II. Inner Freedom

In Hobbes, discussions of obligation and obedience tend to begin with his writings on the natural condition of mankind in chapter 13 of Leviathan. From that point on, Hobbes sets out the idea of the social contract, the basic elements of the de facto claim, the laws of nature, and different forms of institution. Whether or not one reads Hobbes as a natural right or a natural law theorist, his discussions of obligation are roundly concerned with showing them in the affirmative. This approach is fine, save that it tells us nothing about the reason why the previous polity had dissolved—that is, why citizens abjured their obligation to the sovereign—leaving the distinct impression that Hobbes is beginning from a sort of ahistorical and unconditioned void. This is unfortunate, as the chapter preceding Hobbes's discussion on the natural condition of mankind (chapter 12, “Of Religion”), provides such an account.

In chapter 12, Hobbes sets out an account of the process of regime collapse that corresponds with the incremental emergence of what can be fairly termed inner resistance. Having explained the politics of new foundations and the processes founders use to command the faith of subjects, and having declared that the natural laws and the positive laws contain each other,Footnote ¹⁵ Hobbes then—in a discussion that bears little resemblance to the natural law and natural right interpretations of obligation—turns to the decay of faith and the undermining of obligation. Hobbes begins by characterizing a subject's faith in the sovereign-founder as based on the belief that he or she will “labour to procure their happiness,”Footnote ¹⁶ turning then to the reason why regimes fail. Each of Hobbes's answers involves the citizens’ evaluation of sovereign conduct. “It followeth necessarily,” Hobbes writes, that

Four conditions, then, all of which turn on the character of the sovereign: wisdom, sincerity, love, and revelation (I will return to the subordinate clause).

Hobbes links the reputation for wisdom with the logical coherence of promulgated doctrine. Whatever the symbolic content of religious creeds (“Men, Women, a Bird, a Crocodile, a Calf, a Dogge, a Snake, an Onion, a Leeke”),Footnote ¹⁸ their attendant ethical-political claims must not be blatantly irrational. Founders of religions and new state doctrines will invariably have their wisdom assessed by way of the internal coherency of the regime. This is because an irrational claim necessarily “discredits him in all things else he shall propound as from revelation supernaturall: which revelation a man may indeed have of many things above, but nothing against naturall reason.”Footnote ¹⁹ These claims are not as strict as they first seem. As the examples listed above show, the symbolic content is not important. But the logic of the sovereign's promulgated doctrine is.

As well as assessing the rationality of the sovereign's ideological claims, citizens also judge the sincerityFootnote ²⁰ of the sovereign making the claim. In language that will be evoked again in his discussion of virtue and war, Hobbes writes that “that which taketh away the reputation of Sincerity, is the doing, or saying of such things, as appeare to be signes, that what they require other men to believe, is not believed by themselves.”Footnote ²¹ Whatever the formal marks of sovereignty, in practice there is an implicit obligation for sovereigns to abide by their own ideological claims and by the laws of nature. This obligation becomes stricter as these claims become clearer, for example when codified as law. But the claim is not merely one of the intention behind the law (or religious doctrine), it is that as well as an evaluation of the actual deeds of the founder. Hobbes does not describe these actions of lawbreaking, but instead describes a sovereign's insincerity as “sinful,” a character trait flagged by eminent vice: “Injustice, Cruelty, Prophanesse, Avarice, and Luxury.”Footnote ²²

Hobbes's advice is not only that sovereigns abstain from vice. He further writes: “That which taketh away the reputation of Love, is being detected of private ends.”Footnote ²³ Sovereigns who direct the state apparatus to fulfill their own egoistic desires undermine their claim to securing equity and general flourishing—the very reasons the commonwealth was founded.Footnote ²⁴ “For that which men reap benefit by to themselves, they are thought to do for their own sakes, and not for love of others.”Footnote ²⁵ These moral transgressions are all the more flagrant where the ideological apparatus of the state claims other ideals. Note that this claim does not turn—as the laws of nature generally doFootnote ²⁶ —on the silver rule of negative reciprocity (“do not unto others as you would have them not do unto you”), which Hobbes routinely advises for the great majority.Footnote ²⁷ Instead, it relies on the golden rule (“do unto others as you would have them do unto you”), and indeed pushes this to the realm of charity, as there are no express requirements to requite.

