Page 110 - DPOL201_WESTERN_POLITICAL_THOUGHT_ENGLISH

Western Political Thought

Notes areas that were politically irrelevant. Hobbes accepted the fact that there were many types of
human activities that had to be left to the realm of the non-political.
• Many of Hobbes’ critics felt the need to control government by the superior authority of
society. Lawson (1657) and Whitehall, contemporary critics of Hobbes, demanded the need
to bind the rulers by law, else they would usurp little by little. All of them feared the
consequences of arbitrary power. Clarendon and Whitehall asserted that Hobbes had no idea
of practical politics, and that his theorem of government was artificial. All his critics insisted
on the need to provide for a limited and constitutional authority. Locke himself scorned
Hobbes’ prescription of providing absolute authority without adequate safeguards to prevent
the abuse and misuse of power.
• Many of Hobbes’ critics denied the reality of the state of nature, both as a statement of fact
or as a hypothesis. If individuals were so asocial, they would never have been able to come
together to establish a civil society and government. If they could do so, then they would
have never gone without it. His critics insisted that Hobbes’ depiction of the state of nature
was unreal, grossly exaggerated and even misleading. Bramhall (1658: 503) commented that
the Hobbesian conception of human nature was a libel on individuals, for he characterized
them worse than bears and wolves. Eachard (1672: 14) felt that humankind, contrary to
Hobbes’ analysis, was tolerably tame and that society did not reflect the wickedness that
Hobbes wanted us to believe. Clarendon was confident that God did not make human beings
lower than animals. According to his modern interpreters, Hobbes showed human beings to
be morally neutral by nature, for it was possible to achieve happiness by one’s own efforts,
without God’s grace. Happiness and goodness were entirely matters of an individual’s ability
to form society and control it rationally.
• Furthermore, Hobbes’ notion of absolute state sovereignty was developed at length by Austin
and Bentham. He pointed out that Aristotle failed to identify a tenable conception of
sovereignty, and mistakenly supposed that laws could be sovereign, for it was not individuals,
words or promises but arms that made the force and power of laws. The unsociability of
human nature—a facet of human personality—had be taken into cognizance while delineating
a theory of sovereignty. Therefore, a human being backed by swords and arms was the true
sovereign in a commonwealth. Unlike Aristotle, Hobbes did not see the existence of the state
in terms of its guarantee of a good life, but in terms of the security and safety it provided.
Relationships between humans were not those of friendship, but rivalry. The significance of
Hobbes lies in the fact that he set aside, rebuked and rejected the dominant Aristotelian
tradition which looked upon social and political relations as natural, and peace and
accommodation as part and parcel of normal functioning. “For two centuries after him self-
interest seemed to most thinkers a more obvious motive than disinterestedness, and enlightened
self-interest a more applicable remedy for social ills than any form of collective action”. Hobbes
did not establish the link between social and political factors and the fact that political practices
were shaped by social relationships. As a result he was able to clearly identify and establish the
ambit of the political “For Hobbes, the political in a society comprised three elements: the
authority whose unique office it was to superintend the whole and to exert directive control
over other forms of activity; the obligations which rested on those who accepted membership;
and the system of common rules governing publicly significant behaviour”.
• Hobbes’ greatest contribution was his philosophy of individualism, making him not only a
thorough-going modern thinker, but also a person in line with the times to come. Furthermore,
he emphasized that human beings without a government would be in a permanent state of
insecurity, viewing war and conflicf as permanent and normal conditions. In the process,
“Hobbes treats the problems of politics as an aspect of a universal human dilemma involving
freedom and security”.

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