Abstract
Thomas Hobbes’s infamously severe accounts of the phenomenon of laughter earned the condemnation of such varied readers as Francis Hutcheson and Friedrich Nietzsche, and he has maintained his reputation as an enemy of humor among contemporary scholars. A difficulty is raised by the fact that Hobbes makes ample use of humor in his writings, displaying his willingness to evoke in his readers what he appears to condemn. This article brings together Hobbes’s statements on laughter and comedic writing with examples of his own humorous rhetoric to show that Hobbes understands laughter as a species of insult, but that there are conditions under which humor can be made to serve the cause of peace. Drawing on evidence from across Hobbes’s works, and in particular from an understudied discussion of “Vespasian’s law” in the Six Lessons, this essay theorizes the conditions under which Hobbes found witty contumely to be conducive to peace. On this reading, Hobbes models the discreet use of humorous rhetoric in defense of peace, a defense that will be ongoing even after the commonwealth has been founded. Hobbes offers insight into how we can remain attuned to laughter’s inegalitarian tendencies without foregoing the equalizing potential to be found in laughing at ourselves and at those who think too highly of themselves.
The first major refutation of Thomas Hobbes’s grim account of laughter came from Francis Hutcheson in 1725. At the beginning of his three-part Reflections Upon Laughter, the teacher of Adam Smith connected what he saw as Hobbes’s misunderstanding of laughter to a more fundamental misunderstanding of human nature. Hobbes, who “very much owes his character as a Philosopher to his assuming positive solemn airs,” had as his “grand view” to “deduce all human actions from Self-Love”; in so doing, he “overlooked every thing which is generous or kind in human kind.” Because of his narrowness of vision, Hobbes’s philosophy “represents men in that light in which a thorow knave or coward beholds them.” 1 His commitment to seeing everything through the prism of “Self-Love” caused Hobbes to mistake the most self-aggrandizing dimension of laughter, “ridicule,” for the whole of the phenomenon. 2
A century and a half after Hutcheson, Friedrich Nietzsche joined the attack. For Nietzsche, Hobbes was a “genuine Englishman” who “tried to make laughing a defamation of character among all thinking men.” True philosophers ought to be elevated to the level of the gods by a “golden laughter” at “the expense of all serious things.” 3 Despite the theoretical chasm that otherwise separates Nietzsche and Hutcheson, Nietzsche similarly suggested that Hobbes had failed to find a place for laughter in human life as a result of his narrow view of human nature. On this reading, Hobbes’s petty definition of laughter epitomizes the pettiness of his political theory.
Contemporary political theorists who have engaged Hobbes’s accounts of laughter have enriched but not contradicted the assessments of Hutcheson and Nietzsche, finding in Hobbes an enemy of laughter. For instance, David Heyd echoes Hutcheson in writing that “Hobbes’s entire psychology is founded on the assumption of human egocentricity. . . . Hobbes’s superiority theory of laughter suits this theoretical framework.” 4 Beyond Hobbes scholarship, Hobbes has come to represent the “superiority thesis,” which explains laughter as a sudden outward expression of one person’s sense of superiority over another. 5 There is good evidence for the consensus view. In chapter 6 of Leviathan, Hobbes describes “Sudden glory” as “the passion which maketh those grimaces called LAUGHTER, and is caused either by some sudden act of their own that pleaseth them, or by the apprehension of some deformed thing in another, by comparison whereof they suddenly applaud themselves.” 6 While Hobbes nowhere says that laughter is “a serious infirmity which every thinking man will strive to overcome,” as Nietzsche had claimed, he does say that “much laughter at the defects of others is a sign of pusillanimity.” 7
There are cracks in the consensus view, however. If Hobbes’s condemnation of laughter is as thorough as Leviathan’s definition of sudden glorying would suggest, then why did he not follow his own advice? His writings make ample use of humor, as Quentin Skinner’s estimation of the English Leviathan as a “masterpiece of satire and invective” attests. 8 His contemporaries knew this side of Hobbes; he was well-regarded in the court of Charles II for his “witt and drollery,” according to his biographer, John Aubrey. 9 Hobbes even said of himself that “in familiar speech he was jocose.” 10 The conclusions that Hobbes’s readers have reached from his theoretical statements about laughter are in tension with the conclusions that they might reach from experiencing the laughter that his masterfully witty writings produce.
Was Hobbes simply being hypocritical in reserving for himself a rhetorical tool that he so thoroughly cautioned against, or does this tension in Hobbes’s oeuvre suggest that he had a more complex understanding of laughter than Leviathan’s definition lets on? This essay argues for the latter possibility. Bringing Hobbes’s disparate statements about laughter, witty contumely, and comedy together with his own frequently humorous rhetorical practice, it forwards an explanation for the seeming disjunction between Hobbes’s theory of laughter and his practice of using humor to advance his positions, arguing that Hobbes saw humor as an important rhetorical tool in service of political stability.
This more nuanced understanding of Hobbes’s humorous rhetorical practice has important implications for our understanding of his political thought. My analysis suggests that Hobbes saw an ongoing role for laughter and those who produce it in the commonwealth; the instruction of the people that is so important to Hobbes’s theory of the state requires not only those who will instill salutary civic instruction, but also those who will defend against unsociable subjects and noxious doctrines. 11 Just as Hutcheson and Nietzsche implied that Hobbes’s petty definition of laughter was a microcosm of his petty vision of politics, ascribing a more positive use of humor to Hobbes suggests that his political thought is more capacious than it seems.
Reevaluating Hobbes’s understanding of laughter is of interest beyond Hobbes scholarship. Laughter continues to frustrate analysis; it appears to promise amity and equality but often delivers division and disdain. 12 In what follows, I begin by drawing on Hobbes’s translations of classical texts, his historical context, and, above all, his own explicit statements in order to explain why Hobbes thought laughter posed such a risk to political stability. I then turn to Hobbes’s uses of humorous rhetoric, and especially to what I will call (following Hobbes) “witty contumely,” or humorous insult, 13 in order to theorize the main ways in which Hobbes thought laughter could promote peace.
