tell me about hobbes

[ed miliband]

like, beyond the typical "life is cruel, mean and short" thing leftists usually bring out to shut down debate about hobbes, are there any interesting marxist readings of his work worth checking out?

[jookyle]

I've never come across any marxist writings on Hobbs but, I have encountered quite a few academic journal articles in which Hobbs and Marx are compared and contrasted. They usually focus around the views each had on human nature and how that influences society.

One thin that Hobbs wrote about in the Leviathan which I happen to like and this is worth considering about by anyone is that a state can not justify it's own existence if it does not/can not protect it's citizens from violant death.

You must also remember that he wrote during some of Englands most violant times and was a royalist/monarchist supporter.

[L.A.P.]

well, I don't really know that much about him. But from the little I know, I know he is the founder of social contract theory, so he influenced Locke and Rousseau. He starts his analysis on the basis of imagining what life would be like without the state, army, infrastructure, etc. and concludes that the "state of nature" is bat-shit insane chaotic, or "war of all against all". Though this would be oversimplifying it, it kind of follows the reasoning of the classic "oh, the dear leader is obviously responsible for the little food I get, so without him, I would have no food at all." He was also actually one of the first philosophers to view people as purely material and the soul being imaginary, at the same time he completely rejected the existence of subjectivity as well. He reduced humans to beings of pure drive that had to be diverted, regulated, etc. (sonds a bit similar to the Freudian super-ego) by the absoulte sovereign (state). Thus, people enter into a 'social contract' with the absolute sovereign that in exchange for living on his property and under his protection, the subjects are basically his ass-slaves. A lot of the commonsense arguments for the state and whatever is rooted in Hobbes' philosophy.

He also goes into proving how people don't have the 'right of revolution' and can be executed just because the sovereign feels like it. And though he thought the sould was some imaginary bullshit, he still believed in a Christian commonwealth but still felt religion should be subordinate to civil law.

[ed miliband]

You must also remember that he wrote during some of Englands most violant times and was a royalist/monarchist supporter.

ya, i know, i'm doing a (compulsory) module in civil war and restoration lit. and have to read some hobbes in that context.

see, i thought bad stuff about him, simply because of what i know from leftists talking about him, and then read this:


Well, that's one orthodox view of him i suppose. A different one would be alive to the possibilities for opening up that he buried in his work - i.e establishing that the conditions for the liberty and freedom can only come about through ongoing collective activity, activity that actually produces the the social individual of history rather then the free-individual of bourgeois and some anarchist thought. And that this collective activity required some sort of process of continuous adaptation consent and participation on the part of the members of any society. Which in turn opens up the question of who constitutes society, what constitutes an interest in society and so on. It's all there if you want it.

http://www.urban75.net/forums/threads/the-worst-philosophers-in-history.298416/page-2

which made him seem much more interesting/appealing. just wondering if there's anything that can expand on that, cos i'm too lazy/dumb to read leviathan from that perspective.

[L.A.P.]

I think there would be some value in reading Leviathan, but in the same way you would read The Prince and The Art of War. Actually, out of those three, Hobbes is probably the most interesting as he openly states how to use religious scripture to construct an ideology that legitimizes the state. No wonder Althusser studied him.

[theblackmask]

I'd rather read Against His-Story Against Leviathan than actually read Hobbes.

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

Hobbes gives a pretty convincing account of why the State comes to exist, and he was a materialist. He was, of course, incredibly conservative, but that's no reason to dismiss someone's ideas out of hand. Some interesting ideas he has: *the state of war, which is a sort of negative "anarchism" without the solidarity and bottom-up collective organizing which anarchist theorists call for. This consists of individuals and small groups struggling often violently against one another for resources and basic necessities. *the desire of people to accept authoritarian rule to escape the material costs of the state of war *people's willingness to accept contracts because it is in their immediate interests, and how this requires the creation of a state In other words, he has an interesting account of the material interests which lead to people creating and accepting a state. Whether or not he is right or wrong is another matter, but if he is read in the context of the English Civil War he makes a lot of sense. edit - for some reason the forum is not letting me use paragraph breaks ... sorry for the text block