Hobbes's Leviathan in the time of Coronavirus

 Hobbes’s Leviathan in the Time of Coronavirus

Thomas Hobbes’s famous treatise on political philosophy, Leviathan (published 1651) has been the subject of a couple of recent articles (May 2020). In The Guardian the political philosopher David Runciman writes that the imposition of national lockdown displays the raw power of governments over their subject citizens, in ways that Hobbes would have recognised and indeed advocated.

Runciman’s article is illustrated by a caricature of the original frontispiece to Leviathan – the famous image of a gigantic kingly figure looming over a city.

The figure is composed of a multitude of tiny human beings – the citizens of the “commonwealth”. They, in order to escape the brutish state of nature, where there is a “war of all against all” in the absence of civil authority, are deemed to have covenanted (made an unbreakable promise) to cede most of their natural rights and bestow absolute power on a sovereign government. Thus they leave the state of nature and come into a state of civil order.

The “Sovereign” stands representative of all the citizens, because its power is derived from their collective power – hence the image in the frontispiece.

In the Guardian’s caricature, the kingly head of the sovereign has been replaced by the yellow mop head of Boris Johnson.

Which suggests a thought..

The other article, in the blog of the London Review of Books, looks closely at that part of the frontispiece not often examined – the detail of the City. – thinks that the two small figures in the foreground of the rather empty town are plague doctors (from the beaked masks that the figures appear to wear) and speculates that one task of the sovereign was indeed, as now, to impose lockdown when plague struck , as it often did.

The thought is this: What has Hobbes got to say about a Leviathan that is a lurching, bumbling sovereign, and not the efficient wielder of power envisaged in his philosophy?

Although Hobbes writes of sovereign power, and that that power may often be bestowed on an actual sovereign, he actually calls the political entity created by the deemed covenant of the citizens the “Commonwealth”, the government of which may be vested in any sort of political system, from democracy to absolute monarchy. The essential point is that, barring a very few retained liberties, the covenanting citizenry bestow all their rights on the sovereign government of the Commonwealth, whatever form it takes.  Thereafter the sovereign has complete power over them, for the sovereign is understood to “bear the person” of each covenantor, so that all collectively authorise every act of the sovereign as though it were their own. Obedience is not optional. The power which the sovereign holds and wields is the glue of civilisation.

In our present times, it is somewhat difficult to identify the UK’s sovereign power, shared as it is between a constitutional monarch, her ministers and Parliament (remember the prorogation row). But let’s leave that problem to one side, and state confidently that the “Sovereign” is not prime minister Johnson, in spite of The Guardian’s amusing caricature, and in spite of the very Hobbesian thought expressed in The Daily Telegraph during the prime minister’s illness: “the health of Boris Johnson is the health of the body politic and, by extension, the health of the nation itself”.

This may represent a wishful belief that Mr Johnson is so above the common run of prime ministers, and so essentially potent, that he does indeed “bear the persons” of our citizenry, thus reinstating The Guardian’s cartoon as a true icon.

Nonetheless, Mr Johnson does certainly hold the office of one of the (in Hobbes’s language) “magistrates” through whom the sovereign power administers the affairs of the commonwealth; and we are entitled to ask what Hobbes would say to citizens protesting that the Sovereign power is not doing much of a job .(We ask the question hypothetically, without of course taking sides in the national debate about the quality of the job being done).

Hobbes has no truck with moaners.  Any thought of throwing off the commonwealth (which, given the fundamental change in position wrought by the covenant, Hobbes thinks not possible in justice) is met by the overriding consideration that the horrors of a failed state are far worse than the inconveniences of a badly managed one:

…the state of man can never be without some incommodity or other; …the greatest, that in any form of government can possibly happen to the people in general, is scarce sensible, in respect of the miseries, and horrible calamities, that accompany a civil war; or that dissolute condition of masterless men, without subjection to laws, and a coercive power to tie their hands from rapine and revenge…

The most Hobbes allows the citizenry, so far as relevant to present circumstances, is a right to the citizen to ward off or resist actual physical harm, even if that harm is inflicted or directed by the sovereign power. This right cannot be given away by any covenant: “covenants, not to defend a man’s own body, are void”.

If the sovereign command a man.. to kill, wound, or maim himself; or not to resist those that assault him; or to abstain from the use of food, air, medicine, or any other thing, without which he cannot live; yet hath that man the liberty to disobey.

There we have it. Lockdown is indeed a paradigm example of Leviathan’s power. But protest and refusal to comply with an order to put oneself in danger is a paradigm example of the citizen’s right to resist the toxic overreach of that power.

Personally, I think that a literary analogy that is better suited than Leviathan to Mr Johnson’s case is the First World War poem The General, by Siegfried Sassoon:

“Good morning, good morning! The General said

When we met him last week on our way to the line.

Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of them dead,

And we’re cursing his staff for incompetent swine.

“He’s a cheery old card,” grunted Harry to Jack

As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.

But he did for them both by his plan of attack.

May 2020