The Problem with Laughter
The core of Hobbes’s objection to laughter at the expense of others is that it poses a threat to the maintenance of civility; in turn, incivility leads to quarrels that threaten political stability. Hobbes lists glory among the three principle causes of quarrel in the state of nature and explains that glory makes humans “invade” for reputation. 14 Insofar as laughter is a sign of contempt for those being laughed at, it is an insult to their reputation, and “men” are liable to fight over any “sign of undervalue, either direct in their persons, or by reflection in their kindred, their friends, their nation, their profession, or their name.” 15 Hobbes’s deep concern with the importance of maintaining civility for the sake of political stability has been recently recovered by a number of scholars. 16 Among these scholars, Skinner has led the way in concluding that Hobbes was unwilling to use insult and ridicule to keep unsocial insult in check, but a closer look at Hobbes’s use of humorous rhetoric tells a different story. 17 While drawing on Skinner’s groundbreaking work on Hobbesian civility, I suggest important emendations.
Why does Hobbes think laughter is so insulting? Firstly, there is a venerable tradition of seeing laughter this way. He might have found resources for this position in the ancient Greek texts that he translated at the beginning and end of his life. In Medea, which Hobbes translated from Greek to Latin around the age of 14, Medea makes the awful claim that the murder of her children will be easier to bear than the laughter of her enemies. 18 In his 1629 translation, Hobbes has Thucydides describe sincerity being “laughed down” during the bloody civil war at Corcyra. 19
Homer, whose epics Hobbes translated at the end of his life, generally associates laughter with scorn. 20 A few episodes give a sense of the general tenor of Homeric laughter: Hector tells Paris he would rather his brother had never been born than have been born to be laughed at by the Greeks; 21 the Achaean troops laugh uncontrollably when Odysseus beat the scoundrel Thersites; 22 and Penelope’s suitors laugh often, in blithe self-satisfaction, further inflaming Odysseus’s rage. 23 These dark episodes provide forceful fodder for Hobbes’s claim that to be laughed at is to be “triumphed over.” 24
Important classical treatments of laughter were also to be found in texts that Hobbes knew well—for example, Plato’s Philebus, Aristotle’s Rhetoric (which Hobbes translated in part as A Briefe of the Art of Rhetorique in 1637), 25 Cicero’s De Oratore, and Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria. 26 These last three authors on rhetoric were powerful influences on the blossoming civility literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which in turn influenced Hobbes. 27 For Italian students of la civil conversazione, like Stefano Guazzo and Baldassare Castiglione, insults are likely to lead to duels, for which gentlemen must prepare when their honor is at stake. If you are the recipient not of insult but merely of “ill-mannered or contemptuous behaviour,” you should be prepared to retaliate with contemptuous speech of your own—a possibility that Skinner does not think Hobbes was ultimately willing to countenance. 28
In his 1595 Defense of Poesy, the Elizabethan poet Sir Philip Sidney rehearsed the dangers of laughter but suggested an educational possibility. He warned that we are mistaken when we equate laughter too quickly with delight, for the two have “a kind of contrariety”: “We laugh at deformed creatures, wherein certainly we cannot delight. We delight in good chances, we laugh at missed chances. We delight to hear the happiness of our friends and country, at which he were worthy to be laughed at that would laugh.” 29 Laughter is dangerous insofar as it has the potential to make us mock what we should admire, find amusement in that which we should censure, and scorn that which we should pity.
Sidney and the civil conversazione authors equated laughter with insult, but also cautiously endorsed laughter as a useful scourge of certain social vices. Whereas the latter saw the utility of laughter in its capacity to shame the one who is laughed at, Sidney saw a more expansive possibility: that laughter, when properly directed, could be socially salutary. It could instruct an audience to have contempt for certain socially noxious behaviors without offending any particular person. The character of the “self-wise-seeming schoolmaster,” for instance, could be beneficially ridiculed without unduly offending this or that schoolmaster. 30 I will argue, pace Skinner, that Hobbes appreciated both of these possibilities for laughter, even as his theoretical statements foreground laughter’s dangers.
