'The School of Life offers a radical if a simplistic
account of the 17th Century philosopher Thomas Hobbes. It takes a
very skilled author to make a case for a writer who lived in the seventeenth- century
having anything to say to us in the 21st century.
Dawson's book provides us
with an interesting and thought inducing attempt. Her book concentrates solely
on Hobbes's Leviathan and is part of Alain de Botton's The School of Life
Series. Other philosophers include Freud, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Byron, and
Bergson.
From the beginning, Dawson is honest about her book.
She wants to rehabilitate Hobbes and "reveal the insights that he
possessed despite – and sometimes because of – the darkness, and the sparks
that they might ignite in our albeit very different twenty-first-century minds."
Hobbes was a significant figure in English
philosophy. He was one of the first English materialist philosophers to put
politics on a scientific basis. Also very controversially at the time he advocated
a separation of state and religion. Some say he laid the foundations for modern
sociology. Recently it has become fashionable to use Hobbes to navigate society
and politics today.
As Dawson intimates in her book, Hobbes's
philosophical outlook has made a strong resurgence not so much in academic
circles which have always taken a keen interest in his work but in today's
wider political circles. Even today, Hobbes reputation provokes admiration and
hatred in equal doses. In 2009, Corey Robin wrote in the Nation lumping Hobbes
with Italian Futurists and Friedrich Nietzsche as a "blender of cultural
modernism and political reaction."
Given today's levels of social inequality, it is of little
surprise that Hobbes's ideas are provoking an interest. For many people around
the world, human life has become 'nasty, brutish and short.' The growing
international protest against these conditions has seen the rise of political
figures such as Donald Trump who advocates a semi-fascist totalitarian state to
maintain order and head off a revolution. It is safe to say that the
materialist side of Hobbes' is not being resurrected.
Dawson is heavily influenced by Hobbes. She explains
why she decided to put her fascination with Hobbes into book form "Why on
earth, then, have I chosen him for this book? What could he, nasty, brutish Mr
Hobbes, the 'Monster of Malmesbury,' possibly have to teach us about how to
live well? In a sense, it is precisely because of his gritty verdict on our
human condition that we need to listen to him. While we do not want to let him
take us all the way to the abyss of his authoritarian dystopia, we would do
well to take note of his clear-eyed assessment of the psychological forces that
pit us against one another, and the fact that, as uncomfortable as it is, we
need to be restrained" She continues "I can whistle about the streets
or, indeed, in the office or at home, safe in the knowledge that I probably will
not be hit or killed, in part at least because my would-be attackers are
frightened of going to jail and therefore leave me alone. This is the civilized
and civilizing foundation without which the fantastically plural coordination's
of society could not hope to get underway. It is on this foundation that I am
free to make as much or as little of my life as I am able. This is why Hobbes
helped me to understand, and I should obey and value government. As the first
great social contract theorist, he shows us why we consent – even tacitly – to
authority.".
I do not detect Dawson's tongue in her cheek, so I
will take these comments at face value. There is a degree of complacency here
that is very dangerous. I am sure Julian Assange would love to walk down the
street and whistle. I am sure the hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing war
in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan would like to walk down a British street free
from want.
A major weakness of the book is that it is not a very
realistic picture of class relations both in Hobbes time and ours. It was also
very simplistic to intimate that people get the government they deserve.
As the Russian revolutionary Marxist Leon Trotsky
observed "There is an ancient, evolutionary-liberal epigram: Every people
gets the government it deserves. History, however, shows that one and the same
people may in the course of a comparatively brief epoch get very different
governments (Russia, Italy, Germany, Spain, etc.) and furthermore that the
order of these governments doesn't at all proceed in one and the same
direction: from despotism – to freedom as was imagined by the evolutionists
liberals. The secret is this that a people are comprised of hostile classes,
and the classes themselves are comprised of different and in part antagonistic
layers which fall under different leadership; furthermore, every people falls
under the influence of other peoples who are likewise comprised of classes.
Governments do not express the systematically growing "maturity" of a
"people" but are the product of the struggle between different
classes and the different layers within one and the same class, and, finally,
the action of external forces – alliances, conflicts, and wars and so on. To
this should be added that a government, once it has established itself, may
endure much longer than the relationship of forces which produced it. It is
precisely out of this historical contradiction that revolutions, coup d'etats,
counterrevolutions, etc. arise.
