Infinitesimal: How a Dangerous Mathematical Theory Shaped the Modern World (32 page)

It was not just
Leviathan
’s timing, however, that marked it as the product of the civil war, but also, more deeply, the darkness of Hobbes’s vision and the desperate solution he proposes. Behind every line in
Leviathan
lurks the specter of the social anarchy and fratricidal war that was convulsing England. Behind every crisp and stately phrase, behind every elegant philosophical argument, loom the unruly mobs bullying their betters; the great houses turned to ashes; the bloody battlefields of Marston Moor and Naseby; the murdered king. As Hobbes saw it, Parliament had removed the king and unleashed every form of political and social subversion. Order was replaced by chaos, and civic peace by a cycle of civil war that seemed to feed on itself to the point where it no longer seemed to matter who was fighting whom, or why. It was no longer the war of Parliament against the king, or of Presbyterians against Anglicans, but simply of all against all. The only way to end it, Hobbes believed, was to reinstate the sovereign, return the demons of anarchy and subversion to the pits of hell from which they had come, and seal them there forever.
Leviathan
would show how.

The first step toward ending the chaos of civil war was to understand what had led to it, and according to Hobbes, it was not the political and religious controversies that were raging in England, but something more fundamental: human nature. Men, Hobbes explains in
Leviathan
, are not particularly aggressive beings. All they desire is food, sex, some creature comforts, and a modicum of security to enjoy all these. The problem is that, without an established political order—what Hobbes calls a “Commonwealth”—men could have no security. What one person had worked for and acquired, another could come and take from him, and suffer no consequence. All men were therefore fearful of all their neighbors, and the only way they could achieve any measure of security was by gaining power over them. It is, in other words, fear that leads men to make war upon their neighbors. Unfortunately, Hobbes warns, power never leads to security, because once men acquire it, they inevitably seek more: “And the cause of this,” he writes, “is not always that a man … cannot be content with a moderate power but because he cannot assure the power and means to live well, which he hath at present, without the acquisition of more.”

If men are left to their own devices, according to Hobbes, fear of one’s neighbors leads to war, war leads to more fear, which in turn leads to more war. Under such conditions there is no point in investing in the future, and life is a misery: “there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently no culture of the earth, no navigation, nor building, nor instrument of moving and removing such things as require much force, no knowledge of the face of the earth, no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society, and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death.” This is life in Hobbes’s “state of nature,” and he sums it up in what might be the most famous line in all political philosophy: in the absence of political order, human life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

This was also, according to Hobbes, precisely the condition of England during the civil war. With the removal of the king, Englishmen had reverted to the state of nature, and were engaged in a “war of every man against every man.” Men might give any number of reasons for waging war upon their neighbors: Presbyterians and Independents might accuse one another of erroneous religious doctrines; Levellers and Diggers might denounce the rich and claim that all men are created equal; Fifth Monarchy Men might proclaim that they were preparing the way for the Day of Judgment. But all these fancy claims were to Hobbes mere window dressing, because the real reason Englishmen were fighting one another was much simpler: fear. With the sovereign gone, people were left defenseless against the depredations of their neighbors, and to gain some measure of security, they resorted to attacking them first. The result was an endless cycle of violence. Hobbes had already seen it happen once, when he visited France with his Cavendish charge in 1610, shortly after the assassination of King Henri IV. The fear and disorder of those days left a deep impression on young Hobbes, who would never forget what happened to a land that deposed its sovereign. The Frenchmen of 1610 gave different reasons for their actions than the Englishmen of 1640, but that hardly mattered: in a land without a sovereign, Hobbes learned, every man lives in fear and makes war upon his neighbor.

But if eternal civil war is the natural state of human society, how can it be quelled? How can people gain the security for themselves and their families that is required if agriculture, commerce, the sciences, and the arts are to flourish? The answer, according to Hobbes, lies in a uniquely human attribute: reason. Animals are forever trapped in the state of nature, and some humans, too, such as “the savage people in many places of America.” But reason gives men a choice. They can remain in the miserable state of nature, or they can recognize their unhappy condition, and rationally seek a solution that will lift them out of it. But once they choose to do so, according to Hobbes, all choices end, because reason will lead them to the only solution to their quandary: the Leviathan.

