If these new books are indicative of trends in Hobbes scholarship, we can look forward to hearing more about several themes. Samantha Frost and James Martel agree that his theory is not liberal, or even proto-liberal, and instead see community as considerably more central than has been understood previously. But liberalism and community have many meanings. Frost associates liberalism with the concept of an autonomous, rational individual and, by contrast, depicts the Hobbesian individual as an intersubjective being, enmeshed in and constituted by networks of social relations. Martel associates liberalism with sovereignty and makes Leviathan into a radical democratic warning against political authority.
Even more basic, however, is a contrast in their approaches to interpretation. They exemplify the difference between an orientation to an understanding of meaning as this might have been intended by the author versus a concentration on audience (i. e., the interpreter's) reaction. In more or less traditional fashion, Frost offers a textually based explication of Hobbes's accounts of human nature and knowledge. Martel dismisses authorial intention and forswears the claim to have gotten Leviathan “right” in favor of the weaker claim that we “can” read the work as he does.
By my lights, Frost is the more successful of the two, both for offering a cogent explication of important and difficult Hobbesian arguments and for showing their relevance to a twenty-first century audience. Lessons from a Materialist Thinker is an apt title for an interpretation that finds in Hobbes's theory a model anti-Cartesian account of the self. Materialism opposes the separation of mind from body, but does so at the cost of rendering thinking and willing problematic. If our perceptions are, as Hobbes said, the product of bombardment by motions from external matter, and if willing is simply the last in the chain of desires caused by that bombardment, then has not the ghost disappeared from the machine? Frost skillfully argues it has not. Key to her argument is the claim that the effects of external stimuli are “brought to bear upon and transformed by the history and patterns of motion internal to animate bodies” (p. 23). To elucidate this internal motion, she carefully reconstructs Hobbes's account of sensing, starting from the idea that sensing entails distinguishing between objects. Hence, sensing implies and requires memory, and herein resides the ghost in the machine. Our capacity to remember and compare makes temporality essential to the construction of the self: “the thinking-body's memory [is] a tangle of residual stimulation that undergoes constant modification by experience” (p. 86).
Frost's account makes memory and imagination central, in turn, to choosing. On its face, Hobbes's well-known definition of the will as simply the last desire prior to action paints us as passive agents, beings who do not so much choose as react to external stimuli. What saves us as agents is that memory (experience) and imagination (anticipation) add their sculpting to our desires. It is worth lingering on Frost's intriguing observation, “One of the most striking features of Hobbes's account of action is the imagination's displacement of the will as the signal capacity that enables us to choose” (p. 87).
The last two chapters extend this account of the self to ethics and politics. To conceive of the self as partly determined by external forces is to conceive of us as inherently intersubjective creatures: “We are always and inescapably social even if we are not sociable” (p. 125). At the heart of Hobbesian ethics, then, is the injunction to see ourselves as individuals whose actions bear causally on others and to see ourselves as part of a collective. As Frost works this out, it is a consequentialist ethics in which presentation matters more than intention (which yields an interesting take on the laws of nature) and in which lying can be permissible. Emphasizing our interdependence generates, finally, an image of a Leviathan-state in which sovereign power is seen to rest on citizen cooperation and the “social contract” is simply a metaphor for citizens' ongoing authorization of rulers.
It is a long chain of deduction from an innovative account of the centrality of memory in Hobbesian epistemology. I am skeptical about the later links in the chain: It seems a stretch to derive from his materialism the view that we should regard ourselves, in private and public life, as parts of a greater whole. His “reply to the fool” in Leviathan seems, instead, to associate cooperative behavior with self-interest in what are now called “iterated games.” I am also skeptical of an interpretation that puts cooperation at the center of Hobbesian politics: Nonresistance and allegiance to established authority were more important goals in his mind. Nevertheless, Frost's interpretation of Hobbesian materialism is a novel and cogent contribution. She shows in a new and interesting way how he succeeded at the game plan of deducing an account of “man” from an account of “body.”
Martel means to do for Leviathan what others have done for The Prince: transform it from a defense of strong rulers into a cautionary tale about them. As he sees it, “Hobbes is not succumbing to the absolute but is rather demonstrating how the absolute might possibly be banished from political life” (p. 137). He finds this demonstration in Parts 3 and 4 of Leviathan, which are seen to offer an account of divine authority that subverts and undermines the authoritarian account of terrestrial political authority in Parts 1 and 2. Martel concentrates, in particular, on the three personifications of God—Moses, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. Where the first two represent kingdoms of the past and future, “the figure of the Holy Spirit is the critical one for our kingdomless time” (p. 191); “the authority that stems from the figure of the Holy Spirit can be seen as radically democratic” (p. 195). Interesting discussions of idolatry and demonology flesh this out: These religious concepts prompt skepticism about the “conceits” of terrestrial sovereigns.
Martel argues, secondly, that Hobbes undermines sovereignty by unmasking it. This rescues him from liberalism inasmuch as sovereignty is a concomitant of liberalism. Furthermore, he suggests that Hobbes saw in the community of the early church an alternative to both authoritarianism and chaos. This community is exemplified in scriptural interpretation, specifically in an alternative to sovereign interpretation of Scripture versus a cacophony of individual readings. In democratic fashion, the latter can take communal form when readers “adjudicate with one another to form widely held … beliefs, opinions, and authorizations” (p. 206).
Martel's is a “rhetorical” reading of Leviathan, expressly intended to be more radical than David Johnston's, Raia Prokhovnik's and Quentin Skinner's. Critical of their rhetorical interpretations for hardly departing from the overt meaning of the text (pp. 30–33), he is intent on revealing an anti-Leviathan. The obvious question is posed in conclusion: “Isn't it perverse to claim that this, of all books, is antisovereign?” No, Martel replies, “this is no more perverse than reading The Prince as being against the prince” (p. 222).
It is difficult to know what to say about the claim that the theory can be read in this way. However, taking a more traditional view of the relationship between author and reader, let me suggest two gaps in Martel's interpretation. While it covers a wide range of literature, including relating Hobbes to Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, and Emmanuel Levinas, he neglects literature specifically relevant to his arguments. I have in mind, in particular, the subject of authority over scriptural interpretation, which has been extensively canvassed by, among others, Richard Tuck, Johann Sommerville, and Glenn Burgess. Second, he fails to note an obvious difference between The Prince and Leviathan. In Machiavelli's case, there is overt textual evidence—in the form of the Discourses—for an anti-prince reading. Although parts of Hobbes's theory were appropriated by republicans in the Engagement Controversy of the early Interregnum, he never penned republican sentiments.
As different in approach and subject as these commentaries are, they both are efforts to rescue Hobbism by relieving it of now-unfashionable ideas of competitive individualism and political absolutism. Frost's and Martel's Hobbism is more communitarian and therefore less disturbing than Hobbism of a Lord of the Flies variety, and its politics more appealing than the Hobbism that served the Stuart monarchs. There is something to be said, though, for not endeavoring to tame the bear of Malmesbury. A natural state of war and the fearsome Leviathan-state are images that have become part of the stuff of Western political imagination and ought not to be painted over with prettier scenarios.
