To Live Among Wolves
Thomas Hobbes on Liberty.
Just above the entrance in the town hall of my hometown in northwestern Transylvania hangs Romania’s coat of arms. Shown in the image here, it depicts a crowned eagle raising the cross in his beak and the symbols of power, sword and scepter, with his claws. They declare the sovereignty of the union of five historical Romanian provinces represented by their traditional flags. Below the golden aquila, the text translates as “Town Hall of Zalau” with the motto, placed right under it, “Nimeni nu e mai presus de lege” or “No one is above the law.” If we read the image from bottom up, we discover an amusing example of sovereignty found in Hobbes and a depiction of the concept of state of exception in Agamben. No one is above the law, except the Town Hall of Zalau, except Romania. The implication is that the individual may thrive only through the sovereign or must otherwise find liberty somewhere else.
Perhaps in exile.
To live outside of rules and regulation to the full extent of your personal abilities to provide for yourself and for the ones you care for without any obstacles set by a political entity. It is an anarchist’s wet dream and Hobbes’s nightmare. The anarchist considers government obsolete. “Anarchists taking over the world and leave you alone.” You know the memes. The classical liberal keeps the government to a size carefully balanced around absolute necessity and still be skeptic of its utility. With Marx, we know what happens. Everyone owns everything simultaneously, but history shows us that it is actually the government that calls the shots (all the shots). Government reached a level that would scare even Hobbes. And it is difficult to scare someone who said that people should willingly give up their liberty for security.
Hobbes insists in the opening of De Cive that “Man is a God to man, and man is a wolf to man.” He had at least two intentions here. First, as Amnon Lev points out, to signal the departure from the Aristotelian philosophical framework. Aristotle, as we remember, said that whoever is not part of the polis, except by chance or on purpose, is either a beast or a god. Second, Hobbes wants to show that human nature is predatory, a view that leads to the description of nature as “bellum omnium contra omnes” [“that condition which is called war as if of every man, against every man”]. In this state of nature life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Hobbes measures the quality of life outside of the state. Remember that Hobbes is a materialist. He views political philosophy as a component of natural science which means that good government can be measured, explained, and even achieved objectively.
For Hobbes, the success of government is measured through the ability of political institutions to preserve human life. People, in the view of the English political theorist, are irrational and impulsive with appetite for power and destruction. These appetites need to be kept in check. Leo Strauss thinks that Hobbes “denied the moral value of all virtues which do not contribute to the making of the State, to consolidating peace, to protecting man against the danger of violent death, or more exactly, expressed, of all virtues which do not proceed from fear of violent death.” The disagreement with Aristotle, therefore, is that for the ancient philosopher the good city is the purposeful, harmonious, interactions of citizens while Hobbes considers that a good government, a sovereign entity, needs to coerce the irrational appetites (passions) of people for them to pursue their primary obligation in the state of nature — self-preservation. This duty of self-preservation originates, according to Lev, in divine command.
With this idea, something profound, yet subtle, happens in the history of political thought. We all know that kings at that time had a divine right to rule. Robert Filmer vehemently supported this idea. Hobbes agrees that kings have a divine right to rule, but… the king has a duty to the people too. Rather than to exercise his divine right to rule as he pleases, the king now has a duty to uphold God’s command and to create the necessary harmony for subjects to live in peace. Failure to do so meant that people had the right to replace him. Hobbes sought a mutual symbiotic relationship between king and people in sovereignty.
In The Elements of Law, Hobbes understands liberty as action, ‘liberty to do or not to do.’ Quentin Skinner comments that “the process of arriving at a decision to perform any action may therefore be said to consist in ‘taking away of our own liberty.’” For clarification, take the following response from The Question of Liberty to Bramhall’s accusation of licentious thinking: “I do indeed conceive that deliberation is an act of imagination or fancy; nay more, that reason and understanding are acts of the imagination, that is to say, they are imaginations.” Thus, we de-liberate through decision making. In The Elements of Law he places the individual in an initial ‘blameless liberty’ before the process of deliberation. Hobbes then proceeds to call this ‘natural liberty’ without caring to provide a satisfactory definition. Furthermore, passions guide actions. The passions are sorted in two categories: appetites that force action, which are the violent, irrational, impulses and desires of man, and aversions that withhold them.
Fear is probably responsible for withholding action. Hobbes writes in the Leviathan:
“Fear and liberty are consistent; as when a man throweth his goods into the sea for fear the ship should sink, he doth it nevertheless very willingly, and may refuse to do it if he will: it is therefore the action, of one that was free: so a man sometimes pays his depth, only for fear of imprisonment, which because nobody hindered him from detaining, was the action of a man at liberty.”
Thus, the individual is not losing liberty because of the necessity to preserve his life.
