The Other Hobbesian State

i) Hobbes, sovereignty and governmentality

Social contract theories have explicitly tackled the question of liberty and security. The luminary of the social contract, Thomas Hobbes, has built the whole legitimation of the sovereign state and its powers upon a construction of security, the state as a protector of the individual against the state of nature ‘bellum omnium contra omnes’ and the similarly war-like state of anarchy in the international realm. Political theory has therefore mostly considered freedom as a prerogative of the individual prior to the social contract and the constraints and limitations that the Leviathan imposes on that. If individuals give up freedoms in search of security, the state is therefore allowed to ‘do whatsoever he shall think necessary to be done, both before hand, for the preserving of Peace and Security, by prevention of Discord at home and Hostility from abroad’ Hobbes, 1985 #47 p. 233. Moreover, there is a temporal continuation of such practices as the state continues to have to protect its citizens from war.

The wording of Hobbes’ Leviathan points to the actuality of the social contract theory rather than to its historical obsolesce. Quentin Skinner’s advice that we might do well to reconsider it in a context when - with the passing of the 2001 Anti-Terrorist Act for example - even the right of habeas corpushas been jeopardized Skinner, 2003 #48 p. 25 is worth taking. We might do well to reactivate Hobbes in such a context. We might do even better to reactivate Hobbes in the renewed context of invocations of liberty against security and their rather meagre effect. Individual freedoms have little weight nowadays against security concerns. Why cannot liberty be successfully invoked against security? My contention is that re-reading Hobbes we could have the beginning of an answer.

Building upon Hobbes, the liberty/security debate takes up the ‘sacrificial’ logic of one against the other. The question of how much liberty or how much security we should have depends not on contractarian logic, but on understandings of liberty and security in specific historical contexts. From being automatically connected to the state, security has known a large variation in meaning and practice. Similarly, Quentin Skinner has remarked that various traditions of thinking freedom have at different times answered to different human interests Skinner, 2003 #48 p. 24. An appropriate definition of freedom is thus subject to political and historical considerations, depending on the struggles for which it is mobilized. To appeal once more to Quentin Skinner,

The neo-Roman claim that dependence constitutes a form of constraint worked well for those whose chief concern was to limit the exercise of arbitrary power. The contention that our freedom is taken away only by identifiable acts of interference worked well for those who wished to insist that contracts are free so long as subject people are not actively oppressed...’ Skinner, 2003 #48 p. 24.

If is therefore important to understand to what historical challenges Hobbes wanted to respond with his concept of freedom. [1] A historical contextualization of Hobbes needs to consider his theoretical response to the conditions of the civil war in England at the time. What is this danger that the Leviathan fears and what does this entail for freedom? Michel Foucault is probably right to name it the resurgence of civil war in the midst of the state. According to Foucault, ‘[i]t is a discourse of struggle and permanent civil war that Hobbes wards off by making all wars and conquests depend upon a contract, and by thus rescuing the theory of the state’ Foucault, 2004c #71 p. 99. For Etienne Balibar too, the necessity of the state in Hobbes can only be accountable in terms of ‘a permanent state of exception, a limit-experience rooted in the possibility of reversal of civil peace into violence and civil war’ Balibar, 2002b #72 p. 304. The resurgence of civil war appears in Hobbes as the fear of seditions. Although Foucault indicates that invisible adversary of the Leviathan, the permanent civil war is actually the conquest, I think sedition is the other side of the discourse of conquest. Externally, conquest; internally, sedition. [2] Hobbes has dedicated considerable space to seditions in both De Cive(1642) and Leviathan(1651). His Behemoth is entirely devoted to the issue of the civil war and seditions; it takes these analytical considerations and applies them historically to the English civil war. Seditions are to be prevented not only through ‘forewarning’ and ‘forearming’ as he suggests in De cive; Hobbes devises a much more subtle and varied tools for it. Thus the Leviathan does not ensure the protection of citizens against civil war, but needs to ensure itself against it, should the civil war target the state itself. Hence Hobbes’ diatribe against Roman and Greek understandings of liberty, which could buttress claims of individuals against the state. In Behemoth, he clearly states among the causes of the English civil war the exceeding number of men who had been educated by famous books on ancient Greece and Rome, in which ‘popular government was extolled by the glorious name of liberty, and monarchy disgraced by the name of tyranny’ Hobbes, 1990 #52 p. 3.

