Sovereignty as a Vocation in Hobbes’s Leviathan (3)

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.

Meghan Robison

Montclair State University

Foundations in J. Matthew Hoye’s Sovereignty as a Vocation: New Foundations Statecraft and Virtue in Hobbes’s Leviathan

Thomas Hobbes is well-known for advancing an original justification of sovereignty. Those who studied Leviathan in university likely remember Hobbes as arguing that state power is legitimized by subjects’ consensual surrender of rights in exchange for protection. J. Matthew Hoye contends that we have misunderstood the nature of Hobbesian sovereignty. In Sovereignty as a Vocation: New Foundations, Statecraft, and Virtue, Hoye argues against the interpretative tradition, claiming the character of the Hobbesian sovereign, rather than subjects’ consent, legitimizes his authority.

While I am not fully convinced by Hoye’s argument, his focus on Hobbes a theorist of new political foundations makes a valuable contribution to contemporary Hobbes scholarship. To further the conversation about new foundations that this book reinvigorates, I provide a critical reconstruction of the key steps in Hoye’s interpretation of Hobbes’ theory of new foundations in Chapter Five of Sovereignty as Vocation.[1]

Hoye begins by asserting that the basic outline of Hobbes’ theory of new foundations overlooks the pivotal discussion of foundations presented in Chapter Twelve, an oversight he seeks to correct. He contrasts his approach with what he calls “The Standard Model,” which begins with the Hobbesian State of Nature—a condition in which human beings live in perpetual fear of violent death.[2] According to the Standard Model, the multitude escapes the State of Nature by surrendering their power to an individual or a group, thereby making that person or persons sovereign.[3] Hoye finds this interpretation inadequate due to its overemphasis on the productive role of fear in the foundation of the Commonwealth.[4] As an alternative, he suggests that sovereignty and political unity are derived from the character of the sovereign: ‘new foundations depend on exceptionally wise, sincere, loving, and revelatory leaders who can unite the multitude into a commonwealth without threatening violence, instead instantiating justice before the creation of a commonwealth’.[5]

On Hoye’s reading, Hobbes’ begins to advance his character-based theory of new foundations in Chapter Twelve of Leviathan. I quote him at length:

But Hobbes starts by laying out a general account of new foundations. Public religions can be founded in two ways. ‘[T]hese seeds have received culture from two sorts of men,’ Hobbes begins. ‘One sort have been they, that have nourished, and ordered them, according to their own invention. The other, have done it, by Gods commandment, and direction.’ In the Latin edition of Leviathan, the former is described as having ‘set themselves up as authors of religions, according to their own invention’ The foundational politics of the ancients teach the ‘humane Politiques’ of effective obligation, and ‘Divine Politiques’ teach sovereigns how to hold themselves.[6]

Let’s reconstruct Hoye’s interpretation. First, he claims that in the discussion of ‘Public Religion’ Hobbes is not explaining ‘two different kinds of founding’ but offering two ‘different perspectives on the founder’.’[7] Secondly, Hoye interprets the passage as giving a positive account of founding: that is, he takes Hobbes to be explaining how states should be founded and how sovereigns should ‘hold themselves’. Finally, Hoye argues that the Hobbesian founder is a ‘type’ of man, that is, one who is motivated to pacify and civilize his dependents for own well-being.[8]

These claims are foundational for Hoye’s interpretation, but it is not clear to me that they are foundational for Hobbes’ argument. In the passage cited, Hobbes is explaining two ways in which ‘the natural seeds of religion were cultured’ and distinguishing the two ways according to two kinds of men not in terms of their character but to their own relation to ‘culturing’:

For these seeds have received culture from two sorts of men. One sort have been they that have nourished and ordered them, according to their own invention. The other have done it by God’s commandment and direction.[9]

Hobbes also claims that both types of men had the same purpose, ‘to make those men that relied on them the more apt to obedience, laws, peace, charity, and civil society’, as Hoye points out, however, Hoye misinterprets the main point. Hobbes is elaborating the two ways that ‘the natural seed of religion’ have ‘received culture’ in order to distinguish two kinds of politics, human and divine as directed by God or by a human being. He says that Commonwealths are ‘human’ but he is makes no claims about the sovereign’s character in this passage.

The second step of Hoye’s interpretation is built upon Hobbes’ account of political collapse. To cite Hoye at length once again:

Hobbes begins [his discussion of collapse] by characterizing a subject’s faith in the founder—‘’in some one person’—as based on the belief that the founder will ‘labour to procure their happiness’, as the author of the religion. He then turns to the reasons why regimes fail. Each of Hobbes’s answers involves the subjects’ evaluation of the sovereign’s conduct. ‘It followeth necessarily,’ Hobbes writes, that when they that have the Government of Religion, shall come to have either the wisedome of those men, their sincerity, or their love suspected; or that they shall be unable to shew any probable token of Divine Revelation; that the Religion which they desire to uphold, must be suspected likewise; and (without the feare of the Civill Sword) contradicted and rejected. These four traits—wisdom, sincerity, love, and divine revelation—all turn on the character of the founder.[10]

In Hoye’s interpretation, Hobbes attributes the failure of political regimes to the people’s negative evaluation of the founder’s character. Inverting this idea, Hoye argues that a positive evaluation of the founder’s character—and he identifies four characteristics—is essential for the successful founding of a regime. In the following section, he examines each of the four traits that he believes Hobbes identifies as characteristics of a virtuous founder. Drawing on passages from various chapters of Leviathan, Hoye constructs a Hobbesian account of what makes a founder wise, sincere, loved, and so forth.

