The Making of the Subject of the Leviathan by Miloš Petrović A
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The Making of the Subject of the Leviathan By Miloš Petrović A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Rhetoric in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Michael Wintroub, Chair Professor Mark Bevir Professor Martin Jay Professor Hans Sluga Fall 2015 Abstract The Making of the Subject of the Leviathan by Miloš Petrović Doctor of Philosophy in Rhetoric University of California, Berkeley Professor Michael Wintroub, Chair The thesis of this dissertation is that modern society makes individuals into conformists and therefore into suitable subjects for social control and undemocratic rule. This thesis may seem counterintuitive at first. What characterizes modernity, one could say, is precisely that it releases individual members of society from existing structures of incorporation. And this is true. What is also true, however, is that individuation and conformism are not incompatible. Indeed, it is the history of their compatibility that is demonstrated in the present work. This is demonstrated on the example of England. Politically, England is the birthplace of constitutionalism and parliamentarism; economically, of the industrial revolution and capitalism; socially, of middle-class consumerism; intellectually, of liberalism. England—especially the England of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries—is therefore the most suitable point of entry for the analysis of modern society, and of the origins of contemporary global society. More precisely, the focus is on the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes and his work Leviathan. Though Hobbes’s own views are discussed at length, the presence of Hobbes here looms larger in a symbolic way. Namely, to the extent to which he has stood for authoritarianism, Hobbes has not been taken as a progenitor of English and global modernity, especially not of political modernity, but as its opponent. Already loudly rejected by his own contemporaries, Hobbes remained notorious—a practically unspeakable name—for generations after his death, and the entire subsequent development of political practice and theory in England (and Scotland later on) could be seen as a frenzied reaction to his work. And, yet, the argument here is that Hobbes’s political testament was nevertheless in essence quietly realized. Generally speaking, this testament has to do with the way society is held together. What keeps a society together according to Hobbes is an omnipotent and capricious force hovering over and above all individual members of society, a force external to them and keeping them all in check. To claim that this force ceased to exist in England in the centuries after Hobbes would be foolish, even for Hobbes’s staunchest critics. More importantly, however, what marked the period after Hobbes is that the integrity of English society became just as dependent on the way its individual members came fully to embody this external force through their language, their tastes, manners, emotions, and their entire demeanor and attitude—the so-called English mentality. In other words, the Leviathan came to reside within and not outside the individual. The Leviathan was produced (or, more correctly, reproduced) in the course of the production of the individual. 1 The task of this dissertation is therefore twofold. First, it shows that Hobbes was indeed aware of this subjective element in his conception of the Leviathan. He recognized that an ordered and peaceful society must rely both on the force of the sovereign as well as on the particular make-up of the individual. He was very much concerned with the kind of individual that would be most suitable for the purposes he assigned to the state. Second, it shows the actual ways in which Englishmen did change along the lines of Hobbes’s thinking between the middle of the 17th and the middle of the 18th centuries. To this end, close analysis has been made of the changes that took place in the various spheres of human intellectual activity at the time, especially in literature, philosophy, science, and pulpit oratory, as well as in built environment, arts and crafts, and clothing. It is shown that all these spheres were strongly affected by a particular ideology of individual self- effacement. Analysis has also been made of the changes in manners and speech, and in the interaction between individuals, especially between men and women, parents and children, both verbal and physical. What they all have in common is an increased tendency to uniformity, a desire to be agreeable and pleasant, to be “sociable.” Anything that could upset the order of things, arouse strong feelings, or offend, or even draw attention, is suspicious. Forms of individuality are carefully prescribed and can be expressed in countless ways as long as they fit the given framework. In brief, an underlying conservatism came to dominate 18th century England in ways that were extra- political, but which would continue to make a profound impact on the political reality of the state. 2 To Theodore G. Schmidt, Jr. and In memory of Elizabeth Ellis Schmidt With immense affection and gratitude i The task at hand is to answer the following question: Who is the subject of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan? To pose the question of the subject as opposed to the sovereign may be odd from the standpoint of a tradition which seems enthralled with those who govern, with those, who are, at least ostensibly, in power. In Plato we begin with the philosopher king, in Machiavelli with the prince, in Hobbes with the sovereign. Later the focus is on the enlightened legislator, the state, government, the party, etc. Even so-called democratic theory has rarely concerned itself with the demos, and has instead preferred the loftier discussions of the rule of law, of constitutions, regulations, and other norms. In each case, the individual is either ignored or treated derivatively. As any student of Hobbes very well knows, the fascination has always been, and remains, with the figure of the sovereign (“the head of the Leviathan”), and it is this figure that has exerted the greatest influence and retained the greatest mystique. And yet, to know the nature of the sovereign, we ought to know the nature of his subject and the way the subject has come to be. The two seem to compose an inseparable pair. What is more, when Hobbes wrote his Leviathan, there was no Leviathan properly speaking. Hobbes was only making a case for one. It was a piece of propaganda, though carefully couched in terms of universal truths. What did exist was the individual who, in Hobbes’s view, required most urgently a sovereign of the sort he had described. The aim of Hobbes was to protect society from ever again falling apart, and the Leviathan was only his potential solution; the source of the problem, on the other hand, namely the men needing a Leviathan, was presumably already there. So who was this man? More precisely, what sort of subject did this man need to become, in Hobbes’s view, in order to be a proper subject to the Leviathan? This question is important not only because of Hobbes. As one of the founders of modern political theory, and one of the early theorists who is still deemed to be modern, perhaps more so than ever before, Hobbes figures prominently in our understanding of the political condition itself. In so far as Hobbes is our foundation, in so far as he is still modern, his subject must be present with us to the extent that his Leviathan is, and merely to say that this subject is a member of the nascent bourgeoisie, an egotist and a possessive individualist, is no longer sufficient. The goal is not so much to illuminate Hobbes, as it is to illuminate the nature of the Hobbesian subject, of the person who subjects. We must therefore enter our subject quite carefully and patiently, not in order to assail, but to unravel and to unveil. It should not be necessary to emphasize that this work is guided by the understanding that every theoretical problem in the social sciences is always at the same time a historical one. Moreover, that only within, and to the extent of, our understanding of its history, is it a problem in the first place. It is also guided by the conviction, well stated by Max Weber, that changes in history are not all mere “matters of degree,” and that a genuinely critical reflection “will focus on the 1 changes that emerge in spite of all parallels, and will use the similarities of two societies only to highlight their distinctiveness.”1 I In the eighteenth century, England was considered by contemporaries to be a land of freedom and equality, a land of habeas corpus and of trial by jury, of the freedom of opinion, speech, and press, of assembly and petition, a land of religious toleration. It was, moreover, a land which had replaced serfdom with a growing middle class and which had granted both political and social dignity to occupations in trade. By the beginning of the eighteenth century the member of the middle class had already become the subject of praise even in the poetry of England. We can observe it in Philips (Cyder, 1708), in Tickell (The Prospect of Peace, 1712), in Pope (Windsor Forrest, 1713), in Thomson (The Seasons, 1726), in Dyer (The Fleece, 1757); but also in the drama of Steele (The Conscious Lovers, 1722) or Gay (Polly, 1729; The Distress’d Wife, 1734), and in the novels of Defoe (Roxana, 1724) or Richardson (Clarissa, 1748). The most influential of these works was George Lillo’s play The London Merchant (1731) where we are told, among other things, that “those countries where trade is promoted and encouraged do not make discoveries to destroy but to improve mankind.”2 Words such as these were previously unheard of, in England or on the Continent, and meant much more than might seem to us at first blush.