Abstract
“Trust” is not usually considered a Hobbesian concept, which is odd since it is central to the definition of a covenant. The key to understanding Hobbes’s concept of trust is to be found in his account of conquest— “sovereignty by acquisition”—which is a heavily revised adaptation of the Roman justification of slavery. Hobbes introduces a distinction between servants, who are trusted with liberty, and imprisoned slaves. The servant/master relationship involves mutual trust, an ongoing exchange of benefits (protection for service and obedience), and performance monitoring. In contrast to Quentin Skinner’s and Philip Pettit’s shared concentration on the contrast between slavery and freedom, I argue that the salient analogy is between servants and subjects.The trust relationship between subjects and the sovereign involves defined roles, limited absolutism, and accountability in the early-modern form of licensing subjects to switch political allegiance should a regime fail.
“Where’s no trust, there can be no Contract.”
Trust is commonly thought to be a Lockean concept and not a Hobbesian one. 1 But the estimation would be revised if we paid more attention to Hobbes’s account of “sovereignty by acquisition,” the “realistic” corollary to the hypothetical tale of “sovereignty by institution.” On its face, “sovereignty by acquisition” involves an odd, implausible consent argument: those conquered in war—whether individuals or countries—legitimize the victor’s authority via consent. Doesn’t their lack of choice preclude anything resembling genuine consent? Hobbes’s answer hardly improves the argument. It seems that consent is signified by a choice on the part of the victor whether or not to allow the conquered to go free. “Every one that is taken in the War, and hath his life spar’d him, is not suppos’d to have Contracted with his Lord; for every one is not trusted with so much of his naturall liberty, as to be able, if he desir’d it, either to flie away, or quit his service, or contrive any mischief to his Lord.” 2 It appears that it is the victor who decides whether their relationship is or is not consensual!
But this dismissive interpretive construction is not the last word. More kindly interpreters, notably Kinch Hoekstra, have given a sympathetic reading to Hobbes’s account of consent in the conquest situation. Addressing the textual question of whether the principle of a “mutuall Relation between Protection and Obedience” is a novelty of Leviathan, 3 Hoekstra argues it was a consistent feature of the theory from the beginning. Hobbes was always both “a consent theorist and a de facto theorist of authority. If tacit and attributed consent count as consent, then he may be considered a thoroughgoing consent theorist. If they do not, then he is, after all, a de facto theorist of authority of a particular kind.” 4 Hoekstra saves Hobbes by substituting consent for agency as the core issue in the story of conquest and consent: the identification of the victor as the active agent fades into the background in favor of a notion of Hobbesian tacit consent.
The general thrust of Hoekstra’s interpretation is, I believe, correct: Hobbes is both a consent theorist and a de facto theorist of authority. However, my purpose here is to show that the key concept connecting these dimensions of the theory is trust and not, as Hoekstra thinks, tacit consent. The Hobbesian covenant institutionalizes a trust relationship in which both sides have a consensually defined part to play—government’s part is to supply protection and subjects’, to be obedient. Versus Hoekstra’s complicated notion of attributing (tacit) consent to parties in situations in which it would be necessary for consent to be given, trust, as Hobbes uses the idea, refers to the commonplace experience of trusting others to carry out their part in a defined relationship. It is the case, to be sure, that Hobbes’s theory includes a concept of tacit consent, which is defined in the usual way as “Signes of Contract by Inference”: consent given “by other sufficient signes of the Will” beside express words. 5 However, I see this as but a subsidiary element in the larger account of consent, whereas the relationship between ruler and ruled is constituted and defined by trust. This relationship, we will see, explains away the problematic agency issue and links the conquest model of sovereignty by acquisition to the theory of sovereignty by institution.