Finally, the question turns to how sovereigns can continue to instantiate evidence of their “divine Calling.” It is politically crucial that they do so, for if sovereigns cannot evince their special calling—either by miracle, “true Prophecy,” or “extraordinary Felicity” (by which Hobbes always means perception of “miracles” etc.)Footnote ²⁸ —then the declared moral values of the commonwealth risk appearing (and being) unmoored, left instead to conventionalism, “Custome, and Lawes of the places, in which they be educated.”Footnote ²⁹ Hobbes's answer here is an outright rejection of mere de factoism. The operative distinction is between religion, superstition, and what Hobbes calls “true religion”: “Feare of power invisible, feigned by the mind, or imagined from tales publiquely allowed, religion; not allowed, superstition. And when the power imagined, is truly such as we imagine, true religion.”Footnote ³⁰ If the “tales publiquely allowed” corresponds with “true religion,” all the better. But Hobbes's emphasis is on the latter. Note the difficulty of the task at hand for any sovereign. The sovereign must persuasively instantiate (give a “probable token of Divine Revelation”) his or her own divine calling. But the veracity of that miracle—that is, its status as pertaining to a “true religion”—is independent of the sovereign's office, and is an output of his or her personal persuasiveness and sincerity, and the judgment of individual citizens thereof. Failing to do so, Hobbes tells us, can result in the failure of the commonwealth.

Hobbes summarizes his discussion of the four faults undermining sovereignty with what I take to be a crucial insight regarding the effective grounds of obligation: “For as in naturall things, men of judgement require naturall signes, and arguments; so in supernaturall things, they require signes supernaturall, (which are Miracles,) before they consent inwardly, and from their hearts.”Footnote ³¹ There is much more to say about the obligation of citizens and the collapse of regimes. However, here, in one of Hobbes's clearest discussions of regime collapse and the economy of responsibility thereof, he claims that the core problem is the collapse of inner consent. Moreover, Hobbes assigns the sovereign the responsibility to maintain and foster inner consent by way of his or her own virtue. The implication is that the ideological debates regarding obligation are important but symptomatic concerns.

No matter how fortified the sovereign's coercive power—and no matter how pervasive the sovereign's concomitant ideological apparatus may be—subjects retain the faculty of judgment. Regardless of social contractual or de factoist claims regarding the legitimacy of the state, maintaining the fiction of the state is contingent upon subjects judging that his or her personifying sovereign is representative of his or her will.Footnote ³² The stakes are existential and the game is perpetually in play. For this reason, Hobbes writes elsewhere: “The examples of Princes, to those that see them, are, and ever have been, more potent to govern their actions, than the Lawes themselves.”Footnote ³³ Following this, in an express political rebuke of the de facto rule, Hobbes writes that “And though it be our duty to do, not what they do, but what they say; yet will that duty never be performed, till it please God to give men an extraordinary, and supernaturall grace to follow that Precept.”Footnote ³⁴

III. Inner Resistance

This brings us back to the subordinate clause: “(without the feare of the Civill Sword).”Footnote ³⁵ Inner consent implies the possibility of resistance. Hobbes is not keen to broach the topic, but in his later discussion of sinful and blasphemous sovereigns, he is compelled to address it.Footnote ³⁶ Blasphemous sovereigns are those who command a belief in a god other than the “true god” manifest as justice, modesty, honor, and equity. Recounting the biblical story of the prophet Elisha and Naaman—the Syrian slave and Christian convert who was compelled to bow in the house of Rimmon—Hobbes writes: “This the Prophet approved, and bid him Goe in peace. Here Naaman beleeved in his heart; but by bowing before the Idol Rimmon, he denyed the true God in effect, as much as if he had done it with his lips.”Footnote ³⁷ Following this, Hobbes asks “what shall we answer to our Saviours saying, Whosoever denyeth me before men, I will deny him before my Father which is in Heaven?”Footnote ³⁸ Hobbes's answer is tremendously important: one can supplicate and genuflect in the face of sovereign duress, but in that case the subject's actions are “not his, but his Soveraigns.”Footnote ³⁹ That is, the sovereign reverses the social contractual logic of authorization: it is the sovereign who authors the actions of the people, revealing both the ephemeral nature of his or her obligation and the astoundingly vainglorious character of that sovereign. Hobbes had earlier declared it absurd to resist sovereigns, as it is akin to resisting one's own will. However, this critique cannot stand where faith in any but the “true God” is coerced, as it removes a final lingering critique of resisting a sovereign's authorized commands. It is disagreement, not absurdity. In fact, it inverts the critique, ascribing absurdity to the sovereign while allowing subjects to retain rationality.Footnote ⁴⁰

