Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:39:25 — 91.1MB)
Discussing Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan (1651), Chapters 13-15.
Have we implicitly signed a social contract whereby our native right to punch other people in the face is given to the President? Hobbes does things that eventually result in the U.S. Constitution and makes Wes nauseous. Plus: Star Trek and the Bible!
Buy the book
End song: "The Villa" by Mark Lint and the Fake Johnson Trio (1998).
If you enjoy the episode, please support our efforts.
I don’t buy hobbes’s argument on the face of it. A social contract depends on the fact that the contractors are moral, if they are moral no contract was needed in the first place, except to judge disputes. Not a inevitable dispute, but an honest dispute.
Justin–
Thanks for listening! I think Hobbes’ position is that in the state of nature, actors are not moral. His only criteria is that they be rational as this is what is required to enter into contracts with each other. You have to know what you are getting into but you aren’t trusted or expected to honor it. The judge or authority then needs to be present to enforce the contracts – precisely because you can’t trust the individual actors to fulfill their sides of the contract, even though they know exactly what they are doing and say they will.
It’s a bleak view of human nature, which is opposed by both Rousseau and Locke, who we’ve done podcasts on as well (Locke to be posted shortly).
–seth
Firstly, I’ve been enjoying your podcasts on my daily walk–thanks.
Secondly, I think you guys did a decent jobs of analyzing elements of Hobbes, but you miss the elephant in the room. That elephant is historical context. Hobbes’ motivations were almost purely to defend monarchic status quo of Charles I. He writes Leviathan during the English Civil War, a series of battles in which the parliamentarians overthrow the royalist forces, leading to the Commonwealth era.
Hobbes is exiled and watching his royalist ideals go down to defeat. To say that he’s the genesis of the ideals of the American Revolution is only tangentially true in that he arrives at the idea of the social contract, something Locke will use in 1690 (after being influenced by the Glorious Revolution and the abdication of James II, really the final triumph of parliamentary dominance in England and the end of the Stuart line on the throne).
You’re too gentle in your interpretation–Hobbes views the Leviathan as the ONLY way to actually enforce a social contract since in a state of war man is not capable of assenting to a willing compact of any meaning.
This is a case where the historical motivations of the writer are crucial to understanding his philosophy. You guys didn’t have that. In fact, one of you actually states that Queen Eliz. comes after Hobbes, when in reality she was crowned almost a full century before the ECW.
Anyway, keep up the generally good work.
Thanks much, Jason, for clarifying the history. I was familiar with his unrepentant defense of the monarchy but appreciated Seth’s reading of it as, most important from a history-of-ideas perspective, providing (even if inadvertently) some progress on the cause of liberalism: i.e. the idea that we’re all, for practical purposes, created equal, in that even the most glaring natural advantages of strength, intelligence, etc. are easily overcome if people gang up against you.
Regarding your conversation about style at the start of the podcast – Hobbes was a mathematician as well as a philosopher (a fairly well-regarded one, at least up to the point where he got into a pig-headed row with an Oxford professor about whether or not he had squared the circle). There’s a story that he was visiting a friend who had Euclid open at one of the more complex proofs, said “this cannot be possible”, and then sat down and followed the proofs all the way back to the axioms to discover that provided you accept a few simple and indubitable ideas, the apparently impossible complex proofs follow as a matter of inexorable logic. So in his philosophical writings, he was consciously trying to follow the same method – it seems geometric and mathematical because that’s what he was aiming at.
Just thought I would post an interesting historical fact. Anyone else know that Hobbes knew Gallileo, and that the two loathed each other? Besides being smart men, the two were opposite personalities. Galileo used to say that “Hobbes is solitary poor nasty British and short.”
Lol… that Galileo lad is pretty clever eh?
In spite of all efforts to avoid gratuitous name-dropping, you mentioned a text- “My misery entitles me to the bones of Schopenhauer”…
Where in the world do I find this?
Oh, and you guys are my favourite!! Thanks for all those comforting and enlightening hours of entertainment!
Thanks for listening, Cassie. All books mentioned at the beginnings of episodes are fictitious!
Around 40 minutes it is stated that acting selfishly does not explain why someone would join some sort of group that would in fact not benefit them, like joining an army to fight a cause (the 100 year war was brought up).
However there are the psychological egoists who would completely disagree with what you said.
You join the cause, even knowing that you might die, for some sort of glory you get, that is a self interested motive.
You could also join the cause because you want to prevent the bad feelings you would get from not joining, feeling guilty you are letting your people down or something… that is a self-interested motive..
I just don’t think that issue should have been thrown aside so easily.. there are many good arguments for psychological egoism and things like it.
Egoism is the sort of “theory” that one can give an explanation of any action in terms of it. That doesn’t at all make it well supported, and its unfalsifiability in principle should be evidence that something’s wrong… much like Freudians giving interpretations of everything in terms of sexual urges that people would deny having or Marxists charging people with false consciousness.
