By Gordon Hull
Last time, following a new paper by Andrea Rossi, I suggested that Hobbes’s reformulation of the Stoic “security” in terms that we would recognize as biopolitical – oriented toward human flourishing, and not just survival – enables him to reformulate the Ciceronian salus populi suprema lex (“the welfare of the people is the supreme law”). As I suggested, this renders Hobbes a different thinker from what Foucault thought he was. Here, I want to suggest that it also shows that one of the usual divisions between Hobbes and Spinoza (roughly: Hobbes is a juridical absolutist and a theorist of potestas; Spinoza is a democrat and theorist of potentia) just doesn’t hold much water. In other words, the sharp division drawn by Negri regarding the “permanence and opposition of two lines” in modernity, “the absolutist one, following Hobbes, and the democratic one, espousing Spinoza” (Porcelain Workshop, 52) – gets in the way of a more productive engagement between the two. It’s not that Hobbes and Spinoza come to the same political conclusions (they clearly do not) – the interest is in how similar they are prior to those conclusions.
"The fear of death is therefore no longer at the root of all our motivations, nor consequently is the desire to indefinitely accumulate all possible means of protection. At the intersubjective level, the man of Spinoza, very different in this from Hobbes's, desires above all to rejoice in what his fellow men rejoice in, which can lead, depending on the case, to relieving their suffering."*
Rossi’s work on security underscores that this reading divides them too sharply. Hobbesian subjects want to persevere in their essence as rational beings, and whatever residual sense of normativity remains in Hobbes is much reduced from the scholastic background. But doing that requires precisely overcoming the corrosive illogic of the state of nature. That Hobbesian subjects might reason this way in the state of nature says that we only function properly in political contexts. Matheron elsewhere suggests that we find a “inverse Thomism” in Hobbes around the laws of nature.** But laws aren’t just normative in Hobbes; they’re also descriptive of what we are. Changing the laws can change political subjectivity. Laws can function architecturally in structuring our possibilities, as Hobbes underscores in comparing them to hedges:
“For the use of Lawes, (which are but Rules Authorised) is not to bind the People from all Voluntary actions; but to direct and keep them in such a motion, as not to hurt themselves by their own impetuous desires, rashnesse, or indiscretion; as Hedges are set, not to stop Travellers, but to keep them in the way” (L 30.21).
Michael Bray remarks of this passage that “sovereign power is thus administrative power: stability is established only through the constitution of a system of laws that directs subjects along certain paths, protects them from the antagonisms that they would otherwise produce, and guides them into a manner of thinking and living in which they accept implicitly the will of the sovereign” (190-91). In other words, laws promote security when they function as hedges.
So yes, there is a complex mix of juridical potestas and constitutive potentia in Hobbes. But Hobbes also thinks power is productive, in the biopolitical sense that Foucault indicates: power is not just repressive, but productive. It produces us.
In the Theological-Political Treatise, Spinoza considers the objection that by transferring power to the state, we make ourselves into slaves. He replies that “the real slave is one who lives under pleasure’s sway… and only he is free who lives whole-heartedly under the sole guidance of reason” (TTP 16, Shirley ed. p. 184). He adds that a “commonwealth whose laws are based on sound reason is the most free, for there everybody can be free as he wills, that is, he can live whole-heartedly under the guidance of reason” (ibid.). This is a “sovereign state where the welfare of the whole people, not the ruler, is the supreme law” (idid.). Later, he underscores that “the welfare of the people is the highest law [salute populi summam esse legem], to which all other laws, both human and divine, must be made to conform” (TTP 19, Shirley p. 223).
If you’re inclined to apply Rossi’s insights about Hobbes to Spinoza, then this seems like the place to start. In particular, one might recall the preface to the TTP, where Spinoza writes that “the supreme mystery of despotism … is to keep men in a state of deception, and with the specious title of religion to cloak the fear by which they must be held in check, so that they will fight for their servitude as if for salvation.” Getting past this is going to require an askesis, a training, in political subjectivity; most people are not up to the task, at least not initially. Overcoming superstition is one of the primary tasks of that training. Central here is the problem of teleology, the “widespread belief among men that all things in Nature are like themselves in acting with an end in view” (E1 Appx). The Ethics text here does a genealogy of this superstition, and it sounds a lot like Hobbes does when he talks about the origins of natural religion in Leviathan – the most obvious difference being that Spinoza doesn’t mysteriously declare Christianity to be the “true” religion. Similarly, TTP 6 treats belief in miracles as exemplary of this process.
Obviously there is a lot to be said here – but prima facie, the interest in the Hobbes-Spinoza relation is in part how close they are, even as they endorse very different readings of how best to achieve the salus populi.
* “Politique et religion chez Hobbes et Spinoza,” in Anthropologie et Politique au XVIIe Siècle. Paris: J. Vrin, 1986, 123-153.
** “Spinoza et la decomposition de la Politique thomiste: Machiavélisme et Utopie,” in Anthropologie et Politique au XVIIe Siecle, 49-79 : 77.
Recent Comments