The Demand for Punishment

Contemporary readers encountering Hobbes for the first time find it almost impossible to imagine Leviathan as an attractive political vision. Why would anyone embrace an all-powerful ruler? The short answer to this question lies in the Hobbesian vision of the state of nature that reflects the turmoil of his time: his philosophy was born from the same fear he claimed as his twin. As Corey Robin's recent examination of Hobbes explicates, fear is the foundational political psychology of liberalism—a tendency that is particularly relevant in times of turmoil and change.¹

Fear may govern the direction of Leviathan, but Hobbes also examines the psychological drive of humans in a far more basic sense. He asserts that causality is the primary tool used by humans to assert control over their lives and environments, rather than being subject to them in the way of other creatures. If something happens, we want to know why. Determining the cause of events allows us to prevent tragedy, or attempt to recreate or to perpetuate fortune. This human proclivity forms the starting point of Hobbes's political vision in Leviathan. He states that “it is peculiar to the nature of men to be inquisitive into the causes of the events they see—some more, some less, but all men so much as to be curious in the search of the causes of their own good and evil fortune.”²

But while this proclivity towards causality has been at the root of all political orders, it is a necessarily tragic propensity since matter has a way of defying the mind's grasp. Causal logic offers the tantalizing possibility that we can know why things occur, and even more importantly, that we might be able to control what happens to us. However, experience proves that a complete mastery of events is impossible. Our perpetually unsuccessful attempts to control our lives and fortunes are shadowed by a nagging unease. The frequently suppressed knowledge that absolute control cannot be maintained creates a psychology of anxiety common in human beings. We set the stage to create calm and clear progression, and yet have some consciousness that our narrative is bound to be disrupted in ways we cannot anticipate. The inevitability of failure spurs us on to try and create ever tighter contingency plans, which unfailingly fall short as well.

The search for causality is the source of anxiety, but it also can provide comfort when our plans go awry and we suffer. We can look back and see different choices that might have been made, envision the different paths we will walk in the future, or we can comfort ourselves with the knowledge that there will be some reward for the pain we feel currently. Understanding suffering as punishment immediately creates a different conceptual lens for human pain. Unlike the randomness of suffering, the pain of punishment has a cause, a clear end, and the promise of forgiveness or transformation. The present may be painful, but this deprivation provides hope for a better future. At least, this is what we learn humans aspire to in an examination of the Book of Job and Hobbes's Leviathan. Whether political regimes actually transform pain into something that conforms to this desire for causality is another question to which I shall return.

The Fall from Grace: How Judgment Begat Punishment and Punishment then Denied Judgment

In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the ability to judge gives birth to the punishments of God. Before their ability to know the difference between right and wrong, Adam and Eve dwell in Paradise and have been given life everlasting. God tells Adam that the day he eats the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil he shall die. Adam and Eve eat the fruit, and do not die. The fruit itself does not kill them; instead mortality becomes their punishment for disobeying God. The punishment for the crime brings on their eventual death. After Adam and Eve gain the faculty of judgment through their disobedience God observes, “Behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now lest he put forth his hand and take also the tree of life, and eat, and live forever” (Genesis 4:22, NRSV). God doesn't conclude his thought, that then humans will have become Gods, knowing and immortal. Instead, he banishes humans from paradise, curses them to suffer estrangement, pain, and the return to dust at the end of their lives.

The story is primarily important because it offers an explanation for the suffering that humans endure. We brought a state of original sin upon ourselves, hence our state of life is one long punishment from God. Yet what interests me here is the link between the faculty of judgment and the punishment that is wrought as a result. The punishment of God would not have made sense without the faculty gained by the crime. Dying from eating the fruit would have been a causal relation that any animal would have been able to learn from. This fruit is poisonous. But to understand that disobedience itself is wicked, not merely the consequence of disobedience, relies upon the faculty of judgment. A child can disobey her father and touch a hot stove, and will learn why not to touch a hot stove out of instinct and experience. To teach a child not to disobey even when there are no direct consequences for her or his actions is a much more difficult enterprise. Why is lying wrong if no one finds out? Understanding this requires a faculty of judgment and the ability to know the difference between good and evil as abstract principles.

