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II. Was Hobbes a Lockean?
It is in the light of this vast transformation in the Western conception of God, nature, and reason coinciding with the disintegration of Christendom that we should take up the relation between Hobbes and Locke that forms the central question of Reilly’s pivotal eighth chapter. We can then ascertain more clearly what it might mean to speak of a “Hobbesian” dimension of American order, if indeed such a description is useful.
Locke, Living within Hobbes’ Unreal World
“The continuous dialogue with Hobbes,” wrote Funkenstein, “is the distinguishing mark of modern political theories.”[79] It is impossible to do justice to the depth and complexity of this “dialogue” when viewed simply as a binary choice to accept or reject him. “The most important political thinkers of the seventeenth century did not reject him outright even if they were profoundly irritated by his claims. Instead, they absorbed the full force of his arguments before transforming them into a different, sometimes even a contrary, theory.”[80] Peter Laslett, editor of the Cambridge edition of Two Treatises and no simple adherent to the “Hobbes with a smiley face” view of Locke’s political philosophy, concurs: “If Locke wrote his book as a refutation of Sir Robert Filmer, then he cannot have written it as a refutation of Thomas Hobbes.”[81] Laslett continues, “Locke rejected Hobbesian absolutism along with Filmer’s, of course: the word ‘Leviathan’ occurs in his Second Treatise, and there are phrases and whole arguments which recall the Hobbesian position, and must have been intended in some sense as comments upon them. Moreover, the thinking of Hobbes was of systematic importance to Locke and enters into his doctrines in a way which goes much deeper than a difference in political opinion.”[82]
The precise literary relationship between Hobbes and Locke is difficult to establish; the formal similarities in their argumentation are not. They are virtually identical. Each deduces the social compact with Euclidean precision from a highly abstract and counterfactual “state of nature” reduced to its basic “mechanical” elements, thereby repeating in the “new science of politics” the founding gesture of the new science more generally: premising the actual world on the basis of the counterfactual.[83] Both the form and content of this reasoning are mechanistic, as basic elements are abstracted from the totality in which they actually exist, treated as if they were ontologically basic, and then become the basis for reconstructing the whole from which they were originally abstracted.[84] Metaphysically speaking, this reflects the elevation of possibility or power over being-as-act in the aftermath of Aristotle’s overthrow.[85] Locke himself seems to hedge his bets on whether his “state of nature” should be regarded as a kind of ontological structure prior to history, an identifiable historical condition—or both at once.[86] For both Hobbes and Locke, the characteristics that define the natural state are not the multitude of relations characterizing our actual existence (kinship, for example) or the inclinations heretofore regarded as “built in” to our creaturehood (a desire for the good, an obligation to the flourishing of others, a supernatural end)—but freedom and equality, albeit somewhat differently conceived by each. For Hobbes, equality derives from our lethality: our capacity to kill each other as we seek to act without hindrance in preserving our lives.[87] For Locke, equality follows from the freedom of all men “to order their Actions, and dispose of their Possessions, and Persons as they think fit, within the bounds of the Law of Nature, without asking leave or depending upon the Will of any other Man.”[88] In the absence of a common authority, this entails an equal right (and obligation) to execute the law of nature. One can speak of a certain “individualism” here, but the primary sense is not a moral one. Rather it is that the indivisible unit, the singular, is the foundational element in a mechanistically-conceived order.
This difference in the way each conceives of equality underlies the material differences in their respective conceptions of the state of nature. Whereas Hobbes identities the fundamental condition as the “war of all against all,” Locke differentiates between the state of nature and the state of war, going beyond Hobbes and expanding the Law of Nature to include not only self-preservation, but an obligation not to “harm another in his Life, Health, Liberty, or Possessions.”[89] Hobbes never explains how the fact of our natural striving confers a right and obligation to self-preservation: a difficulty that would seem to be exacerbated by the fact that “justice” and “injustice” are, for him, consequent upon the erection of an authority who compels by fear. It seems like pure positivism. The difficulty persists in Locke, who nevertheless attempts to ground his obligations on the conflation of nature and art discussed above and on his “labor theory of property” writ large, so to speak: that is, because we are God’s “Workmanship,” we are God’s “Property.”[90] It is not clear, however, why this fact alone should oblige. One must look beyond the Second Treatise to the Essay and Locke’s reinvention of reason and of the wellspring of human action (changing it from the inclination toward the Good to “unease”) to understand how this might oblige and why it might be reasonable.
