Most-read this week: Hobbes
The most popular essay on greycat.org over the past week has been ‘Hobbes and liberty: the subject’s sphere of liberty in Leviathan‘.
Hobbes’s assertion that ‘Feare and Liberty are consistent’ (II: xxi, 262) has caused a certain amount of puzzlement and confusion: how freely can a person robbed at gunpoint really be said to be acting when he hands over his wallet? Yet it is consistent with Hobbes’s view that liberty can only be restricted by an external agent. If the robber knocks his victim to the ground and restrains him physically while extracting his wallet from his pocket, then the victim’s freedom has been restricted; but if the victim reaches into his own pocket and hands the robber his wallet out of fear that he will be shot if he does not, he has chosen that course of action freely, while others, no matter how unpalatable, remain open to him; and he has removed his wallet and surrendered it with his own hands and of his own volition. This is an important point for understanding the nature of the covenant which gives rise to Hobbes’s Commonwealth, for its ultimate motivation is fear (‘The Passions that encline men to Peace, are Feare of Death’ (I: xiii, 188)), and yet it is freely arrived at by all concerned.
Hobbes’s Leviathan is commonly seen as an argument for absolute despotism on the part of the sovereign and absolute submission on the part of the subject; yet Hobbes asserts that individual liberty is inalienable. How can these positions be reconciled? This is the question explored in ’Hobbes and liberty: the subject’s sphere of liberty in Leviathan‘. Click here to read the essay, in full and for free.
Picture: Frontispiece from Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, 1651 (detail). [Source]