Later, Hobbes extends his discussion to cases where sovereigns use terror to enforce idolatrous prayer. Hobbes's conclusion is, again, striking:

This is a potentially subversive statement on Hobbes's part, one that strikes at the core of the ideological claims of various theories of obligation. At its heart, it is another qualification of the theory of authorization. Hobbes's claim is that in cases where the sovereign uses fear to force obedience, he or she may garner short-term success, but at the cost of undermining the foundations for long-term peace.

This discussion has significant implications for how we understand obligation and political self-consciousness in times of “too much Authority.”Footnote ⁴² It implies that sovereigns who act without virtue and in contradiction to the laws of nature create subjects who reflectively construct a critical subjectivity in inner discordance with society's “conversation” and the sovereigns’ will (instantiated, declared, and suspected). Hobbes will later call this “inward, and hearty detestation.”Footnote ⁴³ While Hobbes may not allow for the public rebuke of sovereigns through the redescription of the sovereign as tyrant, he surely allows for private disgust at greed, iniquity, insincerity, and infidelity as a form of internal freedom. Thus, Hobbes continues, “For an unlearned man, that is in the power of an Idolatrous King, or State, if commanded on pain of death to worship before an Idoll, hee detesteth the Idoll in his heart, hee doth well; though if he had the fortitude to suffer death, rather than worship it, he should do better.”Footnote ⁴⁴ There are two further political corollaries to this argument that relate specifically to the “unlearned man” (in the next section, I will address the implied fortitudinous learned person who risks suffering death). The first is that subjects who resist internally prepare for the prospective acceptance of a suitably virtuous sovereign replacement. Second, these subjects will begin to reflect on the actions of their fellow subjects, and consider whether they, too, are only feigning observance to the sovereign command. Hobbes's critique of the fool is not operative here.Footnote ⁴⁵ Inner resistance does not make either the silent or the overt claim that there is no justice, or no God. Inner resistance consists of the contemplation as to whether or not one's regime pertains thereto. The point here is not that “the Foole hath sayd in his heart, there is no such thing as Justice.”Footnote ⁴⁶ It is that the sovereign acts as though there were no such thing as justice, while the subject intuits that there is. These are not empty nothings. As chapter 12 of Leviathan makes clear, susurrations of discontent can hollow out regimes that, from the outside, appear to be rapt by doctrines of obligation.

IV. Fortitude, Fidelity, and Magnanimity

What, then, of the exceptional figure, who Hobbes describes as having the “fortitude to suffer death” rather than “worship before an Idoll”?Footnote ⁴⁷ To examine this idea, we can start by tracking a similar exception to Hobbes's discussion of citizens who do not sin by genuflecting. Extending his discussion of founders from chapter 12, in the second half of Leviathan Hobbes often refers to the sovereign as “that one chief Pastor… the Civill Soveraign.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Later, in a discussion of the role of the pastor in the directing and teaching of the multitude, Hobbes writes reverently of the time when “Kings were Pastors, or Pastors Kings.”Footnote ⁴⁹ There, in contrast to his discussion of the duties of the subject under a blasphemous sovereign, Hobbes finally takes an overtly critical line against the sovereign. Hobbes begins by considering the exception to the rule of inner freedom. The exception is for those “whose actions are looked at by others, as lights to guide them by.”Footnote ⁵⁰

Hobbes does not afford this eminent figure the same luxury of quietism he affords to the “greatest part” of mankind. Hobbes writes that if pastors (or present or future sovereigns)

The implication is that while the many may be afforded a reprieve for genuflecting to false gods, for certain figures no exceptions are made. Indeed, inner resistance is expressly denied to eminent figures whose social position and natural disposition confers a popular audience. Hobbes concludes that “if a Pastor… has undertaken to teach Christs Doctrine to all nations, should doe the same”—that is, suffer silently, instead of resisting and inviting the punishment of a standing sovereign—“it were not onely a sinfull Scandall, in respect of other Christian mens consciences, but a perfidious forsaking of his charge.”Footnote ⁵² This special individual has a calling to resist (outwardly) precisely because he or she is self-conscious of his or her eminence and knows that his or her actions have influence over the multitude. It is a moral imperative that transcends sovereign command.

What character traits define a person called to resist iniquitous sovereigns? Part of the answer is given in chapter 15 of Leviathan, in a discussion of the difference between agents and actions, and how the terms “just” and “unjust” are attributed to each naturally, irrespective of the positive law. For the most part, whether an action is just or unjust is measured by whether those actions conform to reason and manners (i.e., the laws of nature). However, there are exceptional moments where actions anchor rationality and give definition to the manners. “That which gives to humane Actions the relish of Justice,” Hobbes writes, “is a certain Noblenesse or Gallantnesse of courage, (rarely found,) by which a man scorns to be beholding for the contentment of his life, to fraud, or breach of promise. This Justice of the Manners, is that which is meant, where Justice is called a Vertue; and Injustice a Vice.”Footnote ⁵³ Hobbes's claim here is that justice is a natural virtue, no matter its name. Certain eminent individuals—that is, individuals marked by “Noblenesse” and “Gallantnesse”—will have the wisdom, the courage, and the calling to identify and defend “true justice,”Footnote ⁵⁴ and through their actions “[give] it its relish” (note the parallels between the concepts of “true justice,” “true religion,” and “true God”).Footnote ⁵⁵

Here, however, the problem of vainglory emerges. How are we to distinguish the vainglorious, imposters, and false prophets from eminent individuals?Footnote ⁵⁶ The answer revolves around Hobbes's understanding of the fortitude of the person who will “suffer death.”Footnote ⁵⁷ That is, again, it turns on an assessment of character. Hobbes uses the term fortitude four times in Leviathan.Footnote ⁵⁸ The first is in reference to magnanimity (to which I will return), and the second speaks of fortitude in regard to “the meanes of peaceable, sociable, and comfortable living.”Footnote ⁵⁹ The third reference echoes Hobbes's discussion of the prophetic role of founders in chapter 12 and clarifies the conceptual affinities between Hobbes's discussions of fortitude and new foundations. There, in a discussion of the “extraordinary gifts of the Vnderstanding” (a trait that corresponds to the discussion of religious founders),Footnote ⁶⁰ Hobbes examines the relationship between wisdom and the “Spirit of God,” which he describes as “extraordinary Understanding… the Gift of God.” Hobbes cites similar passages from Exodus and quotes Isaiah: “Where the Prophet speaking of the Messiah, saith, The Spirit of the Lord shall abide upon him, the Spirit of wisdome and understanding, the Spirit of counsell, and fortitude; and the Spirit of the fear of the Lord. Where manifestly is meant, not so many Ghosts, but so many eminent graces that God would give him.”Footnote ⁶¹ These graces manifest as natural gifts of eminent individuals whose knowledge exceeds what is normally afforded by either prudence or sapience. They are what Hobbes had earlier called a “probable token of Divine Revelation.”Footnote ⁶²

But fortitude can also be feigned. How can vainglory be distinguished from fortitude? Hobbes's answer appears to turn on the concept of fidelity.Footnote ⁶³ The first use of the term is in a discussion of counsel. Hobbes writes that “great Assemblies are necessitated to commit such affaires to lesser numbers, and of such persons as are most versed, and in whose fidelity they have the most confidence.”Footnote ⁶⁴ The second occurrence is in a discussion of natural laws that should guide the actions of the sovereign's subordinates when they must make independent decisions. Hobbes writes that the “Instructions of naturall Reason may be comprehended under one name of Fidelity; which is a branch of naturall Justice.”Footnote ⁶⁵ However important the question of natural law is here, Hobbes clearly understands it as a second-order concern to natural justice (a concept that Hobbes never uses in relation to the positive laws or contracts specifically, and makes no sense in relation to either Hobbes's interpretations of natural right or natural law, but which makes some sense by way of virtue ethics).Footnote ⁶⁶

The third reference to fidelity speaks directly to the problem of vainglorious upstarts:

The bivocality of this statement is interesting as it implies its (perhaps revolutionary) opposite: fidelity to natural justice justifies the multitude in following a popular and potent leader of virtue and design when that leader's fidelity is eminent. It is possible to differentiate the vainglorious agent from the eminent one, because the grounds for judgment are the natural virtues, which are known—however vaguely—by all.

The final reference to fidelity is found in a discussion of the threat of popular commanders and takes us full circle back to the question of war and virtue. “This love of Souldiers, (if caution be not given of the Commanders fidelity),” Hobbes writes, “is a dangerous thing to Soveraign Power.” The significance of this passage—and of Hobbes's discussion of fortitude and fidelity more generally—is made clear in the next paragraph: “To have a known Right to Soveraign Power”—not simply de facto sovereign power, but the known right to it—“is so popular a quality, as he that has it needs no more, for his own part, to turn the hearts of his Subjects to him.”Footnote ⁶⁸ The ambivalence is telling; the “known right” of sovereign power is a determination to be made on the part of subjects. It is a popular quality, irrespective of the formal title holder of sovereign power.Footnote ⁶⁹ In spite of “the fact of power and the facts of human nature,” these conditions lend no motive power to the commonwealth. Lasting peace—peace that exists beyond the shifting fortunes of brute power politics and ideological whim—is secured by way of reverence and love, not fear. Here, Hobbes claims unequivocally that “there is no danger at all from the Popularity of a Subject.”Footnote ⁷⁰ This argument works symbiotically with the earlier discussion of war and honor.

All of these arguments direct our attention to the character of the sovereign as the cause of a regime's flourishing or failure. Which seems problematic, as this discussion appears to run afoul of Hobbes's own critique of virtue ethics. “Writers of Morall Philosophie,” Hobbes writes, “though they acknowledge the same Vertues and Vices; Yet not seeing wherein consisted their Goodnesse; nor that they come to be praised, as the meanes of peaceable, sociable, and comfortable living; place them in a mediocrity of passions: as if not the Cause, but the Degree of daring, made Fortitude; or not the Cause, but the quantity of a gift, made Liberality.”Footnote ⁷¹ It is clearly a critique of Aristotelian virtue ethics, but it surely is not a denunciation of virtue ethics in toto and, importantly, it is not entire in its account of the virtues delineated by Aristotle, leaving out most conspicuously the virtue of magnanimity, to which I now turn.

Leo Strauss first noted that magnanimity, while absent from Elements and De Cive, is given new prominence in Leviathan.Footnote ⁷² Strauss was compelled to broach this discussion, as Hobbes's return to magnanimity contradicted his interpretation of Hobbes as discursive founder of liberal natural right theory. Unable to reconcile this apparent contradiction, Strauss dismissed Hobbes's discussion of magnanimity as anomalous, asserting that Hobbes was temporarily “confused as to his own real intention.”Footnote ⁷³ We are now positioned to reevaluate whether it was anomalous.

Magnanimity is a puzzling virtue in Aristotle's thought, as it bridges both his ethical and political philosophies while also seemingly standing apart from both.Footnote ⁷⁴ In the Nicomachean Ethics, magnanimity is characterized variously as “greatness of soul” and a “[concern] with great things.” The magnanimous man “is thought to be great-souled if he thinks himself worthy of great things and is indeed worthy of them.” He (for Aristotle always “he,” not so for Hobbes) is “an extreme with regard to the grandness of his claims, but a mean with regard to their correctness,” and is “concerned with honours and dishonours in the right way.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Elsewhere, Aristotle writes “the great-souled person, since he is worthy of the greatest things, must be the best person of all. For the better a person is, the greater the things he is worthy of, and the best will be worthy of the greatest things; so the truly great-souled person must be good.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Finally, “The great-souled person looks down on others with justification, because he has the right opinion of himself, but the masses do so capriciously.”Footnote ⁷⁷

Hobbes writes of the ethics of magnanimity in similar ways. “Contempt of little helps, and hindrances, magnanimity. … Magnanimity, in danger of Death, or Wounds, valour, fortitude. … Magnanimity in the use of Riches, liberality.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Magnanimity proceeds “from the conscience of Power.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Hobbes contrasts the “Crooked Wisedome” of pusillanimous agents who use “unjust, or dishonest means” with the wisdom of magnanimous agents who have “contempt of unjust, or dishonest helps.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Like Aristotle, Hobbes sees magnanimity as something like a crowning natural virtue that gives orientation and definition to the other virtues.