In Chapter XXI of Leviathan, Hobbes defines liberty as follows:
“Liberty, or freedom, signifieth (properly) the absence of opposition; (by opposition, I mean external impediments of motion;) and may be applied no less to irrational, and inanimate creatures, then to rational.”
Liberty, then, exists only in the absence of physical obstacles. For the individual to lose liberty is to be in a position in which an external entity can prohibit his physical ability to move. Therefore, “a freeman, is he, that in those things, which by his strength and wit he is able to do, is not hindered to what he has a will to.”
We are inclined to consider the introduction of “wit” as obstacles of censorship. However, I believe that it is appropriate to interpret “strength and wit” in the framework of the mentality of power as it appears in the Homeric epics. Achilles is free through physical prowess, arete, which later finds its way in the abstract under the form of “wit” as represented by Odysseus (for more on this transition see Mihai I. Spariosu’s God of Many Names). Hobbes also advises that it is “absurd” to associate liberty to anything else but bodies.
Hobbes declares that man is incapable of utilizing liberty without succumbing to the irrational forces of the passions. Therefore, the king and other representatives must step in:
“The Athenians and Romans were free; that is, free commonwealths: not that any particular men had the liberty to resist their own representative; but that their representative had the liberty to resist, or invade other people.”
The liberty that is important is that of the “commonwealth” instead of individual liberty. In the state of nature, full of wolves always at each other’s throats, the individual finds it morally compelling to give up liberty in favor of security and abide to God’s command of self-preservation.
The individual-commonwealth relationship requires covenants which imply the loss of ‘blameless’ or ‘absolute’ liberty. The covenants between individuals and the king establish, as we see in Chapter XX and XXI of Leviathan, ‘bodies politic’ and representative institutions. In Hobbesian terms, even if the individual’s liberty is restricted by the terms of the agreement, he is still free under the king to the extent that the king does not find it necessary to impose rules that would further restrict freedom or to exile the individual.
“If the sovereign banishes his subject; during the banishment, he is not subject. But he has it sent on a message, or hath leave to travel, is still subject; but it is, by contract between sovereigns, not by virtue of the covenant of subjection. For whosoever entereth into another’s dominion, is subject to all the laws thereof; unless he has a privilege by the amity of the sovereigns, or by special license” writes Hobbes in Leviathan.
Exile means that the individual is thrown back into the state of nature. Death is expected as the murdered would not be held accountable by any law. For example, when Nero was declared by the Senate to be the enemy of the state, the Roman citizen had the duty to kill the former emperor. Also interesting from the paragraph above is that the sovereign is in the state of nature. Kings are free to collaborate for peace to preserve the lives of their subjects. Kings, therefore, just as the exiled find themselves in the state of exception.
Giorgio Agamben opens the book Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life with an explanation: “the paradox of sovereignty consists in the fact that the sovereign is, at the same time, outside and inside the juridical order.” In other words, the sovereign king can declare: “I, the sovereign, who am outside the law, declare that there is nothing outside the law.” The exiled, however, as Hobbes notes, may not be under the juridical order of the sovereign. So, what is he then?
‘Bare life.’ Life outside of biopolitics and ‘body politic.’ Life tossed to a liminal place dominated by strife and violence. Agamben recalls old Germanic and Anglo-Saxon sources underlie “the bandit’s liminal status by defining him as a wolf-man (wargus, werewolf).” Of course, “homo hominis lupus”.
The interesting connection between Agamben’s state of exception and Hobbes resides in the notion of banishment or exile and the paradox that emerges in the sovereign-subject relationship. Just as Hobbes thinks of ‘absolute liberty’ in the state of nature before the individual freely deliberates and transfers that liberty to the sovereign, Agamben sees bare life as the politically unregulated life. The political (and legal) relationship between the sovereign and the banished is mutual: the latter’s status is determined by the former’s ability to declare him the banished while he is sovereign in the state of exile and, therefore, back into the Hobbesian state of nature. ‘Absolute’ liberty exists only in the state of exception.
For Hobbes, liberty is the ability to move freely and to do what one wishes. Yet, what the individual will do is guided by passions and through agreements with ‘body politic’ the state of nature is subdued. Peaceful, harmonious, life is available as a consequence. The king, however, can find it necessary to exile individuals to preserve peace.
We do not usually associate exile with positive potential. On the contrary, it bears connotations of suffering and persecution. While, of course, this is mostly true, I would like to propose the idea that pure liberty can be found in the perpetual state of exception that is exile. Mihai I. Spariosu notes in Modernism and Exile that the person is ‘in no man’s land’ upon leaving his country. The individual now finds himself in-between social structures, cultures, and languages, in a position that offers him freedom. The positive outcome of exile comes when “instead of brooding over his exilic condition, yearning for the lost center, or conversely, engaging in the power game of replacing the center with the margin, the exiled person becomes aware of his radical freedom.”
The subject for next week may be“the potential of exile” (or “time travel through music”). Stay tuned!