In his own accounts of human nature, Hobbes made explicit the principle that underlay laughter’s offensiveness: namely, that we laugh when we suddenly think ourselves more powerful than some person or group, whether rightly or wrongly. He provided three accounts of the passion that prompts laughter: in the Elements of Law (1640), Leviathan (1651), and De Homine (1658). That passion was first said to have “no name,” 31 but by the writing of Leviathan, he had proposed to call it “sudden glory,” 32 and then, similarly, “sudden self-commendation” in De Homine. 33 The explanation of the passion in Elements is the longest and takes us through examples of what we laugh at, each of which is ultimately reducible to an experience of our own eminency (for example, when we laugh at others, it is really because our “own abilities are set off and illustrated” by comparison). 34 For this reason, we do not laugh at the misfortunes of friends “in whose dishonour we participate.” 35
This longest account in the Elements includes crucial details that do not feature in the later, shorter accounts; the first is that we might laugh at our former selves, provided it does us no “present dishonour,” and the second is that we might laugh “without offence” if we laugh at “absurdities and infirmities abstracted from persons, and where all the company may laugh together.” 36 While I elaborate the possibilities of laughter without offense below, these feature as exceptions to a general condemnation of the phenomenon. Laughing is an instance of “vain glory” and an announcement of superiority: “[i]t is no wonder therefore that men take it heinously to be laughed at or derided, that is, triumphed over.” 37 It is because the one laughing implicitly claims to have triumphed that laughter leads so easily to quarrel. 38
At its least destabilizing, the quarrel could be between two individuals, as in a duel or a brawl. At its most destabilizing, it could be a quarrel between elite factions, or even between classes. 39 In De Cive’s discussion of the natural law prohibiting insult, Hobbes observes that “nothing is commoner than taunting and offensive remarks by the powerful against the less powerful.” 40 “Manners,” for Hobbes, concern not “the small morals,” but “those qualities of mankind that concern their living together in peace and unity”; 41 the ill-mannered, in this larger sense, pose a serious threat. The laughter of the powerful at the less powerful threatens peace and unity by openly denying the nominal equality that undergirds the social contract. 42
Hobbes’s objections to laughter extend beyond the worry that laughter will result in quarrel. As Patrick Giamario has argued, laughter confuses social relations because we betray our insecurity at the same time as we announce our triumph. In Leviathan, Hobbes calls much laughter at the weakness of others a sign of “pusillanimity.” 43 Giamario puts the issue nicely: “laughter, as vainglorious, makes a claim of superiority that is undermined through its very performance.” 44 Hobbes’s warning against laughter is two-pronged. The first prong attempts to shame readers who are fond of laughter by telling them that they actually reveal the smallness of their souls when they laugh, 45 while the second prong warns them that laughter could lead to quarrel. This distinction is important because the second prong encompasses the main danger to peace: because insult itself is a threat to peace, and laughter is insulting. 46
Hobbes sometimes treats these two prongs discretely, and it is analytically useful to hold them apart. For instance, in De Cive’s seventh law of nature, Hobbes mentions laughter explicitly: “no one should show hatred or contempt of another by deeds, words, facial expression or laughter [emphasis in original].” As Hobbes had said in introducing this law, “[a]ny sign of hatred and contempt is more provocative of quarrel than anything else [emphasis added], so that most men prefer to lose their peace and even their lives rather than suffer insult.” 47 In other words, the second prong is what matters from the perspective of stability; the laugh itself, more than the confusion of power relations, is what provokes a quarrel.
This conclusion is borne out elsewhere in Hobbes’s texts. In a discussion of the role of the passions in comedy, for instance, Hobbes says that “great persons that have their mindes employed on great designes, have not leasure enough to laugh, and are pleased with the contemplation of their own power and vertues, so as they need not the infirmities and vices of other men to recommend themselves to their owne favor by comparison, as all men do when they laugh.” 48 Here, the emphasis is on the shame we should feel at laughing, and there is no mention of the quarrel laughter might incite. If the most frequent laughers are those “most conscious of the fewest abilities in themselves,” then laughing will usually be a sign of vainglory. The vainglorious like to feel superior, but they know better than to test their pretended superiority in combat. 49 When laughter causes a quarrel, it is more likely to be at the instigation of the one being laughed at than as the result of a miscalculation of power differentials on the part of the vainglorious.
A similar sentiment is conveyed by the conclusion to Hobbes’s brief account of laughter in Leviathan, in which he claims intriguingly that “of great minds one of the proper works is to help and free others from scorn, and compare themselves only with the most able.” 50 (It might be surprising to find that Hobbes reprimands laughers for ignoring the “proper work” of helping and freeing others from scorn, but when one considers that publicly acknowledged equality furthers political stability, 51 one sees how Hobbes has ingeniously married self-interest and benefaction.) Laughter is a problem for the laughers because they might find themselves embroiled in a quarrel, but also because it is advantageous to focus on our own past and future success and not on the failures of others. 52 This is the first prong, divorced from the second.
The important point here is that Hobbes has two distinct objections to laughter: first, we should not laugh because this suggests that we are evaluating ourselves in a way that hinders our future successes (it is a threat to accurate self-evaluation); second, we should not laugh because we might find ourselves in a quarrel (it is a threat to civility). These are both ultimately threats to the advancement of our interests, but the advantage of thinking about these two objections separately is that some modes of laughter are vulnerable to the first objection but not the second. Recall that, in Elements, Hobbes had said that there can be laughter “without offence” if the whole company laughs together at “infirmities or absurdities abstracted from persons.” We might laugh at the personifications of the Just and Unjust speeches in Aristophanes’s Clouds, or Sidney’s “self-wise seeming schoolmaster,” without necessarily offending anyone present.
Even in such instances, one should proceed with caution; we lose sight of the core of Hobbes’s objection to laughter if we forget just how sensitive he thinks we are to insult. Laughing at an abstracted vice might still cause offense if a particular group tends to be associated with that vice; if philosophers are associated with the Unjust Speech, laughter at the Unjust Speech could be perceived by philosophers as an insult directed their way. As Cicero had warned, the “shafts” of wit “may light upon unintended victims, however featly they may be winged.” 53 Nevertheless, as I show below, Hobbes was sometimes willing to take this risk in order to cultivate a sense that possessors of a given vice are laughable, and that we should therefore avoid that vice and the ridicule that will attend upon it. Laughter of this sort might still encourage us to buy our self-esteem too cheaply (thereby hindering our own advancement), but that concern is distinct from the concern about quarrel. Sometimes, the civic benefits of instilling in audiences a sense that vices are laughable, and that audience members are superior to the vicious, outweigh the minor boost to the audience’s vainglory.
The Elements offers another situation in which the pedagogical benefits of laughter might outweigh the risks: when we laugh at our former selves in a way that does us no “present dishonour.” We can laugh at our former selves safely if we have advanced beyond whatever was laughable about our former condition—and perhaps if no one in our company laughs too loudly with us at our former infirmities. 54 Laughter under these conditions poses no risk of quarrel, and it might even promote self-advancement; we might recognize that our lives ought to be characterized by forward progress away from a laughable original condition. 55 If hindsight allows us to see that we were laughable at some former point, we might be prompted to consider the ways in which we are still laughable.
