Hobbes’s Social Contract

Overview

We talked about three questions surrounding Hobbes’s social contract.

1. What is it supposed to do? What problem is it supposed to solve?

2. How does it work? Taking Hobbes’s legalistic lingo at face value, what is supposed to be involved in the social contract?

3. Why does Hobbes have two versions of the social contract? Why isn’t one enough?

What Problem is it Supposed to Solve?

The social contract is supposed to solve the problem of the state of nature. Without the state, competition, diffidence, and glory cause a war of every man against every man with the consequence that life is nasty, poor, brutish, and short (see ch. 13). So the state is supposed to stop the war.

To refresh your memories, here is how the prisoners dilemma illustrates the phenomenon of diffidence in the state of nature. (Here the first number is the payoff for the row player, the second number is the payoff for the column player).

The idea is that each side has what is called a dominant strategy, namely, one that it is rational to pursue regardless of what the other side does. That strategy is anticipation or starting the conflict on your own terms.

The sensible thing to do is to have a mutual non-aggression pact. I say that I won’t attack you if you say that you won’t attack me. If we say this to one another and shake hands, that should solve the problem, right? Well, making an agreement is one thing but keeping it is another. When we have to make the choice about whether to break or keep the non-aggression pact, this is what it will look like.

We want to be locked into the southeast box and we can’t do that on our own. The state is supposed to solve the problem by threatening to punish anyone who starts a fight or who breaks their covenants (17.1). The genius of this is that it reduces the defensive motivations for fighting. If I am not worried that August will attack me, I face less pressure to attack him first. If he thinks that I am not worried about him, then he faces less pressure to attack me first. That is how the state stops the cycle of insecurity that causes conflict through diffidence. In other words, in diffidence, Hobbes has identified a cause of conflict in the state of nature that the state seems to be eminently capable of solving. All it has to do is credibly threaten to punish anyone who starts a fight and its work is done.

What is weird about the social contract, though, is that it does not explain how the sovereign gets the literal power to punish. A social contract is just a bunch of promises. Those are as good as the wind they are spoken on without force to back them up. Hobbes knows this! He says that “covenants, without the sword, are but words, and of no strength to secure a man at all” (17.2). But Hobbes does not put much effort into explaining how we get from the words in the social contract to actual force on the ground. That is very strange.

The class had a number of pretty good ideas about how to fill the gap. Cathy said that people could pledge to pay taxes or do things that augment the sovereign’s power without putting themselves at risk. Amadi noted that power likes where people think it lies. Perhaps the social contract can play a role in orienting people’s thoughts about power. For what it’s worth, I think the story could well be like the one about power in chapter 10 (“Of Power, Worth, Dignity, Honour, and Worthiness”). There, Hobbes had said that people ally themselves with people who they think are powerful which, in turn, actually makes those people powerful and attracts even more followers. You can see how the social contract could get the ball rolling.

Alienation and authorization

If you look at the description of the social contract at the end of chapter 17, you will see that the future subjects are described as doing two things:

1. Alienation: they give up their right of governing themselves to the future sovereign.
2. Authorization: they authorize the future sovereign to act as their representative.

This [the social contract] is more than consent, or concord; it is a real unity of them all, in one and the same person, made by covenant of every man with every man, in such manner, as if every man should say to every man, I (2) authorise and (1) give up my right of governing myself, to this man, or to this assembly of men, on this condition, that thou (1) give up thy right to him, and (2) authorize all his actions in like manner. This done, the multitude so (2) united in one person, is called a commonwealth, in Latin civitas. (Leviathan, 17.13. Numbers added).

Those are two different things. Alienation involves giving up rights. In particular, the subjects give up the liberty or permission to ignore what the sovereign tells them to do. After the sovereign has been instituted, his commands are obligatory. This is how the sovereign can make laws.

Authorization involves enabling the sovereign to act as the representative for the future subjects. Hobbes uses authorization to perform a lot of tasks. One thing authorization does is create the corporate body of the commonwealth. The idea is that all the members of the commonwealth can act individually but they cannot act collectively until they have someone who is authorized to act for them all. When they have a common representative, that person speaks for them all. Then they can speak as if they were all one person or a corporate person.

The other thing that authorization does is that it enables the sovereign to act on behalf of the subjects. To put it in other words, the subjects own the sovereign’s actions as if they were their own. Hobbes claims that this has significant consequences for the relationship between sovereigns and subjects. In particular, he claims, it means that sovereigns cannot treat their subjects unjustly.

To see where he is coming from, imagine that I came up to you and said, breathlessly, that I had just stolen my own pencil. After making sure you heard me correctly, you would probably conclude that I was speaking nonsense. You can’t steal your own things. If I did “steal” my pencil, I would still have it! That’s what Hobbes thinks it’s like when a subject complains of unjust treatment by the sovereign. It’s as if the subject were complaining about something that the subject him or herself did.