The liberty he privileges is therefore minimal and it seems logical to see such it as a ‘preventive’ move against the peril of sedition. As David Burchell has put it, civil peace requires both an absolute sovereign and a population trained and educated in the civic virtues of justice, gratitude and complaisance [3]. Burchell persuasively makes the argument that Hobbes’ ‘education’ (disciplinain the Latin original) covered a wide range of ‘discipines’ by which human beings are made into citizens Burchell, 1999 #77. Thus Chapter xxx of The Leviathanlists the virtues that need to be inculcated in a people so as to make rebellion impossible: not to exalt fellow-citizens above the sovereign, not to speak evil of the sovereign, to respect their parents, not to deprive fellow subjects of their legitimate possessions, and not to have unjust intentions.

Besides this repressive/disciplinary move in Hobbes’ theory, there is another element that appears as part of the state function to prevent seditions. Hobbes’s enlarged definition of Safety in Chapter XXX of the Leviathan spells out this other function of the state:

But by Safety here, is not meant a bare Preservation, but also all other Contentments of life, which every man by lawful Industry, without danger, or hurt to the Commonwealth, shall acquire to himself’.

In De cive,following the Chapter on seditions, Hobbes prescribes upon the sovereign state the duty to ‘ensure that the citizens are abundantly provided with all the good things necessary not just for life but for the enjoyment of life’ Hobbes, 1998 #50 p. 144.

Interestingly however, Hobbes’ theory has been mostly considered in relation to state formation. State creation is based upon a double logic, emotional (the fear of death and of the state of nature) and juridical (the transfer of rights to the state). The trade-off between security and liberty is thus often limited to this initial ‘contract’ involved in state formation. Even if the individual gives up freedoms in exchange for security in the state, Hobbes is thought to be the first to have theorized the separation of the individual from the state. Individual freedom cannot be totally alienated. Even if freedom is restricted to ‘corporeal freedom’, the freedom of moving without impediment, the individual maintains a space of separation from the state. Hobbes could only use such a minimal understanding of freedom to obscure all the other state interventions that he allows for. If one takes seriously the argument that the function of the Leviathan is to avoid seditions, civil wars within the state, then sovereign powers need to be considered in this very function. The double-sided function of the state, protection and prosperity, is subsumed to the concern with seditions.

Despite the notable differences between various definitions of freedom that have existed around the imaginary social contract and the state’s protective function, their logic is the same. Freedom is something individuals possess, something of which they can be deprived by the state. The state can deprive them of freedom to various extents, depending on the role that is attached to state-undermining actions by the citizens or seditions. One could argue that citizens are allowed to enjoy as much freedom as does not lead to seditions, a freedom defined by the ‘silence of the laws’.

The second function of the state that Hobbes identifies takes us along a different path of thinking freedom and security. Although only sketched in Hobbes, whose main approach to freedom is still delimited by the ‘silence of the laws’, such an approach deriving from the state function of ensuring prosperity entails a different conceptualization of freedom. One century later, Rousseau was even more explicit about what this other function of the state entails:

What is the object of any political association? It is the protection and prosperity of its members. And what is the surest evidence that they are so protected and prosperous? The numbers of their population. Then do not look beyond this much debated evidence. All other things being equal, the government under which, without external aids like immigration and naturalization, the citizens increase and multiply most, is infallibly the best government. That under which the people diminishes and wastes away is the worst. Statisticians, this is your problem: count, measure, compare Rousseau, 2004 #49 p. 99.

As Rousseau’s state need not fear seditions as it exists as an embodiment of the ‘general will’, the prosperity-enhancing role of the state becomes a goal in itself. This concern with population, its ‘multiplication’, prosperity is reminiscent of what Michel Foucault has called ‘governmental’ practices. Although Foucault clearly distinguishes governmentality from the prerogatives of the sovereign state, Michel Senellart, the editor of Michel Foucault’s lectures on governmentality, has located the policefunction of the sovereign state alongside its military role. ‘Absolute sovereignty’, he has argued, does not appear - at least with Hobbes - in the process of contractual relations - but in the process of government, namely of state conservation Senellart, 1995 #40 p. 35. The state has therefore to take care of the reproduction of the population, of their prosperity, to ensure domestic peace and defend them against external enemies.

