Ideas

by Peter Watson

  There are no exceptions to this state of affairs. Even kings and queens, he comments, are continually jealous of each other ‘in the state and posture of gladiators’. For Hobbes it therefore follows that, to avoid this primitive condition of perpetual war, men must submit to a common authority. Since the main law of nature is self-preservation, it follows that men are obliged to ‘conferre all their power and strength upon one man, or upon one assembly of men that they may reduce all their wills…to one will…’ This is what he means by the great Leviathan, a form of mortal God (as he put it) who alone has the power to enforce contracts and obligations. For Hobbes this contract is supreme. He does not allow any appeal to God or one’s conscience ‘because that would open the way for cunning men to get the better of their fellows, which is little more than a return to war’. Whatever the sovereign does, whatever taxes or censorship he imposes, they are all just because of the basis of his authority. Hobbes is not blind to the totalitarian nature of his system (as we would call it) and he concedes that it may be unpleasant to live under. He simply insists that it is far preferable to the alternative.39 Of the three kinds of commonwealth–monarchy, democracy and aristocracy–Hobbes comes down firmly on the side of the first, and for clear reasons. In the first place, the personal interests of the monarch will tend to coincide with the public interest, and he can after all, always consult whom he pleases and ‘cannot disagree with himself’. In response to the criticism that monarchs will always have favourites, he concedes ‘they are an inconvenience’ but adds that they will tend to be few, whereas ‘the favourites of an assembly are numerous’.40

  Hobbes knew that his book would be ill-received and he was not disappointed. Indeed, he was in sufficient danger from the Puritans, he felt, that he fled to France. He alienated the Parliamentarian Puritans because of his theory of ‘servile absolutism’, and he alienated the Royalists because, although he believed in absolute monarchy, he did not base his views on divine right.41 A parliamentary commission was appointed to examine the Leviathan and only the intervention of Charles II saved Hobbes from persecution.42 The poor reception of the book also had to do with the novelty of his ideas, partly because he broke with high-minded fashion and based his system not on a divinely inspired morality but on its sheer usefulness. He also rejected any notion of ‘natural law’ or ‘city of God’, which men were familiar with and found comforting. For Hobbes, his Leviathan is justified not because of any high-flown reason that men could have rallied to but simply because it benefits those who comprise it–and that is all.

  Today, we do not find Hobbes anywhere near as objectionable as his contemporaries did–because, for the most part, we actually live by many of the precepts he devised. We recognise now that men are indeed activated by fear or pride and we acknowledge moreover that both are equally dangerous. Above all we get by in societies where the often anonymous state is there to guard against the crude selfishness of human nature.43 Machiavelli’s pessimism, extrapolated by Hobbes’, has lasted too long and too well to be entirely misplaced.

  The rise of English and Dutch prosperity in the seventeenth century was a long-term consequence of two developments: a change in the salinity of the Baltic Sea which drove the herrings into the North Sea, boosting the catch there and augmenting the fishing industry of the countries that rimmed that body of water. And second, more important, it emphasised the drain away from the Mediterranean countries as the Atlantic Ocean opened up, following the discovery of America and the development of trade with the Indies and India. As a result, the politics of the new nation-states changed too, with trade rivalries beginning to take precedence over religious or dynastic feuds. The general increase in prosperity and the growth of mercantile influence on government produced a greater emphasis on property and more concern with the freedoms that should be allowed for individual business initiatives. It was this set of circumstances that produced the philosophy of John Locke.

  ‘John Locke is the prophet of the English business commonwealth, of the rule of law and toleration. It was from the political speculation of Locke (1632–1704) and the actual working out in England of the principles of toleration and limited monarchy, that the French thinkers of the Enlightenment drew their inspiration. In their turn, they reinterpreted and generalised the more liberal aspects of English thought, so that it was translated from a local into a world influence.’44 Locke does indeed epitomise the common sense of a generation wearied by religious and civil wars and a generation all too ready to benefit from colonialism and the subsequent emergence of a commercial class. Like Hobbes, Locke wrote on political philosophy but also on human nature, an Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Two Treatises of Government. This is one reason why his books were so influential: both aimed to fit political organisation into a wider system of understanding and both tried to do so scientifically. Locke studied medicine, was a Fellow of the Royal Society and his patron was Lord Shaftesbury, chancellor of England. He helped draft the constitution of Carolina.45 Locke was a very practical, cautious soul, who disliked abstractions, and thought that truth was probable rather than absolute, making him not untypical of the people then coming to power in England. In his scheme of things, political power should be as far from ‘divine right’ as can be imagined. He thought it was foolish to claim that God passed power to Adam and then through his descendants to today’s royal representatives. After all, he observed tartly, on that basis we are all descendants of Adam and it is impossible today to know who was who. He disagreed fundamentally with Hobbes in that he thought man’s natural state was not war but the use of reason. ‘Political power…I take to be a right of making laws with penalties of death, and consequently all the penalties for the regulating and preserving of property, and of employing the force of the Community in execution of such laws, and in the defence of the Commonwealth from foreign injury; and all this only for the public good.’46 By their nature, he says, men are equal, as Hobbes had insisted before him. But for Locke that is not enough. He goes on to make a distinction between liberty and licence. Without licence, he says, liberty is no different from the continual warfare Hobbes so feared. Therefore, the purpose of civil society is the use of reason to avoid ‘the inconveniences of the state of nature which follow from every man being made a judge in his own case, by setting up a known authority to which everyone may appeal and which everyone ought to obey’. Here he goes well beyond Bodin and Hobbes. Princes and kings, he says, can have no place in this scheme, ‘for no man is exempt the law’. The will of the majority must always reign supreme.

