context within which Weber deploys his analysis are very different from those that animate Hobbes's thought, but this does not prohibit encounters or even revivals since, beyond the diversity of the circumstances of thought, there is the same definition of political order. For us, in keeping to the cited text, we can read that Weber rediscovers Hobbes on the fundamental question of the relation between state and violence. Political domination is not the only important type of domination. Political power [pouvoir] is distinguished from other types of power [pouvoir]. In homogenising the concept of power [pouvoir] and in dissolving it into a network of relations or connections of force that cross social devices and institutions, we lose the political concept of power [pouvoir], and perhaps even that of power [pouvoir] full stop. Not that political power [pouvoir] would be the only kind to make use of violence as a means: in more or less evident ways, all power [pouvoir] supposes or engenders violence (whether it would be physical or not). What is more, we cannot define the power [pouvoir] of the state by the simple exercise of violence. What characterises political domination is another trait: not monopoly on violence, but monopoly on legitimate violence.

FROM THE PROBLEM TO THE THEORY OF LANGUAGE

If there is a problem which is found on all levels of Hobbes's work, it is very much that of language. Whether it is a matter of logic, physics, ethics, politics or theology, and whatever the irreducibility of these different domains may be, they are joined by the place and major function that they give to language.

As concerns logic, it suffices to recall that its proper field is deployed in a theory of names, proposition, syllogism and method in order to show its essential relation to the linguistic function right away: logical space is a logico-linguistic space. I say logico-linguistic and not grammatico-linguistic. On several occasions, Hobbes distinguishes logical considerations from grammatical considerations. And so, in De Corpore, when it is a matter of distinguishing simple names from compound names, Hobbes takes care to note that in philosophy, unlike what happens in grammar, a name does not necessarily consist in a single word, but in all the words which, by their meeting, form the name of a single thing. It is not the morphological unity, but the unity of designation that makes the unity of the name. Even though, for grammarians, the expression body animated, sentient is composed of three words, it constitutes only one for philosophers. The same idea is taken up again in Leviathan:

In logic, the unity of the name is a function of the unity or identity of the reference. The distinction between simple names and compound names thus cannot have the same meaning in logic as in grammar: the simple name is not distinguished from the compound by the preposition, but characterises that which is the most common or universal in its genre, whereas the compound name is that which becomes least universal by adding other names.

BEYOND THE CONVERGENCES

The convergences of Hobbes and Pascal's anthropological and political conception have often been emphasised. These convergences concern points as important as the theory of the expansion of the human self, the universalisation of the desire for domination, the doctrine of interhuman relationships, the necessity of the existence of a political authority that has the broadsword and justice, etc. at its disposal. We can thus think, without great fear of being mistaken, that Pascal read or at least heard talk of Hobbes, in particular of his De Cive. Certain Pascalian claims on the collective conduct of men or on the necessity of power [pouvoir] often seem, if not simple repetitions, at least copies of Hobbes's positions. Most often, Pascal seems to recognise in it an at least partial truth that he tries hard to restore to a level of determined reading. We do not intend to recapture and re-examine these Pascalian repetitions and displacements. This, not only because much has been done on this plane, but also and above all because it seems to us that, despite their real convergences indicated, Pascal and Hobbes's politics remain very differently minded, above all when we consider the question of the nature and the functioning of political power [pouvoir]. Hobbes and Pascal very much seem to furnish two distinct models of the theory of power [pouvoir]. In order to attempt to show this, we will thus examine three points, making it possible to determine the sites of divergence of the two analyses of the political: (1) institution or institutionalisation; (2) adequation or inadequation; (3) effects of reason or reason of effects. At each of these levels, Hobbes's theses and arguments will be developed less for themselves than in view of putting the specificity of Pascalian positions into perspective.

INSTITUTION OR INSTITUTIONALISATION

Hobbes's political doctrine is, in its central point of flexion, a theory of the contractual [contractuelle] institution of the state. The distinction between the republic of institution and the republic of acquisition does not affect the central character of the notion of institution itself. In opposition to this doctrine of explicit or implicit juridical institution of power [pouvoir], Pascal formulates a theory of the institutionalisation of force in right that has a different meaning.