In punishing Adam and Eve, God not only dooms them to lives of pain, but also takes the first step in developing their ill-gotten faculty of judgment. The story is intended to provide a causal answer to the suffering of humanity. We suffer because we sinned. God punished us because we disobeyed him, and through punishment we will learn to remember and act correctly when our judgment is required.

However there is another way to understand this story. Faced with suffering, our desire for order requires us to understand the human condition as punishment based upon clear order—God's will. If we suffer, there must be a reason that we do so; it cannot be senseless and random. To understand our suffering as punishment comes from the faculty of judgment. The faculty of judgment leads us to assume that there must be a cause and effect between our actions and lives.

There is a remarkable convergence of the two interpretations here. In the first, sin creates punishment. Yet we can also see that the content of the sin is not inconsequential—judgment creates the proclivity to see suffering as punishment. We insist that the random chaos of life and death is the result of a divine order of reward and penalty. Human reason creates this order out of faith; though life and death appear random, they are ordered by a force we cannot see or understand. The insistence that such chaos is ordered, despite the dearth of empirical evidence that proves this order, demonstrates the fervent human desire for causality and control.

The Book of Job

Divine punishment and original sin help our minds make sense of suffering. Inherent in our desire to understand punishment is the potential for future control, not just explanation of past events. Further reading of the Old Testament reveals a more complex view of the nature of divine punishment most pointedly and powerfully displayed in the Book of Job. Here the human hope that through obedience we can avoid divine punishment is reconciled with the reality of random suffering. Man's capacity for judgment is more clearly defined. Interestingly, there is a shift from the observations of God and the serpent in Genesis who hinted that Adam and Eve's capacity to know good and evil makes them like God, implying that divine and human moral reasoning are equivalent. In the Book of Job, human rationality is defined as distinctly different from the rationale that guides the bestowal of divine rewards and penalties.

The Book of Job opens with a description of the grace bestowed upon Job's life by God. He has three beautiful daughters, seven strong sons, and was “the richest man in the East”. Job was a “man of perfect integrity, who feared God and avoided evil.”³

An Accusing Angel appears before God and responds when God boasts of the integrity and piety of Job; “Doesn't Job have a good reason for being so good? Haven't you put a hedge around him—himself and his whole family and everything he has? You bless whatever he does, and the land is teeming with his cattle. But just reach out and strike everything he has, and I bet he'll curse you to your face.”⁵

If God is all-powerful, why do the innocent suffer, and why does evil go unpunished? How can we explain the misfortune of the devout when those who flout God's laws enjoy life? The suffering of Job calls attention to the inconsistencies of God's punishments and demands an accounting. The rest of the book is Job's dialogue with his three friends and then God himself about the nature of divine punishment. Job insists that he is innocent, that God punishes him without reason and is therefore unjust, while his friends beg him to be humble, proclaim his sins, and beg for forgiveness. Eliphaz asks rhetorically, “Can an innocent man be punished?” assuming that the answer is no. Yet the Book of Job leaves the question open, for the story itself suggests the opposite answer. Eliphaz insists that man could never avoid being wicked. Job retorts, “Can't I tell right from wrong? If I sinned, wouldn't I know it?”⁷

Job refuses to succumb to the pleading of his friends. He insists upon his innocence, proclaiming the injustice of God.

