Quentin Skinner, Hobbes & Republican Liberty [What Aristotle taught Hobbes]
Hobbes learns with Aristotle: the context of the influences and ideas
Quentin Skinner wrote:
Chapter 1
Introductory: Hobbes's humanist beginnings
In later life Hobbes liked to speak of his years at Oxford as little better than an interruption of his serious intellectual pursuits. He tells us in his verse autobiography that he was obliged to waste his time listening to lectures on scholastic logic and Aristotelian physics, most of which, he adds in his most derisive tones, were far above his head. If, however, we consult the university statutes in force at the time when Hobbes was an undergraduate, we find that his recollections are something of a travesty of the syllabus he would have followed. Under the humanist reforms introduced in 1564-5 he would have spent two terms reading Latin literature, including Horace, Vergil and Cicero, followed by four terms on rhetoric, in which the set texts included Cicero's orations and Aristotle's Art of Rhetoric. He would also have been required to attend public lectures in the uni versity, and would thus have heard additional courses on rhetoric (Cicero and Quintilian), as well as on ancient litera ture (including Homer and Euripides) and philosophy (including Plato's Republic and Aristotle's Ethics). To a large extent the Oxford curriculum of his day was based on the five canonical elements in the Renaissance studia humanitatis: the study of grammar, followed by rhetoric, poetry, classical history and moral philosophy. …
… When Hobbes's own intellectual interests first began to quicken in the 1620s, he initially devoted himself to the three central elements in the studia humanitatis: rhetoric, poetry and classical history. His chief rhetorical work was a Latin translation of Aristotle's treatise on the subject, an English version of which appeared anonymously as A Briefe of the Art of Rhetorique in 1637. …
Chapter 2
The Elements of Law: liberty described
… [Humane Nature in February 1650] … Hobbes informs the earl of Newcastle in his prefatory Epistle that the entire work is concerned with 'law and policy’. He is anxious to stress, however, that in addressing these topics he is by no means forsaking his scientific interests. As he explains, there are two types of bodies for science to investigate. On the one hand there are natural bodies, whose behaviour can be understood by 'comparing figures and motions'. But on the other hand there are bodies politic, whose movements are no less susceptible of being reduced 'to the rules and infallibility of reason'. The correct name for the study of such bodies, he later adds, is 'politiques' or 'civil philosophy', and he boldly lays claim to the scientific standing of his own contribution to this discipline by alluding in the title of his book to Euclid's celebrated treatise, which Henry Billingsley had translated in 1571 as The Elements of Geometrie.
The method Hobbes adopts in studying the laws governing political bodies is to start by laying out definitions of the key terms involved, after which he follows out their consequences. … This being his preferred strategy, it is surprising to find that he makes no attempt to deploy it when he turns to examine the pivotal concept of liberty. He never supplies a formal definition of the concept at any point …
… Hobbes mounts his first discussion of human freedom at the end of his section on the powers of the human mind. Before performing any action, he explains, we may be said to possess the 'liberty to do or not to do' the action concerned. The process of arriving at a decision to perform any action may therefore be said to consist in 'the taking away of our own liberty'.
Hobbes accordingly describes the process as that of de-liberating ourselves, and hence as deliberation.
When we deliberate about whether to perform an action within our powers, we enter into a process of alternation between our appetites, which incline us to act, and our fears, which with hold us from proceeding. When we finally choose to do or forbear, we arrive at a determinate will, for 'in deliberation the last appetite, as also the last fear, is called WILL (viz.) the last appetite will to do; the last fear will not to do, or will to omit'.
This analysis gives rise to one counter-intuitive implication that Hobbes is keen to emphasise. The implication surfaces as soon as he considers those situations in which, as he puts it, we experience hardness of choice: situations in which we feel compelled to act or abstain, or in which we feel that we are acting under duress. As an instance of such a predicament, he cites a case that would have been familiar to many of his original readers, partly because Aristotle had discussed it in book 3 of the Nicomachean Ethics (moa), and partly because it had been picked up and illustrated in a number of emblem books.
The case is that of a man who, in Hobbes's words, 'throweth his goods out of a ship into the sea, to save his person’. For Hobbes, however, as for Aristotle, there is a further question to be asked, which is whether we would be acting willingly if we were to follow this advice.
Aristotle's Ethics had been available in English since 1547, when John Wilkinson published his abbreviated translation, and in Wilkinson's version Aristotle is made to say that a man who performs such an action will be doing so 'part by his wyl, and parte not accordyng to hys wyll'.
Hobbes's counter-intuitive retort is that the man's behaviour is 'no more against his will, than to fly from danger is against the will of him that seeth no other means to preserve himself'. Although he is undoubtedly acting under compulsion, his action is nevertheless the product of his will, and must therefore be classified as 'altogether voluntary'. …
… The humanists appear to have been inspired more by Plato than by Aristotle, with Plato's Timaeus evidently exercising a decisive influence. … [A] Platonist understanding of freedom and reason entered the mainstream of English humanist thought. Erasmus explains how Plato, 'by inspira cyon of God', was led to speak in the Timaeus of the two souls of man, one governed by reason or the spirit and the other by the affections or the flesh. …
… When Aristotle's Politics was first published in English in 1598, the translator appended to Aristotle's analysis of how tyrannies arise the answer given to the same question by Plato in the Republic. Socrates is made to say that democracies 'thirst too much after libertie', in consequence of which 'all other thinges full of libertie and licentiousnesse are there done', and they fall from 'extreame libertie' into 'extreame slavery’. Soon afterwards the same distinction between liberty and licence began to be echoed by the writers of emblem books. …
… Hobbes’s basic principle is not that men always seek to preserve themselves from death; it is that they have a right so to preserve themselves. Here he cunningly appropriates the scholastic doctrine to the effect that natural right consists of acting in accordance with the dictates of reason. It is generally agreed, he observes, that anything 'which is not against reason' can be described as 'RIGHT, or ius'. But 'it is not against reason', he then insists, 'that a man doth all he can to preserve his own body and limbs, both from death and pain'. With this contention, he is able to twist the scholastic doctrine in such a way as to produce the startling conclusion that the liberty 'of using our own natural power and ability' must therefore be equivalent to the natural right of preserving ourselves at all times.
With this conclusion in hand, Hobbes next proceeds to argue that we also possess the right to make our own judgments about what specific actions may be necessary to keep ourselves from pain and death. Reflecting on what this entails, he adds that there is no action that might not turn out to be conducive to our self-preservation at some time or another.
His final conclusion is thus that the liberty or right of nature must comprehend the right to do anything we may desire to do at any time.
This ominous implication is conveyed in one of many turns of phrase that indicate Hobbes's close acquaintance with the 1598 translation of Aristotle’s Politics, a copy of which was readily available to him in the Hardwick library. Aristotle is made to say in book 6 that one of the 'tokens' of liberty is 'to live as men list'. Hobbes agrees that the liberty of nature grants everyone a right 'to do what soever he listeth to whom he listeth'.
This description of the state of nature as a state of equal freedom draws on one of the commonplaces in the political literature of Hobbes's time. Aristotle had admittedly argued the contrary case, declaring in book 1 of the Politics that ( in the words of the 1598 translation) 'some are naturally bondslaves', and that it is therefore possible to 'exercise the authoritie of a master, even by the Lawe of Nature'. But this contention had already been challenged in antiquity, above all in the Digest of Roman law, in which Florentinus is cited for the contrary view that, although the institution of slavery may be permitted by the ius gentium, it is nonetheless 'contrary to nature'. No one is naturally a bondslave. …
… [As] Sir Robert Filmer was to note with dismay in his Patriarcha - we find the same argument no less prominently endorsed by many exponents of monarchical absolutism in the same period.
… Hobbes's fundamental contention is … that our reason basically instructs us to 'seek after peace', since our chief desire is to enjoy the ornaments and comforts 'which by peace and society are usually invented and procured’. The problem we face, however, is that although peace is our basic need, war is our natural fate. So long as there is 'a right of every man to every thing', the resulting 'estate of men in this natural liberty' can only be 'the estate of war'. As he concludes in his most celebrated formula, our primal condition is thus a war of everyone against everyone else, a condition of unending hostility in which 'nature itself is destroyed’.
Hobbes is here engaged in a frontal assault on Aristotle's governing assumption that, as the translation of 1598 expressed it, 'man is naturally a sociable and civil creature'.