Locke’s state of nature, which he describes as a state of perfect freedom, seems positively idyllic in comparison with Hobbes’ grim view—but on closer inspection, this begins to look like a distinction without a difference.[91] The right of each person to enforce the Law of Nature proves to be an impossible possibility, since the very qualities of freedom and equality which constitute the perfection of the state of nature incline it immediately toward the state of war.[92] “Even the least difference,” Locke says, is apt to end in the state of war, presumably because even the attempt to enforce the law meets the defining condition for the state of war: “it being understood as a Declaration of a Design upon his life.”[93] “Not only do we lose a distinction between revenge and justice,” writes D. C. Schindler, “we also lose a distinction between justice and simple crime. Justice and injustice are effectively the same thing in the state of nature in which there is no common authority. However different Locke is from Hobbes in principle, he begins to appear quite close to him in fact.”[94] And so, as with Hobbes, the uncertainty of the natural condition drives men to part from this state of perfect freedom and erect a common authority to protect them.[95]
It is beginning to appear that Locke has premised his political edifice upon the unreality of Nature and its Law, insofar as each is merely a possibility of action or thought and not an actual order antecedently binding its participants and shaping their subjectivity and actions prior to their choosing.[96] Nevertheless, his difference from Hobbes about the state of nature does enable Locke to amend the basis and therefore the end of government, and it thereby seems to provide a fulcrum for leverage against an absolutism of the state in the form of natural rights. Rights, as Locke conceives them, are strictly analogous to property. One might say that property is the essential form of the right, or as Madison will later put it, “[A]s a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights.”[97] The foundational importance of property in Locke’s thought can be seen in his declaration that “Man has a Property in his own Person.”[98] (This notion, too, will be taken up and expanded by Madison.)[99] Property functions almost as a “principle of individuation.” Its essential characteristic is exclusivity, as Locke emphasizes in likening original appropriation to the consumption of fruit or wild venison and the enclosure of land.[100] By its very nature, property separates mine from thine—indeed me from thee—and “excludes the common right of other men.”[101] A right in the form of property serves to insulate one from the claims of others—those “Designs upon his life” that Locke identifies with the state of war. By negating these “designs,” rights create what D. C. Schindler calls “an enclosure of a field of power” outside of any real order, that transforms the innumerable claims characterizing our actual existence into possible objects of choice, subordinate to our freedom.[102] This is why Locke re-conceives of all human relations, whether natural, political, or religious, in voluntary or contractual terms. A government instituted for the protection of natural rights is thus a government instituted to protect this “enclosure of a field of power,” to preserve around each of us a zone of pure possibility free from the claims of others. A government that fails in this responsibility is not really a government and can be dissolved.
Reilly is therefore correct that Locke differs from Hobbes on this point—but this observation does not really apprehend the fundamental change that had already taken place in Hobbes’ aftermath. Abstracting political order from the natural and sacramental orders to which it had previously belonged creates the problem of establishing internal limits to a political order that has abolished all real “external” limits. This problem persists through the Federalist Papers; and federalism, the separation of powers, and the Bill of Rights are all attempts to solve it. But the problem of how to cope with the absolute power of a political sphere comprehended by no real order greater than itself is a problem bequeathed to the modern world by Hobbes. Pious appeals to the Laws of Nature, however sincerely intended, do not alter what remains a fundamentally Hobbesian conception of political order, especially when the state is the ultimate arbiter of those Laws’ meaning. In Locke, moreover, the Laws of Nature are not an actual order of efficacious truth present and determining the mind prior to its choosing—his denial of innate ideas precludes this. Rather they too are transformed into possible objects of reason or of will, which is why they prove to be impotent even in his imaginary State of Nature.
The attempt of modern liberal order to limit itself was therefore destined to fail. Locke remarks that “the end of Law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom.”[103] He does not seem to recognize that the reverse is also true. Rights, we said, enclose a “field of power” or possibility. A political order that exists principally to protect this field of possibility inevitably becomes the mediator of all human relations, insinuating itself between me and all claims upon the property that is my person. This enclosure of possibility, moreover, is threatened by anything that would define me prior to my choosing—even, as it turns out, my own nature. Liberal freedom thus initiates a war against every form of antecedent order, eventually aided and abetted by the new science and its conflation of truth and technological possibility.[104] Rights therefore must proliferate—as indeed they have—producing in actuality the denatured individuals that heretofore existed only at the theoretical foundations of liberal theory.[105] But with every new right comes an extension of the state’s power to enforce that right. The state thus becomes absolute precisely in the name of protecting freedom, arrogating to itself, almost by accident, authority even over the meaning of nature itself and a power beyond anything Hobbes could imagine.
Liberal order is not “Hobbesian,” therefore, because some petty tyrant arbitrarily commands or prohibits every action of its citizens. Its absolutism is a good deal more subtle. Liberal order is absolute because it is the transcendent whole within which social facts like churches or so-called “intermediate associations” are allowed to appear and beyond which there is nothing.[106] Liberal order is absolute because it is our mortal god.
Mechanism: The Ontological Basis of Liberal Order
Part One of Leviathan provides an ontological basis both for Hobbes’ state of nature and for his elimination of the “other sword” of ecclesial authority. Hobbes rejected the notion of “incorporeal substance” in the concluding part on “The Kingdom of Darkness,” for example, not only because of what he saw as the absurdity of such language, but because it was a tool of priestcraft.[107] There is no parallel to these chapters in Locke’s Two Treatises, no basis in metaphysics or natural philosophy for Locke’s state of nature. For that one must look to the Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Reilly does not give much evidence of having really studied the Essay, but he knows, with what he calls its “tinge of voluntarism and nominalism,” that it presents a problem for his thesis.[108] So he proposes simply to set it aside as a work in “empiricist epistemology,” presumably irrelevant in its political implications.[109] This ignores the fact, noted by Peter Laslett, that “the implications of Locke’s theory of knowledge for politics and political thinking were very considerable and acted quite independently of the influence of Two Treatises.”[110] It imposes an artificial separation between natural and political philosophy that is false to the real order of things and false to the way seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thinkers understood themselves. (Much better is the proposal of Shapin and Schaffer to read Leviathan as a treatise in natural philosophy first.)[111] It ignores any symbiosis between two texts that Locke wrote almost contemporaneously. And it leaves notions unexplained that are central to the intelligibility of Two Treatises but undeveloped there—freedom and reason chief among them. However, if one places the Essay Concerning Human Understanding in the position of those early chapters of Leviathan one can see the true nature of his project. And if one reads the Essay and the Two Treatises in this way side by side with Hobbes’ work, then one begins to see an ontological foundation shared by both their political philosophies, one with far-reaching implications for the subsequent shape of liberal order. Indeed when viewed from this more comprehensive vantage as a unity of natural and political philosophy, Locke’s work begins to appear as a significant development of and expansion upon Hobbes. Reilly’s question—was Locke really a Hobbesian?—may thus be looking through the wrong end of the telescope. The more fitting question may be whether Hobbes was a proto-Lockean.
