Hobbes and Republican Liberty

History of Political Thought, 2015

This article traces the main changes to Thomas Hobbes’s account of liberty between the Elements of Law and Leviathan in order to re-evaluate his challenge to republican ideas of liberty. It contests Quentin Skinner’s recent interpretation while advancing two interrelated theses. First, it argues that between these works Hobbes attempted, but ultimately failed, to reconcile two different conceptions of liberty. Second, it shows that the changes to Hobbes’s account of liberty were not driven by his engagement with republican debates. The article concludes by indicating how the analysis challenges prominent historical narratives about republicanism set forth by its contemporary exponents.

Jurisprudence, 2010

INTRODUCTION Hobbes's definition and use of the term 'liberty' has been and continues to be the subject of much debate within Hobbes scholarship. The change in definition from De Cive 1 to Leviathan 2 is one such focus of commentary; 3 another is his purported change in definition between applications of 'liberty' to the state of nature and to civil society. 4 Other commentators also discuss his use in Leviathan of more than one meaning for the term. 5 The focus of a recent study is Hobbes's purported rejection of the rich 'republican' traditional understanding of liberty, in order to champion a radically restricted application of the term to mean nothing more than the absence of external impediments to one's actions. 6 In this article I examine (2010) 1 Jurisprudence 85-104 85

2009

The paper presents a critical discussion of Pettit and Skinner's recent treatments of Hobbes on republican freedom, in particular situating Hobbes's attack on the republican politicians from The Elements of Law in the contexts, first, of other contemporary suspicion directed against those politicians who struck a distinctively “Roman” pose, and, second, of Hobbes's wider psychology of politics, before concluding with some reflections on the relationship between Hobbes's political theory and the project of egalitarian republicanism.

Freedom in the sense of free will is a multiway power to do any one of a number of things, leaving it up to us which one of a range of options by way of action we perform. What are the ethical implications of our possession of such a power? The paper examines the pre-Hobbesian scholastic view of writers such as Peter Lombard and Francisco Suarez: freedom as a multiway power is linked to the right to liberty understood as a right to exercise that power, and to liberation as a desirable goal involving the perfection of that power. Freedom as a power, liberty as a right, and liberation as a desirable goal, are all linked within this scholastic view to a distinctive theory of law as constituting, in its primary form of natural law, the normative recognition of human freedom. Hobbes's denial of the very existence of freedom as a power led him to a radical revision both of the theory of law and of the relation of law to liberty. Law and liberty were no longer harmonious phenomena, but were left in essential conflict. One legacy of Hobbes is the attempt to base a theory of law and liberty not on freedom as a multiway power, but on rationality. Instead of an ethics of freedom, we have an ethics of reason as involving autonomy. The paper expresses some scepticism about the prospects for such an appeal to reason as a replacement for multiway freedom.

Political Theory, 2013

Neorepublican treatments of Hobbes argue that his conception of liberty was deliberately developed to counter a revived and Roman-rooted republican theory of liberty. In doing so, Hobbes rejects republican liberty, and, with it, Roman republicanism. We dispute this narrative and argue that rather than rejecting Roman liberty, per se, Hobbes identifies and attacks a language of liberty, Roman in character, often abused by ambitious persons. This is possible because Roman liberty—and, by extension, Hobbes’s relationship to it—is more complex than neorepublican authors have allowed. Drawing on Roman sources, along with Hobbes’s major works, we argue that Hobbes’s theory of liberty owes much to his engagement with Roman sources, and that this theory speaks to the egalitarian elements in his political thought.

Theory & Event, 2000

2023

Nowadays, it seems evident to us that a society, or a political body (such as a nation, a state or humanity as a whole), is composed of “individuals.” “Individuals” are, so to speak, the “atoms” of which our societies are made. These individuals sometimes voluntarily gather together in a new territory, but most of the time they are born into an already constituted society. The word “individual” is therefore a fundamental part of our basic political vocabulary and our moral horizon. Individuals are obviously different in some respects and similar in others, but today it seems inconceivable to us not to recognize that men are all equal, in a deep moral sense. As opposed to the classics that compared men in accordance with some ideal of excellence, it seems to us that the equality of men is more evident if we compare what they all share, a kind of lowest common denominator. Indeed, all men have several fundamental characteristics, but the most basic seems to be the desire to live and thus a right to life, which cannot be waived under any circumstances (not even, as many think, because of a serious crime). This is a right that all individuals have regardless of gender, color, creed, age and merit, and with which an individual can morally rebut the claims of not only other human beings, but a political sovereign and society as a whole (and perhaps God himself). This approach centered on the basic moral equality of individuals appears with the formulation of the idea of the “state of nature,” that is, of an age of human life before the foundation of civil society. In ancient literature there are reports of the state of nature in the sophists, or Lucretius, and late scholasticism, with Juan de Mariana in particular also mentioning it, but this type of state of nature never represented a moral reference. On the contrary, it is rather like the situation of the savage Cyclopes. The expression “state of nature” itself seems to derive from Christian theology, as opposed to both the “state of grace” and the state of man after the fall of Adam, with its corrupted nature. However, the idea that the “natural man” is a solitary individual who at the same moment in time joins civil society implies replacing the biblical view of the origins of human history with an unbiblical, or ungodly, rational conception. The replacement of the state of nature / state of grace dichotomy by the state of nature / civil status distinction further reveals the novel idea that the cure for the defects and problems of the individual in the state of nature is not grace, but political government.

The Journal of Politics, 1997

Springborg, “The Paradoxical Hobbes: A Critical Response to the Hobbes Symposium, Political Theory, 36 2008”, Political Theory, 37, 5 (2009), 676-688; to which Deborah Baumgold responds in the same issue, Political Theory, 37, 5 (2009), pp. 689-94.

Attention has turned from Hobbes the systematic thinker to his inconsistencies, as the essays in the Hobbes symposium published in the recent volume of Political Theory suggest. Deborah Baumgold, in “The Difficulties of Hobbes Interpretation,” shifted the focus to “the history of the book,” and Hobbes’s method of serial composition and peripatetic insertion, as a major source of his inconsistency. Accepting Baumgold’s method, the author argues that the manner of composition does not necessarily determine content and that fundamental paradoxes in Hobbes’s work have a different provenance, for which there are also contextual answers. Hobbes was a courtier’s client, but one committed early to a materialist ontology and epistemology, and these commitments shackled him in treating the immediate political questions with which he was required to deal, leading to systemic paradoxes in his treatment of natural law, liberty, authorization, and consent. Keywords: Hobbes’s paradoxes; materialist ontology; politics

2014