A Short History of Modern Philosophy: From Descartes to Wittgenstein, Second Edition (30 page)

In recent years, nevertheless, considerable interest has been expressed in Nietzsche’s metaphysics and epistemology, which have partially eclipsed the ethical theory for which he was earlier renowned. Nietzsche was acutely aware of the peculiar predicament of modernity. Hitherto, he argued, our beliefs and the concepts used to formulate them, have had the transcendental backing of religious faith. At no point in the conceptual scheme of civilisation has the void been fully apparent behind the thin paste of our conceptions. Now, however, everything is changing. People come into a world without certainties, and between the torn shreds of our inheritance the abyss is ‘always visible. In such a condition human life becomes problematic; without a radical re-construction of our world-view, which will permit the will to power on which our enterprises depend, we shall enter a peculiar spiritual desert, in which nothing has meaning or value—the world of ‘the last man’. Nietzsche has been accused of nihilism, but more recent commentators tend to the view that he is trying—perhaps against the odds, given his sceptical epistemology—to forestall nihilism and to provide us with the weapons against it. Moreover, his acute social criticism, and his ability to sniff the ‘will to believe’ behind all our ordinary beliefs and attitudes, have endeared him to radical critics of Western society, and caused him to be conscripted to secular causes—feminism, socialism, egalitarianism, ‘multiculturalism’—which he himself would have greeted with cavernous laughter. For such reasons Nietzsche, despite the brevity and impatience of his philosophical reasoning, is now as influential as any nineteenth-century philosopher.

Modern writers have tended to regard epistemology and metaphysics as the central areas of philosophy, and to treat political thought as an implied branch of the subject. Of the two greatest modern philosophers—Kant and Wittgenstein—the first wrote in a scattered and fragmentary way about politics, while the second ignored it altogether. Plato’s most famous work consists in a sustained account of political life, in which philosophical problems are shown to arise from the business of living together in a community; few modern philosophers would give so central a place to questions of politics, and of the exceptions the most prominent are often regarded, like Marx, as pseudo-scientists rather than philosophical thinkers in the strict sense of the word. There is, however, one modern philosopher who conceived the entire subject matter of politics in philosophical terms, and who saw political applications in almost every philosophical argument—Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), whose
Leviathan
and
De Cive
set the agenda for modern political philosophy.

Published in Paris in 1651, two years after the execution of King Charles I, the
Leviathan
bears the mark of a civil war in which Hobbes and his contemporaries had been made aware of the terror and evil-doing which stem from anarchy. The book aims to justify the power and authority of the sovereign and to show that rebellion is seldom if ever justified, not only because of the chaos that it brings, but also because it involves a breach of a deep and self-contracted obligation. Many of Hobbes’s arguments are
ad hoc,
part of his own personal response to the tragic conflict which he had witnessed, rather than arguments from first principles. Nevertheless, his wide influence over his contemporaries is due at least in part to his attempt to provide a metaphysical foundation for political institutions, and to rise above the contingencies of history so as to view human community as it must be, in every age. He was a monarchist, but he inspired the republican Spinoza, whose
Tractatus Theologico-Politicus
(1670) displays the same realistic view of human nature, and the same lofty disdain for political fashion, that are characteristic of Hobbes. The fact that Hobbes was an empiricist of a crudely formulated but uncompromising kind shows the extent to which empiricism lies at the basis of modern political philosophy, being the generating principle of major theories of the state, even when these issue from the pen of a philosopher like Spinoza, for whom reason is the ultimate court of appeal.

Hobbes’s principal concern was with the concept of sovereignty, and with the rights and powers associated therewith. He conceived civil association as a ‘commonwealth’, arranged in rank and influence around the sovereign power, much as the parts of an organism are arranged around a single active principle of life. The organic analogy was very important to Hobbes, and enabled him both to describe the nature of the sovereign power, and also to separate it intellectually from any particular person, assembly or constitutional process that might be thought—in this or that political arrangement—to embody it. Hence his ideas about sovereignty were to prove acceptable to many who did not share his conviction that, unless the sovereign power finds concrete expression in a monarch, it neither commands the allegiance of the citizen nor supports the cohesion of the state. Hobbes’s extremely crude empiricism led him to a philosophy of mind that gave little persuasive power to that thought, or to the analogy between the life of a commonwealth and the life of an individual. But this analogy was later to be reinstated by Hegel, with all the philosophical benefits that Hobbes had been unable to provide for it. It then certainly did begin to seem persuasive.