What is the Leviathan? It is much more than an absolute ruler, or even an absolute state. It is the literal embodiment of all the members of the commonwealth in one man: the sovereign. In their desperation to escape the state of nature, men conclude that the only way out is for each of them to give up his own free will and invest it in the sovereign. The sovereign consequently absorbs the individual wills of all the members of the commonwealth, and his actions are therefore their actions. This is the key. Men do not simply submit to the will of an overlord, subjugating their own will to his. Rather, whatever the sovereign wills is also the will of every one of his subjects. Every person in the commonwealth, Hobbes argues, will “own and acknowledge himself to be the author” of whatever the sovereign chooses to do. Under the Leviathan there can be no civil war, because the Leviathan embodies the wills of his subjects, and no one would will civil war. The end result is a perfectly unified body politic: “[It] is more than consent, or concord: it is a real unity of them all, in one and the same person.”

“The multitude so united is called a COMMONWEALTH,” Hobbes writes:

This is the generation of that great LEVIATHAN, or rather (to speak more reverently) of that
Mortal God
to which we owe, under the
Immortal God
, our peace and defence. For by this authority, given him by every particular man in the commonwealth, he hath the use of so much power … that by terror thereof he is enabled to conform the wills of them all to peace …

And that, to Hobbes, is the very essence of the Leviathan: “one person, of whose acts a great multitude … have made themselves every one the author” in order that peace will prevail.

Hobbes’s theory of the state is breathtaking in its audacity. He has no interest in discussing the different forces operating in human society or evaluating the different forms of political organization. Instead, with no qualifications or equivocation, he plunges ahead in a take-no-prisoners philosophical style. The problem of human society, he claims, is clear, and it is the perpetual war that exists in the state of nature. The solution is just as clear: the creation of the absolutist “Leviathan” state. Hobbes drives through his argument by sheer intellectual force, moving step by logical step, and leaving no room for dissent or contradiction: human nature leads to the state of nature, which leads to civil war, which leads to surrender of personal will, which leads to the Leviathan. Consequently, the Leviathan is the only viable political order.
QED.

From the very beginning, many found Hobbes’s Leviathan state abhorrent. Where would Parliament fit in? Where would the Anglican Church—or any church, for that matter? But even those critics who were repelled by his conclusions were hard pressed to find flaws in his arguments. For where exactly was Hobbes’s error? His assumptions were sound, and each step seemed reasonable in itself: Yes, humans are acquisitive and self-interested. Yes, they compete with and fear one another. Yes, they are prone to attacking each other out of fear, and one attack leads inevitably to more. It all seems oh so reasonable, and few would be inclined to argue with each particular step. By the time a reader realizes where all this is leading, it is too late. Somehow, without ever taking a false or even dangerous-looking step, the reader unwittingly concedes that the only viable state is Hobbes’s “living God,” the Leviathan.

To many of Hobbes’s contemporaries, this was a completely repellent conclusion, but such is the power of
Leviathan
’s reasoning that it proved extraordinarily difficult to point out where exactly it goes astray. Hobbes followed his deductions to their logical conclusions, whatever those might be, and carried his readers along for the ride. It was as if he were conducting a geometrical demonstration.

The Leviathan, composed of innumerable individuals united in a single will, is, to be sure, a beautiful thing. But bold as it is, and beautiful as it is, the Leviathan as a political organization is bound to give one pause. It is not just a powerful and centralized state as existed in Hobbes’s time in France, where political opposition was difficult and state measures repressive. It is, rather, a state in which political opposition is literally impossible. Opposition to the sovereign by his subjects means that they willfully oppose their own will—a paradox and a logical impossibility. Indeed, in the Leviathan the subjects do not have the same relationship to the state as we understand it, because the Leviathan is not a political organization but a unified organic whole. It is a living being composed of the bodies of all its subjects, and a will entrusted to the sovereign alone. Hobbes says as much when he explains in the introduction that “the great LEVIATHAN, called a COMMONWEALTH … is but an artificial man, though of greater stature and strength than the natural.” In a human body, a hand, or a foot, or a follicle of hair cannot oppose a human’s will. In just the same way, the members of the commonwealth are simply components of the body of the commonwealth, and are incapable of opposing its will.

