Hobbes’s commitment to society as a product of sovereignty: A basis for a Hobbesian sociology

Abstract

There is a commitment in Thomas Hobbes’s work which is largely neglected by sociology, a commitment to society as a product of sovereignty. Hobbes makes this commitment in line with his strident opposition to the scholastic idea of the dominance of reason in nature. For Hobbes, society is not based on natural reason. Drawing on his distinctive Epicurean anthropology, he argues that the small amount of reason that nature supplies to humans is enough to give them a limited capacity for sociability – enough, that is, to achieve a rudimentary level of self-preservation – but not nearly enough to produce society. He builds this argument directly against the scholastic argument that nature in fact supplies to humans so much reason that, were they to apply it in the manner in which nature intends, they would achieve a perfect society. In forging his particular direction against the scholastics, Hobbes draws mostly on his Epicurean political philosophy, whereby the rule of a strong authority, the sovereign, disciplines the wills of subjects in order to properly balance their passions, to the extent that a distinct domain of peace and security is created and maintained, a domain he mostly calls simply ‘society’. His account of society is normative in only one respect, a very important respect – its dedication to the fundamental importance of peace and security.

Keywords

Hobbes natural reason normative Parsons society sociology sovereignty

Sociology has never taken Thomas Hobbes to its heart. One possible reason for the lukewarm reception given to this important seventeenth-century social and political thinker is this: the discipline has neglected his commitment to society as a product of sovereignty, that is, to the type of society that can only emerge under the rule of a sovereign. This leaves sociology in no position to consider the possibility of a specifically Hobbesian branch of the discipline. The question of why the discipline has neglected this aspect of Hobbes’s work will not be a major focus here; to answer that question properly would require a separate paper. Suffice to say that while some aspects of Hobbes’s will-focused, sovereignty-based account of society are similar to some accounts offered by sociology, most are decidedly foreign to nearly all of the discipline’s traditions. With a few notable exceptions, to be discussed later, the great majority of sociologists have not sought to overcome the difficulties presented by the unfamiliarity of Hobbes’s thought. This could be because Hobbes is regarded by many sociologists as a thinker concerned with individuals qua individuals, not with society. For those who regard him in this way, the present paper might be read as a challenge. If so, it should be read as an indirect challenge, for it will not seek to confront the Hobbes-as-individualist position; instead, it will concentrate on making clear Hobbes’s commitment to society as a product of sovereignty and thereby demonstrating the potential worth of a specifically Hobbesian branch of sociology. This is to say that the paper regards Hobbes as an individualist only in the sense that he has a well-developed account of individual humans which he uses in forging his account of society. As this could be said equally about Max Weber, it does not seem to the paper’s author to be grounds to dismiss Hobbes as a major contributor to sociology.

Drawing on his distinctive Epicurean¹ anthropology, Hobbes argues that the small amount of reason that nature supplies to humans is enough to give them a limited capacity for sociability – enough, that is, to achieve a rudimentary level of self-preservation – but not nearly enough to produce society. This is in direct contrast to the scholastic argument that nature in fact supplies to humans so much reason that, were they to apply it in the manner in which nature intends, they would achieve a perfect society. In pursuing his own account of society, Hobbes draws mostly on his Epicurean political philosophy, whereby the rule of a strong authority, the sovereign, disciplines the wills of subjects in order to properly balance their passions, to the extent that a distinct domain of peaceful, secure human interaction is created and maintained – a domain he mostly calls simply ‘society’, though occasionally he uses the term ‘civil society’ (for example, 1845a: 69; 1845b: 437).

In this context, ‘civil society’ might seem to be the more likely term for what Hobbes is emphasizing. However, this would create more problems than it would solve. As Dominique Colas’s detailed history of the uses of ‘civil society’ demonstrates, since Hobbes’s era this term has been far more often employed in developing anti-Hobbesian, reason-focused thinking than it has in developing Hobbesian, will-focused thinking (Colas, 1977: esp. 248–277). Indeed, ‘civil society’ is now almost totally associated with reason-focused thinking, whereas in Hobbes’s time it was not. The paper is keen to minimize the chances of reason-focused thinking about society being confused with Hobbes’s will-focused thinking.

In its first section the paper will explore Hobbes’s opposition to the scholastic idea of the dominance of reason in nature, while in its second it will conduct most of its exploration of his own will-focused account of society as a product of sovereignty. In this second section the paper will argue that Hobbes’s account of society is normative in only one respect, a very important respect – its dedication to the fundamental importance of peace and security. In its third section, in expanding upon this last point, the paper will take issue with Talcott Parsons’ influential proposition that Hobbes’s contribution to sociology is compromised by the fact that his work on society lacks a normative dimension. In its conclusion the paper will consolidate its underlying theme: that sociology would benefit from making Hobbes’s commitment to society as a product of sovereignty into a core feature of the discipline, thereby marking out a specifically Hobbesian sociology.

