Reflections on Thomas Hobbes' Behemoth

I recall knowing about Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan at least as far back as the ninth grade--because I distinctly remember that Hobbes and his Leviathan were both mentioned in the World History texbook the class used in a chapter which discussed the English civil war and the beginnings of contemporary political theory. (Yes, contrary to the sniveling of certain political hacks one is taught about such things as a matter of course in an American public school, even in a part of the United States less than renowned for the quality of its school system.) Some of Leviathan's more significant selections were required reading in my undergraduate years, certainly in my International Relations courses, while I read the book itself cover to cover in grad school.

Yet amid all that I never heard a word breathed about Hobbes' other book Behemoth, which I found my way to through the circuitous route that passed through Franz Neumann's classic sociological study of Nazi Germany, Behemoth. In the volume he discussed Hobbes' book and the significance of his title--that where the Leviathan represented state-imposed order (rational, presumably consent-based and law-abiding, with obligations resting on the sovereign--indeed, if swallowing society "not swallow[ing] all of it"), the Behemoth represented a "non-state . . . characterized by complete lawlessness," which was certainly Neumann's understanding of Nazism.

Given the parallels between "Behemoth" and "Leviathan" I expected to find in the book a complement or companion to Leviathan--but ended up with something quite different. Where Leviathan is a work of political philosophy, Behemoth is a work of political history, recounting the course of events from the outbreak of the English Civil War to the Restoration of the Stuarts in the form of a question-and-answer dialogue, which I suppose is one reason why it has fallen into such obscurity compared with the other book. Rather than a milestone in the development of modern philosophy it is a secondary history of the events, heavy on commentary that is less anything of really deep interest to political theorists than commonplace op-ed-type stuff--which, unexpectedly, proved to be its main source of interest for me. While most such stuff is merely a matter of political hacks repeating the same stale clichès over and over and over again there was an interest in seeing those clichès, the very same ones, being uttered in relation to the events of almost four hundred years ago. In discussing the causes of the English revolution Hobbes (who was, of course, an opponent) chalked it up to how self-aggrandizing intellectuals and the pernicious influence of the universities corrupted the young "of the better sort" rather than "bringing up . . . young men to virtue"; how the young were susceptible to a dubious idealism and even others not so young might be seduced by foreign ways; how intellectuals and their democratizing notions "corrupted" a swinish multitude "ignorant of their duty" and ever ready to follow any side pandering to their vanity and offering the best prospects with regard to "pay and plunder"; upsetting even the most established and happiest of orders, like some latterday ranter against "Marxists."

Still, what made the accusations really interesting was that while they were familiar, the targets against which he directed them were different, profoundly different from those of today--as with the foreign ways in question, and the kinds of people he regarded as troublemakers, and in what he considered the ignorance of the commons to consist, and what sort of persons he saw cozening them. Today no one pontificates more than the right (in the English-speaking countries, anyway) about liberalism being some wholly Anglo-Saxon invention, all but derived from the very DNA of the English-speaking peoples, who had always been and always would be natural liberals (if not without significant variations, with American centrists championing their own). But as a conservative three centuries back Hobbes was emphatic about liberalism being a pernicious foreign notion-- governance such as the Dutch enjoyed (the notion that "like change of government" such as the Dutch had had in England "would to them produce the like prosperity") in his view an invasive species of weed that no one had any business planting in the soil of Merrie England, with Hobbes the one sounds like what a right-wing writer less than fastidious with his words would today call a Marxist in his attacks on the "entrepreneurial." (Thus did he denounce those "merchants, whose profession is their private gain" and whose "only glory [is] to grow excessively rich by the wisdom of buying and selling," and whose "setting the poorer sort of people on work" supposed to make their calling "the most beneficial to the commonwealth" he regarded in actuality as merely "making poor people sell their labour to them at their own prices . . . to the disgrace of our manufacture"--while more important still assailing them for the anti-tax mentality that has them throwing their lot in with rebellions, unleashing forces they cannot control.) The right exalts the Classical heritage, and maligns the left for, in its view, failing to respect it --but here Hobbes lamented the way the Classics had filled those better-sort young men's heads with republican ideas ("the books written by famous men of the ancient Grecian and Roman commonwealths . . . in which . . . the popular government was extolled by the glorious name of liberty, and monarchy disgraced by the name of tyranny"). And where the right today would that more read the Bible, it was for Hobbes a great tragedy that so many did so (the translation of the book into English meaning that "every boy and wench, that could read English, thought they spoke with God Almighty, and understood what he said," again, upsetting order in the kingdom), as his usage imbued the word "Presbyterian" with the same ring "Jacobin" or "Bolshevik" would have for a later era.

All that, just part of the bigger look at how the events were perceived at the time by an observer who happens to be one of the most foundational political theorists of modern times meant that the book ended up being worth the read--and I would say, deserving of rather more attention than it has got in an era where even what pass for our experts prove themselves frighteningly lacking in either a grasp of the most basic ideas of political philosophy, or the slightest degree of historical perspective.