For the purposes of this chapter, the single most important thought to be found in Hobbes lies in his assertion that there can be ‘no obligation on any man which ariseth not from some act of his own’. The history of political philosophy in the eighteenth century is largely the history of that thought, and the rising conviction either that it is false, or that it serves to conceal something far more important. If the thought is right then it follows that no one is born into the world encumbered by obligations, and that no state has a right to allegiance unless it arises from some act of ‘consent’—however tacit, unreflecting or spontaneous— on the part of the citizen. (It has to be understood that when Hobbes speaks of an ‘act’ he means an intentional act of a kind that could be seen as bearing within itself the creation and acceptance of an obligation. Promising is a clear example of this; so too is the knowing engagement in business according to the common laws of contract and trade.)

Hobbes finds his paradigm of obligation in contractual or quasi-contractual relations between ‘consenting adults’ (to use the modern term). This is naturally an odd starting point for the defence of monarchical government, in which the sovereign usually has rights over the citizen that transcend anything the citizen himself can either contract or even understand. Nevertheless, Hobbes believed that in acquiescing in the benefits of government the citizen does thereby accept, and so put himself under an obligation towards, the established order of the commonwealth. The sovereign, who is nothing but the embodied will of that order, therefore acts with the authority of all those who have overtly or covertly sought his protection.

The philosophical basis of Hobbes’s quoted remark is important for what follows. Political philosophy has been preoccupied since its origins by an all-important distinction—that between rights (which are enforced only in the name of justice) and powers (which are enforced come what may). Plato’s
Republic
opens with an argument that purports to reduce the first to the second; Marx’s historical materialism regards the first as a mere institutional reflection of the second, and allows
material
reality to powers alone. Hobbes, preoccupied by legitimacy, saw how fragile are our human conceptions of justice when not supported by material power. What therefore makes the exercise of justice possible? It cannot exist in the ‘state of nature’, in which the life of man is ‘nasty, poor, solitary, brutish and short’: it is therefore an artifact, made possible by the power of the state. So the sovereign power creates the possibility of a just order. At the same time, Hobbes recognised, we distinguish legitimate from illegitimate sovereign power. Is this merely—as the ‘vulgar’ Marxist would persuade us—an ideological illusion? Or does it have some independent basis in reality—independent, that is, of the evident motive that we all have, out of greed or cowardice, to believe that where might is, there right is also?

Clearly rights exist only between persons, and a distinguishing mark of persons is that they can engage in voluntary transactions and thereby acquire at least a
sense
of obligation towards one another. It therefore seemed clear to Hobbes that we can make sense of ‘rights’ if we trace them back, through the complex history that surrounds them, to those acts in which the sense of obligation is first aroused. Rights can be seen as
conferred
by one person on another. They have their objective foundation in a habit of reflection that informs and is indispensable to the friendly commerce between rational beings. Their origin is wholly different from the origin of power, and hence they can stand in judgement on the exercise of power, even when power seeks to overthrow them. The happy commonwealth is clearly the one in which right and might are in consort, so that the sense of obligation confers its authority upon those
de facto
powers which seek its allegiance. Such thoughts raise enormous philosophical questions about the nature of rational agency, and about the relation between fact and value. But they serve in part to explain why so many moral and political philosophers have concentrated on the act of promising as a starting-point for their investigations. They also show the philosophical basis of a doctrine which was to develop through Locke and Rousseau to become one of the most influential of all political ideas, the doctrine of the social contract (or ‘compact’ as Locke called it).