In presenting its main arguments about Hobbes, the paper will draw evidence primarily from Leviathan, supported occasionally by evidence from two of his earlier works, De Cive and De Corpore Politico.²

Hobbes’s opposition to the scholastic idea of the dominance of reason in nature

Hobbes does not approach the topic of humans living in society in the same way as does modern sociology. He is not, for example, directly attempting to do what those branches of the discipline which specialize in the intricacies of human interaction attempt to do – to show what a difficult and fragile achievement successful interaction, and hence society, can be. Such branches include not just those at sociology’s boundary with anthropology, which employ ethnography to build detailed pictures of particular societies, especially societies exotic to the sociologists studying them, but also branches dedicated to the ‘micro’ study of interactions within the ‘home’ societies of those doing the studying. These micro branches include, at least, symbolic interactionism (for example, Goffman, 1961, 1972), ethnomethodology (for example, Garfinkel, 1967), and conversation analysis (for example, Sacks, 1992; Silverman, 1998).

While Hobbes would not disagree that society is a difficult and fragile achievement, as will be demonstrated later, it would be inadvisable to attempt to draw links between his account of society and any of these branches of sociology, for it would not allow a full appreciation of what he is doing when he paints the detailed picture of human behaviour that serves as the basis both for his opposition to the scholastic idea of the dominance of reason in nature and for his arguments in favour of his account of society as a product of sovereignty.

At the heart of the scholastic account of human beings is the figure of homo-duplex, the term at the centre of a set of ancient Greek propositions, especially Aristotelian propositions, which emphasize humans’ bifurcated nature, that is, the nature by which humans have both higher reasoning selves, which are capable of striving for perfection, and lower sensuous selves. By this account, the higher reasoning selves always try to assert their superiority over the lower sensuous selves (Hunter, 2001: 20). The fourth-century theologian Augustine of Hippo attempted to Christianize these homo-duplex propositions in a bid to help humans here on earth – in the ‘Earthly City’ – to use their reasoning selves such that they would constantly aspire to a perfect condition – the ‘City of God’ (Colas, 1997: 23). In the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas, a dominant figure in the history of scholasticism, welded these basic Christian doctrines onto Aristotle’s proposition that ‘man is a political animal whose “rational and sociable” nature can be completed or perfected’ in a special community of reasoners – the polis. This special community encourages ‘the virtues of benevolence, charity and mercy, culminating in the summatory virtue of justice’ (Hunter, 2010: 477 n. 12).

Aquinas does more than adopt the Aristotelian conception of an ideal community based on an ideal politics; he actually forges it into a Christianized blueprint for the idea of a natural, reason-based, perfect society, a blue-print which is still widely used, albeit only in its later, renovated form, in which it serves secular rationalist arguments as well as it formerly served mainly theological rationalist ones. Aquinas is able to achieve this because he constructs a remarkably durable link between reason-focused natural law and his reason-focused account of human beings. For Aquinas, God is ‘the divine mind or reason from whose creative intellection emanate the essences or “natures” of all things … thereby constituting the lex aeterna or eternal law of the cosmos’. Humans can and should, according to Aquinas, know this law because, for him, human nature ‘shares the rational nature of God’ (Hunter, 2010: 477). The role Aquinas gives to God as the source of nature is, with secularity to the fore, rarely discussed within modern sociology, and it would be anachronistic to suggest a direct link between scholasticism and modern sociology. But to suggest an indirect link is another matter; indeed, one has already been suggested. To reiterate, this is the type of link whereby traces of scholastic thinking are present (albeit only in their secular form, without direct reference to Aquinas) in the not-uncommon modern sociological proposition that society is natural and based much more in reason than in rule. According to Aquinas, it is through the ‘intellection of the natures of things’ that ‘God imbues … [humans] with the law of the “perfection” or completion of their own nascent essences or “goods”’, such that ‘human nature is inclined by the law of its perfection to know the truth about God and to live in society’ (Hunter, 2010: 477), by which Aquinas means perfect, reason-focused, natural society.