While unfamiliar as an interpretation of the relationship between ruler and ruled in Hobbes’s theory, the concept of trust has figured in recent years in game-theoretic analyses of the state of nature. Rather than representing a prisoner’s dilemma in which the dominant strategy (in a one-shot game) is to defect, Hobbes’s narrative, it is argued, corresponds to an assurance game. 6 The two differ in that assurance games are ones in which it is rational to cooperate when others can be trusted to do so too, which corresponds to Hobbes’s second law of nature (i.e., “a man be willing, when others are so too, . . . to lay down this right to all things” 7 ). In an assurance game, “once mutually advantageous agreements become possible, individuals can complain . . . whenever others fail to uphold their part of the agreements they have made.” Within the cooperative equilibrium, “failing to do one’s fair share becomes reprehensible.” 8 The present interpretation argues that the relationships between master and servant and sovereign and subject center, in similar fashion, on trust between the parties.
Hobbes’s thinking about trust grew out of the neoRoman account of slavery which the English inherited via Brackton and Coke and which he adapted for his own political and philosophical purposes. 9 My interpretation will begin here: with the justification of slavery in the sixth-century codification of Roman law, the Digest of Justinian, and Hobbes’s adaptations of it. The root idea that he took over and elaborated was the rationalization that slavery involves an exchange of benefits between master and servant. The Digest explained that “Slaves (servi) are so-called, because generals have a custom of selling their prisoners and thereby preserving rather than killing them.” Explicitly rejected in the Roman work was the Aristotelian view that some humans may have a slave’s nature: “Slavery is an institution of the jus gentium, whereby someone is against nature made subject to the ownership of another.” 10
Against this background, I turn, in the second section, to the main subject: how Hobbes transformed a neoRoman view of service into an account of trust in which, crucially, life and liberty are seen as connected goods. The final sections take up the political significance of the account, which played out in Hobbes’s definition of the political covenant and, in an idiosyncratic explanation of great immediacy in the Civil War, the nature of political servitude and freedom. In recent years, Quentin Skinner and Philip Pettit have made the last a subject of note in discussions of republican thinking about freedom. Disagreeing with the views of both, I offer an alternative “take” on Hobbes’s message concerning the freedom of subjects. This leads into a concluding re-assessment of the nature of Hobbesian absolutism.
War Captivity: Hobbes’s NeoRoman Reasoning
From the start, Hobbes imported the Roman rationalization of slavery into his political theory. Even in The Elements of Law, though, he also criticized their failure to conceptualize alternative outcomes to war captivity:
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when a servant taken in the wars, is kept bound in natural bonds, as chains, and the like, or in prison; there hath passed no covenant from the servant to his master; . . . This kind of servant is that which ordinarily and without passion, is called a SLAVE. The Romans had no such distinct name, but comprehended all under the name of servus; whereof such as they loved and durst trust, were suffered to go at liberty . . . the rest were kept chained, or otherwise restrained with natural impediments to their resistance.
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The subsequent versions develop the point into a full-fledged distinction between servants, who are allowed freedom, and slaves, who are not: “after such Covenant made, the Vanquished is a S those that are absolutely in the power of their Masters, as Slaves taken in war, and their Issue, whose bodies are not in their own power, (their lives depending on the Will of their Masters, in such manner as to forfeit them upon the least disobedience,) and that are bought and sold as Beasts, were called Δoῦλoι, that is properly, Slaves, and their Service, Δoυλϵία: The other, which is of those that serve (for hire, or in hope of benefit from their Masters) voluntarily; are called Θῆτϵς; that is, Domestique Servants; to whose service the Masters have no further right, than is contained in the Covenants made betwixt them.
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Nor is the distinction merely linguistic, but entails a crucial revision to the Roman defense of slavery. By failing to distinguish the roles, they had over-generalized the rationale of an exchange of benefits. In the case of servants, Hobbes concurs that their service is justified by their lives having been spared:
If a man taken Prisoner in the Wars, or overcome; . . . (to avoid Death) promises the Conquerour, or the stronger Party, his Service, i.e. to do all whatsoever he shall command him; in which Contract the good which the vanquisht, or inferior, in strength doth receive, is the grant of his life, which by the Right of War in the naturall state of men he might have depriv’d him of; but the good which he promises, is his service and obedience.
