Thomas Hobbes’s attempt to resolve the problem of commanded blasphemy in Leviathan results in a dilemma for his theory. According to what I call the Authority Dilemma, Hobbes is simultaneously committed to subjects being the authors of all that the sovereign does and commands as well as to the sovereign being the sole author of commanded blasphemy, meaning the subjects are not the authors of that command. I review a variety of ways Hobbes and various commentators have attempted to resolve this tension, but ultimately suggest that the tension persists. I spell out the implications of both horns of the authority dilemma: if subjects authorize all actions and commands, then the possibility of commanded blasphemy risks the stability of the commonwealth; if subjects do not authorize all actions and commands, then the commonwealth is not properly unified and thus cannot be stable. Thus, either way, Hobbes fails to establish how individuals can form a stable commonwealth. I conclude with a Hobbesian inspired solution that accepts that subjects authorize all actions and commands, including blasphemy. However, I leverage two recent lines of scholarship – one regarding the inalienable right of self-preservation and the other regarding the fear of eternal damnation – to provide a means for disobedience without the risk of instability.
Purchase
Buy instant access (PDF download and unlimited online access):
Institutional Login
Log in with Open Athens, Shibboleth, or your institutional credentials
Personal login
Log in with your brill.com account
Thomas Hobbes, Hobbes’s Leviathan Reprinted from the Edition of 1651 with an Essay by the Late W. G. Pogson Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909) ii.xvii, 87. All page numbers are from the 1651 edition.
Andrew I. Cohen, “Retained Liberties and Absolute Hobbesian Authorization,” Hobbes Studies 11, no. 1 (1998): 36; Hanna Pitkin, The Concept of Representation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 14; Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics Volume iii: Hobbes and Civil Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 178.
David Gauthier, Logic of Leviathan (Oxford : New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 120–21.
Anthony Kronman, “The Concept of an Author and the Unity of the Commonwealth in Hobbes’s Leviathan,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 18, no. 2 (1980): 160.
Kronman, “Concept of an Author,” 171; Green, “Political Authority,” 39–40.
David Gauthier, “Public Reason,” Social Philosophy and Policy 12, no. 1 (1995): 25–27; Gerald Gaus, “Hobbes’s Idea of Public Judgment: A Social Coordination Analysis,” 4, 14, accessed April 5, 2016, http://www.gaus.biz/Gaus-HobbesJudgment.pdf; Chambers, “Who Shall Judge?,” 353.
Kronman, “Concept of an Author,” 166, 171; Green, “Political Authority,” 32. A “commonwealth by acquisition” is formed by a similar act: “men… for fear of death or bonds do authorize all the actions of that man or assembly that hath their lives and liberty in his power” (Leviathanii.xx, 101–2).
Jean Hampton, Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 117-22-40; A. P. Martinich, Hobbes (New York; London: Routledge, 2005), 115–25; Green, “Political Authority,” 28–29.
Katrin Flikschuh, “Elusive Unity: The General Will in Hobbes and Kant,” Hobbes Studies 25, no. 1 (2012): 25; Sheridan, “Scaffold,” 143.
Gerald Gaus, “Public Reason Liberalism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Liberalism, ed. Steve Wall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 7.
Johan Olsthoorn, “Worse than Death: The Non-Preservationist Foundations of Hobbes’s Moral Philosophy,” Hobbes Studies 27 (2014): 148–70.
Thomas Hobbes, Elements of Law, Natural and Political (London: Routledge, 1969) ii.6.5.
Olsthoorn, “Worse than Death,” 157; Cf. Christopher Scott McClure, “Hell and Anxiety in Hobbes’s Leviathan,” The Review of Politics 73, no. 1 (2011): 1–27.
All Time | Past Year | Past 30 Days | |
---|---|---|---|
Abstract Views | 350 | 33 | 4 |
Full Text Views | 233 | 2 | 0 |
PDF Views & Downloads | 56 | 6 | 0 |
Thomas Hobbes’s attempt to resolve the problem of commanded blasphemy in Leviathan results in a dilemma for his theory. According to what I call the Authority Dilemma, Hobbes is simultaneously committed to subjects being the authors of all that the sovereign does and commands as well as to the sovereign being the sole author of commanded blasphemy, meaning the subjects are not the authors of that command. I review a variety of ways Hobbes and various commentators have attempted to resolve this tension, but ultimately suggest that the tension persists. I spell out the implications of both horns of the authority dilemma: if subjects authorize all actions and commands, then the possibility of commanded blasphemy risks the stability of the commonwealth; if subjects do not authorize all actions and commands, then the commonwealth is not properly unified and thus cannot be stable. Thus, either way, Hobbes fails to establish how individuals can form a stable commonwealth. I conclude with a Hobbesian inspired solution that accepts that subjects authorize all actions and commands, including blasphemy. However, I leverage two recent lines of scholarship – one regarding the inalienable right of self-preservation and the other regarding the fear of eternal damnation – to provide a means for disobedience without the risk of instability.
All Time | Past Year | Past 30 Days | |
---|---|---|---|
Abstract Views | 350 | 33 | 4 |
Full Text Views | 233 | 2 | 0 |
PDF Views & Downloads | 56 | 6 | 0 |