By Gordon Hull
Foucault aligns Hobbes with juridical power, not biopower. Juridical power is repressive and takes life away; it is epitomized by monarchy. Biopower, in contrast, is power that “exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations” (HS 1, 137). Foucault then famously says that “the representation of power has remained under the spell of monarchy. In political thought and analysis, we still / have not cut off the head of the king” (HS1, 88-89). In Society must be Defended, he argues that:
“Rather than asking ourselves what the sovereign looks like from on high, we should be trying to discover how multiple bodies, forces, energies, matters, desires, thoughts, and so on are gradually, progressively, actually and materially constituted as subjects, or as the subject. To grasp the material agency of subjugation insofar as it constitutes subjects would, if you like, be to do precisely the opposite of what Hobbes was trying to do in Leviathan” (SMD 28).
Well, no. I think this is a misreading of Hobbes, and in my Hobbes book, I argued that it’s productive to see Hobbes as a sort of proto-theorist of biopolitics in the Foucauldian sense. How so? My argument was basically that Hobbes actually rejects a juridical model of power that’s focused on the king, and instead focuses on how the commonwealth can bolster the population. More precisely, Hobbes starts by rejecting the Aristotelian zoon politikon. In De Cive, Hobbes claims that “man is made fit for society not by nature, but by training” (DC I.2, note). This is a direct repudiation of the Aristotelian dictum that “the political art does not make men but takes them from nature and uses them” (Politics 1258a22). On my reading, Hobbes shifts focus to how to make people fit for society, a project that involves their subjectification as rational subjects. This requires, above all, careful regulation of the system of signification at work in the commonwealth, because stability there is key to getting inside people’s heads. After all, Hobbesian people actually lack an intellectual faculty – intellect specifically reduces to imagination. The pithiest pronouncement of this thesis is in De Homine, where Hobbes announces that “intellect is in fact imagination, but which arises from the settled signification of words [est enim intellectus imaginatio quidem, sed quae oritur ex verborum significatione constituta]” (DH 10.1; OL II, 89). This means that if you can control external stimuli, you have a pretty good shot at getting bad thoughts out of people’s heads.
I concluded that “Hobbes takes the bold move of banishing nature from political philosophy. No longer is man the political animal. He is the desiring animal, but these desires are programmatically reduced to the interplay of competing forces and drives; this interplay can then be regulated by the sovereignty, the job of which it is to reorient these desires in a mutually productive way” (141).
A new paper by Andrea Rossi develops this general approach by way of Foucault’s “security,” which Rossi suggests Hobbes takes from the stoics, but then inverts to align with his psychology. Hobbes says repeatedly in chapter 17 of Leviathan that people want “security.” However, Hobbes also rejects the stoic tranquilitas. Felicity in this life “consisteth not in the repose of a mind satisfied. For there is no such Finis ultimus, (ultimate ayme,) nor Summum Bonum, (greatest Good,) as is spoken of in the Books of the old Morall Philosophers” (L 11.1). We are restless creatures of desire, and in a state of nature, we’d be unable to do anything but worry about others and our future survival, despite our having reason. Rossi shows that in developing a political response to this psychology, Hobbes inverts stoicism. In both cases, the goal is to enable an conversion and realignment of the self according to reason. But where the stoics learn to distinguish what can be controlled from what cannot, Hobbesian people must create the conditions where they can actually use their forward-looking reason to achieve stable satisfaction of their desires.
This of course happens when the state provides for physical security against others, but this in turn enables space for individuals to pursue their own projects through mechanisms such as stability in the signification of meaning, control over religion and judicature (my examples in the book), or the administration of correct law and establishment of a system of contract (Rossi’s examples). That is:
“Hobbes, in this respect, did not simply transpose – as it may appear at first – Seneca’s theory of security from the ethical to the political sphere. He rather reframed the relation between these two domains. Stoicism had already linked individual and collective security by arguing that the sage had the responsibility to project his securitas onto the polis, so as to integrate the latter into the logos of the greater cosmic republic (see above). Hobbes, in a way, turned this paradigm on its head: whereas, in Seneca, it was the virtue of a ‘converted’ elite to safeguard the community as a whole, Hobbes thought of the establishment of sovereign (and ethically neutral) institutions as the only legitimate means to individual security. Put differently, Hobbes no longer viewed the ethical conversion of the subject of security as the condition of possibility (arche) of political rule, but rather as its ultimate objective (telos).” (17)
The reorientation here has all sorts of advantages as a reading of Hobbes, not least that it continues to help us nuance our understanding of his very complex relation to ancient Greek philosophy. He heaps a lot of abuse on Aristotle and scholasticism, but the actual picture is a lot more complicated than that.
Two other points of emphasis. First, if it wasn’t clear enough already, Hobbes explicitly does not think that the main goal of the state is mere survival. Rather, the goal is doing more than that – he retains the old Aristotelian that politics is for the sake of “living well.” Second, this allows Hobbes to reframe the salus populi:
“The Office of the Soveraign, (be it a Monarch, or an Asssembly,) consisteth in the end, for which he was trusted with the Soveraign Power, namely the procuration of the safety of the people; to which he is obliged by the Law of Nature, and to render an account thereof to God, the Author of that Law, and to none but him. But by Safety here is not meant a bare Preservation, but also all other Contentments of life, which every man by lawfull Industry, without danger, or hurt to the Common-wealth, shall acquire to himself” (L 30.1)
The language reverses that of the state of nature, where Hobbes notes (emphasizing the part before the “nasty, solitary, poore, brutish and short” line) that:
“In such condition, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments 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 feare, and the danger of violent death; And the life of man solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short” (L 13.9).
Next time, I’ll suggest why I think this matters for thinking about Spinoza.
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