Job is innocent, and his suffering proves God is unjust.¹⁰

God comes to earth and speaks to Job and his friends from a whirlwind and immediately complicates the situation by asking, “Do you dare to deny my judgment? Am I wrong because you are right?”¹¹

Job is converted; he acknowledges the limits of his reason. “I will be quiet, comforted that I am dust” he concludes. Therefore the contradictory becomes reconciled: Job was innocent but God is just. There is a fundamental inability of human rationality to understand the order created by God's punishments. We can strive to follow his rules and use our judgment in ways that he would find praiseworthy, but this does not mean we shall not suffer at his hand someday. The crushing reality of punishment has outstripped our attempts to rationally order cause and effect. Job was right to fear that suffering would invade his life, even when he had done everything possible to curry God's favor.

After Job's realization of the impenetrable logic of divine punishment, the Book of Job ends with one last Psalm. God rewards Job and punishes his friends. Job has “spoken the truth about me” while the friends with all their piety failed to do the same. Job understands the limits of his reason, God punishes the innocent, and that the order of the world is beyond his grasp. The friends are punished because they assume they know the mind of God; they assumed that the source of Job's suffering rested in his actions. In other words, it is a sin to expect God's actions to conform to human reason. Divine order is beyond our conceptual grasp.

Job's Trial

One of the more curious elements in the Book of Job is a pretend trial that is constructed by Job and his friends. His friends urge him to plead his case before God, confess his sins, and beg for His mercy. This leads Job to contemplate such a trial and make a number of observations. First, if God is the judge and prosecutor and Job is the defendant, the grounds of their collision are entirely uneven. “I know that this is true: no man can argue with God or answer even one of a thousand accusations. However wise or powerful—who could oppose him and live?”¹²

Second, Job asks, “If he seized me, who could stop him or cry out, ‘What are you doing?’”¹³

Finally, Job expresses his desire that the punishment he has endured be redemptive. Even if it has proven to be unjust, he would be willing to endure it if it meant that God would embrace him for doing so.

This is a crucial revelation. Job welcomes God's authority, even if he has administered punishment, as long as he is redeemed by it. He is willing to endure hardship for the sake of God's authority, as long as he is honored for doing so, thereby transforming suffering into future grace. If he felt that the punishment has redeemed him in God's eyes, the bond between punisher and punished would only be strengthened. This shows the inexorable desire of human rationality to ascribe cause and effect. God has denied Job the understanding of a causal link between crime and punishment in this case, and indeed, there was no causal relationship to understand. Job can accept his punishment—even if he can't understand why he is being punished—as long as the punishment leads to redemption.

Job's attempt to reason about the conditions of just punishment and to ascribe sensibility to his travails is answered by God in the form of a great sea creature—Leviathan. He describes a most terrible, irascible monster that no human could even dare to imagine placating, as only God has the power to subdue him. Job accepts this illustration of divine might and human impotence and the question of justice seems to have been solved by the assertion of supreme power: God is all-powerful; therefore you cannot question his justice.

Leviathan Returns

Thomas Hobbes adopted the name of this sea creature, leviathan, for his artificial and all-powerful earthly God. A number of scholars have observed that Hobbes carried the lesson of the sea monster away from the Book of Job—might makes right. If the sea monster can be used to frighten Job into accepting God's impenetrable divine judgment, why could it not work to reinforce mortal authorities as well? While the family resemblance is certainly there, I believe that the connections between Job and Hobbes are more complex than that. Hobbes not only adopts God's method of affirming his right to judge, he also responds to Job's pleas during his trial earlier in the text.

Clearly Hobbes was closely engaged in a reading of the Bible. Recent scholarship has exhaustively debated whether or not Hobbes was truly devout. There are those who say that he was devout¹⁶

One interpretation of the Book of Job's resolution is that the monster makes divine and human reason expendable, and therefore justice is based only on power. In an influential article from 1983, Halliday et al. claimed, “For Hobbes, the lesson of Job contained an important political message: the absolutism of the mortal God is an imitation of the irresistible power of the immortal God. And obviously, Hobbes was quite content to rest on this doctrine.”²¹

Michael Oakeshott has argued that while Hobbes's work may appear labyrinthine, it is connected together by one thread—the nature of human reason.