Let us examine this foundation.
Hobbes and Locke are united in their desire to restrict and “regulate” the scope of thought. As Locke put it, “It is therefore worthwhile, to search out the bounds between opinion and knowledge, and examine by what measures, in things whereof we have no certain knowledge, we ought to regulate our assent, and moderate our persuasion.”[112] Locke builds upon and makes infinitely more sophistical Hobbes’ project of reconstructing thought and speech from their basic elements, with the object, in both their cases, of the policing of “abuses of speech” or “insignificant speech”—remote ancestors, no doubt, of Jefferson’s capital-N “Nonsense.” It comes as no surprise that most of these “abuses” turn out to be illicit compounds of simple ideas or hypostasizations, predicated on the naïve assumption by traditional philosophy that our words and ideas somehow give us access to the essences of things.[113] The religious and political implications are immediately obvious. If reason can be understood in such a way that the intelligibility of nature and all but the barest affirmation of God’s existence fall outside of it, then neither priestcraft, with its legitimating apparatus in “the schools,” nor the “enthusiasm” roiling seventeenth-century England can lay claim to political authority or qualify human freedom prior to the exercise of consent. The way is clear for the absolutization of political order and the redefinition of the Church in either Hobbesian terms (as an instrument of the sovereign) or in Lockean terms (as a voluntary association within civil society). It is Locke’s “congregationalist” conception that has become the de facto ecclesiology of American order.[114] Another equally fundamental result is that restriction of the “certainty and extent of human knowledge” will limit the range of things we can meaningfully be said to think about. With one stroke, the whole tradition of philosophical thinking about being and nature, theological doctrines articulated with categories borrowed from the tradition (e.g., the Trinity, the Eucharist), and traditional activities such as contemplation (and their monastic institution) heretofore regarded as the highest goal of human existence will be rendered obsolete and unintelligible, destined eventually to disappear from anything publicly recognizable as reason or knowledge.[115]
So both Hobbes and Locke begin with an inquiry into the causal origins of our ideas, with Locke famously declaring the mind a tabula rasa and denying so-called innate ideas. It is important to see, however, that the insurrection against a metaphysics of participation is not the conclusion of this inquiry, but its presupposition, built into Locke’s notion of an “idea” and his formulation of the question. (Indeed, a history of the changing meaning of “ideas” would capture much of this metaphysical revolution.)[116] Ideas no longer principally signify the exemplars in the divine mind that determine the intelligible natures of things, which the mind somehow participates in through Augustinian illumination or the Aristotelian abstraction of intelligible species. This was the metaphysical basis of the traditional understanding of truth as an adequatio rei ad intellectum. Absent this basis in intelligible form (Platonic or Aristotelian), there can be no adequation, only an opaque causal relation between a mind and a world that are utterly heterogeneous.[117] For this reason, Locke reduces the “idea” from an ontological to a psychological entity, defining it as “whatever is the object of the understanding.”[118] (This definition, strictly considered, leads to a radical conclusion heretofore only implicit in Descartes’ bifurcation of reality, a conclusion that will catalyze the skepticism of Hume and the critical project of Kant: that our knowledge is not of the world, but of our ideas only.)[119]
Hobbes and Locke both sought to locate the causal origins of thought in a newly mechanized conception of sense experience, caused (in Hobbes’ case) by an “external body, or object, which presseth the organ proper to each sense,” either mediately or immediately, or (in Locke’s case) by “impulse, the only way [which] we can conceive bodies to operate in.”[120] Locke will add to ideas derived from sensation a second “original” for our ideas: the so-called “ideas of reflection,” derived from the mind’s attention to its own activities.[121] For him, all of our subsequent ideas, their modes, and ultimately speech are built upon this twin foundation and never depart from it. Knowledge is of our ideas only. All the “abuses” which Locke will later analyze come from illicit combinations of these ideas or from thinking that ideas and words refer beyond themselves to give us knowledge of things. Hobbes’ mechanistic reconfiguration of the senses—and the corresponding reconception of appetite and aversion that underlies the brutality of his state of nature—has as its ontological foundation the new theory of matter as some kind of dimensive quantity liberated from its relation to form that came to prominence in the seventeenth century.[122] This is the ontology that operates in the Essay as well, though in a more complex way. For Locke, the so-called “primary qualities” of bodies produce in us the simple ideas “solidity, extension, figure, motion or rest, and number,” which must be regarded as “resemblances” of some real existence, since these belong to the very idea of body and cannot be separated from it.[123] Nevertheless, the “secondary qualities” such as “red” and “cold” that the primary qualities produce in us bear no resemblance to anything. The mind is now separated by an ontological abyss from the world. Knowledge has ceased to be a participation in the self-communication of intelligible being. This self-communication was the primitive basis of the Platonic-Aristotelian understanding of causality. With being now emptied of its intrinsic intelligibility, causality has been transformed into a kind of force (Locke’s “impulse”) and will soon cease to be intelligible. Reality is thus bifurcated into a merely subjective sphere of meaning and quality and an external realm, closed off to us and unintelligible in itself, drained of the intrinsic form and finality conferred on it by Platonic and Aristotelian form. This emptying necessitates a profound transformation of what were traditionally regarded as transcendental attributes of being. Both Locke and Hobbes reduce truth to a property of propositions dependent upon “the connexion and agreement, or disagreement and repugnancy of any of our ideas,” an anticipation of the coherence theories of later analytic philosophy.[124] And both deny goodness any ontological (and therefore causal) weight, rejecting the summum bonum and redefining “what we call good” as “what has an aptness to produce pleasure in us.”[125] This massive ontological transvaluation leads Locke to reconceive the wellspring of action, and it underlies his reinvention not only of the political sphere but of Christianity as well.