  Locke reflects the new situation in England more than ever when he goes on to argue that the reason men come together to live in society, with laws, is for the preservation of their property. Since men are ‘driven’ into society, it follows that the power of that society ‘can never be suffered to extend further than the common good’. And this common good can only be determined by standing laws, statutes, that all are aware of and agree to, and not by extemporary decrees of, say, an absolute sovereign. Moreover, these laws must be administered ‘by indifferent and upright judges’. Only in this way can the people (and rulers) know where they are.47 In an important amendment to the idea of absolute monarchy, Locke said that the king can never suspend the law.48 Finally, Locke gave voice to the main anxiety of the rising commercial classes in England (a fear of something which they saw happening in France, in state intervention in trade), that no power can take from a man his property without his consent. ‘A soldier may be commanded by a superior in all things, save the disposal of his property.’ In the same way, a man has property in his own person, meaning that a man’s labour is his property too. The most important consequence of this, Locke says, is that people can be taxed only with their consent. (We recognise this now in the doctrine ‘No taxation without representation.’49)

  This is in some ways the final break regarding the divine power of kings. The connection between the state and the individual is, for Locke, a purely legal and econom
ic convenience, relating only to the practical aspects of existence. In other words, and very bluntly, the state had absolutely no part to play in matters of belief or conscience. Where religion was concerned, Locke was a great advocate of tolerance (he devoted two works to the subject, in his Thoughts Concerning Education and Letters Concerning Toleration). Tolerance, he says, should arise from the very obvious fact that different minds have different aptitudes, as is evident from the way different children grow up within the same family. Moreover, the principles of Christianity, he says, demand nothing less than toleration. ‘No man can be a Christian without Charity, and without that faith which works not by force but by love…’50 The church, he insists, must be an entirely voluntary association; and it goes without saying that a person’s religion should not affect his or her civil rights. ‘The care of each man’s salvation belongs only to himself.’

  As with much of Hobbes’ Leviathan, Locke’s views today seem little more than commonplaces–again because we take them so much for granted. But they were very new in Locke’s own day. The idea that government should derive its authority from the governed, which implied that it should last only so long as the people wanted it, was breathtaking. ‘At a time when kings ruled for a lifetime, this offered the prospect of change, even of revolution.’51

  Baruch de Spinoza (1634–1677) was born two years after Locke but in some ways he had more in common with Thomas Hobbes. Like the latter, he thought that sovereign power is the price we pay for order. Unlike Hobbes, however, he had a better opinion of humanity and felt that, by making more use of the new sciences, intellectual and political liberty would be possible. In his optimistic way, he thought that mutual aid ‘is as natural to men as fear and pride’. The purpose of society, for Spinoza, is therefore the extension of human awareness. In making this assumption, and then by examining man’s psychology, as it is, the scientist can find a political structure to fit to that behaviour. As a result an ethical framework can be found that accords well with human nature.52

  Spinoza thought that man can only realise his higher qualities when co-operating for some higher good and that ‘the community alone is the medium through which this can be done’. Indeed, for him government is itself an expression of the impulse to mutual aid ‘instinctive to mankind’. (This is clearly the very opposite of what Hobbes was saying.53) ‘The aim of life and the State is the fullest realisation of its own being.’ ‘It follows,’ he writes in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, his great work, ‘that the ultimate aim of government is not to rule…by Fear, not to exact obedience, but to free men from fear, that they may live in all possible security…the object of government is not to change men from rational beings into beasts or puppets, but to enable them to develope their minds and bodies in security and to employ their reason unshackled;…in fact the true aim of government is Liberty…This outlook is the antithesis of the fear of life apparent in Calvin or St Augustine. We do not need to deny life to gain salvation. On the contrary, in the words of Jesus, the aim of mankind is “To have life and to have it more abundantly” and the State must be directed to this clear end.’54 Spinoza believed in tolerance and freedom of speech because in this way, he thought, the state would be more secure.