For Hobbes, the idea of perfect nature at the centre of the scholastic account, far from being the source of solidarity that the scholastics think it is (and much sociology thinks it is), is an overwhelming obstacle to peaceful, secure human interaction, inasmuch as it fills each faction with the belief that they alone are on the path to perfection. Hobbes can agree with Aquinas that self-preservation is in accordance with God’s natural law (more on Hobbes’s use of the figure of God shortly), which for Hobbes is a source of humans’ capacity for sociality – ‘the inclinations of all men … tend … not only to the procuring, but also to the assuring of a contented life’ (1845b: 85); ‘for man … solitude is an enemy’ (1845a: 2) – but he cannot possibly agree that God does any more than provide the humans with their nature. He cannot agree, that is, with the proposition that God has determined the entire course of all human behaviour flowing from their nature. If he were to agree to this proposition, he would be agreeing that all political and legal questions are to be settled in the terms of Aquinas’s supposedly God-given ‘objective right’, captured in the scholastic argument quoted above, that ‘human nature is inclined by the law of its perfection to know the truth about God and to live in society’. To Hobbes’s way of thinking, this formulation pays too little attention to the fact that self-preservation is not just about protection from the natural elements; it is as much or more about protection from other human beings, something which, for him, humans cannot achieve without a strong sovereign ruling over them. To urge humans to treat society as a community of communities, in which they can seek the perfection that God or nature has supposedly set for them, is, for Hobbes, a recipe for devastating civil war.

For the same reason, Hobbes is equally opposed to giving Aristotle’s polis the central role Aquinas gives it. For Hobbes, this overblown vision of human perfection through politics – another way of expressing the idea of society as a natural-rational community of communities – will ultimately hasten humans not towards a rationalist nirvana of peaceable political debate in a perfectly irenic political community, as both Aristotle and Aquinas contend, but to extreme civil discord, to a situation in which many rival political communities, far from being united into a single super-community, instead form around their disparate visions of the good life and seek to wipe each other out. For Hobbes, the vanity and quarrelsomeness produced by unbalanced passions guarantee the latter outcome and not the former, as will be explained in the following section. In his eyes, questions of politics and of law are not matters which humans can directly sort out by using their (rival) visions of what is good. Instead, they are matters for the earthly sovereign to control (towards the formation of society as a product of sovereignty), the sovereign being the only figure in this-worldly life strong enough to deal with what happens when human wills are not sufficiently disciplined, that is, when passions remain unbalanced (also to be explained in more detail in the following section).³

Hobbes’s account of humans, this is to stress, features both humans’ natural sociality and their capacity to injure and kill one another. He obviously accepts that human behaviour, in and of itself, is natural – which is why he often refers to it by the use of the term ‘the state of nature’, and in this sense is a gift from God, but he does not accept that this fact constrains all humans to seek the perfection that nature, in reflecting God’s perfect nature, has set for them, for he knows what this means: that they will ceaselessly kill one another on the road to different visions of perfection. This is why, for him, the idea of natural, reason-based society (that is, society without strong sovereign rule) is always in danger of collapsing into the war of all against all.

In this argument, as in many of his other arguments, Hobbes uses the figure of God freely. This should in no way be taken to mean that he shares the scholastic position concerning the role of God; he does not.⁴ Not only does Leviathan, especially the Third and Fourth Parts (1845b: 359–700), amply demonstrate Hobbes’s intricate knowledge of Christian scriptures, it also demonstrates both his commitment to the notion that God could not have a direct role in earthly rule (a point already introduced and to be further discussed in the next section) and his commitment to the joint propositions that humans cannot directly know God’s mind and hence cannot seek perfection by imitating the divine (1845b: 273, 353–354, 361, 383, 420, 672, 677, 710).⁵ While readily acknowledging that nature brings humans together, Hobbes is certain that this is not enough to create and maintain society as a domain for peaceful, secure human interaction. Society, in this stronger sense, he suggests, involves more than ‘mere meetings’. To put this matter another way, for Hobbes, while humans are born to interact, they are, nonetheless ‘born unapt for society’, they are ‘made fit for society not by nature, but by education’ (1845a: 2).⁶

Inasmuch as one of Hobbes’s main goals in Leviathan is to emphasize the ‘absurdities’ of the scholastic commitment to the idea of the dominance of natural reason (1845b: 680 n. 13), as has been mentioned several times, he dedicates an entire chapter (1845b: Ch. XLVI) to an attack on scholastic thinking, highlighting its marriage of Aristotelian metaphysics and Christian dogma. In mounting this attack, he takes great pains to relegate reason from its central status. But it must be added that he is equally careful to ensure that reason does not slip from his own account altogether.

He refers to reason as a type of ‘reckoning’ (1845b: 30) and argues that if humans develop this capacity (1845b: 35) and allow it to work in conjunction with ‘experience’ (1845b: 664), it can prove useful to them. He adds, pointedly, that this is despite reason being conflated with custom (1845b: 91) and despite humans having little of it (1845b: 36). He warns his readers that if they allow too much of a role for reason, they will themselves be reasoning erroneously (1845b: 281–282). For Hobbes, then, natural reason does not have the strength to underpin society in the way that the scholastics suggest it does. For this task, Hobbes turns to the disciplined will and, particularly, to the force charged by God with doing the disciplining, the sovereign of the commonwealth, whether individual or assembly, whose laws are consistent with God’s laws and must be obeyed (1845b: 359, 378–380).