But how does it come about that nature condemns us to unceasing hostility? We can easily see the answer, Hobbes goes on, if we recognise that two lethal additions need to be made to his basic diagnosis of our natural state as one in which everyone has a right to everything. The first is that 'many men's appetites carry them to one and the same end; which end sometimes can neither be enjoyed in common, nor divided'. We are liable, in other words, to find ourselves continually competing for the same scarce resources. The other problem is that these competitions are doomed to take place in conditions of equality. Although it is a truth we are reluctant to accept, the fact is that there are 'little odds' either 'of strength or knowledge between men of mature age'. This, then, is how it comes about that the inevitable outcome will be an endless war in which 'one man invadeth with right, and another with right resisteth’. …
… The idea of 'politics' as the name of the art of govern ing cities had first become widely current in England in the early seventeenth century, following the translation of such works as Lipsius's Sixe Bookes of Politickes in 1594 and Aristotle’s Politiques in 1598. A visual tradition soon grew up around this vocabulary, in which Politica or Politics is represented as a woman crowned with walls and ramparts, these being the first requisites of any city desiring to remain independent. Rubens provides a magnificent example in the frontispiece he designed for Lipsius's Opera omnia, which first appeared in 1637 (figure 5). Rubens's portrayal is at the same time an appropriately ambiguous one, for Politica is shown cradling a ship's rudder and resting her right hand on a sphere - two standard elements in the iconography of Fortune. Politics, we are being reminded, is preeminently the arena in which fortune holds sway. Although the fickle goddess may choose to steer us through the storms of public life, the presence of the sphere - on which she is often shown unsteadily attempting to stand - alludes to her inherent unreliability.
Hobbes is one of the earliest English philosophers to write in a similar way of 'politics' as the art of governing cities. He describes Aristotle as a writer on 'Politiques', and he claims with a conscious sense of novelty that, when we speak of bodies politic, we are referring to the fictional bodies of cities:
This union so made, is that which men call now-a-days a BODY POLITIC or civil society; and the Greeks call it polis, that is to say, a city; which may be defined to be a multitude of men, united as one person by a common power, for their common peace, defence, and benefit.
When he later complains that no one has properly grasped this concept of a city as 'one person', he specifically blames 'those innumerable writers of politics' who have analysed the concept of sovereignty without understanding it. … Hobbes agrees with Bodin that, when we agree to restrict our natural liberty by submitting ourselves to sovereign power, we may decide to become the subjects of a single individual, or of a group, or of the people as a whole. …
Chapter 3
The Elements of Law: liberty circumscribed
… Despite its high prestige, Thucydides' History probably played a marginal role in the diffusion of Greek ideas about free states in early seventeenth-century England. Of far greater importance was Aristotle's Politics, especially after the first complete translation was published in English in 1598. When Aristotle turns in chapter 2 of book 6 to examine 'What the end and ground of the Democratie is', he begins by announcing that 'the end and foundation of the popular state, is Libertie'. He adds that 'it is an olde saying, that in this commonweale only men enjoy libertie, as it seemeth that every Popular state aimeth at the same'. The freedom enjoyed by the citizens of such communities is in turn contrasted with 'the propertie of bondage', which is defined as the condition in which it is not possible 'to live according to a mans owne discretion'. To possess liberty is 'to live as men list'; to live in bondage is to live in subjection to the will and discretion of others.
As Hobbes was to note in Leviathan, of scarcely less significance in early seventeenth-century England was the interpretation given to the same concept of the civitas libera by the historians of ancient Rome. The special danger posed by their writings, as Hobbes bitterly observes at the end of The Elements, stems from the fact that 'not only the name of a tyrant, but of a king, was hateful' to 'those that writ in the Roman state’. …
…. [It] is conceivable that Hobbes may partly have Machiavelli in mind when he speaks in The Elements of those political writers who contend 'that there is one government for the good of him that governeth, and another for the good of them that be governed', and that only the latter can be described as 'a government of freemen' . Hobbes assures us in a marginal note that he is referring to Aristotle’s division of regimes …
… [Hobbes] describes … 'the error concerning mixed government’. … ‘The truth is’, he concludes, ‘that the right of sovereignty is such, as he or they that have it, cannot, though they would, give away any part thereof, and retain the rest’. The idea of mixed monarchy is not so much an error as an impossibility. Hobbes's principal concern, however, is with the more general claim that it is always possible to remain a free man while submitting to government. Here he replies in his most adamant tones. 'Liberty is the state of him that is not subject', but under every form of government we are obliged to live in 'absolute subjection' to sovereign power. … As he continually emphasises, within civil associations there cannot be 'any exemption from subjection and obedience to the sovereign power’. So when these writers speak of remaining at liberty under government, 'by the name simply of liberty' they must be referring to something that 'appeareth in the likeness' of it without in fact being the thing itself. The next step must therefore be to uncover what they are actually talking about by construing their claims 'according to the intention of him that claimeth’.
