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November 7, 2005
Fear is fundamental to understanding the workings of political power as Carmen Lawerence and Thomas Hobbes well understand.
I finished that previous post by saying that 'maybe I should re-read Leo Strauss on Thomas Hobbes?' What I had in mind was getting a grasp of political modernity so that I could evaluate these lectures on fear and public policy. So I opened up the section of Strauss's Natural Right and History dealing with Hobbes [Modern Natural Rigjht], skipped all the stuff on Hobbes' mechanistic cosmology, mathematics and nature and turned to the bits of fear, death, self-preservation and the state. Strauss says:
The state has the function, not of producing or promoting a virtuous life [as held by classical political philosophy], but of safeguarding the natural right of each [individual to self-preservation]. And the power of the state finds its absolute limit in that natural right and in no other moral fact. If we may call liberalism that political doctrine which regards as the fundamental political fact the rights, as distinquished from the dutiues, of man and which identifies the function of the state with the protection or the safeguarding of those rights, then we may say that the founder of liberalism was Hobbes.
That brings one up short doesn't it? It does me, as I've been reading Hobbes as a conservative --ie., as an anti-liberal.
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I think one can understand the distinction between liberals and conservatives in many ways, for example, between stingy conservatives and generous liberals. My favorite way of making the distinction, however, is based on the Allegory of the Cave.
So, there are those who believe that their life is defined in terms of the shadows and echoes which gives them all the "knowledge" and "values" they need to carry on happy lives.
Then, there are those who believe that the shadows and echoes cannot provide anything but illusions or falsities. They base their decisions on what they can find out about the reality of the forms. Maybe a messenger from the gods provides this information.
The first group is the liberals. The second, the conservatives. Hobbes might be considered a liberal on this account because his understanding of the state and the workings of government, on his account, is not based on the moral insights or "rights" as understood by those who get this information from the gods or beyond experience. Instead, he thinks the purpose of government and our "rights" are determined exclusively upon what we can discover from the shadows and echoes. Said understanding is mostly about power and the prospect of pain, suffering, and certain death.
An advocate for the divine right of kings, on the view I've described here, would be conservative. The religious right in America which believes morality can only be based on divine preferences would be conservative. The Straussian idea that religion is useful to maintain social cohesion and strength, even though there isn't a God or a real divine intervention, would be liberal.
On this view, the founder of liberalism would not be Hobbes, unless he just coined the term. The idea that you can and should base your decisions, political or otherwise, on your personal experience and judgement or on a social contract kind of operation, was thought up at the same time as the idea that one's decisions should be based on the preferences of the gods and the experiences of reality beyond our senses.
Understood in terms of the cave dwellers who've not seen the light, verses those who have, I guess I'd blame Socrates for setting up the liberal- conservative argument.