Locke differs from Hobbes in holding out eternal rewards and punishments as opposed to the merely temporal punishments doled out by the Leviathan. Reilly is correct about this, but he completely misunderstands why it is “most important.”[126] It is not an indication that the traditional principles of form and finality have been retained, but that they have been overthrown, evacuated as intrinsic principles of motion and rest and transposed into the “designs” of the God whose “workmanship” we were in the Second Treatise and whose laws extrinsically govern nature in a fashion analogous to Newton’s laws in the physical realm. The tradition understood the highest meaning of liberty as the undivided love which fulfills my natural inclination toward the good and which alone makes my action an expression of my desires.[127] This differs radically from Locke’s conception of liberty, though Locke takes some pains to disguise this difference. With goodness emptied of ontological weight, liberty can no longer consist in the purity of an undivided will embracing a singular object of affection that realizes an end antecedently given along with my nature—freedom as an actuality, not a potency. This loss is reflected in his reduction of happiness from an objective fulfillment of my nature to “the utmost pleasure we are capable of.”[128] Instead, Locke redefines liberty as “the power to do or to forebear any action,” a possibility foregone the moment it is actualized, thereby transforming the heretofore antecedent realities of God, nature, the moral law, etc., from anterior sources of freedom into possible objects of that power that I may or may not choose to want.[129] For Locke, the Laws of Nature merely qualify the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain by adding a cost-benefit analysis regarding which actions might conduce to eternal pleasure or pain. This answers our earlier question of how the law obliges. Locke concedes that “the greatest visible good does not always raise men’s minds in proportion to the greatness,” but the prospect that God, disposing of his “property” as he sees fit, might reward our deeds with eternal punishment appeals to the “unease,” the restless disquiet that has, for Locke, replaced the inclination toward the Good as the fundamental wellspring of human action and that compelled perfectly free man to abandon his imaginary State of Nature.[130]
From Leviathan to the New Atlantis
Locke draws out a radical implication of the heterogeneity of mind and world that Descartes and Hobbes, two forebears in this bifurcated reality, never quite reached.[131] It is contained in the radical conclusion, noted above, that knowledge is of our ideas only. Locke proceeds as if the simple ideas of solidity, figure, bulk, etc., were the elemental building blocks of reality. And he gives grounds for supposing that bodies are “really” like that, certainly more “like that” than the secondary qualities which they occasion in us, ideas such as colors, sounds, and flavors.[132] But he does not identify these “primary qualities” of bodies with their corresponding ideas simply, nor with the essence of matter—which he thought equally unknowable as spirit.[133] This would be to take ideas for things. Rather he describes these qualities as the power of bodies—note once again the primacy of possibility—to produce those ideas in us.[134] And he likewise defines secondary qualities as the properties of the object with the power to produce the perceptions or ideas of color, sound, etc. But the nature of this power as power, as the mere capacity to affect, is unknowable in principle, as is the so-called “causal connection” binding these powers to their effects.[135] Why the extended world of bulk and figure, or the world that produces such ideas in us, should also produce ideas of color and sound—why it should produce meaning at all—is and must remain unfathomable. There “is no conceivable connexion betwixt the one and the other.”[136] Anticipating Hume, he will say that only experience—the “constant and regular connexion” they have in “the ordinary course of things”—can establish that the one follows regularly from the other, and following Bacon he will wish for a method by which experience “were more improved.”[137]
Locke thus provides a philosophical justification for philosophical suicide. His operative ontology bars the way to further ontological speculation and precludes any philosophy of being, its principles, and its elements that would qualify as knowledge. Lockean “skepticism” is thus more radical and more complete than anything explicitly stated by Descartes or Hobbes, though he, like them, is quite certain of the limits of reason. Neither the clarity and distinctness of our ideas nor a proof that God is not a deceiver could, for Locke, suffice to guarantee that ideas give us a true representation of the world, since “true” now refers merely to the relationship among our ideas themselves.[138] Mind and world remain eternally separated by an abyss bridged only by “impulse,” a “causal connexion” that we cannot understand. The “bounds” and “extent” of our knowledge thus turn out to be quite narrow, and yet it is this very narrowness—the unintelligibility of being and nature—that warrants Locke’s embrace of the Baconian experimentalism that Hobbes, despite his conflation of nature and art and his own constructivism, held in suspicion.[139] The “Reason” exalted by Reilly in Locke’s name is thus in one sense a much more humble creature than Reilly acknowledges. It is true that it still suffices “to secure the great ends of morality and religion,” but only because religion will henceforth be reduced to a morality only arbitrarily related to our mechanistic reality. And yet, in another sense, reason’s humility proves to be a false modesty, for its real benefit is to increase our mastery over nature, to attain “whatever is necessary for the conveniences of life,” and to “put within the reach of [men’s] discovery the comfortable provision for this life and the way that leads to a better.”[140] Metaphysics becomes unintelligible in the wake of this philosophical suicide; natural philosophy is absorbed into the empirical and experimental sciences. The mind is left with morality and technology; and morality, as Alasdair MacIntyre explained over thirty years ago, will soon afterward cease to be regarded as a matter of reason at all.[141] This partly explains the overwhelmingly moralistic character of American religion, as well as Whig Catholicism’s inability to see beyond a moral diagnosis of America’s ills to the “technological” ontology harbored within animating principles.[142] But it is this technological ontology that has come to define for us what it means to think—and what there is to think about.
