Hobbes and Democracy

Machiavelli laid the foundations for modern politics through his reconsideration of the political capacities of ordinary people. Although Machiavelli had few illusions about the weaknesses of Florentine republicanism and was prepared to tack between open flattery and oblique criticism of Medici princes, Machiavelli's abiding aim was to advance the prospects for a new democratic republicanism. If Machiavelli is the first modern democrat, Hobbes is the first modern antidemocrat. In so naming Hobbes, I want especially to emphasize Hobbes's hostility toward the moral dynamics of democracy—what he once described as “envy in the likeness of zeal to the public good.” This hostility is the bedrock of his political theory and the origin of his novel vantage point (T, 15).

Placing Hobbes's attitude toward democracy at the center of his “civil philosophy” also raises new questions about his masterwork, Leviathan. Hobbes's fame as a political theorist rests upon this celebrated book. Yet, as a political proposal, Leviathan, according to Richard Flathman, is a “gimcrack contraption,” and Flathman says that Hobbes knew it. Hobbes's political aims are better understood not as advocacy of a certain kind of regime but rather as a Machiavellian counterpoint. He wielded his civil philosophy as a club with which to beat back the political energies unleashed by Machiavellian republicanism and revolutionary Protestantism. Hobbes accepted much of the political landscape recast by Machiavelli, such as his broad division of regimes into principalities and republics as well as his discoveries regarding the moral-political energies of the democratic sense of injustice. In this regard, Hobbes was especially interested in the relationship between the felt sense of “oppression” among ordinary people and their inclination to what he called “sedition.” Hobbes was also a student of the Reformation and of the growing social fluidity of his own society. But what would have given Machiavelli hope for the prospects of democracy, in Hobbes aroused fear.