Atul Mishra on some recent works on Hobbes

Atul Mishra, a CIPOD PhD candidate, has contributed a nice little essay to the CIPOD Blog. Read on for Atul's comments on a couple of recent essays on Hobbes . . .


Atul:

Revisions are in order. Global power shifts to the East. And history has become curiously interesting again, for the nth time. The New Historians in Israel are questioning the foundations of conventional national history. Some in Russia are trying to resurrect (or reestablish) Stalin. Armenians are trying to dig out a history the Turks claim never happened. It is not just recent events which are set for retelling. We are also being told that Henry V’s victory at the Battle of Agincourt, fought all those years ago in 1415, may not have been so splendid and heroic after all. The subcontinent is no stranger to revisionism in history either. Two recent articles have sought to revise – or at any rate add to – our understanding of Thomas Hobbes, the author of Leviathan (the book and the idea).


Corey Robin, who teaches at CUNY and has earlier written a very readable history of fear, has reviewed Quentin Skinner’s Hobbes and Republican Liberty for The Nation. Corey interprets Hobbes, in the light of Skinner, as one of the first of the modern counterrevolutionaries. Indeed the very first. Hobbes’s prescription and preference of establishing order in situations of civil war is well known. More interesting is the way the article establishes Hobbes’s counterrevolutionary credentials.


Much against the prevailing (and evolving) ideas of republicanism and democracy, Hobbes ingeniously argued that the sovereign’s absolute and undivided power emerges from the contract individuals enter with one another. This theory of consent is well known and so is its basic problem: the apparent irreconcilability of fear and freedom.


Not so, says Robin. Hobbes redefined the idea of will as voluntary. Which means: “If I chose security over rights, then the fact of choosing this is an expression of my will – voluntary and free.” It’s a complex argument Robin makes. An engaging wordplay – “democratic distemper”, “the counterrevolutionary is a pastiche of incongruities” are examples – and his efforts to contextualize Hobbes for modern times make it a good read.


The other article, “More Revisions in Realism: Hobbesian Anarchy, the Tale of the
Fool and International Relations Theory” is by Giulio M. Gallarotti of Wesleyan University and has been published in the latest issue of International Studies. If you thought the likes of C.B. Macpherson, Leo Strauss and Skinner had read all that was apparent and hidden in Hobbes, revise your thoughts.


Gallarotti argues that a close reading of the section on the tale of the fool in Chapter 15 of the Leviathan renders Hobbes’s logic of anarchy more problematic than has been appreciated. With the help of game theory, he suggests that cooperation is possible even in Hobbesian state of nature. Implications of this new interpretation are that there are reasons to see Hobbes as the first early modern neoliberal and constructivist. This synthesis of the realist, neoliberal and constructivist elements in Hobbes can lead us towards a new vision of international relations. Gallarotti’s term for it is Cosmopolitik.
Note: You would need subscription to read Gallarotti's article online.