I argue below that Hobbes does in fact make use of humor in encouraging us to think about vice “abstracted from persons” and to laugh at our former selves, and that this laughter encourages us to see the gap between the way humans behave when left to their own devices (most importantly, in the state of nature) and the way humans must learn to behave if they are to achieve their own interests (in the commonwealth). While Hobbes ceases to mention these possibilities for laughter without offense in his later statements on the subject, I do not think we should follow Skinner in ascribing this shift to a change of heart. 56 Elements offers the longest (and, I think, the fullest) account of laughter in Hobbes’s writings. Even there, Hobbes prefers to emphasize the dangers present in laughter. It makes sense, then, that in future, more concise accounts of the phenomenon (most famously in Leviathan), he would omit consideration of laughter’s positive potential. As I show below, even relatively late in life, his rhetorical practice suggests that he continued to find in humor a useful civic resource.
I turn now to Hobbes’s humorous rhetorical practices in order to show how they respect the theoretical exceptions outlined above and contribute to the Salus Populi. I then propose that Hobbes shows himself willing to go even further than the exceptions suggested in the Elements. Drawing on an understudied passage from his Six Lessons, I theorize rare occasions in which Hobbes goes so far as to counsel insults that are directed at recognizable individuals.
“A King Over All the Children of Pride”
Hobbes insists on the rough uniformity of human nature in Leviathan’s introduction. There, he asks his reader to read Leviathan in order to “read in himself, not this or that particular man, but mankind.” 57 Witty contumely is one of the tools by which he aids us in this self-reading. To judge by the way Hobbes used humor, laughter at ourselves can play an important role in our political education, by which I mean our education into peaceful subjects of the leviathan-state.
Hobbes encourages us to laugh at our former selves (albeit indirectly) in his often satirical treatment of human nature. A striking instance of this satire occurs where we might least expect it: in the gloom of chapter 13 of Leviathan. There, after encouraging us to face the equal vulnerability of our bodies, Hobbes turns to the “faculties of the mind,” in which he claims to find “yet a greater equality amongst men than that of strength.” Here Hobbes’s wit is on full display: “[t]hat which may perhaps make such equality incredible is but a vain conceit of one’s own wisdom, which almost all men think they have in greater degree than the vulgar, that is, than all men but themselves and a few others whom, by fame or for concurring with themselves, they approve.” 58 To render this into more modern prose, we call “vulgar” everyone but ourselves and a few who either agree with us or are famous. Directed at an individual or group, this bit of witty contumely would be offensive, but Hobbes blunts the insult by applying it generally to unreformed human nature.
The jesting continues: the fact that “men” are not willing to believe “there be many so wise as themselves” is proof “rather that men are in that point equal, than unequal.” Why is our intellectual pride proof of our equality? Because “there is not ordinarily a greater sign of the equal distribution of anything than that every man is contented with his share.” Hobbes knew that humans are not usually satisfied with having received equal amounts of anything. The effect of his satire is to encourage us to laugh or at least scoff at these creatures who are paradoxes of pride and cupidity. 59 Disarmed by Hobbes’s wit, and reassured by the universality of the insult, we more readily concede that this risible characterization applies to us, too, and are encouraged to avoid such embarrassing excesses of pride in the future. 60 In chapter 13, he eases us into his argument for our natural equality, and the horrific consequences of that equality in the state of nature, through humor. The knowledge that we are laughing at all human beings when we laugh at ourselves allows us to be usefully humbled without worrying that we are losing status relative to others. Instead, we feel superior to any who might fail to see the truth about our condition.
Hobbes also models self-irony on occasion. Heyd notes that, while “the laughter of self-irony” should be considered nonoffensive laughter by the lights of the discussion in Elements, Hobbes did not mention the possibility explicitly. 61 This is an example of how we gain by bringing Hobbes’s own practice into conversation with his theory of laughter, because Hobbes practices self-irony even though he does not explicitly introduce it as a form of nonoffensive humor. He makes use of self-deprecating humor in his “Verse Life,” where he claims his mother “Did bring forth Twins at once, both Me, and Fear,” 62 and later boasts of being “the first of all that fled” at the dawn of the English Civil Wars. 63 He similarly compares himself to the Capitoline geese, “those simple and unpartial creatures,” in Leviathan’s letter dedicatory. 64
These images create a humorous impression of Hobbes in the reader’s mind, but, in reading Leviathan, we see that we were wrong to laugh; Hobbes’s native fear, his quickness in fleeing, and his squawking like an alarmed goose all turn out to be more rational than stubborn courage would have been. By inviting our laughter, Hobbes first endears himself to us and then leaves us to realize on our own that we had been wrong to find him laughable. 65 He is engaging in a pedagogic form of self-deprecation that ultimately comes to light as realistic self-assessment. If you admit your vulnerabilities rather than insisting on powers you do not have, you will be better positioned to seek your own good. He also provides us with a salutary reminder that we would do better to try to correct those who laugh at us than to enter into combat with them.
Skinner is right to say that “much laughter at the defects of others” is bad because it encourages a complacency that will make us fall behind in life’s race, “since vainglory causes us to look back and pusillanimity causes us to suffer hindrances,” 66 but Hobbes shows that certain kinds of laughter can position us more effectively in the metaphorical race by clarifying our standing relative to our opponents. 67 Leo Strauss voices a concern similar to Skinner’s when he implies that, for Hobbes, laughter is part of the “cocoon” we weave around ourselves in order to deny the “horror” of our situation. However, on my account, inducing his readers’ laughter is a surer way for Hobbes to ease them into a more accurate assessment of themselves and the world around them. 68 Skinner and Strauss rightly identify Hobbes’s deep concern with vainglorious self-congratulation, but this concern does not blind Hobbes to laughter’s educative potential.