There are important differences, however. Magnanimity in Aristotle is unique, because unlike other virtues it is not defined by convention (“For they would be treated unjustly if they were thought to merit equal shares, when they are so unequal in virtue and political power”).Footnote ⁸¹ This was a problem for Aristotle, because it entailed that magnanimity did not pertain to the doctrine of the mean, as magnanimous leaders naturally stand above the multitude and thus above convention.Footnote ⁸² It is exactly for this reason, however, that Hobbes's critique of virtue as conventionalism is so important, because it means that Aristotle's problem emerges as Hobbes's solution. Hobbes solves Aristotle's problem by inverting the order of operations: magnanimity could anchor convention. For Hobbes, magnanimous actions are exemplary (they are “the Cause”), setting the natural value from which the polity take their moral coordinates. Having thus solved the problem, Hobbes can utilize magnanimity while also criticizing “Aristotelity.”Footnote ⁸³

The political consequences of magnanimity in both Hobbes and Aristotle are strikingly consonant. In the Politics, the magnanimous man is described as “so outstanding by reason of his superior virtue that neither the virtue nor the political power of all the others is commensurable with his.” The political implications are that “such men can no longer be regarded as part of the city-state.” Aristotle's discussion culminates in a claim that has notable affinities with Hobbes's own discussions of sovereignty:

This passage immediately brings to mind some of the well-known slogans of Hobbes's political philosophy: sovereignty as the soul of the commonwealth, the sovereign as standing outside of the commonwealth, the sovereign as mortal-god. Magnanimity entails the natural rule of an agent, not law. In sum, Aristotle's magnanimous man prefigures many of the marks of sovereignty found in Hobbes.

For these reasons, in Behemoth, Hobbes distinguishes between two sets of virtues: the virtues of subjects and the virtues of sovereigns. The virtue of subjects, Hobbes writes, “is comprehended wholly in obedience to the laws of the commonwealth,”Footnote ⁸⁵ that is to say that the ethics and science of the commonwealth concern just and unjust. By contrast, “The virtues of the sovereigns are such as tend to the maintenance of peace at home, and to the resistance of foreign enemies.”Footnote ⁸⁶ The “royal” virtues that Hobbes mentions are fortitude, frugality (“(though perhaps you will think it strange) … for it increases the public stock, which cannot be too great for the public use, nor any man too sparing of what he has in trust for the good of others”),Footnote ⁸⁷ and liberality (“for the commonwealth cannot be well served without extraordinary diligence and service of ministers, and great fidelity to their Sovereign; who ought therefore to be encourage, and especially those that do him service in wars”).Footnote ⁸⁸ Hobbes concludes the important discussion: “In sum, all actions and habits are to be esteemed good or evil by their causes and usefulness in reference to the commonwealth, and not by their mediocrity, nor by their being commended.”Footnote ⁸⁹

V. Self-Preservation, Honor, and War

In Hobbes, the first and most recognizable limit on sovereign power is the right to self-preservation. On the basis of this right, Hobbes posits the right to resist a sovereign's violation thereof.Footnote ⁹⁰ Much has been made of this argument, and for good reason.Footnote ⁹¹ However, there are also good reasons to be wary of it especially in regard to the purported limits of Hobbes's argument in explaining war making. At the core of this discussion is Hobbes's claim that there are “some Rights, which no man can be understood by any words, or other signes, to have abandoned, or transferred. As first a man cannot lay down the right of resisting them, that assault him by force, to take away his life.”Footnote ⁹² Here, the individual is bound by natural, vital drives to protect his or her life, including resisting the sovereign where it threatens one's life.

While Hobbes holds that it is impossible for one to give up one's right to self-preservation, he surely does not develop that right into a full-fledged theory of resistance. Hobbes discusses, for example, subjects resisting executioners, but the axe falls, no matter what.Footnote ⁹³ For this reason (and many others) Susanne Sreedhar in her recent study of resistance in Hobbes notes that “we can expect legitimate resistance to be not only relatively rare… but to be entirely unthreatening to the maintenance of the political order.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Sreedhar goes on to conclude that “by appropriating the language of resistance rights, Hobbes undermines actual political resistance.”Footnote ⁹⁵ No matter how one frames the right of resistance in Hobbes, one comes to the same political conclusion: although there is some room for tactical or prudential consideration on the part of the sovereign to take care of the health of the population more generally,Footnote ⁹⁶ these questions are largely insignificant, as protection alone is enough to command obedience.