In heading into the next section’s more detailed discussion of Hobbes’s account of society as a product of sovereignty, with special emphasis on the actual role of the sovereign, it is worth considering the following quote from Leviathan, which, using perhaps his most famous formulation, encapsulates his most pressing insight into the limits of scholastic thinking about society as a natural-rational community of communities:

And because the condition of man … is a condition of war of every one against every one: in which case every one is governed by his own reason; and there is nothing he can make use of, that may not be a help unto him, in preserving his life against his enemies; it followeth, that in such a condition, every man has a right to every thing; even to one another’s body. And therefore, as long as this natural right of every man to every thing endureth, there can be no security to any man, how strong or wise soever he be, of living out the time, which nature ordinarily alloweth men to live. And consequently it is a precept, or general rule of reason, that every man, ought to endeavour Peace, as farre as he has hope of obtaining it; and when he cannot obtain it, that he may seek, and use, all helps, and advantages of Warre.

(1845b: 117, emphasis in original)

Hobbes’s ominous qualifying phrase, ‘as farre as he has hope of obtaining it’, the paper suggests, is indicating that he does not believe that widespread peaceful, secure human interaction can be achieved within natural, reason-based society, with its competing visions of what a perfect peace will comprise. For in such circumstances, the war of all against all is the only possible outcome: ‘… and when he cannot obtain it, that he may seek, and use, all helps, and advantages of Warre.’

Hobbes’s own will-focused account of society as a product of sovereignty

In setting up his own account of society as a product of sovereignty, Hobbes focuses on two elements of human nature – motions and passions. As an Epicurean, he is committed to the study of the process of motion (1845b: 38–39), the process that featured heavily in the early modern revival of classical Epicurean cosmology and physics (see esp. Joy, 1987; Osler, 1991). Hobbes thinks of individual bodies, celestial bodies, and the body politic as having similar natures: ‘… when a thing is in motion, it will be eternally in motion, unless somewhat else stay it’ (1845b: 3–4). It is therefore unsurprising that in thinking about how humans can be governed into a functioning peaceful, secure society he thinks of them in terms of motion (1845b: esp. 5–11), paying particular attention to their ‘voluntary motions’, which, he says, are ‘commonly called the passions’ (1845b: 38).

As has been suggested at a number of points, the will is central to Hobbes’s account of society as a product of sovereignty. This is because the will is capable, at least to some extent, of directing motions. Hobbes uses the term ‘endeavour’ to refer to each instance of the will directing or attempting to direct motions. Endeavours, he adds, are made either towards something that is desired (an ‘appetite’) or away from something that is feared (an ‘aversion’) (1845b: 39 n. 13). In this way, if the passions (the ‘voluntary motions’) are balanced by the will – that is, if excessive desires are checked by appropriate fears – then the passions will lead to actions which promote human life. But if the passions are not balanced in this manner, then the passions will lead to actions which destroy human life. This is to say that in the unbalanced configuration, which occurs whenever and wherever society as a product of sovereignty has not been established, the passions can provide humans with the capacity for seemingly limitless violence, most dreadfully illustrated by their willingness to engage in civil war (1845b: 40–48). Under such conditions, says Hobbes, humans ‘live, as it were, in the precincts of battle continually’ (1845b: 165), they always either ‘hold the sword’ or ‘hire others to fight for them’ (1845b: 333). In other words, humans need to be restrained by the rule of a sovereign because they are hot blooded (1845b: 314), much more passionate than they are reasonable (1845b: 173), incapable of maintaining ‘a constant civil amity’ with one another (1845b: 701), and driven by ‘a perpetual and restless desire of power after power’ (1845b: 85–86).

Boiling it down, Hobbes describes the will as the final deliberation before an action (1845b: 48–49). In this way, the will is a primal force, a force which drives ‘the beasts’ as much as it drives humans (1845b: 48). This is to say that, because the process of motion is a process in which objects always seek to avoid other objects, all animals, including all humans, have an instinctual capacity to use their wills to help them survive. In this sense of simply surviving, then – and in this sense alone – Hobbes says that the will has a natural inclination in humans to promote, in each and every one of them, what is ‘good to himself’ (1845b: 241). He is thus able to make the will’s natural inclination towards self-preservation into a foundation stone of sovereignty, which he does by making this natural inclination the focus of the will’s training. The will can be trained, he maintains, to balance the passions such that they are directed away from the path along which self-preservation is pursued via the desire to kill one’s enemies and towards the path along which self-preservation is pursued via the fear of an absolute ruling force with the power of life and death over all subjects. This, according to Hobbes, is the only feasible means of breaking a cycle of killing once it has started and the only feasible means of preventing new cycles from starting:

This is the generation of that great LEVIATHAN. … For by this authority given him by every particular man in the commonwealth, he hath the use of so much power and strength conferred on him, that by terror thereof, he is enabled to perform the wills of them all to peace at home and mutual aid against their enemies abroad.