I have shown that Hobbes will encourage laughter at himself and at “absurdities and infirmities abstracted from persons” (because applied to all of us as humans). Is Hobbes willing to deploy witty contumely in situations where it is likely to cause offense but might nevertheless be politically salutary? His practice suggests that he is. In Behemoth, the interlocutor known as “B.” responds to “A.’s” reference to transubstantiation by concluding dryly that “[i]t seems then that Christ had many Bodies, and was in as many places at once as there were Communicants.” 69 Behemoth was written around the same time as the Latin Leviathan (ca. 1668), so this example undercuts Skinner’s contention that Hobbes’s oeuvre reveals an “increasingly stern rejection of laughter as a tool of argument.” 70 Hobbes still shows himself willing to scoff at the heart of the Catholic liturgy at this later stage—not for fun, but because of the dangerous political consequences of the doctrine of transubstantiation. As “A” explains, transubstantiation gives clergy the power to grant or deny eternal life to kings and subjects “at the hour of death” by administering or withholding Communion, a power which is incompatible with Hobbesian sovereignty. 71
In Leviathan, after bringing to bear various passages from the Old Testament to show that Christ was both a sacrificial goat and a scape goat, Hobbes concludes: “Thus is the lamb of God equivalent to both these goats.” 72 Here he satirizes the difficulties of reading the Old Testament as a prefiguration of the New by drawing our attention to the mixed metaphor that results. 73 In another context, he refers to Luke 20:34-36 as a “fertile text” because it is ripe with a description of the resurrection to eternal life, but the adjective also puns on the fact that the Elect in the world to come will live eternally but will not procreate. 74 By contrast, the damned in Hell will continue to have children and continue to enjoy the associated pleasures. With this pun, he slyly derides the joys of Heaven and calls attention to the difficulty of imagining human beings who neither “generate” nor “corrupt.” The text is fertile insofar as it gives birth to many interpretations; it is pregnant with confusion.
One of Hobbes’s most hair-raising uses of witty contumely, in chapter 47 of Leviathan, is again at the expense of Catholics. Hobbes concludes a list of parallels between fairies and ecclesiastics with a scandalous break-off, or aposiopesis: “[t]he fairies marry not, but there be amongst them incubi that have copulation with flesh and blood. The priests also marry not.” 75 Hobbes’s list has set us up to expect the description of fairies to mirror that of ecclesiastics at each stage, and when he subverts that expectation by breaking off his parallel, he sets his readers up to finish the parallel themselves. Not all readers will laugh aloud (and some will surely be offended), but it is nevertheless identifiable as an instance in which Hobbes is using his wit to elicit a feeling of “sudden glorying” in his readers. 76
Our sense of our own cleverness at unlocking Hobbes’s message increases the superiority we feel over the vicious priests and the doctrines they spread, which are “contrary to the peaceable societies of mankind.” 77 Given that Hobbes diagnoses clerical power, like the power of the fairies, as coming entirely from fear and ignorance, laughter seems particularly well-suited to promoting peace here. 78 This kind of laughter might promote quarrel, but the doctrines it aims to dismantle are themselves quarrelsome. Some offense now might be necessary in order to prevent more serious quarrels later.
A similar practice of witty contumely can be found in Hobbes’s sometimes feisty exchanges with English elites. His famous exchange with Bishop Bramhall about liberty and necessity features some unmistakable mockery. In the fifth section in “Of Liberty and Necessity” (1645), Hobbes mimics a metaphor in which Bramhall described himself as having divided his “forces” into two “squadrons.” Noting that Bramhall probably employed that metaphor in an attempt at flattery, because the addressee of Bramhall’s discourse is “a military man,” Hobbes turns the screw: “[a]ll that I have to say touching this is that I observe a great part of those his forces do look and march another way, and some of them fight amongst themselves.” 79 He proceeds to engage with Bramhall’s arguments and examples seriously, but he does not deny himself the opportunity to incite his readers’ passions to his advantage, and to the disadvantage of Bramhall; the latter is presented from the beginning of Hobbes’s treatise as a flatterer with a poor command of the forces of his own reason.
Later in the same treatise, Hobbes will mock Bramhall’s seeming erudition. When Bramhall somewhat fancifully refers to one of his arguments as an Argumentum Baculinum (or “stick argument”), by way of a classical reference to Zeno beating his servant with a stick, Hobbes glosses Bramhall’s Latin differently, calling it not a “stick argument” but “a wooden argument,” which is to say a bad argument. If the reader is left with any doubt about the paucity of Bramhall’s argument, Hobbes relates how Bramhall has misunderstood the Zeno story, concluding that Bramhall’s argument “was rather withdrawn than drawn from the story.” 80 Hobbes’s witty contumely reverses Bramhall’s argument and reinforces a favorite point: that learned references are no substitute for rigorous argumentation. Moreover, he charmingly persuades the reader of Bramhall’s inferiority as an interlocutor while claiming to remain on the defensive, thereby evading the charge that he is claiming any superiority for himself. This jest is at the expense of Bramhall, but for the sake of bringing the audience into line with the truth.
A final instance, in which Hobbes is much harsher with his opponents than he is with Bramhall, provides the clearest justification for his practice of witty contumely. The Six Lessons (1656) is Hobbes’s final statement in a debate with two Oxford professors of mathematics. The first five lessons pertain to the substance of the debate, whereas the sixth lesson is on “MANNERS”; Hobbes has left substance behind and has turned to the form in which the Oxford professors made their arguments. In that section, he begins with a typical warning against the addition of contumely, “either directly or scommatically [jeeringly or scoffingly],” 81 to any dispute, calling it “want of Charity, and uncivil.” The introduction of contumely into a dispute is avoided by all who have observed “how hainous and hazardous a thing such contumely is amongst some sorts of men. . . . For evill words, by all men of understanding are taken for a defiance, and a challenge to open war.” 82
However, Hobbes adds that the use of contumely is warranted as a response to an insult already given. He calls this “Reddition,” 83 citing a case (to which I will return) in which the emperor Vespasian judged in favor of a knight who insulted a senator, on the grounds that the senator had insulted the knight first. Hobbes makes full use of the warrant granted by reddition; the final section of the Six Lessons is replete with barbed and humorous attacks against the “egregious professors of the mathematicks” who insulted him first. For instance, he asks pointedly, “can a man raise a great expectation of himself by boasting?” and responds: “If he could, neither of you would be long before you raised it of your selves; saving that what you have already published, has made it now too late.” 84 In other words, if it were possible to increase one’s reputation by boasting, these shameless professors would surely have done so, except that they have already foreclosed that possibility; their argument provides too much evidence of their own ignorance. This is spicy stuff for an academic exchange.