Senellart therefore nuances the Hobbesian theory of the social contract against the sovereign-ist interpretation that Michel Foucault had proposed in Society Must Be Defended.The Leviathan is not simply avoiding the resurgence of the ‘state of nature’ in its middle, i.e. as civil war, through repressive and disciplinary means, but is also supposed to ensure the good living of its subjects through governmental technologies. The policingfunction of Leviathan is thus not simply repressive and dissuasive; it also needs to facilitate the circulation of persons and goods, the provision of goods, use all forces, restrict superfluous spending, etc. According to Michel Senellart there is a double tendency in Hobbes: one to make government equal to sovereignty, by means of the imperative of obedience, the other to separate them in terms of their functioning Senellart, 1995 #40 p. 39.

Although I think that Senellart overstates the argument by locating governmentality with the Leviathan, Hobbes does provide a ‘governmental account’ in embryo. If focused on the prevention of seditions, such a governmental function will develop to strengthen the state. In Behemoth, prosperity (or rather the comparative lack of it) is again mentioned among the causes of the civil war:

...the city of London and other great towns of trade, having in admiration the great prosperity of the Low Countries after they had revolted from their monarch, the King of Spain, were inclined to think that the like change of government here, would to them produce the like prosperity Hobbes, 1990 #52 p. 3-4.

If one were to hypothetically build upon Hobbes, the governmental function of the state is to avoid ‘seditions’, disorders, dissensus, revolt. Protected and prosperous, the citizens have no reason of discontent with the Leviathan. What does this ‘governmental’ function of the state mean for liberty? The social contract theorists do not have the conceptual tools to tackle the governmental function of the state, even in its most incipient form, and are therefore limited to considering a given set of liberties in relation to which the state functions. The freedoms that individuals can enjoy or have to give up are pre-defined and so are their conditions of application. The rest of the freedoms are defined by the ‘silence of the law’; and for such silence to be correctly interpreted and not lead to revolt, ordered and disciplined citizens are required.

There is however another set of liberties that do not pertain to the individual before the creation of political community, but are the product of society. To ensure the prosperity of the population, the state needs to create certain liberties, like the liberty of circulation or commerce. How does more generally the governmental concern with the prosperity of the population link up with security and protection? Michel Foucault, the most consistent thinker of ‘governmentality’, has sketched an answer to this question in his lectures on biopolitics. For the liberal state, ‘[f]reedom has been an objective of government, freedom has been an instrument or means of government, freedom has inspired the invention of a variety of technologies for governing Rose, 1999 #15 p. 67. The state becomes both a producer and consumer of liberties. On the one hand, the state creates a series of freedoms which can serve to enhance its prosperity and the welfare of the population. Liberal states do not only guarantee certain liberties, they consume liberty. Liberal governmentality can only function if it produces certain liberties: freedom of the market, freedom of expression, of movement, of the right to property, etc.

Liberal governmentality needs freedom and therefore it has to produce it and it also has to organize it. Liberal governmentality manages freedom and it does so under the imperative of security. The freedoms created in society for its prosperity need to be controlled and regulated against excessive use or misuse by certain categories of the population. Hobbes points out the dangers that commerce in some products can mean for the state. Trading too much can be dangerous for the state as well as trading too little. Those who do not conform to the limits and conditions set by the state, become dangerous. They are not dangerous for the state itself or for its citizens, they pose a risk to the good functioning of certain societal and economic processes. The danger posed is therefore not one of direct sedition against the state, but also one of indirect disordering of the processes that make up the state. A probably simpler and very direct way of putting it is that the liberal state is also a bourgeois state, which is constituted by capitalist relations as well as juridical ones.

The rise of governmentality means also the rise of certain limits (factual, historical, or imposed by the rationality of government) to what the state can do. Such limits are not established in the contractual relation of the individual to the state, but in relation to the objectives of government Foucault, 2004b #38 p. 41. [4] The analysis of such limits in some way immanent to governmentality, to the rationality which makes possible its functioning and to the objectives it sets itself. The limit of governmental competence will be set by the frontiers of utility of a governmental intervention Foucault, 2004b #38 p. 42. Governmental intervention is by definition limited, unlike the absolute sovereignty of Hobbes’ state. Rather than reducing individual freedom, it re-defines freedoms as the individual’s independence from government.

Liberty is granted in spheres of state non-intervention (similarly and supplementary to Hobbes’ silence of the law as the realm of liberty). How is this sphere of non-intervention defined by governmentality? It is no longer generally the sphere of civil liberties as with the social contract. Governmentality cuts different areas and categories of population as spheres of non-interventions, depending on the object it has given itself. Freedom, warns Foucault, is not a universal that has quantitative variations and more or less serious amputations, more or less important occultations Foucault, 2004b #38 p. 65. Freedom is simply a relation between those who govern and those who are governed.