Another danger contained in Dawson's book is her
attempt to lift Hobbes off his materialist's feet. She states "what he
wants to teach us, in addition to how we can escape debilitating fear, is what
it means to be free, and what it means to be good, to show us that – even at
our most rational – we are pressed on by our desires, and that we must be ever
watchful of the dangers of language and religion. Even if we violently disagree
with Hobbes much or indeed most of the time, he can teach us to meditate more
carefully than we are accustomed on the subjectivity, motivations, and opinions
which structure our lives".
It is not in the realm of this review to examine the
relationship between Hobbes and Locke, but both were instrumental in
establishing a new materialist world outlook. Dawson's paragraph is a direct
repudiation of much of the 17th century's materialist philosophy.
As Dawson knows having written on John Locke
(1632-1704) his Essay Concerning Human Understanding disavowed the concept of
innate ideas. Locke believed that man's thinking had an objective source, the
external world. As the Marxist writer David North states "If there were no
"innate" ideas, there could not be "innate" evil. Man's
thinking, and, therefore, his moral character, was, in the final analysis, a
reflexive product of the material environment which acted upon him. Contained
within this conception of human cognition was a profoundly subversive idea: the
nature of man could be changed and improved upon by changing and improving the
environment within which he lived.
How subversive was Hobbes? One biographer argued in
1691 that Leviathan had "corrupted half the gentry of the nation" .It
can be said without a doubt that the works of Hobbes provoked a storm of
criticism certainly within his lifetime and also after it. So what was it about
them that provoked such hostility?. There is an element of truth in the
suggestion by Jon Parkin" that the response was so violent because Hobbes
ideas went far beyond anything which his readers had come across before. ".
During his lifetime and to a certain extent even today, his name has become
equated with materialism and worse still atheism,.The subject of Dawson's book Leviathan was written by
Hobbes during one of the bloodiest periods of English history. He was one of
only a handful of writers who sought to understand the complex social, economic
and political development that was the English revolution.
Hobbes's felt the fear of war and revolution more
acutely than most and attempted to construct a scientific and materialist theory
of politics. The philosopher hated the war and remained a firm supporter of
absolute monarchy at least up until the war ended then he like many ardent
Royalists only tolerated the new Cromwellian Protectorate when it restored law
and order. To say his work reflected this contradiction would be an
understatement which is why it inspired both hatred and admiration.
Leviathan is a difficult book to master, containing
his Royalist sympathies and anti-revolutionary sentiments. He had to deal with
the reality of a declining aristocracy and the rise of a new class, the
bourgeoisie. The book published in 1651 was seen in some quarters as Hobbes
making peace with Cromwellian revolution. He was starting to come to terms with
the fact that Cromwellian Protectorate was the best chance of a peaceful,
stable government.
It is well known that he believed that humans during
the 17th century were nasty, brutish and short and that mankind's nature is
inherently competitive and selfish. The central theme of his work was to
utilize these traits for the development of the new bourgeoisie.
Hobbes was not an isolated individual philosopher and
had support from philosophers such as Spinoza on the continent. It is a shame
from Dawson's book that you do not get a clear picture of Hobbes influence on
writers from abroad, particularly in Europe. According to Quentin Skinner, the
writers on the continent had a much clearer picture as to the importance of Hobbes
work than in Britain. One of his most famous readers was the writer Spinoza.
According to Quentin Skinner, "it is a commonplace that Spinoza's
Tractatus Politicius shows the effects of critical reflection on Hobbes's
theory in its content and terminology as well as method."
Even his enemies had a grudging admiration for him,
the third Earl of Shaftesbury "I must confess a genius and even an
original among these later leaders in philosophy."
He was also not without influence in England. As C B
Macpherson wrote in the introduction to the Pelican version of Leviathan he
edited "they thought it dangerous because of the widespread acceptance it
was attaining amongst the reading classes".
At an early age, he rejected the prevailing
Aristotelian philosophy, and at university, the dominance of Aristotle meant
that "the study is not properly philosophy but Aristolelelity"
He accused the schools of acting as a "handmaiden to the Roman religion"
.
Hobbes was luckier than most philosophers of his
generation in that he was able to secure valuable employment when he became a
tutor to the Cavendish family, who gave him extensive use of their library. He
would spend most of his long life as a teacher, secretary and to the Cavendish
family. A shrewd move by Hobbes as the job gave him access to some very
influential people who also protected him when things got dangerous. According
to Hobbes, the time spent at the Cavendish's was the most crucial in his
intellectual development.
