How To Think About Capitalism Part Four: Lockeing Down Leviathan

Dear reader,

Happy 4th of July!

Over the last several weeks we have been exploring a very brief introduction in the intellectual history of capitalism.

In our last discussion, we surveyed the history of the civic republican tradition and its suspicion of trade and commerce, which was hand-in-hand with the Christian intellectual tradition.

The question then remains — what, if anything, changed?

That will be the focus of this week’s article.

Let’s dive in.

What happened?

Before I answer that question directly, it’s worth wondering why anything is supposed to have changed in the first place.

Isn’t it possible that both the Christian and civic republican traditions, as they exist today, are still just as suspicious as they have always been towards the ideas of a commercial society?

Certainly.

Nevertheless, it seems clear that most people today participate in some form or another in one or both of these traditions and yet no longer possess the ire towards commerce they might have had in the 15th century, let’s say.

Why is that? Why shouldn’t a secularist or modern-day Catholic be just as suspicious of the destructive and sinful capacities of capitalism as their forebears?

Perhaps they should, but the fact remains that most of us are relatively happy with the idea of commercial society — and the luxuries it provides.

The explanation, in a word, for that change is — liberalism.

In the course of the 17th century, the ideals of both the Christian and civic republican traditions were challenged by many of the great thinkers of the so-called Enlightenment.

Among those who took up the mantle of destroying the great traditions of the West, perhaps none were greater than the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes.

Hobbes set the stage for a revolution in intellectual thought which culminated in the political philosophy known as Liberalism, or what is sometimes referred to as “Classical Liberalism.”

As we’ll see, Hobbes — and his proponents in the 17th and 18th century — argued for a new perspective on commerce and self-love, which saw capitalism as a mechanism for peaceful social life and greater material well-being.

These ideas were eventually married to the traditions of Christianity and civic republicanism, and the offspring of that union would become both great and terrible — The United States of America.

What could be a better way to spend the 4th of July than reading about our intellectual great grandfather, Thomas Hobbes? Barbeques are overrated anyway.

Hobbling Through — The Life and Legacy of Thomas Hobbes

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) was born in England to an uneducated clergyman who spent more time in the bar than the Church (sadly, not uncommon for the time).

Young Tommy, however, could not have appeared more different from his drunkard father. Hobbes was a gifted intellectual and went to Oxford to train as a clergyman.

Fate, God, or the aimless energy flows of the universe, had different plans for Young Thomas, however. He trained as a humanist instead, and became a man of renaissance letters.

If you don’t know, in Hobbes’ day, the word humanist carried a very different connotation from the word today.

A humanist was a person educated in science, philosophy, and the ancient languages of Latin and Greek (i.e. the humanities).

They were not, therefore, adherents to some weird “Man is All” philosophy which has co-opted the word in our present day.

The problem for a humanist in the 16th century is the same problem faced by someone trained in science, philosophy, and dead languages today — what do you do for work??

Fortunately for Hobbes, patronage was still a system available to the nerds of the world back then.

Patronage was a system by which wealthy, often political, noblemen would hire intellectuals to tutor their children in science and philosophy.

We no longer have the patronage system, so those of us who wasted time learning Latin and Greek must content ourselves with the occasional impressed look from the girl in engineering—

Gaudeamus igitur.

(By the way, there does exist a form of Patronage still very much alive — have a looksie at this Patreon page for example.)

At any rate, Hobbes found his patron in the powerful Cavendish family.

Hobbes tutored Lord Cavendish’s son and accompanied him on his Grand Tour where he met the leading thinkers of the day, including Galileo.

Interestingly, Cavendish possessed a board seat on the Virginia Company, so Hobbes also got to sit-in on the board meetings of this famous (infamous?) prototype of modern-capitalism.

Though most famous for his political philosophy, Hobbes also wrote about optics and even translated Thucydides into English (I wouldn’t recommend it).

The Birth of The Leviathan

But, as I said, Hobbes is most famous for his political philosophy, so let’s get down to it.

Hobbes’ life coincided with a period of marked political and religious violence.