Placing Hobbes' interest in cause and effect as the primary categories of human reason at the center of analysis, we can see why Hobbes found a kindred spirit in the figure of Job. Job's meticulous worship of God in the face of his prosperity sought to affirm devotion and reward. His fear of the unknown or the unexpected, causing him to purify his children year after year just in case they had thought something that might displease God, reveals what Hobbes called the fundamental human anxiety—the desire to know and the fear of the unknowable.

In Chapter Twelve, “Of Religion,” Hobbes argues that the origins of religion can be found in the psyche of man. The primary disposition of human beings is to seek the causes of events that they see, and to establish cause and effect between chains of events. The problem is that causality is usually obscure. “And when he cannot assure himselfe of the true causes of things, (for the causes of good and evill fortune for the most part are invisible,) he supposes causes of them, either such as his own fancy suggesteth; or trusteth to the Authority of other men, such as he thinks to be his friends, and wiser than himself.”²³

Of course, as the story of Job demonstrates, unseen forces do not always provide neat explanations for events, so the search for causality leads to acute anxiety regardless of religious belief. Particularly those who meticulously try to anticipate the future and provide for themselves become haunted by the capriciousness of fate. Hobbes describes the state with particular vividness: “So that man, which looks too far before him, in the care of future time, hath his heart all the day long, gnawed on by fear of death, poverty, or other calamity; and has no repose, nor pause of his anxiety, but in sleep.”²⁴

Hobbes describes how religion works to provide a clear causality for events that cannot be otherwise explained. The propensity to assert such a train of events even when events defy explanation is remarkable. Hobbes notes, “And therefore, men by their own meditation, arrive to the acknowledgement of one Infinite, Omnipotent, and Eternall God, choose rather to confesse he is Incomprehensible, and above their understanding; than to define his Nature by Spirit Incorporeall, and then confesse their definition to be unintelligible.”²⁶

Hobbes's ruler may bring terrible punishments to bear upon her subjects, but these punishments will meet the criteria outlined by Job. They will be subject to the categories of cause and effect, there will be a powerful judge to arbitrate, and the subjects shall be equal before the law. In short, punishment will be rational, possible to predict, comprehend, and hence, potentially avoid. Just as important, it will thereby be redemptive, meaning that it will have a definite end, provide consequences for an infraction, and thus offer the hope of a future free from suffering. The Book of Job offered an explanation for the breakdown of causality between piety and divine grace. But Job's cries ultimately did not go unheeded. Leviathan can be read as an attempt to answer Job's pleas, to create a political order that is based upon awesome power, yet is not opaque to human reason. Even if divine order cannot be made accountable to human reason and control, the worldly order can become so. Hobbes marks a shift in the relationship between human reason and the creation of systems of punishment. If human reason invented original sin to make sense of suffering, this is the next step along the way. Reason will not only be able to explain punishment, but will also be able to predict and thereby respond to it. A system of punishment that follows the logic of human reason promises a more transparent ordering of the world and the powers within it.

Hobbes's Theory of Punishment

Punishment plays a most central, yet generally unexamined aspect in the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes. But to understand his system of punishment, it is necessary to situate it in the context of his epistemology, which has been thoroughly explored by scholars. Hobbes states that all thoughts and imagination originate from the senses. He begins his book with the chapter “On Sense” highlighting this element as the basis of his political order. Sense provides the origin of our perception of the world, “(For there is no conception in a man's mind, which hath not at first, totally, or by parts, been begotten upon the organs of sense.)”²⁷

The body receives the senses, and the mind sets about ordering them. Senses provide the material for rationality to exercise itself by developing a “trayne of imaginations.” These are the categories of cause and effect, our senses inform us, for example, that when it rains a particular road floods and the next time it rains we can imagine that the same road has flooded. In that way, sense meets the human inclination to establish cause and effect. The result is science, which Hobbes defines as follows,

Science allows us to learn from the past and try to exert control over the future, to anticipate and plan.

