Coronation Oath-Go-Round

 The Oath-Go-Round at the Coronation

 

One has to admire the attempt to resurrect Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan for the Coronation. Hobbes, writing in the aftermath of the English civil war and at the time the “modern” British monarchy began to be shaped, believed that the only way out of the primitive natural state of permanent civil discord, “a war of all against all”, wherein life is “nasty, brutish and short” was a “covenant”, whereby all submitted to a “sovereign” ( an abstract concept that could include monarchy, oligarchy or democracy) that would supreme, unfettered power to impose civilised order. The original illustration to Leviathan depicts a handsome, Stuartish Monarch – yet on close inspection the Monarch is composed of all the citizens that have transferred their powers to him, and from whom his sovereignty is derived.

 

In May 2023, we were enjoined to enter an actual Hobbesian covenant, and pledge allegiance to a modern Leviathan, King Charles..

 

But the Hobbesian commentator detects two major flaws in this new social contract.

 

First, after an initial frisson over whether this allegiance is “commanded” from everyone, we are told it is voluntary – a mere invitation to pledge allegiance. This will not do at all. According to Hobbes, the covenant transferring power to Leviathan is universal and irreversible. Only thus does Leviathan get his, her or its supreme authority.

 

That is one lamentable failure. The other problem is that, in the UK, the identity of Leviathan is elusive. Is it the King, as Head of State? But in the same Coronation Ceremony, the King swears (in an Oath dating back to Hobbesian times) to uphold the laws enacted by Parliament. But, in turn, in Parliament, MPs swear allegiance to the Crown.

 

We arrive, puzzled, at an Escher-like hierarchy of Leviathans, folding back on one another..

 

I suppose the Crown may represent the feeble spirit of our Leviathan, and Parliament the crude actuality. So affirming allegiance to the Crown may bathetically translate into obedience to some wretched, passing, crew of politicians.

 

Hobbes squirms in his shroud.

 

 

May 2023

Lockdown Dissent

 Lockdown Dissent

 

 

One of the more curious features of the lockdowns and other regimes brought in to protect against the pandemic has been the emergence of do-it-yourself forms of anarchism.

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.

Safety of the People..

Safety of the People or War of All Against All

“Salus populi suprema lex esto”  (“the safety of the people should be the supreme law”) wrote Cicero in the last days of the Roman Republic, before civil wars and dictators fatally threatened the salus.

This principle has been a cornerstone of Western political theory since at least the C17.

Beyond Hobbes's Leviathan: the Alarming Visions of JG Ballard

         Beyond Hobbes’s Leviathan: The Alarming Visions of JG Ballard

The 17^th philosopher Thomas Hobbes believed that, without a civilising authority, humankind is condemned to live in a state of nature, where there is war of all against all and life is nasty, brutish and short. In his book Leviathan, Hobbes proposed that there was a profound drive, or law of nature, to escape this fate: