Was Thomas Hobbes a lousy speller or a good one, but only by the standards of his time?
And I belieeve that scarce any thing can be more absurdly said in naturall Philosophy, than that which is now called Aristotle’s Metaphysiques; nor more repugnant to Government, than much of what hee hath said in his Politiques; nor more ignorantly, than a great part of his Ethiques (Hobbes, Leviathan Cambridge 1991 p. 370).
Hobbes here condemns Aristotle’s thought as vigorously we condemn Hobbes’ spelling. The old Greek contributes absolutely nothing, it would appear, to Hobbes’s philosophy: not to his physics, his ethics, or his politics.
But old folks persist. The very subtitle to Leviathan: “the Matter, Forme, & Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill,” contains words which sound suspiciously like Aristotle’s account of ousia (#8). Could Hobbes, while thinking that he is rejecting Aristotle, only be reinstating his basic metaphysical structure—without, apparently, even knowing it?
Hobbes spells out (!) his argument thusly:
The only way to erect such a Common Power, as may be able to defend [people] from the invasion of Forraigners, and the injuries of one another, and thereby to secure them in such sort, [that] they may nourish themselves and live contentedly; is, to conferre all their power and strength upon one Man, or upon one Assembly of men, that may reduce all their Wills, by plurality of voices, unto one Will….By this Authoritie, given him by every particular man in the Common-Wealth, [the sovereign] …is inabled to conforme the wills of them all, to Peace at home, and mutuall Ayd against their enemies abroad. And in him consisteth the Essence of the Common-Wealth (Lev. pp. 87f).
So a commonwealth must able to distinguish its inhabitants from “forraigners” and to fend off “invasion,” which for Hobbes is synonymous with causality itself, for causality is nothing but the “invasion” (incursus) of one body by another, i.e. the displacement of one body when another body intrudes into the place it occupies (de Corp. VI. 6, VIII. 19, IX.5, pp. 23, 65, 72). So the commonwealth must have a determinate boundary.
Within that boundary a single authority, the sovereign, exercises a power so absolute as to be able to “conform” the wills of everyone else to peace (thus exercising what I call disposition over those wills), and to mutual aid in war (a case of what I call initiative). It is thus entirely in keeping with Aristotelian usage for Hobbes to call the sovereign the “essence” of the commonwealth; the sovereign plays the role of form in Aristotelian ontology (again, see #8).
In keeping with an unsavory philosophical tradition, I will call the sovereign a “he.” But a sovereign, I will note, can for Hobbes be a he or a she, or a they—sovereignty is not tied to gender, and can be vested in any number of people as long as they act in a unified way
The extended discussion of sovereign power in Leviathan Chapter XVIII expands upon this reappropriation of Aristotle in a total of twelve points. According to the first two of these, the people cannot overthrow their sovereign and get a new one, nor can he relinquish his position—because he is their unity, and without him they are not “a people” but merely a “multitude.” Sovereign power can end only where the sovereign no longer has the power to fulfill his part of the covenant–and Hobbes phrases this requirement in terms of an analogy to the ousiodic structure of the human individual:
The Soveraignty is the Soule of the Common-Wealth; which once departed from the body, the members do no more receive their motion from it (Lev. p. 114; emphasis added).
Boundary is further determined and consolidated in the third point, which asserts that anyone who protests against an act of the sovereign is, literally, an out-law:
he must either submit to their decrees, or be left in the condition of warre he was in before; wherein he might without injustice be destroyed by any man whatsoever (Lev. p. 90).
In fact, the sovereign’s dispositive power goes far beyond what is required for preserving peace; it is a power to maintain social order in general. The sovereign has the right to decide what can be taught in society (#6) and sets up the regulations which govern the apportionment of property (#7), of offices (#10), of rewards and punishments (#11), and of honors (#12). He also decides the lawfulness of smaller groups which may form within the society (Lev. pp. 115-123)
The sovereign’s dispositive power over his subjects is so extensive that he cannot injure them: whatever he does to his subjects will not count as an “injury.” There are thus no standards for the right exercise of his power other than those he himself sets (## 4, 5). Sovereignty, in short, is “power unlimited” (Lev. p. 115), and the relation of subjects to sovereign has a familiar air of ancient domesticity:
As in the presence of the Master, the Servants are equall, and without any honor at all; so are the Subjects, in the presence of the Soveraign (Lev. p.93).
When we confine our gaze to Aristotle’s and Hobbes’s strictly political doctrines, the polis and the Commonwealth look very different. Curtis Johnson has summed their differences up as follows: for Aristotle, the state exists by nature, and humans are by nature political; the aim of the state is the good life. For Hobbes, the individual is by nature inimical to others; the state exists by convention, and its aim is security.[1] But when we look to the metaphysical bones which underlie these very different bodies politic, we find them both to be versions of ousiodic structure, exhibiting the three ancient traits of boundary, disposition, and initiative. The form of the Hobbesian commonwealth is the sovereign, exercising both dispositive and initiatory power. Its inhabitants are the matter.
Though Hobbes’s political structure thus has the classical features of an Aristotelian ousia, the justification for them is different indeed. It is not for Hobbes, as for Aristotle, written in all of nature that for any community there must be a single archê. Nor is it a metaphysical or rationalist truth about some ideal realm. Ousia has neither natural nor supernatural warrant–and seems, in fact, to break out, in Chapter XVIII, with no warrant at all.
[1]Curtis Johnson, “The Hobbesian Conception of Sovereignty and Aristotle’s Politics” Journal of the History of Ideas 46 (1985) pp. 327-347