Passions, Politics and the Limits of Society by Heikki Haara Koen Stapelbroek Mikko Immanen

Author:Heikki Haara, Koen Stapelbroek, Mikko Immanen [Heikki Haara, Koen Stapelbroek, Mikko Immanen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, Science & Nature, Science, Other Sciences, History, Social & Cultural Studies, Political Science, Politics, History & Theory, Social Science
ISBN: 9783030238384
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
Published: 2019-08-13T04:00:00+00:00

Conclusion

If Hobbes’s solution to the problem of sociability was emphatically political in nature, he was nonetheless keenly aware that society generates other forces that shape and constrain the individual’s appetites and desires in complex ways. Hobbes identified the desire for recognition as a primary reason why the individual is so susceptible to these currents; and he maintained that they might act on subjects in ways that reliably conduce to peace – the ultimate aim of Hobbes’s political philosophy – only if harnessed and regulated by the sovereign. The sociability debate after Hobbes invites the thought that Hobbes’s diagnosis of the problem was considered to be far more compelling, and convincing, than his solution to it.

Pufendorf and Locke, at least, appear to have held this view. They could agree with Hobbes that man is, by nature, animated by self-love, and that it is the desire to have this love affirmed by others (rather than natural benevolence) that induces him to seek society. They could similarly agree with Hobbes that self-love appears to preclude the possibility that individuals might voluntarily choose to benefit others unless they stand to gain by doing so. As Pufendorf observed, “not just anyone has such goodness of character as to be willing to do all the things by which he can benefit others out of humanity or charity alone, without a well-founded hope of receiving an equivalent in return”.79 Yet, for Locke and Pufendorf, there is an “equivalent” that attends such other-regarding conduct: the reward of esteem, the most pleasing “good” of all. Such esteem, contrary to Hobbes’s claims, cannot be extorted from others by force or fraud: it must be earned, by acting in ways that appear meritorious to the esteem-giver. The desire for esteem makes men inherently interdependent creatures. The mental good they consider to be most essential to their happiness – esteem – requires them to treat others as they would be treated: to love their neighbour as they love themselves. Pufendorf and Locke made no effort to rehabilitate the doctrine of natural benevolence, as Francis Hutcheson would later; instead, they endeavoured to show that self-love can, and must, give rise to friendships characterised by mutual equality and reciprocity. Only thus might we self-loving creatures secure the end – the esteem and love of others – that we seek in entering society.

For Locke and Pufendorf, then, a broadly Hobbesian anthropology demanded not a denial of the very possibility that men are capable of sincere friendship and “mutual Love”, but rather a new purportedly (non-Aristotelian) explanation of how they become such creatures in the course of their iterative mutual interactions in society. This process, as Locke’s writings show most clearly, remains contingent: the criteria by which we learn to evaluate the merit and worth of actions and characters (ourselves included) might all too easily become corrupted in pathological societies. If citizens are encouraged to value one another on the basis of their speculative opinions in religion rather than their moral conduct (as in intolerant “Christian

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