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The equivalent political case enjoys the same defense. 16 “Conquest” is “the Acquiring of the Right of Soveraignty by Victory. Which Right, is acquired, in the peoples Submission, by which they contract with the Victor, promising Obedience, for Life and Liberty.” 17
However, the situation is crucially different with respect to imprisoned slaves. In the passage regarding the Greek roots of the role distinction, notice that Hobbes explains: slaves’ “bodies are not in their own power, (their lives depending on the Will of their Masters, in such manner as to forfeit them upon the least disobedience).” In other words, slaves do not receive the benefit which the Romans had ascribed to the institution because they may be killed by their masters at any time: a slave is “a Captive, which is kept in prison, or bonds, till the owner of him that took him, or bought him of one that did, shall consider what to do with him”; “he that hath Quarter, hath not his life given, but deferred till farther deliberation; For it is not an yeelding on condition of life, but to discretion.” 18 The specter of death is never-ending for them. Being kept in chains, they remain as vulnerable to their masters as they were on the battlefield.
Thus, lurking behind the seemingly simplistic distinction between free servants and imprisoned slaves is a less-than-simplistic concept of life as a good. The good is not simply to be alive (as might be read into Hobbes’s assumption of an innate drive for self-preservation), but rather consists in being securely alive; this, in turn, is crucially bound up with being trusted with liberty. Free servants and imprisoned slaves are both alive, but life is truly a benefit only for those who are trusted with freedom.
Thus, the root proposition is that the benefit of life is received—and therefore defined—by being trusted with freedom. Life and liberty are connected goods because, to Hobbes’s mind, liberty signifies security; while imprisonment spells vulnerability. “Then onely is [a captive’s] life in security, and his service due, when the Victor hath trusted him with his corporall liberty.” A captive’s voluntary surrender will have this outcome only if it is accompanied by a “promise of life” from the victor, since surrender, in and of itself, “obliges not the Victor longer, than in his own discretion hee shall think fit.” 19 We might say that the fact of being alive is morally insignificant in the case of the imprisoned: liberty is a necessary condition for living to qualify as a benefit or good.
This is obviously an existential, not a factual, proposition. Being secure means having some control over one’s life. Recall Leviathan’s explanation that slaves’ “bodies are not in their own power” because their lives depend on their master’s will. The benefits exchanged in the model of “sovereignty by acquisition”—benefits which are summarized in the conceptualization of free servants versus imprisoned slaves—are service and obedience in return for liberty, connoting control over one’s body and a secure life.
Trust
It follows why trust and contract are further, crucial Hobbesian additions to the Roman account. Whereas the Digest described an immediate exchange that rationalizes an enduring relationship, Hobbesian servitude is born of a promise—on both sides—about future behavior. 20 The upshot of the tie between liberty and “life” (properly understood) is to make this necessarily a contract story, a contract being defined as “the mutual transferring of Right”; 21 and more specifically, a covenant story, covenants being pacts in which one or both parties are trusted to perform in the future. 22 The benefit of life, in the case of servants, comes down to being able to count on not being mortally assaulted by their masters; entrusting servants with liberty means, for masters, counting on their service and counting on them not to flee or attack.
Thus Hobbes’s more complicated account has an additional moral dimension that was absent from the Roman original. Where that went no further than rationalizing slavery, Hobbes adds to the rationalization of servitude a further account of the duties of both parties. This dimension is dramatized in the observation that “naturall liberty” puts a servant in a position to “be able, if he desir’d it, either to flie away, or quit his service, or contrive any mischief to his Lord.” Servants are in a position to be able to kill their masters, but are obliged not to do so, whereas slaves, who are permitted to do so, have a hard time of it due to imprisonment. Duty replaces chains. 23
The force of the moral story, from another angle, is to raise and resolve the problem of temporality. Why, it might be queried of the Digest, does a single, one-time exchange of life for service rationalize a perpetual relationship? It is commonly thought that Locke was the first of the contract thinkers to address this issue, which he then resolved with a concept of tacit consent. 24 In fact, Hobbes’s account of the trust relationship between master and servant addresses the same issue. By re-framing the Roman rationale of exchanging benefits into a covenant about future behavior, he, too, justifies duty over time and in the absence of repetitive explicit promising. When two parties trust one another, it means they have assured each another about a future exchange of some good which the other values. This coincides, as a descriptor of action, with the familiar notion of people trusting one another to do their part.
Furthermore, the reciprocity of the trust relationship also resolves the apparent problem of agency in the model of “sovereignty by acquisition.” 25 Despite stressing the master’s agency in trusting servants with liberty, it is the case conceptually (at least) that servants have an independent role in the relationship. In a full account of the creation of the relationship, Hobbes is careful to note the servant’s part: “If a Subject be taken prisoner in war; or his person, or his means of life be within the Guards of the enemy, and hath his life and corporall Libertie given him, on condition to be Subject to the Victor, he hath Libertie to accept the condition; and having accepted it, is the subject of him that took him; because he had no other way to preserve himselfe.” 26 Thus, in the abstract, “acceptance of liberty” is stretched to connote acceptance of the duties of servitude. Yet, in reality on the battlefield, it’s hard to see that accepting servitude as the price of life represents a genuine choice, rather than being simply—as the Romans had said—an obvious benefit.
The reciprocity of the contractual relationship resides, more fundamentally, in the obverse, negative dimension. The key question is not “Do servants have a genuine choice in accepting the relationship?” but, rather, “Whose action may vitiate the relationship?” The answer is that neither party may end it unilaterally: masters are not supposed to assault servants (i.e., treat them as slaves) and servants are not supposed to assault or flee masters (i.e., act as slaves are permitted to do). In effect, Hobbes’s thinking shifts the moral locus of the argument away from the creation moment to the continuing trust relationship between independent actors. At the moment of captivity, the vanquished are at the mercy of the victors; subsequently, masters and servants are at one another’s “mercy,” so to speak. Only the other’s failure to carry out their part can vitiate the contractual relationship.
Although that key implication is not spelled out by Hobbes with regard to the household relationship, it becomes central in the political analogy. The “mutuall Relation between Protection and Obedience” means, on the one hand, that subjects’ obligations depend upon their lives being protected by the sovereign: “The Obligation of Subjects to the Soveraign, is understood to last as long, and no longer, than the power lasteth, by which he is able to protect them.” 27 That the principle had subversive import was pointed up by Clarendon, Hobbes’s royalist opponent, who observed that its effect would be to end subjects’ obligations just when a ruler was most in need of their support. Despite investing the sovereign with absolute power, Hobbes also “hath humbled him sufficiently, by giving his Subjects leave to withdraw their obedience from him when he hath most need of their assistance, for the obligation of Subjects to the Soveraign is understood (he saies) to last as long, and no longer, then the power lasts to protect them.” 28 Even worse, Clarendon projected, the principle would license subjects to switch allegiance as soon as invasion or rebellion created an opportunity, however transient and unsuccessful the occasion might turn out to be. 29
On the other hand, the principle also gave uncomplicated guidance on assessing subjects’ relationship with the sovereign. Identifying when governments are, or are not, doing their part by providing protection is a relatively uncontentious matter, much less so than the effort to identify when consent ought to have been given (i.e., defining tacit consent). The latter is inevitably contestable, even assuming as a starting point Hobbes’s assumptions about human nature. The guidance is also cognitively undemanding inasmuch as it does not involve forecasting the future but calls merely for present-tense monitoring of the sovereign’s performance. The covenant is undone by identifiable failure with regard to an ongoing exchange of benefits. 30
Political Covenants
Trust unites the creation models of “sovereignty by acquisition” and “sovereignty by institution,” because it is basic to the salient kind of contract. A “covenant” is a contract in which one or both parties are trusted to perform—to “deliver the Thing contracted for on his part”—in future. In situations in which both parties “contract now, to performe hereafter: . . . he that is to performe in time to come, being trusted, his performance is called Keeping of Promise, or Faith; and the fayling of performance (if it be voluntary) Violation of Faith.” 31 Beyond the obvious point that a covenant creates an ongoing relationship, the nuanced account of trust provided by the acquisition model aids understanding the other covenant story, sovereignty by institution.
It brings to the fore the essential sense in which the institution covenant comes down to the exchange of obedience and service for protection. Notice that Leviathan’s key covenant passage describes the compact in precisely this way:
The only way to erect such a Common Power, as may be able to defend them from the invasion of Forraigners, and the injuries of one another, and thereby to secure them in such sort, as that by their owne industrie, and by the fruites of the Earth, they may nourish themselves and live contentedly; is, to conferre all their power and strength upon one Man, or upon one Assembly of men.
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The prohibition on resistance is justified in the same terms: “To resist the Sword of the Common-wealth, in defence of another man, guilty, or innocent, no man hath Liberty; because such Liberty, takes away from the Soveraign, the means of Protecting us; and is therefore destructive of the very essence of Government.” 33 Conversely, the exchange principle also demarcates the limits of subjection. An exiled subject is released from subjection “forasmuch as being out of the protection of the sovereignty that expelled him, he hath no means of subsisting but from himself.” Absent the benefit of protection, “there had been no necessity that any man should enter into voluntary subjection, as they do in commonwealths.” 34
It might seem, though, that recognizing the centrality of the exchange principle in Hobbes’s theory effectively undermines its contract arguments. Since the covenant is defined by an exchange of benefits of indefinite duration, doesn’t the theory reduce to an exchange story supporting de facto authority? 35 The question, that is, is whether the contract plays an independent role in Hobbesian logic. Once again, it is helpful to return to his adaptation of the Roman rationalization of slavery, specifically the introduction of a distinction between servitude (based on covenant) and slavery (not). What the covenant accomplishes is the definition of the roles of master and servant and the responsibilities associated with each. The point of using a covenant to do this is to specify with some precision (1) what constitutes agreement upon and acceptance of the roles; (2) the duration of the roles; and therefore (3) what would end them. The roles are inaugurated when, with mutual agreement, captive servants are allowed to go free; they last indefinitely, until the other party fails to carry out its part. Thus, the independent weight of the covenant lies not so much in giving subjects an additional motive for political obedience as in specifying what dominion and subjection precisely entail, and why.
Therefore, Hoekstra is correct that it is a false dilemma to worry about whether Hobbes is a consent theorist or a theorist of de facto power. But this does not mean that the exchange rationale fits comfortably in all Hobbes’s creation stories. Although the initial version of the “institution” covenant involves different parties than the acquisition story, the rationale fits readily into that version. Versus the mutual compact of conqueror and vanquished, the original “non-resistance” covenant is made by incipient subjects only; the incipient sovereign is not party to it. 36 However, the nature of the compact itself is independent of the identity of the parties. Consider De Cive on the limits of subjection. Hobbes begins by reiterating the terms of the non-resistance covenant: “We have seen how Subjects, nature dictating, have oblig’d themselves by mutuall Compacts to obey the Supreme Power.” As he continues, it is clear that the fact the sovereign is not a party to the compact doesn’t alter the exchange logic. Subjects’ obligations end if and when the sovereign can no longer carry out its part of the bargain.
If the Kingdome fall into the power of the enemy, so as there can no more opposition be made against them, we must understand that he, who before had the Supreme Authority, hath now lost it: For when the Subjects have done their full indeavour to prevent their falling into the enemies hands, they have fulfill’d those Contracts of obedience which they made each with other.
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Accurately, then, the Hobbesian social contract originally was a covenant in which incipient subjects promised to trust one another to serve and obey, for the indefinite future, that body whom they had nominated as sovereign. In return, they trust that they will receive on-going protection. It is inconsequential whether or not the sovereign actually makes a promise; even when the sovereign does not, the political covenant is defined by the trust that it will do its part, as they will do theirs.
When Hobbes added an alternative, authorization account in Leviathan, he neglected, however, to consider its incompatibility with the exchange rationale. Authorization effectively undoes the limits that are built into an exchange contract. It substitutes identification, which is seemingly permanent, for impermanent, though indefinite, trust. The new image has the sovereign standing in for subjects, who are instructed to see themselves as the author of his actions, whereas the earlier account had described a relationship between parties with different goals, who agree to exchange goods in order to achieve them. The contrast appears plainly in a Leviathan discussion of the servant/master relationship. By this new account, a servant “holdeth his life of his Master, by the covenant of obedience; that is, of owning, and authorising whatsoever the Master shall do.” Should the servant be harmed rather than protected by the master, the moral relationship does not end. To the contrary, the servant, being author of the master’s actions, is author of the harms: “in case the Master, if he refuse, kill him, or cast him into bonds, or otherwise punish him for his disobedience, he is himselfe the author of the same; and cannot accuse him of injury.” 38 Hobbes faced a conceptual problem: how to strengthen the tie between ruler and ruled 39 and also maintain exchange of benefits and trust as fundamental political principles? But it couldn’t be done. Whereas contract versus de facto authority is a false dilemma, these two versions of the institution model—authorization and identification versus exchange of benefits and trust—are genuinely incompatible.
Political Servitude
Subjects in a commonwealth are . . . nothing more than the slaves or servants of the sovereign.
In the recent wave of literature on freedom and subjection, Hobbes’s revisionist distinction between servants and slaves is downplayed and the concept of servitude, narrowly defined, is under-appreciated. Interpretive work on Hobbes’s negative concept of liberty—by, most notably, Philip Pettit and Quentin Skinner—concentrates on the neoRoman dichotomy of slave versus free-man and neglects Hobbes’s additional distinction between servants and slaves. Both interpreters regard these as merely varieties of subjection: “two modes of slavery” (Pettit) or “two species of servant” (Skinner). 41 As the alternative phrasings indicate, though, they interpret Hobbesian liberty differently and therefore arrive at opposing characterizations of his political message. Defining freedom as nondomination, Pettit assimilates subjects to slaves inasmuch as both are deprived of their freedom of decision; and this leads him to conclude that Hobbes accepted the republican charge that subjects of absolute government are not free. 42 By stressing the physical liberty of subjects, Skinner sees Leviathan as an effort, rather, to refute republicans on their own ground: being free of external constraint, subjects of absolute government as just as free as subjects of a republic. 43
Although they draw opposite ideological morals, both interpretations nonetheless focus on the original Roman opposition of slavery and freedom. Curiously, however, their descriptions of the condition of Hobbesian subjects actually correspond to his narrow, revisionist definition of servitude. Pettit uses a negative frame: “Those who live under a commonwealth may be free-men in the sense of . . . retaining corporal freedom—but they are not free-men in the intuitive sense of not being anyone’s servant or subject.” 44 Subjects, thus, are the political equivalents of un-imprisoned servants. Hobbes and Republican Liberty concludes in the same vein, indeed with specific mention of the exchange covenant between conqueror and conquered. Skinner frames the point with specific reference to Leviathan’s defense of the Rump: “it deserves to be obeyed in conscience as a fully lawful power” because “[t]hose who have accepted its protection, thereby receiving from it their lives and bodily liberty, may be said to have consented by sufficient signs to be its subjects.” 45 The point was that English subjects continued to trade obedience for protection, just as household servants do, despite the change in regimes.
In fact, Hobbes freely admitted the essential similarity of political subjects to household servants, especially in definitional discussions of the concept “free man” in The Elements of Law and De Cive. In the original version, the accent is on their shared servitude: “The subjection of them who institute a commonwealth amongst themselves, is no less absolute, than the subjection of servants.” They differ only inasmuch as a “
De Cive accents the positive: their shared physical liberty. (“L
But this priviledge free subjects and sonnes of a family have above servants, (in every government, and family, where servants are) that they may both undergoe the more honourable offices of the City or family, and also enjoy a larger possession of things superfluous. And herein layes the difference between a free subject, and a servant, that he is
Seemingly in an attempt to dress up subjection, he appends an exaggerated version of the “exchange of benefits” rationalization of servitude. Far from being oppressed, servants are “governed and sustained.” A servant shouldn’t complain about a lack of liberty, “unlesse he count it a misery to be restrained from hurting himselfe, and to receive that life, (which by warre, or misfortune, or through his own idlenesse was forfeited) together with all manner of sustenance, and all things necessary to the conservation of health, on this condition only, that he will be rul’d.” 47
Although the analogy to servants is dropped in Leviathan, it shadows the work’s definition of a “free man.” Usually, as in Pettit’s and Skinner’s interpretations, the accent is on its negative concept of liberty. “A F
The political purchase of the servant analogy was plain enough. Hobbes was clearing a middle way between the charged alternatives of political slavery versus republican freedom. His message was that the English were neither slaves of the Stuarts nor should they pine for political freedom in the (republican) sense of self-government. Perhaps he had gone too far in De Cive in claiming that a government such as the Stuarts’ “governed and sustained them.” Still, his account of the political covenant established that the Stuarts provided a real good and showed that, until the Stuart regime failed to provide that good, the English were bound to obey them. It was not hard to identify what would constitute—or had constituted—failure, and to identify what would create a relationship with the Rump.