  His most startling attempt to promote freedom of thought comes in that part of the Tractatus where he gives an impartial analysis of the scriptures. In a radical departure, the book opens with ten chapters on the Old Testament, assessing the authenticity of the books and the exact nature of miracles. This was, in effect, the application of science to religion, a head-to-head confrontation. It leads on to an examination of Natural Law and Spinoza’s conclusion that ‘men are not conditioned to live by reason alone, but by instinct, So that they are no more bound to live by the dictates of an enlightened mind…than a cat is bound to live by the laws of nature of a lion.’55 This position of Spinoza was wholly original: he was a scientist but he wasn’t as much in thrall to reason as most of his fellow scientists. But Spinoza did join with Hobbes in concluding that ‘the basis of political obligation is the desire for security’, a wholly utilitarian notion. And so, at a stroke, Spinoza overturned the entire classical and medieval assumptions that politics was a rational response to a divinely inspired Natural Law. Instead, Spinoza simply looked upon the sovereign state as Hobbes did, as the ‘least of two evils’. He advised the sovereign to listen to the public, ‘since an unpopular government does not last’. Democracy had its advantages, he said, because ‘the danger of irrational commands is less to be feared, since it is almost impossible that the majority of people, especially if it be a large one, should agree on an irrational design’.56 ‘The sovereign power should count all men, rich and poor, equal before it…The power of the ruler is in practice limited by the fear he feels of his subjects: it is the fact of obedience, not the motive of obedience, which makes a man a subject. The aim of the statesman is to frame our institutions so that every man, whatever his dispositions, may prefer public right to private advantage; this is the task and this the test…Public affairs ought to be administered on principles which are fool proof and knave proof.’57

  For Spinoza, then, life was as much about the fulfilment of instinct as the exercise of reason, the human intellect was part of the divine mind and therefore reason has its shortcomings. ‘Whenever, then, anything in nature seems to us ridiculous, absurd or evil, it is because we have but partial knowledge of things, and are in the main ignorant of the order and coherence of nature as a whole, and because we want everything arranged according to the dictate of our reason…Every man has a right to fulfil his own being in so far as he has the power, and men have naturally authority over one another only in so far as they can impose it by force or persuasion; further no man need keep faith with another after he has judged it, rightly or wrongly, in his own interest to break it. Moral values are a human creation, cultivated in an artificial garden.’58

  On this view of humanity, almost the only relevant political fact is the power of the majority. Since men are inevitably ‘subject to passions’, peace can be had only on these terms. In the same way, the only test of the state is the peace and security it brings.59 It is no more than a convenience; the state exists for man, not the other way round.

  Where Spinoza differed most from Hobbes and Locke was in his emphasis on knowledge. For knowledge changes and therefore ‘the government must stand ready to change’. Further, insofar as the state is a convenience, an artificial garden, change is to be expected.60

  In his recent book Radical Enlightenment, Jonathan Israel identifies Spinoza as a key figure in the creation of modernity, uniting the ideas discussed in this chapter, on political theories and arrangements, with those discussed in the previous chapter, on the scientific revolution, in the next chapter, on religious doubt, and in Chapter 26, on the Enlightenment search for the laws of human nature. After Descartes introduced the New Philosophy–his idea of a mechanistic universe–it was Spinoza, Israel says, who changed humanity’s ways of thinking most, in the process creating the modern world. Israel’s argument is that the Enlightenment was not, as generally pictured, a change in thought associated mainly with France, England and Germany (the Aufklärung) but was Europe-wide, taking in Scandinavia, Spain, Portugal and Italy, but led from the United Provinces, as the Low Countries then were. It was Spinoza, he says, who sparked the overall and general change in thought that encompassed five areas which we generally treat separately but where Spinoza’s thought wove a neat web: philosophy, Bible criticism, scientific theories, theology and political thought. Spinoza’s role has been insufficiently appreciated, Israel argues, because a lot of his support was clandestine. He discusses twenty-two ‘Spinozist’ manuscripts which circulated clandestinely and reports on many followers who were forced into exile, or whose works were banned by the authorities. Nevertheless, he describes countless groups of secret ‘Spinozist’ thinkers all over Europe, whose religious, political and scientific views went hand-in-hand, to incubate a new sensibility,
which would burst into the open as the Enlightenment.61

  It was Spinoza, he says, who finally replaced theology with philosophy as the major way to understand our predicament, and as the underpinning rationale of politics; it was Spinoza who dispensed with the devil and magic; it was Spinoza who showed that knowledge is democratic–that there can be no special-interest groups (such as priests, lawyers or doctors) where knowledge is concerned; it was Spinoza who more than anyone persuaded us that man is a natural creature, with a rational place in the animal kingdom; it was Spinoza who persuaded his fellow men and women that freedom could only be understood philosophically; it was Spinoza who laid the groundwork for republicanism and democracy; it was Spinoza who explained that the end-result of all these ideas was toleration. For Israel, Spinoza was Newton, Locke, Descartes, Leibniz, Rousseau, Bayle, Hobbes and, yes, maybe Aristotle all rolled into one, the most consequential figure, on this reading, since Aquinas.