Hobbes developed his metaphors carefully, and therefore I do not take the fact that he described punishment as the “nerves” of the Artificial Man, the Commonwealth, lightly. The relationship between nerves and action are mechanical. If you hit your thumb with a hammer, the hand will recoil and blood will rush into the appendage automatically. The sensation of pain will teach us to be more careful next time. Punishment and reward are the nerves of the commonwealth, “by which fastned to the seate of the Soveraignty, every joynt and member is moved to performe his duty.”³⁴

Once again, the matter is one of perception. As Hobbes observes, the purpose of punishment is not revenge but correction. Therefore the sovereign needs to punish in ways that correct rather than cultivate resentment. If crimes are committed out of fear, need, or ignorance “there is place many times for Lenity.”³⁵

The causal relationship Hobbes is searching for here is not a direct correspondence between punishment and crime. If this were the case, theft would be punished in the same way, regardless of who committed it and why. Rather, humans need to be able to perceive a direct correspondence between crime and punishment. Therefore, punishment needs to occur as a clear message to the members of the commonwealth. It is with this goal in mind that Hobbes elaborates the rules and methods of punishment in Chapter 28, “Of Punishments and Rewards.” In contrast to the trials of Job, Hobbesian punishment must be perfectly transparent, otherwise it loses its utility.

Nor is it simply the sovereign's ability to punish that informs the body. If Hobbes were adopting a simple linkage between power and might, then the mere ability of the sovereign to punish—and punish terribly—would be considered sufficient to generate adherence to the law. Yet Hobbes quite specifically delineates how the sovereign should punish. Because punishments and rewards send particular lessons and teach the body through sensation, it is important that the sovereign punish and reward correctly in order to teach the body the correct response.

Hobbes details the conditions of just punishment in Chapter 28. “A Punishment, is an Evill inflicted by publique Authority, on him that hath done, or omitted that which is Judged by the same Authority to be a Transgression of the Law: to the end that the will of men may thereby the better be disposed to obedience.”³⁷

Some argue that the sovereign authority's power makes the law; the law is created and maintained by his authority to punish those who transgress it. But the second aspect to note of Hobbes's description of punishment is that he carefully limits the sovereign power's ability to punish. Here the mere fact of punishment does not establish sovereignty, instead sovereignty bounds the ability to punish. In a fashion all the more remarkable considering his leniency of the necessities of sovereign power at other locations in the text, Hobbes places a series of restrictions upon punishment. Hobbes's standards of punishment are surprisingly rigid—it must be rational, redemptive, and transparent—all the elements which Job desires for his own trial before God.

Only through the perception of causality between crime and punishment, and then punishment and redemption, does punishment become useful in training members of the commonwealth. For that reason, “all evill which is inflicted without intention or possibility of disposing the Delinqquent, or (by his example) other men, to obeey the Lawes, is not Punishment; but an act of hostility.”³⁸

In achieving the perceptible relationship between the punishment and just authority, Hobbes makes the following provisions. First, the amount of punishment needs to be exact in order to achieve its utility. The pain of punishment must outweigh the benefits derived from the crime, otherwise it will not create adherence to the law. More interestingly, Hobbes also specifies that if a punishment for a crime has been specified, increasing the penalty is not legitimate punishment, but is instead “an act of hostility.” This provision belies the assumption that for Hobbes might makes right. Instead, punishment must adhere to the law in order to generate obedience to the law. Furthermore, a person cannot be punished for breaking a law that does not exist.