Limited Absolutism
But to whom is allegiance due, and who is our lawful sovereign? This question is often the most difficult of any, and liable to infinite discussions.
The upshot is to suggest that Hobbesian absolutism comes in two strengths. The protection/obedience covenant underwrites reciprocal responsibilities, subjects’ liberties, and even a form of governmental accountability, whereas the authorization covenant creates formally unlimited absolutism. While the latter is the usual view of Hobbism, authorization is nonetheless a novelty of Leviathan. The trust covenant had been laid out from the beginnings of the theory in The Elements of Law and therefore has better claim to be seen as Hobbes’s real view. As has been detailed, it is an account of specified mutual responsibilities and associated penalties for failure to carry out these responsibilities. Rulers who do not provide protection lose their claim to subjects’ obedience; and subjects may not resist the sovereign because “such Liberty, takes away from the Soveraign, the means of Protecting us; and is therefore destructive of the very essence of the Government.” 50
The precision of Hobbes’s account—of a covenant to exchange specific benefits for as long as the other party does its part—makes it not so different, in the end, from the Lockean accountability contract. The latter carefully spells out the contractual terms by which rulers are to be held to account. Should they fail to provide indifferent authority or protect individuals’ lives, liberties, and estates, 51 they have contravened their role and subjects may rebel. Much as Hobbesian subjects are never licensed to rebel (which would be an illicit unilateral violation of the covenant), Hobbesian rulers are nonetheless accountable to provide specific goods, just as Lockean rulers are.
Hobbes obviously gives a far more minimalist definition of government’s responsibility but, otherwise, the key difference between their discussions lies in the form that accountability takes—switching allegiance versus removing a sitting government. In Hobbesian thinking, when rulers fail to provide protection, or can no longer do so, subjects may switch allegiance to those who can. Although the message is plain (especially in Leviathan’s “Review and Conclusion”), it is not commonly described as a form of accountability. But understanding the logic of his covenant of trust shows why and how it should be counted as one.
Furthermore, it is worth considering whether Hobbes has not articulated an early-modern understanding of accountability, perhaps (as Hume would suggest), the most commonplace understanding of all before the modern era. Holding rulers to account by switching allegiance had always been the way to change governments. Only in the authorization discussion did Hobbes tell his contemporaries that the Stuarts were not accountable for their rule; otherwise, his message was that they were accountable, though on much narrower grounds than their parliamentary and religious opponents argued. Hobbes also told them how to hold the regime to account when it could no longer provide protection: switch allegiance to the Rump. Clarendon, indeed, thought Hobbes had made accountability in this form all too likely. Whereas good subjects would not withdraw their allegiance from a “natural” prince, even when he or they were in dismal circumstances, he warned that subjects who heeded Hobbesian reasoning would “take the first opportunity to free themselves from such a Soveraign . . . and chuse a better for themselves.” 52
Locke’s definition triumphed over Hobbes’s not because it was inherently more cogent, but because it suited the modern institution of electoral politics as the means of holding governments to account. Today, the British vote their rulers out of office. Yet, Hobbes’s conception has not completely lost its purchase even in the modern world of electoral politics. Many share the Humean suspicion that the key questions for subjects are always whom to obey and when to switch allegiance.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.