The Development of Political Theory by Charles Vereker

Author:Charles Vereker [Vereker, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781000706376
Google: s4omAAAAMAAJ
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Goodreads: 49532132
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-11-19T00:00:00+00:00

Hobbes thus went much further than the natural law theorists in completely secularizing the dual society of church and state, though an important vestigial distinction remained in the two spheres of legal compulsion and individual freedom. The political emphasis was in one sense negative; it was the prevention of chaos not directly the production of felicity which was the duty of the government. But because Hobbes was concerned with the achievement of results in a situation containing an ever-present threat of chaos, and because results depended on effective sanctions in this world, the sovereign government which held the communal force in its sole guardianship became thereby the guardian, interpreter and promulgator of all moral values, whether secular or religious. We go too far if we argue simply that for Hobbes the law is morality, for what he is saying is that no moral rule or divine commandment can have any effect if it is not to be enforced.

It is this view which governs his treatment of what he misleadingly calls natural laws. These are not moral norms in the light of which political acts can be judged, but general rules of behaviour, discovered by reason in experience, which like the social covenant itself can only be relied upon when confirmed and enforced by the civil government. The typical example of these rules of expediency, ‘thai men perform their covenants made’, which Hobbes believed impossible lacking coercion, may be compared with Locke’s version of the same precept: ‘For truth and keeping of faith belong to men as men, and not as members of society.’1

Two points may be noticed before we pass on to later variations on the felicific theme. Hobbes’s method of descrying a universal pattern of political relationship in his analysis of an unchanging human nature allows no place for historical development or progress, or for the effects of continuity and tradition. This unhistorical approach also warps the views of some of the utilitarian thinkers who followed in Hobbes’s footsteps. The notion that organized society is in perpetual tension between the centrifugal thrust of its participants and the centralizing pull of political power tends to overestimate the strength and authority required at the centre to keep an historical society in being. In particular, it disregards the part played by custom and habit and by the long continued life and influence of social institutions other than the government. This defect of Hobbesian theory was remedied in the following century by Hume and Burke. Hobbes himself saw that the possession of political power does not necessarily betoken its exercise any more than does the possession of wealth its spending. But he does not draw the conclusion that possibly much less power is required to achieve his ends.

1 Second Treatise, ii, 14

Secondly, compared with Locke’s version, Hobbes uses the metaphor of covenant or contract to suggest that men have naturally no interests in common, whereas the conclusion of the argument is that they have one overwhelmingly important common concern: the maintenance of civil society.

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