(1845a: 158)

While Hobbes acknowledges, as was discussed earlier, that the ultimate responsibility for training the wills of humans lies with God – unbalanced passions are against the will of God (1845b: 352) – he insists that God charges the sovereign with the task of actually doing the training on earth: only the ‘monarch, or the sovereign assembly … hath immediate authority from God, to teach and instruct the people’ (1845b: 228). Hobbes’s detailed arguments about how sovereign rule operates are many; the paper has room to deal with only some of them.

In Leviathan, Hobbes defines a sovereign as a public common power charged with keeping ‘private men’, by holding ‘them all in awe’, from the brink of a ‘war … of every man, against every man’ (1845b: 112–113). To become sovereign, an individual or assembly must publicly be made sovereign by the covenants of the subjects (1845b: 161). Once this has been achieved, the individual or assembly immediately becomes a (singular) public ‘person’ – the ‘commonwealth’ or ‘civitas’ (‘the state’) (1845b: 158).⁷ In this way, the sovereign, as ‘the state’ (an assembly which can, it is clear, 360 years after Leviathan was first published, grow so large as to stretch the term ‘assembly’ a long way), is the ‘representative of all and every one of the multitude’, the ‘person’ who or which always carries the force of the multitude (1845b: 171).

In De Cive, in setting out the differences and similarities between democratic, aristocratic, and monarchical rule, Hobbes seeks to clarify his usage of each of the following terms: the multitude, the people, the person of the sovereign, and the subject of rule. He draws a line between ‘the people’ and ‘a dissolute multitude’, stressing that ‘we can neither attribute any action or right’ to the multitude (1845a: 97). Hobbes insists that a multitude becomes ‘the people’ only as part of the process of forming a sovereign government: ‘… the people is not in being before the constitution of government’ (1845a: 98, emphasis in original). For the purpose of governing, each individual in the multitude becomes a subject of the sovereign. As such, a subject cannot ‘make any contract with the people … because the people contains within its will the will of that subject’ (1845a: 98). In offering more detail on this matter, Hobbes says that the contract between the sovereign and the subjects is brought into being in this way:

… each man contract to submit his will to the will of the major part, on condition that the rest also do the like. As if every one should say this: I give up my right to the people for your sake, on condition that you also deliver up yours for mine.

(1845a: 99)

By way of example, Hobbes says that ‘a monarchy is derived from the power of the people, transferring its right, that is, its authority on one man’ (1845a: 100, emphasis in original).

Complicating this already complex picture, Hobbes argues in De Corpore Politico that ‘the word people hath a double signification’ (1845c: 145). By this he means that the figure of ‘the people’ can be used to mean, on the one hand, ‘the multitude of persons that inhabit those regions without consideration of any contracts’ and, on the other, the ‘person civil’, the ruler, as discussed above. His explanatory example here is that when they sit in the commons ‘with authority and right thereto’, ‘the lower house of parliament’ is ‘the people’ in the ruling sense, but if parliament is dissolved, then the same group of individuals in the same place is ‘the people’ only in the sense of ‘aggregate, or multitude of the particular men there’ (1845c: 146).

This extra explanation proves especially helpful when considering the passage in De Cive in which Hobbes expresses his annoyance at the ‘great hindrance to civil government’ that is caused by ongoing confusion over the terms ‘the people’ and ‘the multitude’. After stressing that ‘the people’ ‘rules in all governments’, he offers a different clarification of his terms: ‘In a democracy and aristocracy, the citizens are the multitude, but the court is the people. And in a monarchy, the subjects are the multitude, and (however it seem paradox) the king is the people’ (1845a: 158, emphasis in original).

