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Hobbes's Constitutional Theory-Dyzenhaus.Pdf EDITORIAL Leviathan COMMITTEE FOR Rethinking Or The Matter, Forme, the & Power of a Common- Western Tradition Wealth Ecclesiasticall David Bromwich Yale University and Civill Gerald Graff University of Illinois at Chicago Geoffrey Hartman Yale University Samuel Lipman (deceased) THOMAS HOBBES The New Criterion Gary Saul Morson Northwestern University Edited and with an Introduction J aroslav Pelikan by Ian Shapiro (deceased) Yale University with essays by Marjorie Perloff John Dunn Stanford University David Dyzenhaus Richard Rorty Stanford University Elisabeth Ellis Alan Ryan Bryan Garsten New College, Oxford Ian Shapiro Yale University Yale Frank M. Turner UNIVERSITY Yale University Allen W. Wood PRESS Stanford University New Haven and London Contributors Published with assistance from the Louis Stern Memorial Fund. John Dunn is Fellow of King's College and Professor of Political Theory at the University of Cambridge. Copyright© 2010 by Yale University. All rights reserved. David Dyzenhaus is Professor of Law and Philosophy at the University of This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, Toronto. including illustrations, in any form (beyond that Elisabeth Ellis is Associate Professor of Political Science at Texas A&M copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. University. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Bryan Garsten is Associate Professor of Political Science at Yale University. Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, Ian Shapiro is Sterling Professor of Political Science and Henry R. Luce business, or promotional use. For information, please Director of the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale e-mail [email protected]. University. Printed in the United States of America. ISBN: 978-0-300- I 1838-4 (pbk.) Library of Congress Control Number: 2009938243 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39-48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). 452 John Dunn 31. Richard Tuck, "Hobbes and Locke on Toleration," in ed. Mary Dietz, HOBBES'S CONSTITUTIONAL THEORY Thomas Hobbes and Political Theory (Kansas: University of Kansas Press, 1990), pp. 153-7!. 32. Dunn, The History, chap. 4· DAVID DYZENHAUS 33. John Dunn, ed., The Economic Limits to Modern Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Albert Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977); eds. Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff, Wealth and Virtue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); and Istvan Hont, Jealousy ofTrade (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005). Hobbes's Leviathan is a wonderfully written, complex argument about how 34· Dunn, The Cunning. to design an enduring political order. It was first published during the "Engagement Controversy" following the English Civil War, when the parliamentary victors caused a crisis of conscience for the losing side ­ including Hobbes, an avowed royalist- by requiring a public promise of allegiance to their new government. We can therefore read the book as an extended justification for such "engagement." 1 Hobbes's arguments remain relevant to us today, because they are perennially relevant: people will always wonder about the relationship between power and authority, about the question, "What can make the exercise of political power authoritative such that I should obey its dictates, even when their content seems to me to be incorrect?" Hobbes's radical answer to this question is that subjects are obliged to obey whatever sovereign power rules over them (whether democratic a - sembly, aristocracy, or monarch) so long as that power can provide th em with "Protection."2 Exactly what he means, I will argue, can be understood only through a close examination of Leviathan's somewhat neglected di s­ cussions of law and legal theory. There Hobbes explains how the relation­ ship between sovereign and subject is mediated by law and law, in his view, has two parts. First, there is the extensive set of natural, unwritten laws that he claims are obligatory even in the state of nature,3 and which are al­ together obligatory in civil society. Second, he maintains that sovereign commands constitute a set of civil or enacted laws that subjects are also obliged to obey. Hobbes claims that these two kinds of law "contain each other, and arc of equall extent." 