The public authority alone has the right to punish. Hobbes distinguishes punishment from private acts of revenge, as well as acts of nature or God, such as a curse or illness that falls upon someone after they have done evil.³⁹

This is yet another way that Hobbes answers Job's pleas for a redemptive punishment. Hobbes places the conditions of punishment under a utilitarian imperative: if it is not useful for bolstering the judgment of the commonwealth, it should not be done. For this reason, “all Punishments of Innocent subjects, be they great or little, are against the Law of Nature: For Punishment is only for transgression of the Law, and therefore there can be no Punishment of the Innocent…. For there can arrive no good to the Common-wealth, by punishing the innocent.”⁴⁰

Conclusion

Hobbes's Leviathan and the Book of Job offer us one way to evaluate our political order: does it meet the demands of causality and is the justice meted out perceptible as such? Looking at the contemporary penal system in the United States, it must be admitted that it meets neither of these criteria. The links between crime and punishment, and punishment and redemption, have been severed. Those in prison often feel that their incarceration was random since dozens of people engage in similar criminal activities, yet are not caught and sentenced. The perception of irregularity extends into white-collar crime as well. For example, ask other people whether they think insider trading is consistently punished or whether Martha Stewart was singled out. Having undergone punishment does not often lead to the possibility of a better future either since the punishment does not always truly end. For instance, Meghan's Law provides for the permanent stigmatization of some offenders, while employment and suffrage exclusions create a multi-tiered system of full and partial citizenship. All of these problems have been noted by others as unjust for those unfortunate enough to be subject to them, but I hope this reading suggests why these practices may be detrimental to our entire political order. If the practice of punishment does not meet the basic human desire for clear causality, it will ultimately create anxiety rather than dispel it.

And citizens today are certainly not waning in their expectation that their political systems provide a sense of predictability. The other lesson that emerges here is what Hobbes establishes about the desire for control confronted with a chaotic world that drives us to establish, revise, and insist upon political order. This also seems to be a lesson that is worth heeding in the contemporary political climate. People do look to their government to eradicate the unforeseeable and mitigate misfortune, from hurricanes to mortgage rates. It will inevitably fail in its attempts to provide predictability.

In the past couple of years, more political scientists such as John Mueller and Ian Lustick have made the argument that the U.S. government has created a Sisyphysean task for itself in promising to provide security for the country. Lustick accounts sitting down at a table and starting to draw up a list of all the different potential threats and vulnerabilities of the United States, and watching it infinitely expand, while Mueller presents the odds of terrorist attacks and measures the benefit of spending to avert these slim possibilities. The priorities of the government are redirected towards a simply impossible goal. The argument is that the government should instead focus on everyday likelihoods such as children needing to learn how to read and flu vaccines being delivered to senior citizens, and not worry about what someone might do with the grain silos in Nebraska.

Though I heartily agree with this pessimistic assessment of the security state, I think it is important to remember that it is the desire to understand and control that rests at the root of our political system. This is not to say that all resources should be spent in making us feel safe, even though we never will be. Rather, we cannot simply dismiss the drive for security and the government's response to it as bad politics or fear-mongering. Insurance industries are not about to fold because of a mass conversion to fatalism, and if the government refuses to respond to this basic desire to control, other entities will.

What then, are critics of the security state to do? The story of Job and Hobbes's response allow us to see that human beings are capable of developing quite sophisticated and even circuitous understandings of cause and effect. Hence, our explanations of risk and safety can be much more complex than is often assumed. Rather than dismiss the politics of fear, perhaps we need to become more adept at maneuvering within the politics of security, debating it, and redefining it.

Perhaps the true dynamism of political systems is the paradox that gave birth to them: the human desire to order the universe and find stability combined with the persistence of the unforeseeable. Embedded in human reason is the anxiety that will drive us to find different, more responsive orders. Fear is not necessarily the enemy of rational politics, but is an integral element within it.

So why exactly is man's life a prison, as Job claimed? Because of the seemingly inescapable drive to create order that will disintegrate, just as Sisyphus's boulder rolls down the hill again? Because we see punishment everywhere around us where there is only random suffering? Because we create orders to punish us in ways that are comprehensible, perhaps with the intention of occluding the pain and suffering that ultimately defy perceptible order? All three of these dynamics pervade our experiences, and help explain the prisons and rules that we carry within—and create for ourselves and one another.