Is Hobbes doing what we just saw him chastise Bramhall for—namely, justifying a position with a classical reference instead of an argument? He knows that a fresh insult will only bring opponents closer to conflict. His reference to the decision rendered by Vespasian sheds some light. It appears to refer to an episode in Suetonius’s “Life of Vespasian” in which the emperor attempted to restore the orders of senators and knights and to reconcile them to each other. He did this by resolving a dispute in favor of a knight who returned an insult to a senator. In order to “make clear that the orders were distinguished from one another not so much by privileges as by position,” Vespasian judged that “senators should not be insulted but to return their insults was both proper and right.” 85
Combining Hobbes’s deployments of witty contumely with his allusion to Vespasian, I conclude that it is permitted to ridicule someone when this contributes to stability. This is specifically the case when such ridicule helps to temper the arrogance of elites. 86 Hobbes’s claim in De Cive that “nothing is commoner than taunting and offensive remarks by the powerful against the less powerful” suggests that ridicule usually serves the cause of social inequality, but his own practice, and his use of “Reddition” to justify it, raises the possibility of a form of ridicule that runs in the other direction. 87
In fact, Hobbes claims in his conclusion to the Six Lessons that he has “here and there been a little sharper with you [the “egregious professors”] then else I would have been,” in order to “disabuse” young students who might come across their writings and mistake their “Gall” for “Salt.” Hobbes wants to dispose young students to “not admire such kind of wit,” and he claims to be rendering a public service, rather than simply defending himself, by pricking the bombast of these potential corrupters of the young. 88 In the same place, he reminds the professors of what he now calls “Vespasian’s law,” that “it is uncivill to give ill language first, but civill and lawfull to return it.” 89 Hobbes does not back down in the face of these rebarbative Oxonians but instead uses his fierce wit to insist on the equality that must characterize a scientific disputation.
While it might at first appear that “Vespasian’s law” runs counter to the laws of nature, and particularly to the law counseling “pardon,” a closer look at those laws makes clear that Hobbes recognizes the possibility of socially salutary insult. In his discussion of the sixth law of nature, “Facility to Pardon,” Hobbes says that “upon caution of the future time, a man ought to pardon the offences past of them that, repenting, desire it [italics in original],” because pardon is “nothing other than granting of peace.” Built into this law is the notion that only those who repent of their offenses should be pardoned; granting peace to “them that persevere in their hostility be not peace but fear [my italics].” 90 Hobbes agrees with the first part of Christ’s council (at Luke 17.3)—“If thy brother trespass against thee, rebuke him; and if he repent, forgive him”—but what follows at Luke 17.4 is recast by Hobbes as motivated by fear: “And if he trespass against thee seven times in a day, and seven times in a day turn to thee, saying, I repent; thou shalt forgive him.” Unlike Christ, Hobbes subscribes to the “fool-me-once” model of pardoning.
Even when the offender is not repentant, the seventh law of nature, which treats revenge, or “retribution of evil for evil,” forbids us from “inflict[ing] punishment with any other design than for correction of the offender, or direction of others.” It is foolish to pardon those who continue to offend against us, but if we must return evil for evil, we must do so with an eye to peace. For “revenge without respect to the example and profit to come is a triumph, or glorying, in the hurt of another, tending to no end . . . and glorying to no end is vain-glory, and contrary to reason.” 91 We may correct others harshly, but never for our own sake; rather, we must do so for their sake or for the “direction of others.” Leviathan’s eighth law of nature, which expressly forbids contumely, requires qualification in light of the seventh law of nature and Vespasian’s law.
In the caustic final pages of the Six Lessons, Hobbes maintains his claim that he is turning his satirical firepower on the “egregious professors” for good reason. He will correct them if they will listen; he repeatedly points out what he takes to be their faults of both manners and reasoning. If they will not, he will deter any students who might be attracted by the authority of their positions and the ferocity of their polemics. Given that Hobbes thinks “[a]rguments seldom work on men of wit and learning when they have once engaged themselves in a contrary opinion,” 92 he would not likely have held out hope of convincing the professors of their errors, but he nevertheless thought it necessary, in order to establish the truth of his claims, to clear away the contumelious allegations of the professors with some carefully calibrated contumely of his own.
The Possibility of a Peaceful Laughter
I have shown that Hobbes was willing to use humor to promote peace in at least three ways, and that these three practices of humor respect Hobbes’s theoretical accounts of laughter and witty contumely. First, he used his wit to make readers laugh at the features of human nature that cause so much quarrel and pose such a threat to peace (laughter at our “former selves”). Second, he used his wit to ridicule doctrines and practices that are inimical to peace (laughter at “absurdities and infirmities abstracted from persons”). Third, he used his wit to ridicule troublemakers whose correction was required for the public peace (which he justified using “Vespasian’s law”). What connects these three allowances for ridicule and laughter is that each promotes peace.