Pursuing this course, Hobbes first returns to those who insist that we can live as free-men under government provided that we live in a democracy or free state. Here, he submits, the required construal can readily be supplied: what these writers are talking about is not liberty but sovereignty. To make good his case, he examines the passage from book 6 of the Politics in which Aristotle had reflected on the common opinion that freedom is possible only in self-governing regimes. Hobbes allows that 'Aristotle saith well' that 'the ground or intention of a democracy, is liberty'. The reason why this makes sense, however, is not because we can hope to retain our freedom while submitting to government. Rather it is because, in setting up a democracy, we do not in fact submit to government. Each individual becomes a subject, but the people as a body becomes the bearer of sovereignty. Although it is possible to describe this arrangement by saying 'that no man can partake of liberty, but only in a popular commonwealth' - as Aristotle does when referring to what 'men ordinarily say' - what Aristotle is actually describing is the sense in which everyone in a democracy becomes a partaker of sovereign power. Hobbes draws the moral in his most emphatic style: 'seeing freedom cannot stand together with subjection', it follows that 'liberty in a commonwealth is nothing but government and rule’. …
… Given that we are wholly subject to sovereign power, how can we possibly claim to be free at the same time? As we have seen [earlier], the answer given to the House of Commons by Charles l's legal representatives had been that, so long as the sovereign is basically limited by the law of the land, there need be no barrier to living as a free-man under monarchy. …
Chapter 4
De cive: liberty defined
… The other and related argument that Hobbes had confronted in The Elements had been that liberty is not forfeited under democratic rule. There he had answered in remarkably respectful tones, acknowledging that 'Aristotle saith well' that 'The ground or intention of a democracy, is
liberty'. Now [in De cive] he responds in a joltingly different style. Those who believe that there is greater liberty in democracies are misled by the fact that, under such systems of rule, the people participate in government and are not subject to anyone else. But to argue that this leaves them more liberty is to commit the egregious error 'of giving the name of liberty to what is in fact sovereignty’. Hobbes ends by replacing his earlier commendation of Aristotle with a sneer. When Aristotle declares that 'in a popular state there is liberty by supposition’, he is merely uncritically following the custom of his time. …
Chapter 5
Leviathan: liberty redefined
… [A] loose end had arisen from Hobbes's apparent equivocation over whether acting under compulsion should be distinguished from acting voluntarily. Although he had given an affirmative answer in chapter 22 of The Elements, this conclusion had been in tension with his generally anti-Aristotelian understanding of voluntary action, according to which a man who throws his goods into the sea for fear of drowning is not acting against his will. This tension had only been increased by the introduction into De cive of the concept of an arbitrary impediment. As we have seen [earlier], arbitrary impediments are said to take away freedom of action, but fear is said to be an instance of an arbitrary impediment. The implication is that fear takes away freedom, a doctrine that Hobbes elsewhere contradicts in De cive as well as The Elements, especially when considering whether covenants undertaken out of fear are willingly performed.
It was only with the introduction of the distinction between external and intrinsic impediments that these problems were finally resolved. Freedom is now [in Leviathan] said to be taken away only by external impediments, and fear is clearly not an example of an external impediment. On the contrary, as Hobbes defines it in chapter 6 of Leviathan, fear is one of the 'interior beginnings' of voluntary movement. As before, this solution initially appears in the letter to Newcastle, but it reappears in chapter 21 of Leviathan.
Reverting to Aristotle's example, Hobbes clinches the argument with one of his grimmest jokes. He now declares that 'when a man throweth his goods into the Sea for feare the ship should sink', he not only acts willingly but very willingly.
The Source:
Quentin Skinner*, Hobbes and Republican Liberty, Cambridge University Press 2008
*Social Science Files subscriber
This is one of the illustrations in the book. When my ‘parliamentarian’ Australian uncle visited us in London in the early 1970s he gave me a replica from the British Museum. It meant little to me then but now it is one of my favourite possessions.
Evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.