The reason why rights discourse is insignificant, however, is instructive, for this reveals altogether different reasons for why citizens feel unobligated to follow the commands of the sovereign. Here, the problem of war is instructive.Footnote ⁹⁷ Consider Hobbes's claim that “when Armies fight, there is on one side, or both, a running away.”Footnote ⁹⁸ This claim is often taken as exemplary of the political paradox of the right of resistance in Hobbes, because if it holds, it implies that Hobbes cannot explain why wars are ever fought. So, it is worth taking a closer look at Hobbes's claims. Consider first the paragraph preceding the “running away” claim:

Hobbes cites two reasons for not executing sovereign command: dangerous office and dishonorable office. Does either countenance “running away”?

Regarding dangerous offices, the answer is clearly not. Hobbes's claim is not that the fear of a “dangerous office” naturally trumps sovereign command. Instead, he posits that there are conditions for evaluating whether one should carry out a sovereign's dangerous commands—a question of judgment on the part of the subject. The foremost condition regards the affinity (or lack thereof) between the command and “the End for which the Soveraingty was ordained.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ These ends include security and peace, but they also include justice, commodious living, and flourishing. Here a choice has to be made. Where individuals have come to their own evaluations regarding the existential threat to the commonwealth (not only their egoistic self-preservation, their communal self-preservation), and, further, where the ends of the commonwealth are judged as having been upheld by the standing sovereign, Hobbes writes that there is in fact no liberty to refuse at all. Even further, Hobbes holds that citizens will feel themselves obliged, as he writes in the Review and Conclusion, “to protect in Warre, the Authority, by which he is himself protected in time of Peace.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ Here, Hobbes assigns the communal good priority over the good of self-preservation, the reverse of the position usually afforded to him.Footnote ¹⁰²

What of dishonorable office? This question turns primarily on the kind of (dis)honor that the sovereign commands. Hobbes distinguishes between two kinds of honor: “things Honorable by Nature; as the effects of Courage, Magnanimity, Strength, Wisdome, and other abilities of body and mind: Others made Honorable by the Common-wealth; as Badges, Titles, Offices, or any Other singular marke of the Soveraigns favour.”Footnote ¹⁰³ The latter group are derivatives of command. On that account, “dishounorable Office” is oxymoronic as both honor and office are ultimately based on commands of the sovereign. This means that Hobbes must understand the citizens’ measure of (dis)honorable office as referring to the former group of prepolitical natural honors. Hence, returning to the question of (dis)honorable office and war, Hobbes's claim appears to be that there is both an imperative for resisting commands that are dishonorable or would bring about dishonor to the commonwealth, and a natural obligation to carry them out when they are judged honorable.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Read as such, Hobbes's discussion does not appear particularly modern. Instead, it appears to hark back to Plato's Apology, where Socrates reflected on having grappled with exactly such a dilemma.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

Hobbes's subsequent discussion regarding desertion allows a similar interpretation. His first claim is that “a man that is commanded as a Souldier to fight against the enemy, though his Soveraign have Right enough to punish his refusall with death, may neverthelesse in many cases refuse, without Injustice.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Does this claim indicate, as one commentator writes, Hobbes's “steadfast dedication to the principle of self-preservation”?Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Surely not. Although one can see where the liberal individualist interpretation could apply, Hobbes is not making a claim regarding an essential trait of human nature. First, the claim specifies “in many cases,” not all (dialed down further to “in some cases” in the Latin edition). Hobbes then describes one of those cases: “As when he substituteth a sufficient Souldier in his place: for in this case he deserteth not the service of the Common-Wealth.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ If Hobbes is assuming that cowards will find their replacement, his observations cannot be reflections on human nature.

These are the conditions framing Hobbes's celebrated claim that “when Armies fight, there is on one side, or both, a running away; yet when they do it not out of treachery, but fear, they are not esteemed to do it unjustly, but dishonorably. For the same reason, to avoyd battell, is not Injustice, but Cowardise.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Does this claim represent Hobbes's “uncompromising commitment to the individual,” as another commentator observed?Footnote ¹¹⁰ Again, surely not. It is an acknowledgment that an allowance needs to be made for cowards. That people sometimes run from battle is not a significant insight on Hobbes's part, a major contribution to the liberal notion of agency, or a pivotal point in the turn away from the ancients to modernity. It is something of a truism.