How do these allowances for witty contumely alter our understanding of Hobbesian civility and, with it, the requirements of political stability? As Teresa Bejan has shown, Hobbes saw two conversational virtues in particular as essential for civility: discretion and complaisance. 93 The fifth law of nature concerns complaisance; we must be accommodating, rather than “stubborn” or “insociable.” 94 Discretion is the virtue of discerning “times, places, and persons” in business or conversation. 95 Together, Bejan argues, these two conversational virtues encourage a “civil silence” in which subjects do not have to agree with each other but must maintain an outward conformity for the sake of peace; subjects are agreeable without being in agreement. 96
Like Skinner’s conclusion that Hobbes will not use insult to counter insult, Bejan’s account suggests that public disputes will be settled by the sovereign. If “indiscreet individuals refused to bite their tongues and insisted on inflaming their listeners instead, the sovereign had a duty to intervene.” 97 This would appear to leave no room for the kind of witty contumely I have been discussing.
In cases in which the commonwealth is at threat of dissolving, as it did during the English Civil Wars, Hobbes clearly thought that using state power to silence rabble-rousers was advisable, as in his infamous claim that 1,000 “seditious ministers” should have been killed to save 100,000 people. 98 Yet Hobbes recognized that his proposition would have entailed “a great massacre,” and he surely did not think that killing or otherwise silencing every subject who held forth about something inimical to peace would be feasible or even a good idea, given that subjects need to feel protected in order to owe obedience (not to mention the sheer callousness of such a proposition). 99 What I am proposing is an expanded understanding of the Hobbesian virtue of discretion, one that involves knowing not only “what not to say and when not to say it,” 100 but also what to say, to whom, and in front of whom (that is, taking into account “times, places, and persons.”)
The statement that most demonstrates the centrality of the virtue of discretion comes in the opening of Hobbes’s preface to his translations of Homer, where he writes that “The Vertues required in an Heroick Poem (and indeed in all Writings published [my italics]) are comprehended all in this one word Discretion [italics in original].” 101 Discretion “consisteth in this, that every part of the Poem be conducing, and in good order placed to the End and Designe of the Poet.” 102 Poets and historians are here permitted a license that he seems to permit himself—that “as far as the truth of Fact can defame a man, so far they are allowed to blemish the reputation of Persons.” 103 Discretion is compatible with defamation, so long as that defamation does not depart from the truth, and so long as it serves the “End and Designe” of the writer. Hobbes’s end and design is a peaceful commonwealth, and he employs his witty contumely with discretion, which is to say in a way that aligns with his theory of political stability. 104
Humor is a particularly effective tool of persuasion. It “weakens an audience’s defenses and makes them more amenable to persuasion,” as Hans Speier puts it, citing the agreement of Cicero, Quintilian, and Castiglione on this point. 105 It surprises the reader, as Hobbes himself acknowledges in calling the passion “sudden glory,” and this surprise grabs the reader’s attention. 106 Cicero says that it “clearly becomes an orator to raise a laugh,” listing among its advantages the facts that “merriment naturally wins goodwill for its author,” that “everyone admires acuteness,” that humor “shatters or obstructs or makes light of an opponent,” and that it “often dispels distasteful suggestions not easily weakened by reasonings.” 107 How could Hobbes have denied himself this crucial rhetorical tool in the defense of his theory of the state? My answer is that he did not.
Moreover, humor is particularly good at targeting the vices of the arrogant, as Hutcheson had pointed out in his criticism of Hobbes. 108 Strauss sums up this dimension of humor pithily: if we laugh at defects, and what counts as defective varies, then the surest source of laughter will be when someone is defective according to their own standards; “[h]ence pretense, affectation, or boasting become the preferred theme of comedy.” 109 Speier concurs and adds that “we laugh hardest when pretentious dignity comes to grief.” 110 Modern readers might sometimes miss Hobbes’s humor because of the “solemn airs” that Hutcheson accused him of assuming, 111 but once we notice them, these airs can often make his humorous rhetoric all the more poignant. As Cicero says of a phenomenon with which we are all familiar, “the sterner and gloomier a man’s expression is . . . the more humorous as a rule his remarks are considered.” 112 Hobbes’s witty contumely fits nicely with his somber rhetorical persona.
According to his civil science, the license Hobbes allowed himself would likely be regulated by the public authorities, but there is no indication that Vespasian’s law would no longer count as equitable in the Hobbesian commonwealth. It is true that in his discussion of both laughter and discretion, Hobbes consistently emphasized the risks over the possibilities. Without Hutcheson’s realizing it, he stated Hobbes’s position well when he wrote that “[r]idicule, like other edged tools, may do good in a wise man’s hands, though fools may cut their fingers with it, or be injurious to an unwary bystander.” 113 Used in the ways I have described, witty contumely can perform both an immediate public service and play a part in a more long-term civil education.
As Skinner and other scholars of Hobbesian civility have shown convincingly, the maintenance of civility is of utmost importance to Hobbes’s political thought. As Skinner has it, “[i]f any form of social life is to be possible,” the “destructive tendencies” of the unsociable “will obviously have to be curbed and controlled,” yet Hobbes does not explain how such control could be achieved using only legal means. 114 As I have noted, Skinner canvases and then rejects the possibility that Hobbes, following writers like Guazzo and Castiglione, thought insult could be used to keep “unsociability” in check. In light of what he sees as the failure of this option, Skinner concludes that “Hobbes’s principle suggestion . . . simply takes the form of a plea for forbearance.” 115 The sociable must tolerate the unsociable if peaceful society is to be possible.
It is an important part of Hobbes’s strategy to encourage subjects to forbear insults, as when Hobbes writes that a “gallant man, and one that is assured of his own courage,” would take no notice of “words of disgrace.” 116 Yet Hobbes’s encouragement of forbearance appears aspirational. The “gallant man” will not notice insult, “great minds” compare themselves only with the most able, and “great persons” do not have leisure to laugh. The Hobbesian commonwealth is not composed only of the gallant and the great; given Hobbes’s many warnings about the dangers posed by insult, it is unlikely that he would have pinned the possibilities for peaceful social life on the majority of subjects developing an immunity to offense. 117 Forbearance alone leaves too much of the field to the unsociable and asks too much of ordinary subjects. “Great minds” should “help and free others from scorn,” 118 and they should use their full powers of persuasion to do so.