CRISIS AND PROJECT

What are the terms of Hobbes's political philosophy? In order to understand it, we should first resituate it within the more general framework of his philosophy. The elaboration thereof is situated at the meeting point of a project and a crisis. The project was considerable and, in certain aspects, comparable to those of several of his great contemporaries. Hobbes intended, in fact, to take up a rational reconstruction of the whole of human knowledge so as to introduce order, certainty and truth into it. This rational reconstruction supposed a double approach. The first was analytic; it aimed to achieve, by the application of a resolutive method, the most universal concepts and most general terms, beyond which all human knowledge could not go back. The second was synthetic; it aimed, by the application of a compositive method, to find where to progressively produce, according to a rigorous deduction, all the knowledge which man could attain. Differently from Descartes, whose ambition was also to reach deductive knowledge of all the things that man can know, Hobbes's own special features stemmed, on the one hand, from this, that linguistic concerns again find a prominent place and, on the other hand, from the fact that he intended to reintroduce politics within the field of philosophy. The crisis was of an order other than the project, but just as considerable as it. It concerned the beginning of the English Civil War, the history of which Hobbes himself came to write later in a work titled Behemoth. The first lines of this work sufficiently emphasise the importance that this crisis had for philosophy:

THE SINGULARITY OF THE HERO AND THE UNIVERSALITY OF THE INDIVIDUAL

The theoretical figure of Gracián's1 work is singular. Indeed, an heir in several of its aspects to Renaissance treatises on the courtier and on the prince and a participant in the theoretico-cultural context of the Counter-Reformation, it shows the traits of a hero who will remain on the margins of the conception of man that organises the dominant currents of moral and political thought in the seventeenth century. We thus cannot fail to be struck by the contrast in the conception of the individual singularity – which subtends the heroic type – to the new notion of the individual that philosophers and moralists elaborate from before the middle of the seventeenth century, and who, precisely, efface that singularity in order to promote a universalisable image of man. This new notion of the individual implies a reinterpretation of the primacy, superiority and excellence that define the hero, a reinterpretation that transforms it into a fiction, the content of which is no longer real but imaginary. Gracián's hero gives way to an antiheroic conception of the individual.

It is this contrast that I would like to interrogate insofar as we cannot bring it back to a pure and simple opposition. Indeed, many of the constitutive elements of the world within which Gracián's hero lives are found again in the anthropological doctrines of authors like Hobbes, Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, etc. as principles that preside over its conduct. On the side of the social world, we again find the distinction, even the separation, between being and appearing, the idea of an inversion of values, the conception of a language and of ciphered conduct that it is essential to decode. On the side of human conduct, we again find that necessity of staying in the background in relation to others, of governing its appearance in order to be placed in a superior situation. Yet Gracián's hero is no longer there. Therefore, it must be that something happened, that the essential determinations of the hero had disappeared and that others were substituted for it. The rules that Gracián conceived within the framework of an instruction manual for the hero's exceptional qualities and capacities are from now on found integrated within the analysis of the behaviour of an individual who is no longer in any way heroic.

REPRESENTATION, CIVIL PERSON AND STATE

The theory of juridical representation – a particular case of which is the theory of political representation – formulated in chapter 16 of Leviathan is not only one of the absolutely new aspects of this work in relation to The Elements of Law and De Cive. It is a centrepiece starting from which Hobbes reconstructs the whole of his theory of the social contract. Indeed, the social contract puts into play the passage from a multiplicity of natural persons in conflict to a single civil person. Hobbes formulates the passage thus in The Elements of Law: ‘a multitude of persons are united by covenants into one person civil, or body politic’. De Cive takes up a comparable formulation again: ‘By what hath been sayd, it is sufficiently shewed, in what degrees many naturall persons, through desire of preserving themselves, and by mutuall feare, have growne together into a civill Person, whom we have called a City.’ Finally, we can read in Leviathan: ‘A Multitude of men, are made One Person, when they are by one man, or one Person, Represented.’ The fundamental difference in relation to the two preceding utterances is that henceforth the notion of representation takes account of the notion of the civil person.

