Theology and Constitutional Theory in Thomas Hobbes and James Harrington For Workshop on ‘Theological Foundations of Modern Constitutional Theory’, Institute d’Etudes Avancées de Nantes, 20-21 January 2016 Thomas Poole London School of Economics & Political Science Politics is concerned with coercive forms of human association. Constitutions concern how such associations are organized. Three forms of association are relevant to an inquiry into the theological roots of modern constitutional theory. First and most obvious is civil association: that is, membership of a political community or body politic, a form of association whose characteristic feature is subjection to the same body of (civil) law. Second, religious association: that is, membership of a religious community or Church. A central feature of this type of association is a shared set of beliefs about man’s relationship to the world and to the Divine, and associated obligations, practices and rituals. Third, an association of political associations – increasingly as we move into the modern period an association of states – or what we have come to call the international order, centrally comprised of the rights and duties of sovereign states, a system which remained largely inchoate during the period in question.1 The first two forms of association – civil and religious – naturally form the central focus of an inquiry into early modern political theology. Indeed, the manner in which the early moderns began to articulate a vision of man and his place in the world in which the political and the theological were separated is a defining moment in the arrival of modernity.2 This is not to deny the continued resonance of conceptions, arrangements 1 One of the leading historians of international law, Martti Koskenniemi, argues that there is no international law properly so called until the later nineteenth century: see his The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law 1870-1960 (Cambridge, 2001). Bentham seems to have been the first to coin the phrase ‘international law’ in the 1780s. 2 This is a key aspect of what Jonathan Israel calls the ‘crisis of the European mind’: see Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750 (Oxford, 2001), 14-22. See also Israel, A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy (Princeton, 2010). 1 and habits of mind derived from medieval politics and theology.3 But, over time, the new conception came to dismantle the ‘enchanted world’ and led to the redrawing of the presuppositions and practices of social and political life. 4 And, indeed, most of the thinkers discussed in our workshop – with the exception of Grotius but including Thomas Hobbes and James Harrington, the subjects of this paper – had as their primary concern the domestic or interior construction of the commonwealth. It is a mistake to overlook the third type of association, however, and with it the outward facing dimensions of the state and its interactions with other political forms.5 Not only is it an important, if under-elaborated, aspect of this body of thought, one which affords us glimpses into the developing world of modern, post-Westphalian international law and international relations. It also reveals the extent and consequences of the deconstruction of pre-existing juridical and associational linkages across the ius publicum europaeum, a process that involved the fracturing of the medieval image of the res publica Christiana. This process of destruction and reconstruction opened up new vistas for the newly sovereign state. A benefit of pairing Hobbes and Harrington is that despite a considerable overlap in their political outlook, they reach rather different conclusions about the future shape of the international order. Their analysis raises the question of empire and of imperial- commercial confrontation, soon to become endemic to the European state system. It also invites us to reflect about how legal relations between the newly minted sovereign states or commonwealths, all the more so given that these writers saw the modern state as an architectonic structure of legal rule – an ‘Artificiall Man’ (Hobbes) 6 – whose function was to make peaceful coexistence possible by way of a sovereign power of legislation and a unitary power of judicature – an ‘empire of laws and not of men’ (Harrington).7 To our disenchanted eyes, these now appear straight questions of law and politics into which theology need not intrude, questions of ‘public reason’ in the 3 See, e.g., Joseph R. Strayer, On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State (Princeton, 1970); Michael Oakeshott, Lectures in the History of Political Thought (Imprint Academic, 2006), chs 23 & 24. 4 For a majestic philosophical and historical analysis of these changes see Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Harvard, 2007). For a reconsideration of the pre-modern condition see, e.g., Euan Cameron, Enchanted Europe: Superstition and Religion 1250-1750 (Oxford, 2010). 5 Richard Tuck makes a similar observation in The Rights of War and Peace: Political Thought and the International Order from Grotius to Kant (Oxford, 1999). See also David Armitage, Foundations of Modern International Thought (Cambridge, 2013). 6 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Cambridge, ed. Richard Tuck, 1991), 9. 7 James Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana (Cambridge, ed. J.G.A. Pocock, 1992), 21. See also Leviathan, 168: ‘all Judicature is essentially annexed to the Soveraignty’. 2 Rawlsian idiom.8 But as we shall see, to contemporaries – even those, like Hobbes and Harrington, who were not obviously religious – they were anything but. * * * * * Let us consider first how the ‘master leveller’ 9 himself handled the three modes of association and the relationship between them. One is tempted to call Hobbes’s strategy on this point one of divide and conquer. Let me explain why. The goal of his political theory was the erection and maintenance of an institutionally untrammelled and normatively untroubled sovereign state apparatus, the existence of which was essential, Hobbes argued, for peaceful coexistence. This theory required a primary conceptual move that rendered our forms of association are distinct and separate (or at least separable) modes. This is not to deny that, in some sense or other, these forms of association had a distinct conceptual existence within the medieval political imaginary.10 This is evident if we consider the intellectual traditions on which Hobbes drew: Erastianism, for instance, which sought to claim civil jurisdiction over ecclesiastical matters;11 and the tradition of idealizing civil religion that went back to Machiavelli.12 Hobbes navigates these modes of association in an original way,13 the effect of which is systematically to redraw the boundaries between them. (The modes of association interact as a complex whole in Hobbes’s theory, but for the sake of the analysis I treat them separately.) With civil association we see a thorough and complete move to deny any independent authority to intermediate forms of association – Norberto Bobbio calls them partial societies14 – those institutions that represent or reflect sites of power other than those of the sovereign. As sovereignty is centrally a matter of jurisdiction, the power 8 John Rawls, Political Liberalism (Columbia, 1993). 9 Mark Lilla, The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West (Vintage, 2008), 77. 10 On the relationship between Hobbes and both the Protestant Reformation jurists and theologians and the Catholic Scholastic tradition see Annabel S. Brett, Changes of State: Nature and the Limits of the City in Early Modern Natural Law (Princeton, 2011). 11 Erastianism exerted a considerable pull in England from the mid-sixteenth century for reasons connected with Tudor statecraft: see Jeffrey R. Collins, The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes (Oxford, 2005), ch. 1. 12 See, e.g., J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, 1975), ch. 11. 13 J.P. Sommerville, ‘Absolutism and Royalism’ in J.H. Burns and Mark Goldie (eds), The Cambridge History of Political Thought 1450-1700 (Cambridge, 1991), 372: ‘In England, only the most extreme of Erastian theorists denied that the clergy possessed spiritual authority independently of the prince.’ 14 Norberto Bobbio, Thomas Hobbes and the Natural Law Tradition (Chicago, 1993), ch. 6. Hobbes himself tends to use the term ‘systems’ to indicate collective bodies – see e.g. the title of Leviathan, ch. 22 ‘Of Systems Subject, Political and Private’. 3 to legislate and to adjudicate, the legal dimensions of this move are especially clear. Hobbes systematically downgrades forms of law other than civil law, which is now defined austerely as the public commands of the sovereign.15 Common law, canon law, customary law, natural law – each a familiar semi-autonomous source of normativity – all are brought under the sovereign’s jurisdiction. The proximate rationale for this root and branch programme of juridical harmonizing was the need for a single public voice. The sovereign’s commands provide the standards of right in relation to which the subjects are to organize their lives and resolve their conflicts. These laws are in the final analysis self-imposed and self-authored, 16 and constitute ‘Artificiall Chains’17 that link sovereign and subject. The ultimate rationale is peace: any other arrangement runs the risk of disagreement and so tends towards the dissolution of the