Hobbes wrote his best-selling book smack-dab in the middle of a great upheaval of war in Europe— the English civil war, the 30 years war in central Europe, and The Fronde in France.

Working for the Cavendish family, Hobbes was allied to very pro-royalist forces in England during the English Civil war.

This war pitted the Anglican Church (along with its Supreme Pontiff the King of England) against the largely Calvinist parliament.

This became problematic for Hobbes when his side began, decidedly, losing. Fearing for his life, he fled to Paris.

Hobbes arrived in central Europe to find a situation much the same as the one he had left.

During the 30 Years War, the Lutherans and the Calvinists were killing each other at a faster rate than the Catholics could have ever hoped to kill either of them.

It has been estimated that as many as 8 million people died in the 30 Years War, and as much as half of the total population of Germany was wiped out, making this conflict one of the greatest in European history.

To make matters worse, when Hobbes arrived in Paris, France was embroiled in its own civil war, known as The Fronde.

Perhaps out of sheer frustration with all the violence, and in particular the religious violence, Hobbes wrote his most famous (infamous?) work — Leviathan.

If you haven’t read, or even heard of, Leviathan it means you definitely didn’t study philosophy at college, because Leviathan is certainly considered one of the greatest works of philosophy ever written in English.

Well, not to fret, your engineering degree served you well because I'll be giving you the synopsis of the book anyways (see, I just saved you like $1,200 in college course fees, what a savings!).

Anatomy of the Big Fish — Hobbes’ World-Changing Argument

So what was Leviathan? It was a book on political philosophy, and it was meant to address a specific situation that Hobbes saw in Europe at the time — namely all the war we just covered.

The book wasn’t simply a critique on contemporary politics, however.

It concerned long-lasting, recurrent social issues, and for that reason it has continued to command an honored place in political philosophy curricula.

In the interest of keeping my post under 200 pages, I will do my best to really simplify Hobbes’ argument, particularly in the context of the traditions we have been discussing over the past weeks.

Hobbes’ main contention in Leviathan is that we ought not to assume that mankind has any purpose whatsoever beyond survival and material well-being.

In politics, therefore, we shouldn’t begin with an idealized view of what man ought to be, or what society should look like in some perfect world.

We can’t assume, for example, that man’s purpose is to be Holy and know God, because men do not agree on what man’s purpose is.

Even if they agree on man’s purpose — say, salvation — they don’t agree on how to get it.

The Catholics, Hobbes’ contends, would argue that only through their Church can one come to know God.

But the Lutherans also argue that salvation can only be found in the Lutheran church, same with the Calvinists, and the Puritans, and so on.

So, Hobbes concludes, rather than organizing around a vision of the best society, we ought to organize around what we agree is the worst form of society.

The worst form of society is what Hobbes calls the state of nature. The state of nature is any state where sudden violent death is a constant or imminent threat.

For Hobbes then, the central problem of politics was how to prevent everyone from killing each other all the time.

The solution? — Create a powerful state, ruled by a sovereign, with the strength necessary to keep the peace.

He called this “sovereign” — Leviathan.

He based much of his argument, he claimed, on correctly understanding human psychology. In his mind, everyone fears a violent death and constant combat.

Therefore, it is relatively easier to get people to agree that peaceful living was preferable to violent physical death, than to get everyone to agree on the vision of Utopia.

On that basis, Hobbes argued that people begrudgingly accept the need for a powerful sovereign, even if they don’t love the idea of government.

Technically speaking, this “Leviathan” could be a monarch or a democratically-elected government, but Hobbes was very critical of the civic republican tradition.

What use, asked Hobbes, is participation in the governmental process if it inevitably leads to such a weak and fractured society that the state cannot even protect its citizens from one another?

So in practice, Hobbes advocated for the establishment of a powerful monarch, virtually totalitarian in its scope.

After we have agreed on the worst case scenario, as far as Hobbes is concerned, everyone can go enjoy their own little vision of the Good by themselves, so long as they don’t harm anyone else in the process.

A Slight Snag

It is also important to note that Hobbes ran into a small problem — he was totally wrong.

