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.