To speak then, of Locke as a Hobbesian or Hobbes as a proto-Lockean, is not to allege a malign esoteric intent on the part of Locke or that of the Founders who numbered him among their sources of inspiration. Neither is it to deny other influences upon their work, or the possibility of locating Locke with the Judicious Hooker within an alternative tradition from which he and the American Founders undoubtedly drew. To locate him in that tradition in a way that completely neglects the permanent effects of the Reformation and the revolution in every branch of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thought, however, is to fail to detect the soldiers inside the horse. Finally, to speak of the Hobbesian dimension of liberal order is not to suggest that the fictional Lockean commonwealth or the real American Republic is a Hobbesian despot that dictates everything one can and cannot do. To the contrary, atomization and fragmentation are the logical consequences of Lockean liberty, even in the state of nature, and a society organized around the Lockean conception of natural rights will be a virtual factory for the production of new factions. America’s peculiar genius for birthing new religious sects surely attest to this. It was the genius of Federalist 10 to perceive that atomization increases rather than diminishes the power and stability of the state.
To propose that Hobbes might be a proto-Lockean is to suggest, however, that Locke succeeded, even beyond Hobbes, in fulfilling Hobbes’ technological ambition to create a “mortal God,” whose “divine” attributes of unity and indivisibility mimic and indeed ultimately replace those of the Immortal God.[143] What do I mean? I mean that liberal order is for us the all-encompassing whole within which we live and move and have our being, and beyond which there is nothing at all. Within its transcendent horizon, so-called “intermediate associations” are permitted to appear like so many congregationalist polities as mere parts of this comprehensive whole comprehended by nothing.[144] I also mean to suggest, moreover, that this artificial God is predicated upon an “artificial” nature, whose opaque and mechanical ontological-epistemological premises define the limits of our intellectual horizons and commence an interminable pursuit of technical conquest that is increasingly our collective raison d’etre. In which case the ultimate import of Locke’s “Hobbesianism”—or Hobbes “Lockeanism”—is as midwife to the establishment of Bacon’s New Atlantis on the western shores of the Atlantic.[145]
Download the full PDF of parts I, II and III here:
[79] Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination, 327.
[80] Ibid. He gives Giambattista Vico as a case in point. “He refused to accept the paradigmatic role of mechanics precisely because he endorsed the principle that truth and what is made are identical, verum et factum convertuntur. Since we did not make nature, we cannot hope to understand it properly, either; but the science of humanity is entirely open to our investigation because—here Vico agrees entirely with Hobbes—society is a human artifact, because ‘we have made the commonwealth ourselves.’ Our second, historical nature is entirely our own making” (328).
[81] Laslett, Two Treatises, 67. The observation complicates Reilly’s classification of absolutisms. Laslett adds, “Locke certainly absorbed something from patriarchalism. It has been shown above that there had been a time when he went a very long way with this traditional argument. But he did not learn enough, not enough to understand such institutions as the family, the nation, the community of a neighborhood, as we think they should be understood. And Hobbes could do nothing with the patriarchal attitude. To him patriarchal societies were those ‘the concord whereof dependeth on natural lust’, and that was all. He was unwilling to distinguish the authority of a father from the naked exercise of force. In all these respects, then, Hobbes, Locke, Tyrrell, Sidney and others were on the one side, with Filmer and the tradition he stood for on the other. Leibniz apparently classed Two Treatises and Leviathan in contrast with Patriarchia, and Leibniz was in no doubt that Filmer was Locke’s target throughout the book. A controversy between Locke and Hobbes would have been within one party only, and could never have given rise to the characteristic political attitude of the modern world” (70).
[82] Ibid., 67-8.
