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Why Thomas Hobbes ranks as the father of liberty

Sunday, July 22, 2012 1:07

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After three months I finally managed to find some time to edit The Discovery of Freedom, which is languishing and requires focused attention. I expect it to take another 2-3 revisions, possibly one more year. I’m not happy with the current draft.

Here’s the current version on the role of Thomas Hobbes, being a small extract from the third chapter which I’m currently editing.

=EXTRACT=

Thomas Hobbes, in my view, should be considered as the Father of Freedom together with John Locke, who expanded and refined his comprehensive work a few decades later.

Hobbes is not typically given this status by most others. But arguments underpinning the free society were first brought together by Hobbes – through his ‘laws of nature’. And he highlighted the importance of accountability. His analysis was based on a scientific analysis of human nature.

His second law of nature, for instance, recognises strategic behaviour. A man should ‘be willing, when others are so too, … to … be contented with so much liberty against other men as he would allow other men against himself.”[1] This is a rather modern (‘tit-for-tat’) conception of liberty.

Hobbes is best known for his advocacy of the social contract that generats a strong government to protect our liberty, a concept later expanded and appropriately restrained by Locke. (Rousseau, who wrote about the social contract, as well, was not in this tradition. His focus on positive liberty and the ‘general will’ gave the state unlimited powers to dicate its ‘will’, creating dangers that the world only came to recognize much later, at a great human cost.) It was clear in both Hobbes and Locke that without a strong state that enforces justice we are susceptible to the beast within us, for ‘during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war as is of every man against every man’[2].

His third law hits out at those who think they have liberty of action without accountability:

The fool hath said in his heart, there is no such thing as justice, and sometimes also with his tongue, seriously alleging that every man’s conservation and contentment being committed to his own care, there could be no reason why every man might not do what he thought conduced thereunto: and therefore also to make, or not make; keep, or not keep, covenants was not against reason when it conduced to one’s benefit.

To me this Hobbesian focus on individual justice is absolutely critical. He requires ‘men [to] perform their covenants made’[3]. We must meet our commitments. That, to me, summarises the limits of liberty. The social contract can thus be ‘contracted [summarised] into one easy sum, intelligible even to the meanest capacity; and that is: Do not that to another which thou wouldest not have done to thyself’[4]. The Golden Rule, a fundamental principle of justice, along with his argument for a state as an institution necessitated by human nature, makes Hobbes, in my view, the main founder of classical liberalism.

One does not have to agree with everything he wrote, in order to give him this honour. Being an early thinker, his ideas left much to be desired. I would debate his arguments for rehabilitation, not punishment: ‘we are forbidden to inflict punishment with any other design than for correction of the offender, or direction of others.’ In my view, a precisely accountable system will first ensure an equivalent punishment. Deterrence is a naturally (and desirable) outcome of punishment. The goal of reform must be largely consequential, and achieved by treating the criminal with respect as a human, with the crime being distinguished (for the purpose of punishment) from the criminal.

His ninth law – about political equality – is particularly important. It asks us to ‘acknowledge another for his equal by nature.’[5] No one is therefore privileged: ‘no man can … reserve to himself any right which he is not content should he reserved to every one of the rest’[6]. A more precise statement of political equality is hard to find.

But then he goes overboard. Upon handing over our sovereignty (in part) to the sovereign, Hobbes suggests that the sovereign then becomes above the law. This idea – of our sovereignty being handed to anyone, or of the ‘sovereign’ being above the law, is entirely incompatible with rule of law, and therefore the modern concepts of classical liberalism. Buchanan critiqued Hobbes’s conception of the state, thus: ‘Hobbes failed, himself, to share the liberal vision; he failed to understand that an idealized structure of social interaction is possible in which no person exerts power over another.’[7]

Regardless of these issues, it remains a fact that most ideas of classical liberalism were first brought together by Hobbes. Without his book, Leviathan, to test our ideas against, we would not have had the scientific theory of the liberal state. Leviathan is to modern society as Darwin’s Origin of Species is to modern biology. It is perpetually pertinent.

While the government must exercise no sovereignty over citizens, its is an authorised power. What Hobbes fails to appreciate is that the exercise of whimsical power by the ‘sovereign’ is incompatible with the idea of liberty and justice. He did not appropriately bind the sovereign, which John Locke (1632-1704) was to do a few decaces after him, thus becoming far more influential today than Hobbes[8].

[1] Leviathan, 1651, Chapter 14 http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/h/hobbes/thomas/h68l/chapter14.html

[2] Leviathan, 1651, Chapter 13 http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/h/hobbes/thomas/h68l/chapter14.html

[3] Leviathan, 1651, Chapter 15 http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/h/hobbes/thomas/h68l/chapter15.html

[4] Leviathan, 1651, Chapter 15 http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/h/hobbes/thomas/h68l/chapter15.html

[5] Leviathan, 1651, Chapter 15 http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/h/hobbes/thomas/h68l/chapter15.html

[6] Leviathan, 1651, Chapter 15 http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/h/hobbes/thomas/h68l/chapter15.html

[7] Buchanan, James, ‘The Soul of Classical Liberalism’.

[8] His writings include A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), Two Treatises of Civil Government (1690), Some Considerations of the Consequences of the Lowering of Interest, Raising the Value of Money (1692), and A Vindication of the Reasonableness of Christianity (1695).

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