This intellectual ferment as David North describes "started
to fundamentally change the way man saw the world. Up until then, mankind's
worldview had largely been dominated by the Aristotelian worldview. Until the
early seventeenth century, even educated people still generally accepted that
the ultimate answers to all the mysteries of the universe and the problems of
life were to be found in the Old Testament. But its unchallengeable authority
had been slowly eroding, especially since the publication of Copernicus's De
Revolutionibus in the year of his death in 1543, which dealt the death blow to
the Ptolemaic conception of the universe and provided the essential point of
departure for the future conquests of Tycho Brahe (1546-1601), Johann Kepler
(1571-1630) and, of course, Galileo Galilei (1564-1642). Intellectually, if not
yet socially, the liberation of man from the fetters of Medieval superstition
and the political structures that rested upon it, was well underway.
Hobbes was indeed connected profoundly with what was
to be a massive leap in political and scientific knowledge, which would see the
dissolution of the medieval world view to be replaced by one based on science
and reason. The previous one having given mankind a somewhat limited
understanding of his place in the universe. Hobbes played a crucial role in
laying the foundations for the Enlightenment his most important work Leviathan
published in 1651 was one the first studies of what the early modern capitalist
state would look like.
His book was groundbreaking because it laid the basis
for scientific principles on which to base that state. As Dawson states, Hobbes
was not democratically inclined. The ruler or rulers of his state would have to
rule it with an iron fist because as mankind's life was solitary, poor, nasty,
and brutish and short, he believed to overcome this there had to be a "war
against all."
In Chapter 8 On Religion as a Human, Construct Dawson
is correct in pointing out that it is hard to work out his thoughts on
religion. Hobbes knew he was on dangerous ground. Given that men had fought a
war and carried out a revolution because they believed they had God on their
side.
Hobbes correctly believed that an understanding of
religion was crucial in solving the problem that beset the English state. His idea of a national religion in which the
sovereign ruled was dangerous. As G A J Rogers points out his "mechanical
determinism soon brought a charge of atheism. Although it would be wrong to
regard him as strongly religious, there is no reason to doubt his claim that he
was an Anglican, albeit with Calvinist leanings. He is often seen as sanctioning
absolutism, but he would reply that all he had done was to describe the way in
which societies work and that unless was recognized the outcome would be
disorder and social disaster".
While his philosophical writings were more important
than his religious leanings. Their impact was to be momentous. His thoughts and
emotions were a product of his environment, and ideas remained in his brain
long after they had been first stimulated.
According to Hobbes, "words are wise men's
counters, they do but reckon by them, but they are the mony of fools. He
believed that words must never be allowed to take a life of their own. He
continues "the universe is corporal, body…. And that which is not body, is
no part of the world".
It is hard to separate Hobbes political views from
his philosophical ideas. He was acutely aware of choosing his words well. He
drew definite conclusions from the civil war.One aspect of the war which filled
Hobbes with dread was the spread of ideas put forward by the English
Dissenters. He believed their ideas were a form of madness.
According to Frederick C Beiser they were "the ultimate source of enthusiasm,
Hobbes is convinced, is the same as that for all human actions, the desire for
power. Whether he is aware of it or not the enthusiast attempts to dominate
people. He claims divine inspiration to win the allegiance of a superstitious
multitude: and then he promises them eternal happiness if they obey his dictates".
Hopefully, in the future, Dawson will include other
17th seventeenth-century philosophers in the Life series as it is important to
place Hobbes within the wider context of modern philosophy. Bacon would be a
good choice while it was Hobbes who developed the idea of mechanical
determinism in the latter half of the 17th century, it was Francis Bacon
(1561-1626) who was the real founder of English materialism.
Frederick Engel's described Bacon as "The real
progenitor of English materialism. To him, natural philosophy is the only true
philosophy, and physics-based on the experience of the senses is the chief part
of natural philosophy".
"Hobbes had systematized Bacon, without, however, furnishing a
proof of Bacon's fundamental principle, the origin of all human knowledge from
the world of sensation. It was Locke who, in his Essay on Human Understanding,
supplied this proof."
To conclude after he died in 1679, to be called a 'Hobbist'
was one of the most diabolical insults. No one is referred to as a Hobbist
today, so why should we show an interest in his ideas. As George Orwell once
wrote, "Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the
present controls the past." While there much to disagree with Dawson's
book, it is nonetheless a significant contribution to a deeper understanding of
this philosopher, leading to a deeper understanding of our world.
Equality, the Rights of Man and the Birth of Socialism-By David North -24
October 1996
