Sovereignty as a Vocation in Hobbes’s Leviathan (1)

This online colloquium is dedicated to discussing Matthew Hoye’s book, Sovereignty as a Vocation in Hobbes’s Leviathan. The discussion will commence with three critical commentaries, presented by Diego Rossello, Andrés Rosler and Meghan Robison. The author will then respond to his critics. We extend our gratitude to Amsterdam University Press for their support of this colloquium.

Diego Rossello

Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez

Remarks on J. Matthew Hoye’s Sovereignty as a Vocation in Hobbes’s Leviathan. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2024.

Hoye’s book is a welcomed addition to the growing literature on Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan. The main argument of the book, clearly laid out in the Introduction, takes shape in contrast with two predominant approaches: the natural right/egoistic and the natural law/deontological. Hoye’s book departs from these approaches as it seeks to shed light on Hobbes’s statecraft from the perspective of virtue ethics (10). However, whereas conventional academic wisdom asserts that Leviathan is a book dedicated to why subjects should obey the sovereign state, Hoye’s suggests that it is a book on how the sovereign should govern its subjects. Thus, according to the author, Leviathan should not be understood primarily as invested in making the science of politics impersonal, abstract and logically tight, like geometry. On the contrary, Hoye approaches Leviathan from the perspective of virtue ethics applied to the natural person of the sovereign. By focusing on virtue ethics, Hoye chooses to stress the humanist and rhetorical dimensions of Leviathan while remaining inattentive to other aspects of Hobbes’s work.

Hoye’s reading of Hobbes shifts focus from the legitimacy crisis that opposed monarchists to parliamentarians to the research agenda of recent urban historians who recuperate the republican political theory of boroughs. Hoye suggests that Hobbes simultaneously receives and reorients the main tenets of borough republicanism, providing a replacement for them in Leviathan. According to Hoye, the “modern representative fictional state” (61) allowed future sovereigns to avoid ancient conceptions of democracy as well as democratic and oligarchic communal republicanism. Since Hoye’s main interest is to show how Hobbes contributes to understanding “how founders and sovereigns persuade the multitude and citizens in practice” (71), he introduces what he calls “rhetorical action” (69). This strategy leads Hoye to recuperate the rhetorical tradition from Aristotle to Cicero and Quintilian, exploring issues related to the theatricality of rhetoric, as well as its connection with authenticity and inauthenticity of intentions. Hoye also lays out how classical rhetoric is received in Late Renaissance and Early Modern philosophy, particularly in terms of inventio, dispositio, and elocutio. According to Hoye, Hobbes attends to this tradition but at the same time departs from it in important ways.

However, Hoye’s careful reconstruction of the rhetorical tradition and of Hobbes’s idiosyncratic place in it, is fueled by dissatisfaction with what he calls the “standard model” of reading Hobbes’s political theory. This model consists, roughly, of two logical steps: 1) the natural condition, where man is a wolf to man; 2) the social contract that extracts individuals from an –undesirable—natural condition. In Hoye’s words:

The “state of nature,” a term Hobbes does not use in Leviathan, is experienced as a period of relentless fear and trepidation. To exit this condition, a “social contract,” another term Hobbes does not use in Leviathan, is forged whereby the multitude confers their power on one person (or group of persons) who is thereby sovereign. This bundle of ideas informs a panoply of considerations save one: the real politics of new foundations (162).