In the wake of these arguments from Hobbes, we might usefully end this discussion about the finer points of the formation and operation of sovereign rule by considering the most straightforward distinction he offers between the sovereign and the subject. In Leviathan, after setting out the attributes of the ruling person, dealt with above, and after stressing that this ‘person’ ‘may use the strength and means’ of all who have made ‘covenants with one another’ to bring this ‘person’ into being, he adds, ‘And he that carrieth this person is called SOVEREIGN, and said to have sovereign power; and every one besides, his SUBJECT’ (1845b: 158, emphasis in original).⁸

The final dimension of Hobbes’s account of society is its crucial normative dimension – its dedication to the fundamental importance of peace and security, ‘the peace and security of the subject’ (1845b: 203). We have already seen that Hobbes thinks that ‘every man ought to endeavour peace’ and that ‘peace at home and mutual aid against their enemies abroad’ is the main goal of sovereign rule, but this does not capture the full flavour of his admiration of peace and security. As well as insisting that ‘the first, and fundamental law of nature … is to seek peace, and follow it’ (1845b: 117, emphasis in original),⁹ Hobbes goes so far, in De Cive, as to make the attainment of peace by sovereign rule and the attainment of society by sovereign rule into one and the same goal, thereby producing the apparent paradox (it is, of course, no paradox to Hobbes) that it is only through their fear of the sovereign that subjects will be able to enjoy ‘all that pleasure and beauty of life, which peace and society are wont to bring with them’ (1845a: 12).¹⁰

For Hobbes, then, society as a product of sovereignty, just like the peace and security it delivers, is a hard-won achievement. It can be achieved only when sovereign rule overcomes the great burden of life in the state of nature: the burden of trying to survive not just the threat posed by nature itself – the elements, wild animals, diseases, and so on – but also the greater threat posed by other people, by the violent tendencies unleashed by unbalanced passions. So when Hobbes famously says that life in ‘the state of nature’ is ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’ (1845b: 113), he is talking about the great many situations in which people’s passions are not constrained by sovereign rule. When he adds that, ‘In such condition, there is no … industry; … no knowledge of the face of the earth; … no arts; no letters; no society’ (1845b: 113, emphasis added), he is talking about society as a product of sovereignty, and he is emphasizing the gulf between his account of this type of society and the scholastic account of natural, reason-based, perfect society. More than this, he is emphasizing that society as a product of sovereignty, as a domain of peaceful, secure human interaction, is something which can never be taken for granted, something which requires enormous effort, something which can be lost.

Before bringing this section to a close, it is worth revisiting Hobbes’s remarks about the dangers of external attack, in order to consider them in the context of his assessment of the greatest threat posed to sovereign rule. He is abundantly clear that the greatest danger facing sovereign rule, and hence society under sovereignty, is the danger of internal unrest, especially the danger of civil war. He says that the ‘greatest incommodity’ which can befall ‘any form of government’ is ‘the miseries’ and ‘horrible calamities’ that ‘accompany a civil war’, with its ‘dissolute condition of masterless men’, that is, ‘men without subjection to laws’, without ‘a coercive power to tie their hands from rapine and revenge’ (1845b: 170). As we saw earlier, he insists that sovereign rule cannot afford to ignore the danger of external attack, that sovereign regimes are charged with protecting their populations from this type of attack as well as from internal attack. Yet this does not mark them out in the same way as does their commitment to above-the-fray maintenance of peaceful, secure human interaction. As Stephen Holmes puts it, focusing especially on the work of Jean Bodin, an important precursor of Hobbes, sovereign rule was initially a ‘concentration of power … justified … [as] the one acceptable alternative to religious civil war. Mutual butchery of citizens was [the] summum malum, the uttermost evil to be avoided at all costs’ (1988: 7).

The limits of Parsons’ account of Hobbes’s potential contribution to sociology

In the late nineteenth century, Ferdinand Tönnies, a figure widely regarded as a founder of sociology, worked to keep Hobbes’s name uppermost in the thoughts of his fellow sociologists. He edited Hobbes’s Behemoth (Hobbes, 1889) and he based one of the key problems in his own major work, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, on Hobbes’s work, arguing that a Gesellschaft needs to constrain ‘natural enemies, mutually exclusive and contradictory’, and calling these ‘natural enemies’ ‘Hobbes’s people and their descendants’ (Tönnies, 2001: 131).¹¹ But in all this, Tönnies did not see the importance for sociology of Hobbes’s distinction between his own account of society as a product of sovereignty and the scholastic account of natural, reason-based, perfect society. In any event, Tönnies did not succeed in his quest to guarantee Hobbes a high profile within the discipline. Apart from Parsons’ famous attempt to promote the ‘problem of social order’ as one of sociology’s main concerns, to be discussed in detail shortly, few sociology books published after Tönnies’ era deal thoroughly with Hobbes or his legacy. In introductory textbooks Hobbes is usually totally absent, and even in more demanding books, such as Michael Mann’s The Sources of Social Power, when Hobbes does make an appearance it is more often than not a cursory appearance: Mann mentions Hobbes only three times in the volume dealing with the seventeenth century (1986: 36, 58, 417), each time treating him as if he were as one with Locke.¹²

Before considering Parsons’ treatment of Hobbes in detail, it is worth considering some exceptions within sociology to the ‘forget Hobbes’ rule. For example, Stephen Turner and Regis Factor provide considerable evidence for a case that Max Weber’s decisionistic approach to politics and law in the period just after the First World War is fundamentally Hobbesian (Turner and Factor, 1987: 343).¹³ Peter Baehr (2008) similarly reads Weber in Hobbesian terms, particularly in assessing his ‘Caesarism’. And Bryan Turner (1993, 1997) makes an admirable attempt to build a neo-Hobbesian element into his late twentieth-century account of human rights. Ultimately, however, the sociological literature gives little sustenance to those who would like to see Hobbes given more recognition within the discipline.