Education in the commonwealth requires not only the propagation of correct doctrines but also the ongoing refutation of incorrect ones, using witty contumely and other rhetorical tools where necessary. My analysis of Hobbes’s use of witty contumely suggests that he does not rest his hopes for the success of the commonwealth on coercion alone or on every subject coming to a full understanding of his civil science but rather on a multifaceted education that appeals to reason and fear while making use of examples that foster an appropriate sense of glory and shame.
Conclusion
I have argued that Hobbes’s theory of laughter is better understood once we attend to his frequent practice of using humorous rhetoric. Hobbes made allowance for laughter at our “former selves”; at “absurdities and infirmities abstracted from persons”; and, sometimes, at persons whose arrogance or doctrines pose a threat to peace. I have also argued that this revised account of laughter has broader implications for Hobbes’s political theory: namely, that Hobbes recognized that his principles would require ongoing defense, that greater rhetorical leeway is permitted in defense of the principles of peace than in other situations, and that Hobbes was willing to appeal to passions like glory and shame in educating subjects.
Hutcheson and Nietzsche saw a connection between Hobbes’s petty account of laughter and his petty political philosophy. I have shown that they do not do justice to Hobbes, but I suggest that they are right to see an important connection between Hobbes’s position on laughter and his political philosophy. Hobbes’s theoretical critiques of laughter, combined with his practice of scorning the unsociable, nicely epitomize Hobbes’s adopted posture as a benefactor to humankind. By attacking laughter, Hobbes aligns himself with those who are ridiculed against those who laugh blithely and disruptively at their purported inferiors. He assures his readers that he will not laugh at them but will instead free them from scorn by scorning their enemies. He also offers his readers something better than seeing their enemies scorned: the kind of self-assurance that he and other “great persons” possess. Hobbes’s readers are educated through laughter to free themselves, first from the laughter of their purported superiors and then from their own need to laugh at their purported inferiors. If Nietzsche encouraged philosophers to laugh like gods at all serious things, Hobbes encouraged philosophers to take the well-being of ordinary people seriously and to reserve their laughter for those with pretensions to divinity.
Moving beyond Hobbes himself, the contemporary scholarship on laughter and politics shows a Hobbesian concern for the way laughter can signal our contempt for our fellow citizens or our civic obligations. 119 Politicians can use laughter to unite a crowd, to feign humility, or to ostracize opponents or marginalized groups. 120 Political pundits can use it to remind audiences of the humanity of democratic leaders or to call into question the qualifications of elected representatives. Even where laughter seems like a tool of the oppressed, its effects remain complex and hard to predict. 121 Whether or not it is good to hold this or that person or thing in contempt involves a difficult social calculation, as Hobbes reminds us. His warnings about its vainglorious effects remind us that indiscreet laughter can lead beyond the censoring of a single person and into the cultivation of a cavalier contempt for fellow subjects. 122
Hobbes may be helpful insofar as he shares the contemporary worry that laughter has a dark side while nevertheless seeing a path through to forms of witty contumely that are ultimately leveling. For instance, Hobbes’s own rhetorical practices hint at how ridicule aimed at members of a disadvantaged group might be returned to members of an advantaged one in a way that isolates the offending members while reminding everyone of the importance of public equality. His counsel that “of great minds one of the proper works is to help and free others from scorn” suggests that discretion in choosing not to laugh at certain jokes can also serve the cause of public equality. 123 In fact, it implies that refraining from laughter is the real indication of one’s superiority.
Laughter at ourselves, and at those who esteem themselves too highly, continues to play an important civic role by keeping vanity in check and contributing to a sense of our own limits and interdependencies. Angus Fletcher’s description of classical comedy as a “puddle reflection of ordinary life,” one that reminds citizens of their collective need to satisfy shared appetites, 124 bears some resemblance to Hobbes’s frank descriptions of human nature and reinforces the possibility that laughter might contribute to the “constant Civill Amity” at which Hobbes thinks we must aim. 125 Fletcher’s image also recalls Hobbes’s own metaphor for comedy and satire. Whereas heroic poetry is the purview of court poets and pastoral poetry that of rural poets, the “Scomattique” poetry of satire and comedy is like the “insincerenesse, inconstancy, and troublesome humor of those that dwell in populous Citties.” 126 This is far from an enthusiastic endorsement of comedy, but perhaps it is an acknowledgement of that genre’s affinity with the nature and challenges of social life. 127
Laughter in the service of peace does not sound nearly as enjoyable as laughter in the service of intimacy or epistemic openness. Lauren Berlant and Sianne Ngai suggest that, by “[a]lways crossing lines, [comedy] helps us figure out what lines we desire or can bear.” 128 Hobbes was confident that he already knew what we desire and can bear. Nevertheless, he provides a useful, if extreme, baseline by which to think about the civic ramifications of laughter: if it conduces to peace and equality (which it often will not), it is good. However far one is willing to go with Hobbes, I hope to have shown that his account of laughter is more sophisticated and more difficult to dismiss than has often been thought.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author is grateful to Arlene W. Saxonhouse and Michael A. Gillespie for discussing versions of this essay at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association (2018) and the Duke Graduate Conference (2020) respectively, as well as to audiences at both conferences; to Teresa M. Bejan, Scott Dodds, Daniel Schillinger, Daniel Sherwin, Caitlin Tom, Eric Cheng, Zhichao Tong, Ryan K. Balot, Ronald Beiner, Eric Nelson, Seva Gunitsky, and Kirstyn Hevey for comments; and to the editor and anonymous reviewers at Political Theory for invaluable guidance.
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.