Since I am focusing on the foundations of Hoye’s interpretation of Hobbes’ theory, I will focus on the main interpretative question: Is Hobbes advancing a theory of new foundations centred on the founder’s character, as Hoye suggests? If we return to the passage from Leviathan, we see Hobbes claim that ‘formed religion’ is founded on certain beliefs about the founder: ‘For seeing all formed religion is founded at first upon the faith which a multitude hath in some one person, whom they believe not only to be a wise man and to labour to procure their happiness, but also to be a holy man to whom God Himself vouchsafeth to declare His will supernaturally’.[11] Hobbes does not stop here. On the basis of this observation, he goes on to make the following conclusion:

it followeth necessarily when they that have the government of religion shall come to have either the wisdom of those men, their sincerity, or their love suspected, or that they shall be unable to show any probable token of divine revelation, that the religion which they desire to uphold must be suspected likewise and (without the fear of the civil sword) contradicted and rejected.[12]

When Hobbes explains the necessity of the failure of a regime as the people’s lack of belief in the founder, Hoye assumes that the founder’s character is what grounds his authority. But what seems relevant for Hobbes, in my view, is the people’s belief in the founder’s character, not the founder’s character itself. Moreover, and more importantly, Hobbes claims that when a people living under a religious government become sceptical about the character of their leader—that if they are sceptical about that character, then they will necessarily be sceptical of the religion.

In this passage, then, Hobbes does not claim that certain traits—wisdom, sincerity, love, divinity—are necessary characteristics of a founder. He is not trying to advance a positive theory of political founding or presenting a character study of a model founder and sovereign. Instead, he is issuing a warning: governments established on the basis of the people’s faith in the character of a leader are vulnerable to collapse precisely because they are based on belief in the leader. He concludes the chapter ‘On Religion’ by criticizing authority based on faith in spiritual leaders:

who does not see to whose profit redound the fees of private Masses, and vales of purgatory, with other signs of private interest enough to mortify the most lively faith, if, as I said, the civil magistrate and custom did not more sustain it than any opinion they have of the sanctity, wisdom, or probity of their teachers? So that I may attribute all the changes of religion in the world to one and the same cause, and that is unpleasing priests; and those not only amongst catholics, but even in that Church that hath presumed most of reformation.[13]

Hobbes warns us about the stability of authority based on opinion. He argues that even the liveliest faith can be mortified ‘if it is not sustained by something more than the opinion the people have of the sanctity, wisdom, or probity of their teachers’. Contrary to what Hoye claims, Hobbes suggests that sovereignty based on the people’s faith in the sovereign alone are inherently unstable, and that it can only be sustained by the authority of the civil magistrate and custom.

Hoye wisely recommends including the discussion of religion in Chapter Twelve of Leviathan as an essential part of Hobbes’ theory of new political foundations. This discussion plays a crucial role by creating space for the Hobbesian Commonwealth as a new kind of political body—not as formed by an individual ‘miracle representer driven by a divine calling’[14] as Hoye suggests, but as made by ordinary human beings who, by their own ‘art’, make themselves into a law-governed state. Commonwealth-making begins with the making of pacts and covenants, agreements in which individuals mutually renounce their ‘natural right to all things’. As a community founded on human agreement, the foundations of the Hobbesian Commonwealth are never ‘the stuff of individual founders’[15]. They are plural: they are the many who, together, make themselves one.

[1] Hoye, J. Matthew, Sovereignty as a Vocation: New Foundations, Statecraft, and Virtue (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press, 2024), p. 182

[2] Hoye, Sovereignty as a Vocation, p. 161.

[3] “The standard model runs roughly as follows: 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,” Hoye, Sovereignty as a Vocation, p.162.

[4] Hoye, Sovereignty as a Vocation, p. 161

[5] Hoye, Sovereignty as a Vocation, p. 161

[6] Hoye, Sovereignty as a Vocation, p. 166.

[7] Hoye, Sovereignty as a Vocation, p. 166.

[8] Hoye goes on to support this interpretation by invoking Hobbes’ discussion of ‘the first founders and Legislators of Commonwealths’ which he describes as a ‘classic discussion of the law-giver’. He does not say why this a classic discussion of the law-giver. Instead, he turns to consider specific founders that Hobbes names, starting with the Roman king Numa. To describe Numa’s character, Hoye cites passages from Livy and Plutarch (not Hobbes) in which the authors respectively laud the king’s ability to persuade his subjects to obey by words and deeds rather than violence. Hoye assumes that Hobbes shares this view of Numa and, therefore, considering him to be an exemplary founder and bases his own theory of political foundations on this idea of a founder. See Hoye, Sovereignty as a Vocation, p. 167.

[9] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, (New York: Penguin, 1985). p. 173.

[10] Hoye, Sovereignty as a Vocation, p. 262.

[11] Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 179

[12] Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 179.

[13] Hobbes, Leviathan, pp. 182-3.

[14] Hoye, Sovereignty as a Vocation, p. 209.

[15] Hoye, Sovereignty as a Vocation, p. 209.