In The Structure of Social Action, first published in 1937, Parsons uses Hobbes to help him establish sociology’s credentials as the sheriff of all things social (Parsons, 1945: esp. 89–94). In doing this, however, he damns Hobbes with faint praise. For example, as part of his argument that Hobbes’s account of ‘the state of nature as the war of all against all’ is ‘almost entirely devoid of normative thinking’ (Parsons, 1945: 89), Parsons proposes that Hobbes supplies ‘the first great example of … deterministic thinking in the social field’, which makes him the first scholar to apply ‘deterministic theories of a physical nature’ to the social world (Parsons, 1945: 88–89). This, it turns out, is faint praise indeed, for it is Parsons’ way of saying that Hobbes got only half the story right. Although he credits Hobbes with discovering ‘the problem of order’ (Parsons, 1945: 89–90), as The Structure of Social Action unfolds, Parsons allows himself (and the discipline he is seeking to mould) to develop this into what he takes to be a much more telling discovery, ‘the problem of social order’, a phrase which he has as his own by the end of the book (Parsons, 1945: 768, emphasis added).

The damning with faint praise does not stop there. Parsons acknowledges Hobbes’s arguments for a system of strong sovereign rule, but he does so only to emphasize that such arguments are evidence for the proposition that Hobbes’s ‘system of social theory is almost a pure case of utilitarianism’ (Parsons, 1945: 90), that is, lacking a normative element. Parsons then situates Hobbes’s ‘utilitarianism’ on one side of what he sees as a vital divide: that which separates normative order, which is ‘always relative to a given system of norms or normative elements’, from factual order, to do with the order of the universe, the type of order that operates whether there is normative order or not (Parsons, 1945: 91–92). Parsons seeks to establish that while Hobbes and his utilitarian followers are extremely helpful if one is seeking to understand only factual order, one will have to turn to sociology (particularly to the distinctly Parsonian sociology he is assembling by synthesizing Marshall, Pareto, Weber, and Durkheim) if one wishes to learn how factual order and normative order combine to produce social life: ‘Thus a social order is always a factual order in so far as it is susceptible of scientific analysis but … it is one that cannot have stability without the effective functioning of certain normative elements’ (Parsons, 1945: 92).

Parsons contends that because of the exclusive focus on factual order and the power relations at its hub, Hobbes is able to pose and address ‘the most fundamental empirical difficulty of utilitarian thought’ (Parsons, 1945: 89–91), the problem of factual order in the pre-social state of nature. The praise is laid on thick at this point – ‘Hobbes saw the problem with a clarity which has never been surpassed’ (Parsons, 1945: 93) – but it is no less faint for that, for Parsons is effectively saying, ‘If you want to study order and power without studying society, Hobbes is as good as you can get, but who would really want to study order and power without studying society?’ This is where Parsons’ interpretation of Hobbes does most of its work, effectively wiping Hobbes from an entire discipline in just a few pages of just one book, albeit a book which, as Jeffrey Alexander puts it, ‘established the “base line vocabulary of modern sociology”’ (van Krieken, 2002: 257, quoting Alexander).¹⁴

Robert van Krieken takes serious issue with what Parsons does with (and to) Hobbes, insisting that it is time for ‘a re-reading of Hobbes’, a re-reading which ‘can cut us loose from “the problem of order” as Parsons posed it’ (2002: 262):

The trouble with … [Parsons’] ‘standard interpretation’ of Hobbes is that it is wrong, for two reasons. … First, this is not how Hobbes understood the ‘state of nature’ and it is not his ‘problem of order’. The standard interpretation rests on a very simplistic, and incorrect, reading of what Hobbes meant by the ‘state of nature’, revolving around a projection of its own concern to see ‘nature’ as opposed to society onto Hobbes’ much more specific concern with explaining and preventing civil war. … The threat to social order – the threat of civil war – came not from some presocial, egoistic human nature, which Hobbes felt never existed, but from the effects of the passionately held beliefs and opinions with no central authority to decide between them. … Second, the ‘normative’ solution to the problem of order, which almost everyone from Parsons onwards has suggested is specific to sociology, having eluded Hobbes, is actually present in Hobbes himself.

