Leviathan harpooned: aware of the dangers posed by judges and the law, Thomas Hobbes offered a solution

WHEN it comes to PR, the great political philosopher Thomas Hobbes has had one long stretch of bad luck. When his magnificent Leviathan appeared in 1651 he was derided as the "monster of Malmesbury," an allegedly godless man who posed a deep and abiding threat to the established order. And indeed he did, whether godless or not.

His fortunes never really improved in the reputation stakes. In his essay on John Bramhall, Hobbes's most persistent contemporary critic, T. S. Eliot, was snidely dismissive: "Thomas Hobbes was one of those extraordinary little upstarts whom the chaotic motions of the Renaissance tossed into eminence which they hardly deserved and have never lost." Most recently, in the great conservative debate over the nature and future of the American "regime," Hobbes is seen to hover in the nihilistic shadows of modern liberalism like some misbegotten witch ready to crash a christening.

Father Richard John Neuhaus, for example, has indicted the present-day Supreme Court for its perceived tendency to "reinforce the Hobbesian idea that we are a society of strangers, perhaps of enemies, and it is the chief business of the state to prevent others from interfering with or obliging the Sovereign Self." This Hobbesian view which Neuhaus sees as informing the decisions of the Court results, he insists, in "the atomistic and potentially totalitarian doctrine that society is composed of only two actors, the state and the solitary individual."

A similar indictment of Hobbes was offered in NATIONAL REVIEW. Ramesh Ponnuru bewailed "the influence of Hobbesianism" generally, and pointed in particular to a pronounced "Hobbesian streak among conservative critics" of Neuhaus and his fellows. Moreover, he detected in this neo-Hobbesianism "at the very least a tension with the principles and spirit of the American Revolution, in particular with the principles of majority consent."

Present-day conservatives like Neuhaus and Ponnuru have fallen into the trap that has impeded a proper understanding of Hobbes since his own day -- the unfortunate tendency to confuse Hobbes with "Hobbesianism," the latter being a distortion of what Hobbes actually wrote. As Sterling Lamprecht rightly pointed out half a century ago, "the picture of 'man in the state of nature' is not meant by Hobbes as a complete picture of human nature." Nor was his solution a simple defense of absolute monarchy, as is so often asserted. Hob- bes's view of man and his predicament was far more complex than that. As a result, Hobbes has much more to offer to our day than the "Hobbesian" carica- ture presented by Neuhaus and Ponnuru; indeed, he has a great deal to offer conservatives precisely when it comes to defending the Constitution of the United States against those judges who are willing to reduce it to nothing more than their private opinions about right and wrong.

There are two points in Hobbes that seem to stick in the conservative craw. The first is what Neuhaus portrays as Hobbes's belief in the "Sovereign Self" and the tendency of such a view toward totalitarianism; the second is Hobbes's perceived atheism. When it comes to the first matter, Hobbes's entire project was designed not to celebrate the so-called "Sovereign Self" but to show how, if left to their own devices, men would subject one another to the horrors of the state of nature, that grim and forbidding place where life was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" and where there would be an incessant war of all against all. Hobbes's scheme was to temper those proclivities of man's nature by the social contract and the creation of "sovereignty by institu- tion." The result would not be arbitrary or totalitarian rule but a sovereign obligated to govern always for the safety and happiness of the people. Hobbes was the father of modern constitutionalism, not modern totalitarianism.

The second problem posed for conservatives by Hobbes is what appears to be his atheism. Admittedly, he was no friend of the Pope and was convinced that those who sought to give effect to papal power were out to undermine public order by imposing as doctrines of faith many points that were simply "inconsistent with the rights of kings, and other civil sovereigns." But what most assume was atheism is more accurately described as nominalism or voluntarism. Developing the line of argument that began with William of Ockham (1285-1349) during his disputes with papal power, Hobbes's political project rested on a view of divine power that, in a sense, elevated God from the clutches of those who sought to turn the word of God to their advantage. In Hobbes's view "the nature of God is incomprehensible," by which he meant that "men can never by their own wisdom come to the knowledge of what God hath spoken and commanded to be observed." Even if Hobbes were personally an atheist, a point still arguable, he knew the civil importance of religion properly understood. It is worth noting that a large part of Leviathan is given over to the idea of a Christian commonwealth.