4 However, the fact that the sovereign seems to ha ve authority to enact whatever law he pleases creates the possibility of a clash between obligations in cases where the sovereign enacts a law that contra­ dicts a precept of the law of nature. Modem commentators on Leviathan have by and large insi sted on the civil law's supremacy, a trend exemplified by eminent Hobbes scholar 454 David Dyzenhaus Hobbes's Constitutional Theory 455 Quentin Skinner and his influential school. Skinner insists that classics of uals, now subjects, have duties to the sovereign but no rights against him. political theory have to be understood in their own immediate context, if we Only in the limiting case, when the sovereign actually threatens the con­ want to avoid anachronistically foisting our questions on theirs.5 In part, tinued survival of a particular individual, does that subject cease as a matter this is because he holds that the arguments of the classics have to be inter­ of IUs or her right to self-preservation to owe the sovereign obedience. preted in the light of the understandings of the audience of the particular Skinner and these phllosophers share not only a similar interpretation of author. That audience, familiar with the political controversies of the day Leviathan, but a similar disregard for significant chunks of the text which and with the tropes and nuances of political discourse of its time, is an support what we might think of as a natural law reading of Hobbes, one invaluable interpretive resource. To understand a classic of political thought which says that one's obligation to the sovereign is based not on his power is an exercise in careful reading of the text, situated firmly in its context. On but on his compliance with the laws of nature. Notably, Hobbism cannot this basis, Skinner concludes that Hobbes is best interpreted as sharing the easily account for Hobbes's lengthy discussion of natural law in chapter rs, views of those contemporary "Hobbists" who either associated themselves nor for much of his discussion of civil law and the role of judges in inter­ or were associated with his works. We should read Hobbes, that is, as preting the law, both natural and civil, in chapter 26. In addition, these someone whose reduction of morality to self-interest and belief in human­ chapters resonate with extensive and emphatic statements in other chapters ity's fundamentally anti-social nature leads him to argue that we are under a which clearly support a natural law reading. virtually unconditional obligation to obey our sqvereign- the person or To the extent that philosophers who support Hobbisll} do look at what body who has a monopoly of political power. Legitimacy flows thus from Hobbes actually says in these discussions, their allegiance to Hobbism facts about power-a de facto sovereign is by definition a de iure sov­ forces them to resolve any textual difficulties in ways that seem to strain ereign. Generally speaking, Skinner concerns himself with Hobbes's laws Hobbes's claims. For example, on Hobbes's list of the "Immutable and of nature only to explain how it is that a subject might irrevocably assume Eternall" 10 laws of nature is law 15-that safe conduct must be given to the obligation to obey almost any sovereign command.6 mediators, people who are appointed to bring about peace by mediating The Hobbist interpretation has of course much textual support in Levia­ between the antagonists. 11 If the civil law is simply the commands of the than. Hobbes often argues that since any order is better than the misery of sovereign whom one is under (by definition) a prior obligation to obey, and the state of nature, it is rational to give one's obedience to one's sovereign, the sovereign commands that all mediators be executed on sight, it follows as long as he is in fact providing one with the kind of protection - enforce­ from Hobbism that one is under an obligation to kill mediators, despite able laws that safeguard one's survival- so manifestly absent in the state of one's knowledge of the laws of nature, a knowledge in which, Hobbes nature.? Hobbes knows that some will object that it is odd that his argument argues, a sovereign is under a duty to instruct his subjects. 12 Indeed, it delivers us from the state of nature into the hands of someone who has the seems to follow that the command, "kill all mediators," is the correct discretion to act as a tyrant, that is, "that the Condition of Subjects is very interpretation of Hobbes's claim that the law of nature requires safe conduct miserable; as being obnoxious to the lusts, and other irregular passions of for mediators, because subjects must assume that their access to the laws of him, or them that have so unlimited a Power in their hands." His answer nature is through the content of the sovereign's enactments.13 seems to be that those who have understood the horrors of the state of nature This result is not only odd but it reduces the complexity of Hobbes's or of civil war, will know that order-any order - is better than chaos, as argument to something so crude that one might wonder why Leviathan is long as they are equipped by "Morall and Civill Science" (the lesson of regarded as a classic.
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