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November 18, 2007
In this extract from a transcript of Quentin Skinner interviewed by Nigel Warburton for the podcast on Philosophy Bites on Hobbes and the state Skinner says that Hobbes’ Leviathan, is essentially a theory of the state:
Leviathan is the state and the question really is, what is the state? And it’s important that Hobbes is writing in the context in which the concept of the state was very widely employed in political argument: but it tended to be associated with a view of popular sovereignty. So the state is simply the name of the body of the people organized for political power. So you can talk about the whole body of the state. What’s crucial in Hobbes’ political theory is that he thinks that the idea that the people is a body is itself an illusion; there’s no such thing as the body of the people. There are only individuals. So the question, ‘how does the state arise and what is the state?’ is a question that Hobbes asks anew. Because he repudiates the fundamental assumption that generates the idea of the state as the body of the people.
what Hobbes is doing is to reverse the idea that the body politic creates the state and saying it’s only through having a sovereign that you gain a body of the people - otherwise it’s just a mass, a multitude of individuals. Hobbes is vehemently opposed to popular sovereignty.
Skinner says:
A nd when we appoint a sovereign we say keep the peace. We’re not scrupulous about how you do that. We can’t do it, we’re at war. But if we give you all power, you can keep the peace. So Hobbes’ point is that is representative government. So he upends the whole tradition of how we used to think about representative government. And in a way his is the tradition that we’ve inherited because what we do is we appoint our representatives for 5 years. There’s nothing much we can do about them, because we’ve given them sovereign power to make the decisions about what they think is in our interests. And Hobbes’ is saying that’s what we must do. And if they go to war in Iraq and you think that’s the biggest disaster in recent times, it’s really not for you to say that according to Hobbes. Because what you did was give them power to make that decision. And what you also did was to agree that you would not question that. What we find difficult is that latter point.
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