Why two social contracts?

We have two social contracts. The commonwealth by institution is made by people who calmly meet and take a vote (see 18.1) while the commonwealth by acquisition is made when people who have been defeated in a war agree to make the conqueror sovereign in order to avoid “the present stroke of death” (see 20.10). Why the redundancy?

Hobbes’s strategy was to argue that the nice and peaceful social contract was equivalent to the nasty and violent one. To be more specific:

1. Both are equally valid. Fear is the motive in both cases, so fear cannot render the social contract that establishes the commonwealth by acquisition invalid (18.2).

2. They have the same content. The subjects would give the sovereign absolute powers in the commonwealth by institution (18.3).

The idea, as I understand it, is that the commonwealth by acquisition is the realistic account of how actual states are formed. The commonwealth by institution story, by contrast, is an idealized version that will never actually happen. Here is some textual evidence from the very end of the book (it is not included in our readings).

In Chapter 29, I have set down for one of the causes of the dissolutions of commonwealths, their imperfect generation, consisting in the want of an absolute and arbitrary legislative power; for want whereof, the civil sovereign is fain to handle the sword of justice unconstantly, and as if it were too hot for him to hold. One reason whereof (which I have not there mentioned) is this, that they will all of them justify the war, by which their power was at first gotten, and whereon (as they think) their right dependeth, and not on the possession. As if, for example, the right of the kings of England did depend on the goodness of the cause of William the Conqueror, and upon their lineal, and directest descent from him; by which means, there would perhaps be no tie of the subjects’ obedience to their sovereign at this day in all the world: wherein whilst they needlessly think to justify themselves, they justify all the successful rebellions that ambition shall at any time raise against them, and their successors. Therefore I put down for one of the most effectual seeds of the death of any state, that the conquerors require not only a submission of men’s actions to them for the future, but also an approbation of all their actions past; when there is scarce a commonwealth in the world, whose beginnings can in conscience be justified. (Leviathan, “A Review and Conclusion,” ¶8)

So what is the point of the idealistic version? The idea is that the sovereign’s absolute power is not simply a result of the violent, your-money-or-your-life, origins of the state. People would have given the state absolute power even under the most ideal circumstances. I think that is a debatable point, to say the least. But it is the point that Hobbes was trying to make.

Horizontal vs. vertical

The social contract in the commonwealth by institution (ch. 18) is horizontal: it is a covenant among the subjects and does not include the sovereign. The social contract in what Hobbes called the commonwealth by acquisition (ch. 20) is vertical: it is a covenant between the subjects and the sovereign.

This is in interesting because in chapter 18, he insisted that it was very important that the sovereign does not participate in the social contract.

because the right of bearing the person of them all, is given to him they make sovereign, by covenant only of one to another, and not of him to any of them; there can happen no breach of covenant on the part of the sovereign. (18.4)

I will leave it to you to think about whether this difference poses a problem for the commonwealth by acquisition or not.

How could a contract made under duress be valid?

One of the most extraordinary claims that Hobbes makes is that the covenant in the commonwealth by acquisition would be just as valid as the covenant made in the commonwealth by institution. That is hard to swallow because the covenant in the commonwealth by acquisition is made “when the vanquished, to avoid the present stroke of death, covenanteth … that so long as his life, and the liberty of his body is allowed him, the victor shall have the use thereof, at his pleasure” (20.10). Hobbes thinks the two contracts are essentially the same.

Most people find this hard to accept. There are two things to be said to explain Hobbes’s thinking.

First, he is not saying that this is the way the law works in a settled society. Contracts made under duress in normal settings are invalid. (That said, his explanation of how the law works in Leviathan 20.2 is weird.)

Second, the proposition that agreements made under duress are valid is one that most people actually do accept in at least some cases.

Think about surrender in war. When one side is losing and wants to concede, it promises to lay down its arms so long as the other side promises not to continue attacking it. Under almost anyone’s moral standards, an army that asks to surrender and then uses the opportunity to catch its enemy off guard would do something wrong. And the convention of offering and accepting terms of surrender is obviously useful. It gives an army an alternative to suicidally fighting to the death. But formally surrendering is just a promise made under the threat of death: the army only surrenders because it will get wiped out if the fighting continues.

Hobbes was thinking about how people could end the war of the state of nature. His proposition is that they could do so by making a covenant to obey the victor. That is very close to an army surrendering. (There are differences: the army typically gets to go home to its own country while the subjects in the commonwealth by acquisition are stuck with the conqueror as their sovereign. We have to think about how much that amounts to.)

I think Hobbes treats duress too casually. But, at the same time, I think there is a good idea behind it and so I am reluctant to dismiss the commonwealth by acquisition on the grounds that it is the product of coercion.

Main Ideas

These are the things you should know or have an opinion about after today’s class.

1. The components of the social contract: alienation and authorization.
2. The differences between the two versions of the social contract.