Hoye’s emphasis on rhetoric leads him to condemn a standard model that fails to honor the most basic tenets of Hobbes’s own vocabulary. More importantly, this model misses the scenario of new foundations that, according to Hoye, does not begin in chapter XIII, but in the relatively ignored chapter XII (161). In fact, Hoye at times presents chapter XII as a symptom that the standard model can neither process nor subsume. In chapter XII Hoye sees Hobbes reflecting on the personal characteristics of the natural person of the sovereign-founder. These characteristics are wisdom, sincerity, love and divine revelation (168). In addition, Hoye sees that chapter as challenging three common topics in Hobbes’s scholarship: 1) human equality; 2) the idea that justice cannot exist prior to the sovereign; and 3) the assertion that there is no real distinction between regimes by institution and contest, since both are based on fear.                                                               

Hoye’s revisionist understanding of Leviathan in light of virtue ethics and rhetorical action is cogently argued and persuasive. The place he assigns to “the instantiation of great virtue in the natural person of the sovereign” (252) is challenging to established narratives on Leviathan’s scope and meaning. However, I believe that Hoye does not explore or develop further implications of his argument. In what follows, I lay out some possible objections to the book’s main argument. Some of these objections can be seen as ‘external,’ as they pertain to alternative approaches to Hobbes’s intellectual project as a whole. Others focus on exploring further implications of Hoye’s argument on the importance of virtue ethics in Leviathan.

My first objection concerns the general orientation of Hoye’s project. To use Noel Malcolm’s expression, there are aspects of Hobbes that remain unattended when the focus is placed on rhetoric and virtue. Two main aspects of Hobbes’s thought remain concealed in Hoye’s reconstruction of Leviathan: early modern science and materialism. In many ways, the more affinities between Hobbes and the rhetorical tradition are explored, the less evident Hobbes’s engagement with emerging scientific and experimental knowledge becomes (Adams 2023). Put differently, emphasizing continuities between Hobbes’s work and late Renaissance rhetorical humanism often risks pulling Hobbes’s work back into a humanistic philosophy that was important to his background but that he was also attempting to leave behind. At times, one can see Quentin Skinner’s Reason and Rhetoric (1996) engaging in a similar pulling back. I wonder what the author may have to say about these aspects of Hobbes, also very present in key passages of chapter XII, where Hobbes acknowledges the intrinsic desire of men to know the ultimate causes of natural bodies.

In relation to bodies, and to the potential invisibilization of early-modern science in Hobbes, the absence of Hobbes’s materialism in the book is striking. Rather unsurprisingly for an approach that privileges virtue and rhetoric, the issue of the nature and implications of Hobbes’s materialism remains simply unexplored, and the works by contemporary scholars that dwell on this question in Hobbes are not addressed—for example, the work of Samantha Frost (2008). This is again surprising for a book that places emphasis on Chapter XII, where the issue of material and immaterial bodies is addressed. Moreover, new materialism is one of the most vibrant contemporary philosophies, claiming Hobbes (and others) as a source of inspiration for understanding ethics and politics in our time. Accordingly, the contextualist approach to Hobbes deployed in the book adds historiographical dexterity, often at the expense of understanding Hobbes’s contribution to our context as well as his own

As I said, the two objections above can be seen as too external to Hoye’s project and the author may have good reasons for simply shrugging his shoulders at them. The last objection has to do with exploring further implications of the argument based on virtue ethics. If we are to accept such an argument, it is difficult not to think of Hobbes in the genre of “mirror for princes” together with works like The Education of the Christian Prince by Erasmus (1997). However, the author does not dwell on this line of interpretation and does not provide much evidence on the reasons why (14; 146). Can perhaps this brief reaction to the book offer an opportunity for the author to re-state his case against assimilating Hobbes’ Leviathan to the mirror for princes’ literature?

Works cited

Erasmus, 1997. The Education of a Christian Prince, edited by Lisa Jardine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Frost, Samantha. 2008. Lessons from a Materialist Thinker: Hobbesian Reflections on Ethics and Politics. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Hoye, Matthew. 2023.  Sovereignty as a Vocation in Hobbes’s Leviathan: New Foundations, Statecraft, and Virtue. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Adams, Marcus P. 2023. “Hobbes’ Philosophy of Science,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2023/entries/hobbes-science/>.

Skinner, Quentin. 1996. Reason and Rhetoric in Hobbes in the Philosophy of Hobbes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.