(van Krieken, 2002: 259–260)

Van Krieken (2002: 261) extends this argument to demonstrate that nearly all sociologists writing after the publication of The Structure of Social Action have been prepared to stay within the Parsonian reading of Hobbes.

To put van Krieken’s points into the terms of the present paper, Hobbes holds that without the strong rule of a sovereign, the violence that stems from unbalanced passions is ever-present. The vital distinction, then, is between the scholastic account of natural, reason-based, perfect society and his own account of society as a product of sovereignty, not between, on the one hand, a pre-social state of nature which is ordered only by brute facts and, on the other, the type of society that only sociology is equipped to study, a type which tames the brute facts with norms. As Hobbes sees the matter, the scholastic account of natural, reason-based, perfect society is blind to the fact that thousands of normative desires for the good life, some of which are the opposite or near-opposite of others, are as often the trigger for violence between different communities as they are sources of solidarity within communities. As we have seen, sovereign rule is concerned with only one norm, the maintenance of peace and security; it will allow the ‘thousands of normative desires for the good life’ to flourish, but only if they do not disturb the one overriding norm.

Conclusion

We have discussed the failure of sociology to treat Hobbes as one of its own. We have considered and rejected the proposition that Hobbes does not fit within sociology because he is concerned mostly with individuals qua individuals, not with individuals within society. We have explored the possibility that not only should Hobbes be accepted within sociology, he should be thought of as a powerful voice within the discipline. In these discussions, the focus has been on Hobbes’s distinction between his own account of society as a product of sovereignty and the scholastic account of natural, reason-based, perfect society. This focus has included consideration of Hobbes’s opposition to scholastic thinking, an opposition which stems from his conviction that the idea of society as a natural-rational community of communities will lead inexorably to a situation in which many rival political communities, instead being united into a single super-community, will form around their disparate visions of the good life and fight to the death in an endless civil war.

Hobbes, we have seen, thinks of humans not in terms of their capacity to seek perfection through reason but as creatures whose passions need to be balanced by their wills. He is sure that humans cannot do this balancing for themselves; they need the strong leadership of a sovereign ruler. In other words, he knows that while nature brings humans together, it is not strong enough to produce society; only sovereign rule can do that. It can do it by balancing the passions of the subjects of the rule such that a distinct domain of peaceful, secure interaction is created and maintained – society. For Hobbes, then, society is worth pursuing because peace and security are goods in themselves; together, they are the normative component of sovereign rule, the opposite of that which Hobbes sees as the ultimate evil, civil war.

Finally, after acknowledging a few sociologists who are not averse to Hobbes’s account of society, we have, in developing the above point about the normative component in Hobbes’s thinking about sovereign rule and the society it creates, engaged the work of Talcott Parsons in order to challenge his conviction that Hobbes cannot be treated seriously as a contributor to sociology because his work does not contain a normative component.

At the end of all this the paper is left wondering what Hobbes has done to deserve the frosty reception he has been given by a discipline to which he has so much to say. Has he spoken in a manner displeasing to the guardians of sociology? We have seen no evidence that he has. Has he been too crude in formulating his arguments for society as a product of sovereignty? Quite the contrary, we have seen that he has formulated his arguments with sophistication and force. It is noteworthy that in other disciplines, such as political philosophy and political science, these arguments have stood the test of over 360 years of study and debate. Ryan Walter, for instance, acknowledges Hobbes’s achievement in establishing a new way of thinking about public power in terms of the sovereign state, having rejected the then-dominant mode of thinking about it ‘in personal terms’ (2011: 20, citing Skinner).¹⁵

While it is difficult to know what can be done to overturn the anti-Hobbes sentiment that seems to pervade sociology, the arguments presented in this paper suggest that a distinctively Hobbesian sociology is not only feasible, it is also desirable. Sociology would do well to acknowledge that in rejecting the then-dominant mode of thinking about society in naturalist-rationalist terms, Hobbes established a new way of thinking about it in terms of sovereign rule.

Footnotes

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

Author biography

Gary Wickham is Professor of Sociology at Murdoch University in Western Australia. His books include Foucault and Law (co-authored with Alan Hunt; Pluto, 1994) and Using Foucault’s Methods (coauthored with Gavin Kendall; Sage, 1999), both of which have recently been translated into Japanese, and also Cultural Studies: Culture, Order, Ordering (co-authored with Gavin Kendall; Sage, 2001) and Rethinking Law, Society and Governance: Foucault’s Bequest (co-edited with George Pavlich; Hart, 2001). His recent articles on topics similar to this one have appeared in the British Journal of Sociology, the Journal of Law and Society, the Journal of Sociology, the Griffith Law Review, Current Sociology, and Law, Text, Culture.

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