Nothing captures the true essence of the Hobbesian state better than the image that adorned the frontispiece of the early editions of
Leviathan
(and many later ones as well). Engraved by the French artist Abraham Bosse, it shows a peaceful land of hills and valleys, fields and villages, with a prosperous and orderly town in the foreground, where small and neatly arranged houses are dwarfed by a great Church. The eye, however, does not dwell on this peaceful scene, but is drawn to the figure that looms behind it: a giant king who towers over the land like Gulliver among the Lilliputians, his arms spread wide, as if to embrace his domain. On his head is a crown; in his left hand, a bishop’s crosier, or staff; in his right, a sword to rule the land and defend it from all enemies. He dominates the land, and there is no question that it was he who brought it peace, order, and prosperity.

At a glance, the image seems like an advertisement for the virtues of a strong centralized monarchy on the French model. But there is something strange about this towering king. His body appears rugged, and he seems to be wearing some sort of scale armor. A closer inspection reveals the truth: they are not scales, but people. What appears to be the king’s human body is in fact composed of the men of the commonwealth. Each single man is powerless, nothing but a minuscule component of this enormous body. But together, and working with a single will, they are the all-powerful Leviathan.

So overpowering and all-encompassing is the state depicted in the frontispiece that it leaves no room for any independent institutions. For Hobbes,
any
institutions that are not directly dependent on the sovereign are a threat to the unity of the Leviathan and the stability of the state, a threat that, if not checked, will breed disagreements and conflicts and lead, once again, to civil war. The worst offender in Hobbes’s book is the Catholic Church, which claimed ascendancy over all civic authorities and consequently earns itself an entire section in the
Leviathan
, entitled “The Kingdom of Darkness.” In England, the rebellious Parliament is, of course, anathema to Hobbes, but so are seemingly tame institutions such as the Anglican Church and the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Anglicanism is preferable to most churches because it is at least nominally subject to the king, even if, in Hobbes’s opinion, Anglican clerics showed far too much independence. Other denominations, and especially Presbyterianism, are far worse, because they set up their own rule separate from the commonwealth, and Hobbes is not above blaming them directly for the onset of the civil war. The universities earn Hobbes’s ire partly because they traced their intellectual roots to medieval Scholasticism, and so are tainted by association with the “Kingdom of Darkness.” But more fundamentally, the universities seem to Hobbes dangerous breeding grounds for doctrines and ideas that might conflict with the will of the sovereign, leading to open-ended controversies. And controversy, the Earl of Newcastle, Hobbes’s protector, warned Charles II some years after he was restored to the throne, “is a Civill Warr with the Pen, which pulls out the sorde soon afterwards.”

Deciding which opinions and doctrines should be taught and which should be banned, in the universities and elsewhere, is the prerogative of the sovereign alone, Hobbes insists. If clergymen are allowed to preach what they want, and professors to teach what they want, then division, conflict, and civil war will soon follow. But Hobbes goes even further: the Leviathan decides not just which teachings are harmful to the state and which beneficial, but more fundamentally, what is right and what is wrong. In the state of nature, there is no right and wrong, according to Hobbes, since every man acts as best he can to secure his own interests. The notions of right and wrong arrive on the scene only with the Leviathan, and the standard is simple: “the law, which is the will and appetite of the state, is the measure,” and nothing else. Following the law laid down by the sovereign is right, breaking it is wrong, and that’s all there is to it. Anyone who appeals to other sources of authority, such as God, tradition, or ancient rights, is undermining the unity of the commonwealth, and likely plotting against it to benefit his own interests. Right and wrong, good and evil—all are in the hands of the sovereign.