In the Pat Churchland and Hume/Smith morality episodes we deal a bit more with this (i.e. available empirical evidence for egoism), and also in the episodes about self (Hegel’s phenomenology, Sartre, maybe the Kierkegaard). Egoism was a major player in the history of philosophical ethics due to Hobbes’s influence, and it would be valuable for us at some point to consider some of the arguments pro and con, but when I got to, e.g. those sections of Hume’s Treatise having to do with that, they just seemed less interesting and necessary to discuss than many other things in there. Ayn Rand is, as far as I understand it, the last vestige of this view in the living philosophical landscape. The turn toward a more demanding empiricism on the one hand and toward phenomenology on the other has more or less excised it from the mainstream. I may well be wrong, though; if you can recommend a current paper on the topic, I’ll put it on my list to review.
On the question of consent I think we should point out that even if you do not give consent to enter into the social contract as an adult your parents have, on your behalf, entered you into it. Basically (in modern terms) by sending you to school, having the military protect you, ect. your parents are entering you into the social contract.
Reply function has confused me. Replying to Dan Smart. Speaking from the radical perspective of antinatalism, I contend that no decision made by any parent has any binding effect upon any child. That is to say, a child has no obligation to the individuals that forcibly brought about their existence (through the selfish act of sex [and make no mistake about it, sex is a selfish act consisting of no selfless motive regardless of whether conceiving a child is a goal or not. Note that the word goal (and go ahead and try to rephrase my language to make it seem otherwise) suggests a desire on the part of the participants of the act (the act in most cases being sex, which we all know is pleasurable to the individuals participating in it regardless of whether or not their goal is to create life) or some other means of procreation meant to satisfy the selfish evolutionary need to propagate]). On the contrary, those who bring about the existence of another life (the most profound power available to any living being) have every obligation to the life that they have created. The individual created has no obligation to the social contract or any other allegiance that the parent may attempt to oblige them to. Though it is an unfortunate fact that the heretofore non-existent entity must abide by the law of the land into which they were born lest they be subjected to the penalties of that land. My point is that the consent of the parents does not imply the consent of the children, even if the children, having been unjustly indoctrinated into the views of the parents, do not realize that they are free of the laws of their parents.
Hi,I believe your kind of confusing a herd mentality.or emotionalism dressed up as patriotism and by the way this thing is bigger then you sort of intellectual and emotional manipulation etc,in your example of going to war,or in the example of the need to be right, for my religion to be the true religion etc because if not then I am less somehow, and god forbid,that I am less then my neighbor…Jungian power, Freud.. ego..?…or say the effect that empathy,compassion,can have on human choices. (although our cultural influences visa vie capitalism for instance) would promote say a Darwin and Malthus proposition’s,instead of one that takes into account human attributes like empathy,compassion and the role they play in mans survival…Hobbes was right on about self interest though ,for every selfless action or action done out of empathy,many more are done out of self interest and even worse out of sole interest,you may go as far as saying almost all interest as it relates to mans action,start with the I,me,self interest…The major reason we survived this long,the main reason we may extinguish that fire…thanks,I enjoy you guys
Sorry bout the lack of commas,or good punctuation…meant,and by the way citizen,this thing (our war)is bigger then you…so comply…Not to mention that this too you would give up,this self determination. Even if it meant risking your life itwouldnt matter.In order to have peace,I must participate in war,duty to society,train of thought,the power to call to arms….I believe although not spelled out ,for fear of offense to the power that be ,he was laying out terms under which the Authority of the sovereign would be null and void…malfesence etc
Glory impresses the babes (well, it did before 1980), which makes it more likely you’ll mate with them, etc.
I remember (being about 10 years older than you all) in H.S. civics class being taught that the fact that we’re born “here” means that we tacitly agree to the country’s social contract.
I enjoy your podcast very much! As an attorney I remember the loss of these kinds of roving discussions for the hum drum junk of every day practice and it tickles my old dry philosophy bone (connected to my overstated sense of self-importance) to hear them again. I only wish that I could have been there on the line with you guys hashing it out.
Above there is a comment about historical/political context. There is another historical perspective I wonder whether you guys consider. The state of nature to a man in Hobbes’s time means an individual whose shoes fall apart, with little knowledge of the wilderness, and tools that only barely and with much intensity do what you hope they will when you build them. If, however, you took a modern day boy scout, once grown, and place him in the wild with a drop point blade, a backpack, and some rough and tumble clothing, his life is not quite so nasty brutish and short. In order for the state of nature to BE the state of nature you have to remove that which makes us human (artfulness, science, caring, and all those things Hobbes says are lost without society) AND ALSO remove the history of it and the individual knowledge there gained. Seems to me individual knowledge and experience makes society often more dangerous than nature itself. A lion is always a lion and they don’t really change their minds about it. Nor do birds or trees. If you need water you can rely on the morning dew or a variety of plants to provide it to you. A honest man in society however can LEARN to hold his cards close to the vest and play politics and screw you over. Just funny how society run amok (or even sleeping amok if you’ll permit a terrible pun) might as well be itself nasty brutish and short.
Thanks Guys! I love it!
I’m just starting these podcasts, I love them, and I am unsuccessfully stifling laughter at Mark reading that quote and going through about 12 accents. Thanks for making my horrifying days as an accountant in any way interesting.
Nothing wrong with religious defilement. In many ways it demands ridicule. Fair comments within the context of social myth, and a good comparison with comics and Star Trek.
Found your podcast only recently so I am only on episode four and would like to listen to the series in order – interesting stuff. I wonder though, if the prevalent attacks on conservative ideas (or tropes there of) will continue to be as heavy handed as they’ve been so far?