[83] See Funkenstein’s discussion of the history of this tendency and the difference between the seventeenth- and fourteenth-century versions of it (117-201). “Benedetti and Galileo, Huygens and Descartes, Pascal and Newton used their imaginary experiments in a definite way which differs toto caelo from their medieval predecessors not in discipline and rigor, but in their physical interpretation. Counterfactual states were imagined in the Middle Ages—sometimes even, we saw, as limiting cases. But they were never conceived as commensurable to any of the factual states from which they were extrapolated. No number or magnitude could be assigned to them, even if the schoolmen were to give up their reluctance to measure due to their conviction that no measurement is absolutely precise. For Galileo, the limiting case, even where it did not describe reality, was the constitutive element in its explanation” (Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination, 177). See also Hanby, No God, No Science?, 108-49.
[84] This is so common that one is tempted to regard it as a formal feature of modern thought. We see it, e.g., in Descartes’ mechanical reconstruction of the world after his epoché, or in the Newtonian laws of motion, which presuppose the inertial tendencies of bodies that never actually subsist in inertial isolation.
[85] D. C. Schindler’s devastating—and to my mind, decisive—critique of Locke is largely a critique of how all the fundamental elements of Locke’s political philosophy are conceived in terms of this primacy. My own work has traced out its effects in natural philosophy and early-modern science up through Darwin. Schindler, Freedom From Reality, 1-127. Hanby, No God, No Science?, 107-249.
[86] Locke acknowledges the objection in Second Treatise, II, 14. On the one hand, he extrapolates to the level of “Princes and Rulers of Independent Governments throughout the world” to argue that such a state has never been absent and calls on the authority of the “Judicious Hooker” to suggest it as a historical condition that precedes actual human society. This interpretation would seem to be strengthened by Locke’s declaration, “Thus in the beginning, all the world was America,” which testifies to the power that the New World exercised over Locke’s imagination (and perhaps also to the influence of Hobbes: Leviathan, I, 13, 11), to the point of being archetypal for the origins of civil society rather than the other way around. On the other hand, he affirms that “all Men are naturally in that State, and remain so, till by their own consent they make themselves Members of some Politick Society,” which seems to support an ontological, or perhaps a “phenomenological,” interpretation, especially when one takes into consideration Locke’s doctrine of “tacit consent” (VIII, 119), which is given simply from being born.
[87] Hobbes, Leviathan, I, 13, 1; I, 14, 1-2.
[88] Locke, Second Treatise, II, 4.
[89] Hobbes, Leviathan, I, 14, 3; Locke, Second Treatise, II, 6. This contrast can be overdrawn. Even Hobbes, nemesis of the natural law tradition in Reilly’s telling, asserts that it is “a precept, or general rule of reason: that every man ought to endeavor peace, as far as he has hope of obtaining it” (Leviathan, I, 14, 4).
[90] The tradition is of course replete with references to God’s “art,” but these references were always qualified by a) a strong understanding of the difference between things existing-by-nature and artifacts, b) a strong sense of analogy whereby any similarity of the creature to God was surpassed by an ever-greater dissimilarity, and therefore c) a strong sense of the difference between creation proper, which presupposes nothing but the divine goodness, and every other form of making, which presupposes and modifies being. Because of the radicality of creation, predicated on the transcendent otherness of God as ipsum esse subsistens, Aquinas was able to say that in giving being to creatures—the most interior of perfections presupposed in every other qualification of the creature—God was “in all things, innermostly.” Augustine was also keenly aware of the absolute otherness of God the world. Thus he would likewise say that God is more interior to me than I am to myself. See Aquinas, ST I.8.1, resp.; Augustine, Conf., III.6.11. One can glimpse here that a proper sense of divine transcendence, creation ex nihilo, and a metaphysics of the participation of creaturely being in the divine actuality all go hand-in-hand and imply a profound sense of anterior order, whereas the conflation of nature and art has as its theological root a loss of divine transcendence and a reduction of creation to “manufacture,” presided over by a God now extrinsically juxtaposed to creation and relating to it principally through an equally extrinsic law. See Hanby, No God, No Science?, 107-49, 301-74.
[91] Many scholars have reached this conclusion, but I regard the analysis of D. C. Schindler as decisive. See Schindler, Freedom From Reality, 66-98.
[92] Compare with Hobbes: “Nature hath made men so equal, in the faculties of the body, and mind; as that though there be found one man sometimes manifestly stronger in body, or of quicker mind than another; yet when all is reckoned together, the difference between man, and man, is not so considerable, as that one man can thereupon claim to himself any benefit, to which another may not pretend, as well as he. For as to the strength of the body, the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machination, or by confederacy with others, that are in the same danger with himself” (Hobbes, Leviathan, I, 13, 1).
[93] Locke, Second Treatise, III, 17.
[94] Schindler, Freedom from Reality, 76.
[95] Locke, Second Treatise, VII, 77; IX, 123.
[96] We can suggest an analogy here to the way that inertial motion provides the counterfactual basis for the movement of bodies that never in reality exist in undisturbed inertial isolation.
[97] W. T. Hutchinson, et al. (eds.), The Papers of James Madison, vol. 14 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1977), 266-68, available at The Founders’ Constitution, http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch16s23.html.
[98] Locke, Second Treatise, V, 26.
