Hobbesian Political Order

Political Theory

Volumn 19, Issue 2, 1991, Pages 156-180

  Hardin, Russell ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO   (United States)

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EID: 84972700447     PISSN: 00905917     EISSN: 15527476     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0090591791019002002     Document Type: Article

References (52)

1. As Stephen Holmes argues, egoism was a healthy tonic to other, more divisive commitments, many of them in some sense communitarian. See Stephen Holmes, “The Secret History of Self-interest,” in Beyond Self-Interest, edited by Jane Mansbridge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).
2. will cite Leviathan in parentheses in the text by chapter and page number. The first page number is for Hobbes, Leviathan, edited by C. B. Macpherson (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1968). The second number [in brackets] is that of the original edition of Leviathan in 1651. Unless stated otherwise, all Hobbes quotations and thoughts are from Leviathan. See a similar claim for silence as consent in Thomas Hobbes, Human Nature in The English Works of Thomas Hobbes, edited by William Molesworth (London: Bohn, 1860), vol. 4; passage in chap. 13, -11, 76.
3. C. B. Macpherson, “Introduction” to Hobbes, Leviathan, 40; also see 43-44. Macpherson notes, however, that “Hobbess case does not rest on the possibility of men in a state of nature making a contract to establish political society” (p. 61). And he generally argues for a hypothetical, rather than an actual, interpretation of Hobbess supposed contractarian position (pp. 43-45). There is wide consensus on Macpherson's view of Hobbes as a contractarian. See Don Herzog 's brief “story” on this consensus in Herzog, Happy Slaves (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), chap. 3. As noted later, Jean Hampton and Gregory Kavka do not fully join in the consensus.
4. Hence the title of Arthur Stinchcombe's review of works by Jon Elster: “Is the Prisoner's Dilemma All of Sociology?” Inquiry 23 (1980): 187-92.
5. Gregory Kavka, Hobbesian Moral and Political Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 179-88, and Jean Hampton, Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 138-47.
6. John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953, 3d ed.; originally published 1944).
7. spell out the strategic structure of Hume's moral and political theory in Morality within the Limits of Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), esp. chap. 2.
8. David Gauthier, The Logic of Leviathan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969). Gauthier calls the Prisoner's Dilemma by name only in a footnote (p. 79), perhaps because, on his own account, Gauthier seems to have discovered the Prisoner's Dilemma only late in the writing of this book. See the preface to his Morals by Agreement (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), v.
9. Kavka, Hobbesian Moral and Political Theory.
10. Kavka implicitly supports this view in the preponderance he gives to explicating Hobbess “descriptive theory” over his moral theory.
11. A. E. Taylor argues that Hobbess ethical theory is independent of his psychological doctrines and that it is not based on self-interest. “Hobbess ethical doctrine proper. is a very strict deontology, curiously suggestive, though with interesting differences, of some of the characteristic theses of Kant” (“The Ethical Doctrine of Hobbes,” Philosophy 13 [1938]: 406-424, at 407-8). I think Taylor's central thesis is wrong but that his Kantian associations have some license in Hobbes. The Taylor thesis has been soundly criticized. See, for example, Stuart M. Brown, Jr. “Hobbes: The Taylor Thesis,” Philosophical Review 68 (July 1959): 303-23.
12. One's person is, indeed, counted as part of one's property by Hobbes (chap. 30, 382-83 [179]).
13. Alan Gewirth, Reason and Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978); David Gauthier, Morals by Agreement (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986); and John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971).
14. In an apt metaphor, Hobbes attributes part of the success of his understanding to the slow process of historical learning from experience, as we learn over the centuries how to build better, more lasting houses. “So, long time after men have begun to constitute Common-wealths, imperfect, and apt to relapse into disorder, there may, Principles of Reason be found out, by industrious meditation, to make their constitution (except by externall violence) everlasting” (chap. 30, 378 [176]).
15. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge and P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978, 2d ed. [1739-40]), bk. 3, pt. 2, sec. 7, 535. 16. To be consistent, Hobbes must suppose his sovereign will find it in his own interest to serve the people well, as he does suppose (chap. 18, 238-39 [94]).
16. The decision, by a 6 to 3 vote rendered February 22, 1989, exonerated Wisconsin state officials of personal liability for ignoring pleas to protect a child from child abuse. Chief Justice Rehnquist's majority opinion argued that the intent of the relevant constitutional clause was not to force the state to protect citizens from each other but to protect citizens from the state (New York Times, February 23, 1989, 1).