In the state of nature, Hobbes believed, rights cannot be enforced: instead there is a war of all against all, which can be brought to an end only by some agreement to cease fighting. This agreement is rational, to the extent that each person benefits from it. What form would such an agreement take? Surely, Hobbes argued, people would contract together to establish, first of all, a sovereign power supreme over every citizen, and capable of enforcing the law and maintaining the peace. The sovereign so established lies outside the contract which creates him, and therefore is not bound by its terms. Hence rebellion can never be sanctioned by the contract, unless the sovereign acts in such a way as to undermine the whole basis of the civil order, and so to bring the contract to an end.

John Locke’s
Two Treatises of Civil Government
(1689-1690) were written, like the
Leviathan,
in defence of political forces which were active in the England of his time. Locke wrote in defence, not of absolute monarchy, but of a constitutional settlement, such as was established in 1688, in which a compromise of social forces dictated the structure of government institutions. Locke believed that Parliamentary rule had been threatened by the Stuart court, and he followed his patron, the first Earl of Shaftesbury, into exile during the difficult years of King James II. His first treatise was a polemic against the doctrine of the divine right of kings, upon which the Stuart kings had depended for their legitimacy, and which had been vigorously defended by Sir Robert Filmer. This somewhat parochial work is irrelevant to our concerns, except in so far as it shows that the dispute which animated Locke was the very same that had animated Hobbes—the dispute over the nature and ground of legitimate government. In the second
Treatise
Locke gave what is perhaps the first extended account of the logic of the social contract.

Locke had a less bleak vision of the state of nature than Hobbes. Even in a state of nature, he argued, there is a law which all people recognise, and which they would uphold if their interests did not conflict with it. This law is implanted in us by reason (which is in turn the medium through which God’s will is manifest to us). This ‘law of nature’ generates the ‘natural rights’ which are commonly recognised by all rational beings, whatever the particular political constitution which might have been imposed upon them. In subscribing to the existence of these ‘rights’ Locke showed the influence of the ecclesiastical philosopher Richard Hooker (1553-1600), who in his turn had adopted and reworked the mediaeval idea of ‘natural law’ in order to endow the Church with an authority which could transcend, regulate, and also take part in the practice of government. The theory of ‘natural rights’— variously stated and defended—still has its following. It is characterised by its ‘international’ character; it specifies rights which are supposed to be independent of, and antecedent to, the rights generated by any particular political arrangement. It can therefore provide a court of appeal against the particular laws which provide a grievance to the citizen. It is for this reason that the notion of ‘human rights’ (the latest form of the theory) has seemed to provide American liberalism, which has its constitutional foundation in the philosophy of Locke, with an international creed to rival the ideals of socialism.

The question, ‘How can there be natural rights?’ appears throughout the history of philosophy in many forms and disguises, but Locke deserves credit for his clear formulation of the question and his uncompromising answer to it. It seemed to him that we are compelled by reason to acknowledge the existence of rights independently of any convention, agreement or contract which might have served to create them. To use an ancient distinction: there are rights which stem from nature and not from convention. There are, for example, natural rights to life and limb, and to the freedom which is presupposed in the exercise of choice. There is also a natural right to property, in defence of which Locke offers interesting and influential arguments. By ‘mixing’ his labour with an object, as when he cultivates a field, or transforms a raw material, a worker makes it his own. Thereby he transforms a relation of power into a relation of right. Nobody else can now make exclusive use of the object in question without denying this right. Yet the right arose quite naturally. It involved the intercession of no agreement or conventional usage which might have served as its ‘ground’. It is given to reason to see that this ‘mixing of labour’ generates ownership. A person owns the fields that he has tilled as much as he owns the parts of his body. However, as Locke recognised, rights of this kind will be open to qualification. Two people may till the same field; or I may owe the opportunity to ‘mix my labour’ with an object to you, who have already, through your own labour, placed me, or it, in the appropriate relation. Furthermore, I have the rights to the fruits of my labour only if I leave ‘enough and as good’ for others. Nevertheless, Locke thinks, such qualifications and provisos do not destroy the reality of private property as a natural right.