[99] “This term in its particular application means ‘that dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in exclusion of every other individual.’ In its larger and juster meaning, it embraces every thing to which a man may attach a value and have a right; and which leaves to every one else the like advantage. In the former sense, a man’s land, or merchandise or money is called his property. In the latter sense, a man has a property in his opinions and the free communication of them. He has a property of peculiar value in his religious opinions, and in the profession and practice dictated by them. He has a property very dear to him in the safety and liberty of his person. He has an equal property in the free use of his faculties and the free choice of the objects on which to employ them. In a word, as a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights. Where an excess of power prevails, property of no sort is duly respected. No man is safe in his opinions, his person, his faculties, or his possessions. Where there is an excess of liberty, the effect is the same, tho’ from an opposite cause” (Madison, The Papers of James Madison, vol. 14, 266).
[100] Locke, Second Treatise, V, 26.
[101] Ibid., V, 27.
[102] Schindler, Freedom From Reality, 182. For an excellent explanation of why this conception of freedom is a “deceptive and self-destroying illusion” (188), see pp. 152-88.
[103] Locke, Second Treatise, VI, 57.
[104] I have written about this in numerous places. See most recently, Hanby, “What Comes Next,” New Polity, op cit.
[105] Pierre Manent’s assessment of Hobbes is applicable here as well: “One is tempted to say that Hobbes is absolutist in spite of his individualism. But, on the contrary, Hobbes is absolutist because he is so rigorously individualistic” (Manent, An Intellectual History of Liberalism, trans. Rebecca Balinski [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994], 28).
[106] Political order thus becomes “secular” in John Milbank’s and Andrew Willard Jones’ sense: “Our own vision is secular. Even when we acknowledge the importance of religion, we do so from within the assumption of the secular: that reality itself is ultimately free of the religious. Religions come and go; they are relative. The secular is permanent; it is absolute and universal. To us, the secular is the field on which the game of history—including religious history—is played.... In such an approach, “religion” is a category that functions within the secular” (Jones, Before Church and State, 3). See also Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 9-26.
[107] See Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, 92 ff.
[108] Reilly, America on Trial, 238.
[109] Ibid., 233.
[110] Laslett, Two Treatises, 84. He continues, “The famous doctrine of the tabula rasa, for example, the blank sheet of the mind on which experience and experience alone can write, made men begin to feel that the whole world is new for everyone and we are all absolutely free of what has gone before. The political results of such an attitude have been enormous. It was, perhaps, the most effective solvent of the natural-law attitude.”
[111] Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, 92.
[112] Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (London: Penguin, 1997), Intro.3; compare with Hobbes, Leviathan, I, 3, 3-4. Locke continues: “If by this inquiry into the nature of understanding, I can discover the powers thereof, how far they reach; to what things they are in any degree proportionate; and where they fail us, I suppose it may be of use, to prevail with the busy mind of man to be more cautious in meddling with things exceeding its comprehension, to stop, when it is at the utmost extent of its tether; and to sit down in a quiet ignorance of those things, which upon examination, are found to be beyond the reach of our capacities. We should not then perhaps be so forward, out of an affectation of an universal knowledge, to raise questions, and perplex ourselves and others with disputes about things, to which our understandings are not suited, and of which we cannot frame in our minds any clear or distinct perceptions, or whereof (as it has perhaps too often happened) we have not any notions at all.”
[113] Compare Locke, Essay, II.32.13; III.10.1-34 and Hobbes, Leviathan, I, 5, 5-19; I, 7, 27; IV, 46.
[114] One of the best explanations of this remains William T. Cavanaugh, “A Fire Strong Enough to Consume the House: The Wars of Religion and the Rise of the State,” Modern Theology 11.4 (October 1995): 397-420.
[115] This is one reason, perhaps, why Locke’s Reasonableness of Christianity conspicuously omits any mention of the Trinity and why Locke was widely regarded (along with Newton) as a Socinian. See Stephen D. Snobelen, “ ‘God of gods and Lord of lords’: The Theology of Isaac Newton’s General Scholium to the Principia,” Osiris 16 (2001): 169-208, at 194.
[116] See Roger Ariew and Marjorie Grene, “Ideas, in and before Descartes,” in Ariew, Descartes and the Last Scholastics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 58-76.
[117] What Gilson writes of Ockham is largely true of Hobbes and Locke, and it anticipates the culmination of this line of thinking in Hume. Gilson writes, “There is no criticism of the notion of causality in the doctrine of Ockham. To him, causality is given in sense intuition together with substances and their qualities. Only, for the same reason as above, this is all we know about causality. Since no real thing participates in the nature of any other real thing, the simple intuition of a thing cannot give us any knowledge, either intuitive or abstractive, of the nature of another thing which we have not perceived before by sensation or intellection. How do we know that a thing is a cause of a certain effect? Simply by observing that when that thing is present what we call its effect habitually follows” (Etienne Gilson, Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages [London: Sheed and Ward, 1955], 496). See also Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination, 144.
[118] Locke, Essay, Intro.8. Locke’s entire argument against innate speculative and practical principles presupposes and depends upon this reduction. He denies, for example, that the principle of noncontradiction is an innate principle on the grounds that “children and idiots” (and presumably many in between) have not thought of it (Essay, I.2.4-5). Whereas for Aristotle, it was a “most certain principle of being” that one affirms in thinking at all (Metaph., IV.3, 1005b10).
[119] Locke, Essay, IV.1.1.
[120] Hobbes, Leviathan, I, 1, 1; Locke, Essay, II.8.11.
[121] Locke, Essay, II.1.2.