Here, one could leave well enough alone. Hobbes does not. “But he that inrowleth himselfe a Souldier,” Hobbes continues, following the discussion above,

This passage is sometimes ignored, or explained as representative of Hobbes's own struggle to come to terms with his purported hyperindividualism and protoliberalism.Footnote ¹¹² Again, however, the confusion is not on Hobbes's part. Here, Hobbes's concern is the honor of the citizen and the virtues of the sovereign, and the ends justifying the foundation of the commonwealth by institution. When one lives in a political society, Hobbes tells us, one has to have the “courage” and “purpose” to protect it in times of danger—not merely for the sake of protection, not because of the social contract, and not because of the dictates of the laws of nature, but substantively for the sake of honor—and one can only muster that strength where there is a sovereign to model it on.Footnote ¹¹³

In summation, Hobbes's “running away” claim supports the egoist thesis only on the condition that there is no visible virtuous sovereign. Consequently, the inverse pertains: sovereign virtue can motivate a collective “running towards.” Furthermore, it follows that where soldiers do run away, the cause of the war itself has been evaluated as unjust. The problem of war cannot be addressed by way of either natural law or natural right interpretations of obligation alone. However, read as a subset of the problem of sovereign virtue, it can be readily solved.

VI. Barbarism and Natural Punishment

This brings us to the final puzzle: how can any of the above be accepted in light of Hobbes's critique of tyrannicide? In both chapters 29 and 30 of Leviathan, Hobbes criticizes the republican discourse, redescribing regicide as tyrannicide, obscuring the meaning and significance of the act while at the same time stoking the passions of the vainglorious public. Hobbes concludes that “the name of Tyranny, signifieth nothing more, nor lesse, than the name of Soveraignty, be it in one, or many men, saving that they use the former word, are understood to bee angry with them they call Tyrants.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ Are these claims as absolutely in defense of sovereign impunity as they appear? Almost, but not completely. And the exceptions are, once again, important.

The exception to Hobbes's critique of tyranny is his critique of barbarism.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Hobbes's critique of barbarism and tyrannophobia share many similarities. For example, both are connected to the defense of custom-as-natural-law held by certain jurists,Footnote ¹¹⁶ and both often make reference to the Aristotelian absurdities that ground the rebellious discourses of Hobbes's day.Footnote ¹¹⁷ The difference is that where Hobbes sets out to defend the ancient institution of tyranny as a once-lauded description of sovereignty, he is quite open in using the term “barbaric” to attack brutal governance. Indeed, Hobbes opens Leviathan with just such a critique. Alluding to the Capitoline Geese, in the Epistle Dedicatory of Leviathan, Hobbes characterizes himself as defending the seat of power against barbarians both internal and external to the republic. In the introduction, and quite explicitly, Hobbes notes that nosce teipsum (used in reference to the “Artificer” of a commonwealth) should not be used “to countenance… the barbarous state of men in power, towards their inferiors.”Footnote ¹¹⁸

In similar tones, Hobbes asserts that although the language of the tumult is found in the books of the philosophers, the fault for that barbarous language falls squarely on the sovereigns, whom he calls “accessaries to their own, and the Publique damage.”Footnote ¹¹⁹ “I blame those,” Hobbes continues, “that in the beginning, when their power was entire, by suffering such Doctrines to be forged in the Universities of their own Dominions, have holden to Stirrop to all the succeeding Popes, whilest they mounted into the Thrones of all Christian Soveraigns, to ride, and tire, both them, and their people, at their pleasure.”Footnote ¹²⁰ And elsewhere, he writes: “To be severe to People, is to punish ignorance, which may in great part be imputed to the Sovereign, whose fault it was, they were no better instructed.”Footnote ¹²¹ Final responsibility for political upheaval falls on those sovereigns who ride roughshod over the people.

Most importantly, Hobbes brings the second part of Leviathan to a close by addressing the vices of egoistic and barbaric sovereigns, a discussion that relies on the new idea of “natural punishment”:

Those faults deserving of natural punishment all stem from questions of character. Sovereign egoism (in contrast to love, section II) is naturally punished with rebellion. Sovereign intemperance—a vice that Hobbes had earlier identified as akin to drunkenness and “reckoned amongst those things which the Law of Nature hath forbidden”—is punishable with disease (perhaps the disease of tyrannophobia).Footnote ¹²³ Rash, iniquitous, prideful, or pusillanimous leaders are naturally punished. The rot of a leviathan often begins in its head.