17. Gauthier, Morals by Agreement, 162.
18. John Searle, “Deriving ‘Ought’ from ‘Is,’” in Searle, Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 175-98.
19. Gauthier argues that it is rational to adopt a disposition to cooperate with others who have adopted a like disposition. Gauthier calls this disposition “constrained maximization” (Morals by Agreement, chap. 6). This is to suppose one could simply will to bind oneself to the laws of nature. That would have been a remarkably easy solution for Hobbes because it would have let him end Leviathan soon after establishing the laws of nature. “Constrained maximization” was not in Hobbess vocabulary, but it seems not grossly tendentious to say he rejects it outright.
20. “Usual” in the sense that they are the Prisoner's Dilemmas analyzed by most game theorists and played by most experimental games subjects.
21. Defection might be a dominant strategy for an individual who wants revolutionary change but wants to avoid the potential costs that revolutionary action might bring to individual participants. But these costs are what the extant regime can inflict, not the costs of creating a government de novo.
22. For further discussion of the establishment of such a convention, see Hardin, Morality within the Limits of Reason, 47-53.
23. In an earlier variant of part of his Morals by Agreement, Gauthier reconstructs Hobbes on an argument from convention (David Gauthier, “Thomas Hobbes: Moral Theorist,” Journal of Philosophy 76 [October 1979]: 547-59). However, Gauthier is concerned with Hobbess supposed moral theory rather than his political theory: He wishes to make of Hobbess laws of nature a moral rather than a legal code. He also bases his account on an odd reading of Hobbess admittedly vexed response to the Foole who queries whether it would not, in fact, be rational to violate one's covenants (chap. 15, 203-5 [72-73]).
24. There are elements of a convention theory of the maintenance of government in various past philosophers, most extensively in Hume and Adam Smith and, with clumsy missteps, in Austin.
25. David K. Lewis, Convention (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969).
26. One should not overstate the extent of Hobbess understanding of the convention argument for the maintenance of political order. If the argument is sound, it suggests that power need not be so absolute as Hobbes insists it be. He says, “And whosoever thinking Soveraign Power too great, will seek to make it lesse; must subject himselfe, to the Power, that can limit it; that is to say, to a greater” (chap. 20, 260 [107]). Against Hobbess apparent logic, we can, through devices of convention, restrain one another, and varied parts of a government may do so as well. Indeed, contemporary democratic governments are strategically designed to separate powers in order to reduce overall power, especially capricious power.
27. See later note 36 for discussion of his exception of some of the nobility of his time.
28. Kavka and Hampton discuss the impure coordination problem that Hobbes faces. See Kavka, Hobbesian Moral and Political Theory, 184-88; Hampton, Hobbes, 150-53.
29. Moreover, Hobbes implicitly rejects the invocation of God to give one an incentive to act properly in the state of nature, as for example, by fulfilling one's promise or covenant. He says that an oath makes no difference to one's obligation: “For a Covenant, if lawfull, binds in the sight of God, without the oath, as much as with it: if unlawfull, bindeth not at all; though it be confirmed with an oath” (chap. 14, 201 [71]). Since covenants are generally not lawful in the state of nature, they do not bind there in God's eyes even though sworn before God. By implication, God cannot be tricked into service to bring order to the state of nature by ruling over each individual there.
30. C. R. Hallpike, “Functionalist Interpretations of Primitive Warfare,” Man 8 (September 1973): 451-70.
31. E. R. Sorrenson, “Socio-ecological Change among the Fore of New Guinea,” Current Anthropology 13 (1972): 349-84. See further, Elizabeth Colson, Tradition and Contract: The Problem of Order (Chicago: Aldine, 1974), 62-69.
32. Among moral theorists, Gauthier is probably the major dissenter from this view. His Morals by Agreement is primarily a theory of why we would self-interestedly choose to act cooperatively in Prisoner's Dilemmas. However, his generalization of his theory of constrained maximization from two-person to large-number Prisoner's Dilemmas is by assertion rather than by demonstration (see Gauthier, Morals by Agreement, 130n).
33. See, e.g. Russell Hardin, Collective Action (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), esp. 218, and Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (New York: Basic Books, 1984).
34. For criticisms of several tentative generalizations from two-person to large-number iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, see Russell Hardin, “Individual Sanctions, Collective Benefits,” in Paradoxes of Rationality and Cooperation: Prisoners Dilemma and Newcomb's Problem, edited by Richmond Campbell and Lanning Sowden (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1985), 339-54.