[122] Descartes had identified the “essence” of matter with extension. Newton disputed Descartes’ definition as part of his rejection of Descartes’ vortex theory of planetary motion. Nevertheless, like Descartes, he invoked a methodological “principle of annihilation” to destroy all those qualities without which body could not be thought, separating the definition of body from extension (so as to posit absolute space) but still conceiving its “essence” as a kind of dimensive quantity: “that which fills place…so completely that it wholly excludes other things of the same kind or other bodies, as if it were impenetrable being”; and alternatively: “determined quantities of extension which omnipresent God has endowed with certain conditions.” These conditions in brief, are 1) mobility, 2) impenetrability such that two of the same kind cannot simultaneously occupy the same place, and hence they interact according to law, and 3) the power to excite certain kinds of perceptions in the mind and to be moved by mind or will. Newton, De Gravitatione, 122, 149.
[123] Locke, Essay, II.8.9-17.
[124] Locke, Essay, IV.1.1; see also II.32.1. Compare Hobbes, Leviathan, I, 4, 11.
[125] Ibid., II.21.42, emphasis mine; see Hobbes, I, 6, 6, “For whatsoever is the object of any man’s appetite or desire, that is it, which for his part he calleth good.” For his rejection of a summum bonum or finis ultimus, see I, 11, 1. Correspondingly in Locke, “moral goodness” is reconceived as “the conformity or disagreement men’s voluntary actions have to a rule to which they are referred, and by which they are judged” (Essay II.28.4), and virtue is no longer a habit through which my given end is realized and my nature perfected, but an action conforming to law, or more fundamentally, “those actions, which amongst [men] are judged praiseworthy” (II.28.10.).
[126] Reilly, America on Trial, 246.
[127] See, e.g., Augustine, De Civ., XIX.4, 10-12, 15. Michael Hanby, Augustine and Modernity (London: Routledge, 2003).
[128] Locke, Essay, II.21.42.
[129] Locke, Essay, II.21.8. For Schindler it is precisely Locke’s reduction of freedom from an actuality to a mere power or possibility—that is, its separation of the agent from reality and its reconfiguration of the given realities constitutive of the actual world as simply objects of possible choice—that accounts for its inherently “diabolical” and deceptive character, its tendency to undermine and destroy the very thing it promises. This deception derives from the fact that as mere possibility Lockean freedom is fundamentally unreal. See Schindler, Freedom From Reality, 13-192.
[130] Locke, Essay, II.21.29. I would suggest that the role which unease plays in Locke’s theory of volition is paralleled by the role of fear—specifically fear of death—in Hobbes.
[131] It is important to recognize that this “bifurcation” persists inside of any attempt, whether materialist or idealist, to reduce the whole of reality to one of its poles. See Hanby, No God, No Science?, 107-49.
[132] See, e.g., Essay, II.23.24, IV.5.8.
[133] Ibid., IV.3.16.
[134] Locke, Essay, II.8.7. As we saw previously, there is an echo of this idea in Newton.
[135] On the absence of a necessary (and intelligible) connection, see Locke, Essay, II.8.25; IV.3.12–14.
[136] Locke, Essay, IV.3.13.
[137] Ibid., IV.3.28; IV.3.16.
[138] Of course the idea that knowledge is principally a matter of “representation” already presupposes the Cartesian separation of mind and world.
[139] See once again Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, 110-54.
[140] Locke, Essay, IV.4.6; I.1.5.
[141] MacIntyre, After Virtue (South Bend: Notre Dame Press, 1981).
[142] See, e.g., Thomas G. West, The Political Theory of the American Founding: Natural Rights, Public Policy, and the Moral Conditions of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). West’s book should be considered as belonging in the same genre as Reilly’s—which is unsurprising, perhaps, since each did his graduate work at Claremont—and it misses the point in a similar way, treating the Founders’ commitment to Christian morality as the key to the meaning of the American Founding and as a sufficient rebuttal to its critics.
[143] Liberal order thus perfects what Rousseau saw as the essence of sovereignty. This essence lies near to the heart of what we might call the metaphysics of the modern state. Rousseau had criticized his liberal predecessors for “having no precise notion of what sovereignty is” and “for taking mere manifestations of authority for parts of the authority itself.” These manifestations, he maintained, are divisible—into legislative and executive functions, for example—and through them the state can even limit itself to create a free space for the exercise of private agency. But as mere manifestations, they are the expression of a sovereignty which is unitary, inalienable, indivisible—in essence, transcendent. If one recognizes the traditional divine predicates in this description, I would suggest it is because liberal order is, in effect, the mortal god which Hobbes had sought to construct. As Pierre Manent puts it, “The mystery of the modern executive is the mystery of its unity” (Manent, An Intellectual History of Liberalism, 49). See, Rousseau, The Social Contract (London: Penguin Classics, 1968), II.8.
[144] Obviously, then, I reject the premise behind these questions: “If the American Founding was inspired by Hobbesian ontology, why did it not look like it? The denial of formal and final causality defines Hobbes’ thought and his unlimited Leviathan. If they shared in a similar metaphysical rejection, why did the Founders not replicate a Leviathan state?” (Reilly, America on Trial, 310). The American Founding does look like Hobbes’ Leviathan, though it looks like it in its developed, Lockean-Baconian mode, realizing Hobbes’ “technological ambition” on a technological as well as a political plane.
[145] For more on the technocratic fate of liberal order, see my articles cited in footnote 2 above.