It turns out many people were quite willing to die for their eternal salvation, or even the continuation of their civic community, than exchange freedom for material well-being.

As it happens, people who believe in a God that has called each individual to Himself would rather, on average, have eternal prosperity than earthly prosperity.

Go figure.

That is why Hobbes devoted a large section of his work to a critique of institutional religion.

In particular, he tried to show that the supposed theological differences of his day were built on weak foundations.

He argued that scripture was obscure, and that the basis for theological beliefs were flimsy and irrational.

None of these arguments have lasted to the modern day, so Hobbes' remaining contribution to philosophy was to abandon the notion that society be set up for some ultimate or ideal good.

Lockeing Down Leviathan — Liberalism in the 17th Century

Wait — you may be thinking — I saw this video of Jordan Peterson once and that doesn't sound like classical liberalism to me. Aren’t they supposed to be all about limited government?

Well, I said he set the stage for liberalism, didn’t I?

Hobbes was no liberal, but many of his ideas would be picked up by another contemporary English philosopher — John Locke.

Specifically, Locke agreed with Hobbes that the ideal government was not for this world, and instead the role of government should be to prevent the worst kind of social structure — anarchy.

Unlike Hobbes, however, Locke saw correctly that the source of the violent wars in Europe had much less to do with religion than with authoritarian monarchs (an observation modern scholarship has confirmed).

Rather than place sovereignty with some lofty monarch therefore, Locke insisted that the people were sovereign.

Why? Locke appealed to natural law theory, coming from Aquinas, that people were given certain rights by virtue of being created by God.

Any individual’s God-given dignity allows them, Locke argued, to go where they wish and to do as they please, so long as they do not violate the rights of others.

Like Hobbes, Locke argued that people naturally surrender a certain amount of freedom in order to obtain national security, but this is not a permanent subservience to a sovereign.

“The State” is formed by a social contract between the governed and the governing, which can be dissolved at any time by the governed.

Locke’s political philosophy (along with his empiricism) is the basis of the Liberal position — that the government’s sole role is to protect the rights of each individual from violations both foreign and domestic.

Sounds pretty familiar, doesn’t it? After the encyclical Cato’s Letters became widely popular in the colonial US, Locke’s philosophy became the basis for the American political experiment.

Conclusion — Tying it back to Capitalism

Did you think I forgot about my series there for a second?

What does any of this have to do with capitalism?

Remember, Hobbes argued that none of us could know what the ultimate Good is, so there’s no point in making a fuss about the next life.

Instead, we ought to focus on a this-worldly well-being.

To that end, a big part of Hobbes’ work was based on the passions, or emotions. Hobbes tried to refashion concepts like self-love into positive traits, contrary to the historical understanding.

That idea would be picked up by later thinkers, most notably Voltaire. He popularized Hobbes' idea that commerce was actually a tool for peace and prosperity.

Voltaire used the example of the Dutch in the 15th and 16th centuries, where people of various religions lived in peace.

He also wrote an entire book about his trip to England, which by his day had commercialized, where he describes seeing every denomination of Christianity walking side-by-side in peace.

Voltaire became a champion for market economies by arguing that the sins which have been historically ostracized by the Church are actually essential for a functioning society.

David Hume and Adam Smith were both influenced by Voltaire, who was essentially a popularizer of Hobbes, and would go on to argue along similar lines.

All across Europe, thinkers popped up in the shadow of Hobbes to claim that traditional vices like “self-interest” were not only practical, they were actually good.

With the rise of liberalism in the 17th and 18th centuries, there came a political philosophy that divorced the Church’s authority from the state’s, and gave predominance to the notion that individual’s be free to “pursue their own happiness.”

Beginning with Hobbes then, we have the intellectual grounding for a positive view of capitalism which has persisted to today (in some part unchanged).

Next time, we will conclude our series on capitalism with some final thoughts and a brief look at the many facets of the conversation that we have not looked into.

As always, thanks for reading!

Further Reading

Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes

Second Treatise of Government by John Locke

The Mind and The MArket by Jerry Muller

Devil Take The Hindmost by Edward Chancellor