35. The “virtually” covers an exception that seems to have bothered Hobbes. Under his fifth law of nature, Compleasance, “a man that by asperity of Nature, will strive to retain those things which to himselfe are superfluous, and to others necessary; and for the stubbornness of his Passions, cannot be corrected, is to be left, or cast out of Society, as combersome thereto” (chap. 15, 209 [76]). Herzog supposes that the nobility were the target of this worry because, contrary to Hobbess ground principle for his laws of nature, they were not interested in seeking or enjoying peace but actually preferred strife in which they could achieve glory and honor (Happy Slaves, chap. 3).
36. See Hampton's extended discussion, Hobbes, 150-66.
37. Leo Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and Its Genesis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952; first published 1936), 159.
38. Thomas Hobbes, De Cive, edited by Howard Warrender (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983 [1651]), 2.5.5.
39. The English title was Philosophicall Rudiments Concerning Government and Society.
40. Hobbes, De Cive, 2.5.11.
41. Hampton supposes power can be more or less instantly created because the newly elected sovereign can call on a small number of citizens to capture any lawbreaker, say, a contract breaker. This small group, or posse, faces, she says, not a Prisoner's Dilemma but rather a “step good” problem in which everyone must cooperate or the endeavor fails. But each member of the posse would rather bear the expected cost of her participation in the posse than have the sovereign falter and return everyone to the state of nature. Hence each will cooperate and the lawbreaker will be captured and brought for punishment (Hampton, Hobbes, 176-86). This is a too labored story that, like Hobbess very problem of creating a sovereign out of the state of nature, sounds more like a story than a real problem or prospect. Kavka seems only somewhat less confident (Hobbesian Moral and Political Theory, 243-44, 254-66), but see David Braybrooke, “The Insoluble Problem of the Social Contract,” Dialogue 15 (March 1976): 3-37.
42. Herzog ruefully notes that this insight was not available to Hobbes (Herzog, Happy Slaves, chap. 3).
43. So good that he rightly merits the credit David Lewis gives him for discovering a proto-game-theoretic account of convention (Lewis, Convention, 3-4).
44. Hume, Treatise, bk. 3, pt. 2, sec. 3, 504-13 (especially the footnotes) and sec. 10, 553-67. Hume specifically labels the resolution a convention: “And this may properly enough be call'd a convention or agreement betwixt us, tho’ without the interposition of a promise; since the actions of each of us have a reference to those of the other, and are perform'd upon the supposition, that something is to be perform'd on the other part” (Treatise 3.2.2, 490).
45. Kavka, Hobbesian Moral and Political Theory, 181. This is an odd argument: that part of what makes our form of government right is that it originates in a right way. There was once an analogous view of what makes humans subject to morality: that they originate by the creation of and in the likeness of god. If we originated from some primordial slime, we apparently could not be subject to morality. Surely, any such argument from origins is eventually wrong, both for humans and for forms of government.
46. The injustice in this reading is that Hobbes was arguably merely defending whatever government was firmly in place against what he saw as the chaos of revolutionary fervor. He asserts, “That you will esteeme it better to enjoy your selves in the present state though perhaps not the best, then by waging Warre, indeavour to procure a reformation for other men in another age, your selves in the meane while either kill'd, or consumed with age” (Thomas Hobbes, De Cive, “Preface,” 36). Similarly, he notes “that the estate of Man can never be without some incommodity or other; and that the greatest, that in any forme of Government can possibly happen to the people in generali, is scarce sensible, in respect of the miseries, and horrible calamities, that accompany a Civill Warre” {Leviathan, chap. 18, 238 [94]). Unfortunately, therefore, as Macpherson notes, “in immediate application [Hobbess work] supported the King against Parliament” (Macpherson, “Introduction,” 20).
47. Leslie Stephen, Hobbes (London: Macmillan, 1904), 203.
48. For the general argument, see Russell Hardin, “Exchange Theory on Strategic Bases,” Social Science Information 2 (1982): 251-72.
49. Hardin, Collective Action, esp. chaps. 9 through 14; Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation.
50. See further, Hardin, Collective Action, 200-5.
51. Macpherson, “Introduction,” 13.
52. Hampton presents a compelling Hobbesian account of why contractarianism cannot work as a general theory of the state and why Hobbess theory is not contractarian on usual meanings of that term. She then oddly concludes that we should nevertheless call her Hobbesian resolution a variant of contractarianism, as she chooses to do (Hampton, Hobbes, 279). It would contribute more to understanding to assert that it is not contractarian. Russell Hardin s Mellon Foundation Professor of Political Science, Philosophy, and Public Policy Studies at the University of Chicago. He is currently working on issues in ethics and public life and on the foundations of rational choice and social order. He is author of Morality within the Limits of Reason (University of Chicago Press, 1988) and the immediate past editor of Ethics: An International Journal of Social, Political and Legal Philosophy.