Yet the versions of the social pact from The Elements of Law and De Cive do not allow for taking account of the constitution of the civil person, so that the political edifice, no sooner erected, collapses. The notion of the civil person (persona civilis) that appears in each of these works will never be truly operational. It is thus upon the debris of the theory of the social contract and of the state from The Elements of Law and De Cive that Leviathan is going to reconstruct the juridical armature of a new political edifice with political representation.

THE LAW IN GENERAL AND ITS SPECIFICATIONS

‘Law, properly, is the word of him, that by right hath command over others.’ Such is the unified concept that Hobbes gives of the law in general. The difference between laws, in particular the difference between natural law and civil law, derives from the specification of the term left undetermined in the general definition. In order to pass from this definition to particular laws, it is in fact sufficient to specify the name of the legislator. Thus, natural law is characterised as ‘the word of God, that by right commandeth all things’, and civil law considered as adding nothing to the general concept of the law other than ‘the name of the person Commanding, which is Persona Civitatis, the Person of the Common-wealth’. The Elements of Law already indicated it – ‘From the difference of the authors, or lawmakers, cometh the division of law into divine, natural, and civil’ – before recalling in the following paragraph that natural law and divine law are a single law.

The definition of the law in general is composed of two principal determinations: on the one hand, the notion of a right to command which belongs to a legislator; on the other hand, the indication of a mode of signifying. To these two general determinations is added a third, the specification of the legislator, who intervenes in order to specify the kind of law.

First, in the definition of the law, the notion of command is fundamental. It is what assures the unity of the concept but also its limitation. The law returns to a relation of obligation between persons. It is thus neither, in an old sense, a principle of action that immanently governs beings, nor, in a modern sense, a necessary relation between phenomena. As command, the law is indeed the declaration of one person's will to another who must obey him.

FILMER's JUDGEMENT

Everything is somehow already said in this assessment from Filmer. In order to take account of his reading of Hobbes's politics, it is thus necessary to elucidate this paradox that makes him approve the edifice while condemning the foundation, that is to say, retain the doctrine of the rights of sovereignty while rejecting the theory of institution that subtends it. Can the Hobbesian concept of sovereignty preserve the same content when we separate it from the concepts of natural right and social contract in order to replace it within a doctrine that makes of the ‘right of fatherhood’ the foundation for ‘royal authority’? Thus formulated, the question calls for a negative response: the concept of sovereignty is evidently bound to the doctrinal framework within which it is constructed. Sovereignty according to Bodin is not identical to sovereignty according to Filmer, and the latter is not identical to sovereignty according to Hobbes. Certainly, there are numerous and real convergences between Filmer and Hobbes, to which we will return, but there are also some fundamental divergences which affect the content of the concept of sovereignty and explain the incommensurate posterity of their works. This double relation between Filmer and Hobbes can be truly understood only if we perceive the existence of an important differentiation in the work of the second: there are not one but, in a sense, two theories of sovereignty's foundation in Hobbes. Yet these two theories are supposed to agree with an identical definition of sovereignty's rights. It is a question of the distinction between the concepts of regnum patrimoniale and regnum institutivum. The Filmerian critique of Hobbes is going to consist in privileging the first against the second, that is to say, in opposing Hobbes to himself. What is the value of this critique? Is the double foundation of sovereignty in Hobbes internalised in a splitting of the concept of sovereignty?

Yves Charles Zarka is indeed one of the most important philosophers in france, though he has been little recognised in the anglophone world, at least beyond hobbes scholarship. he is currently the chair of political philosophy as well as director of the centre de philosophie, d’épistémologie et de politique at the université paris descartes (sorbonne). he is also the director of several imprints at the presses universitaires de france, is the editor of the journal cités, and has collaborated with jürgen habermas and axel honneth. as to his work on hobbes, he is the director of vrin's oeuvres de hobbes, in addition to several writings – including this book, la décision métaphysique de hobbes and l'autre voie de la subjectivité – as well as a number of edited volumes. thus, while his work on hobbes is what he is primarily known for in english, his research extends to political philosophy broadly, both in its history and its current articulations.

Perhaps the fact that I feel the need to state that Zarka's work covers political philosophy in its historical and contemporary registers explains some of the reasons why he is not as well known to Englishlanguage readers as he could be. It does not seem to be a great stretch to claim that Hobbes scholarship in the English-speaking world has been influenced by the work of Quentin Skinner, whose fundamental philosophical positions lead him to ask ‘why [texts] were written in the form in which we have them’. This question leads to detailed examinations of the surrounding contexts of the material he examines; of other texts of the time that may have influenced by, or been in immediate conversation with, say, Leviathan; and so on. This approach is, in its way, laudable, leading to any number of insights as to how and why a certain text came to be written in the way that it did. However, it is not the only approach to historically grounded philosophy, and I would argue that it is a limiting and limited approach in its way as well.

The limits to Skinner's approach can be seen at the end of the same sentence cited above, where he articulates a problematic approach to the history of political philosophy: ‘what can I hope to learn from this text about politics’.

THE STATE OF NATURE: MISINTERPRETATION OR MODEL?

The specific contribution of Hobbes's philosophy for a thought of war stems from what it creates with the concept of the state of war and, for close to two centuries of political thought, a tradition that is simultaneously distinguished from the theologico-juridical tradition of just war and from the tactical and strategic tradition of the art of war. However, the historical repercussion of a concept cannot single-handedly guarantee semantic value. Better, we can legitimately ask ourselves if the Hobbesian concept of state of war does not cover a misinterpretation, both the specious character – ‘there is no war between men: it is only between states’ – and the function of justification – ‘Who could have imagined without shuddering the insane system of natural war of each against all? What a strange animal this is that would believe its own good depended upon the destruction of its entire species! … Nevertheless, that is where the desire or rather the rage for establishing despotism and passive obedience have led one of the finest geniuses that ever existed’ – of which Rousseau will vehemently denounce. Certainly, Rousseau does not reject the concept of state of war as such, but the form of a war of all against all that Hobbes gives to it. It is thus the pertinence and the originality of the Hobbesian concept that it is a question of re-establishing. For, on the one hand, if it is true that the state of war defines first of all the contentious relations between men in the state of nature, it constitutes above all a model for rendering account of every kind of war, interindividual war as much as international war and subversive war. On the other hand, the state of interindividual war is far from being reduced to a state of pure violence. The act of violence is always temporary, the state of war is permanent, Hobbes says before Rousseau. Yet this distinction can be justified only because the dynamics of human behaviours within the state of nature is a dynamics of signs, and not only of force, or the act of violence: ‘To kill his man’ itself appears as a sign.

HISTORICAL INTEREST AND PHILOSOPHICAL INTEREST

The work that you are going to read relates to the study of the reorienting, transforming and innovative work in political thought undertaken by Hobbes. A certain number of political modernity's nodal problems will follow from this conceptual work. In order to define the stakes of this work, I will first make an effort to point out the general, simultaneously historiographical and philosophical perspective within which it is inscribed, and I will then indicate the places that will bear on the examination of Hobbes's conceptual intervention.

The general perspective of my research concerns, in this work as in my previous works, the moment where political philosophy, particularly in the seventeenth century, conceptually forges ethical, juridical and theological positions which involve the determination of the foundations of modern politics. The direction of this approach is simultaneously historical and philosophical. Historical, because the texts that it is a question of understanding are texts of the past, the study of which must be subject to historically exact criteria; philosophical, because these texts are not simply the vestiges of a bygone era, but are the bearers of interrogations which raise determinations concerning the nature, value and end of the political to the level of concept, and thus involve our comprehension of the political. In this sense, the historical interest that I bring to past political philosophies cannot be dissociated from a philosophical interest. This position supposes two things concerning the status of, on the one hand, the history of philosophy and, on the other, political philosophy's relationship between the past and the present. On the first point, I will say that the properly philosophical stakes of past political philosophies are retrievable and can be reactivated only from a philosophical point of view. On the second point, I will say that, to the extent that they open up the determinations of the political to the thinkable, the texts of past political philosophy are likely to furnish theoretical resources for the renewal of our own reflection.

This double bond of historical interest and philosophical interest is, however, far from being self-evident.