The Moral & Political Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes: A Reconsideration, Part 2 (b)

Please note: Our prior posts, in order, are here and here.

In addition to justifying a principle of political obligation with a rational moral principle of reciprocity in which we have a duty to treat others as equals, Hobbes provides us with a moral argument for the de jure authority of a commonwealth committed to the provision of security and protection. The third law of nature being the (natural) duty to keep covenants, our acceptance of this provision amounts to a tacit covenant to obey the sovereign authority, and "if one has (tacitly) covenanted to obey the political authority of the commonwealth, than one has obligation to do so, since an obligation is just what one owes to another by covenant [elsewhere Lloyd explains Hobbes's distinction between a 'duty' and an 'obligation,' for the latter are by nature self-imposed, while natural duties are not]." The general argument is reminiscent of an earlier and similar one made by the personified Laws of Athens in Plato's Crito, at least inasmuch as the Laws remind Socrates that while he was always free to leave the city of his birth and upbringing, he remained within its borders, a beneficiary of the city's protection and promotion of "commodious living," specifically, Socrates is said to have been indebted to Athens for his life and education (I think the best analysis of the Crito remains Richard Kraut's Socrates and the State, 1984).

Apart from the failure of a state to live up to its raison d’être, the one categorical exemption to political obedience permits us to refuse obedience in those instances where we would be required to violate our duties to God. Here, once again, Hobbes is acknowledging the presence and power of transcendent interests which may be, and frequently are, pursued by people "at the expense not only of their material well-being, but even of their self-preservation." Hobbes perforce must speak to those with religious interests if he is to supply as many individuals as possible with a sufficient reason to adhere to his principle of political obligation. This was dictated, Lloyd explains, by Hobbes's reasonable

recognition that effective social order depends on compliance with the laws made by the political authority—that it depends on obedience of subjects—and that compliance is most effectively obtained when people can be persuaded that they have what they can see, in their own terms, as a sufficient reason for compliance.

Political authority cannot carry out its requisite functions (e.g., legislation, adjudication, taxation, and punishment) without, in the main, the uncoerced cooperation of the commonwealth's subjects. In today's terms, and in the spirit of Lon Fuller, we would say that the binding force of law must be something other than the fear of sanctions, indeed, there must be some sense, however inchoate from the perspective of philosophy or trivialized from the vantage point of legal positivism (as when Oliver Wendell Holmes mocked the idea that law is a 'brooding omnipresence in the sky'), that the law or legal system is morally legitimate. A reluctance to acknowledge the need for moral legitimacy may stem from what Nigel Simmonds, in Law as a Moral Idea (2007), has described as the difficulty we have in understanding the very nature of law, for "on the face of things, law seems to possess characteristics that cannot be combined within a single entity: law is an established social institution, but also a guiding ideal for such institutions, an apparatus of organized force, but also the antithesis of force; a product of authority, but also the source of any such authority." Be that as it may, the necessity of law's moral legitimacy is consistent with and no doubt connected to what Simmonds calls our "pre-theoretical outlook" (we might dignify this 'aspirational view of law embodied in our settled beliefs' by calling it a 'folk theory') which includes "the idea that governance by law is a lofty moral aspiration," a view Simmond's attempts to defend in his Kantian-like (or Platonic) argument that "law is in fact an intrinsically moral idea" or, put differently, "exhibits conceptually necessary connections with morality" (as Simmonds further notes, 'a demonstration that observance of the rule of law may at times, and to some extent, be serviceable for evil goals does nothing to negate law's status as an intrinsically moral ideal'). A failure to acknowledge or appreciate this connection leaves us with a largely instrumentalist conception of law (for an examination of the deleterious consequences of such an impoverished conception, see Brian Tamanaha's Law as Means to an End: Threat to the Rule of Law, 2006). And where does Hobbes's understanding of the nature of law fall out here? Well, for now we'll simply adopt a dogmatic tone and quote Lloyd's impeccable conclusion that "for Hobbes there can be no...deep separation of law and morals as marks the later positivist position." Hobbes well understood that compliance with the requirements of the rule of law is evidence of a commitment to maintain an intrinsically valuable form of moral association as incarnated in the state and enshrined in its rule of law. Much like Lon Fuller whom he cites in support, in Crimes Against Humanity: A Normative Account (2005), Larry May wants to carve out a morally "minimalist" space between legal positvism and a "robust" natural law theory, a space that forms the backdrop for his more than plausible contention that

Moral legitimacy is crucial for any type of law since the law's effectiveness is so closely linked with a person's sense that the law is legitimate and the corresponding sense of obligation that a person feels. Without this sense of the binding effect of the law, there is nothing of moral importance that motivates people to obey the law in the first place [we might imagine the fear of sanctions playing a default role for those failing to properly internalize this binding effect and its corresponding obligatoriness]. Law's effectiveness is dependent on the moral legitimacy of the law.

This would appear to be compatible with, if not identical to, what Hobbes believed, suggesting he might have readily endorsed the remainder of May's argument, which claims that

it makes prudential good sense to link wide-scale acceptance to normative justification. For law to be effective, there must be such acceptance, but the acceptance is not what justifies the norms. Rather it is the moral legitimacy of law that both provides a justification for its enforcement and also creates wide-scale acceptance. There is a minimum moral or natural law content that law must display to be legitimate. This is what I am calling the 'moral legitimacy' of the law. The morality of law does not need to be robust for law to be legitimate. Here there is a set of moral principles, recognized in virtually every legal system, that makes a law worthy of being enforced. Such moral principles ultimately protect the inner normative core of law by guaranteeing that the law is, in some rudimentary way, fair.

If political authority hopes to secure general compliance from its subjects, it cannot simply rely on the threat of force, claimed Hobbes,

for the simple reason that in order for obedience to be reliably attainable by means of threat of force, it must be true that fear of death, wounds, or imprisonment (fear of the means of coercion available to political authority) must be the strongest motivating passion. But the existence of transcendent interests shows we cannot count on this passion (or, we might say, this interest in avoiding personal harm) to override all other passions and interests. More generally, the fear of personal harm (either 'artificially inflicted,' as in the case of punishment by the sovereign power, or 'naturally' consequent to the dissolution of any protective power, which disobedience might bring about) may not be sufficient to motivate people to obey their extant political authority, because that obedience may frustrate their realization of others of their interests (in, for instance, fulfilling their duties to God and to each other, securing the good of their loved ones, and so on), interests for the satisfaction of which they are willing to risk personal harm.

Hobbes therefore proceeds to proffer two new sorts of reason for fealty to sovereign political authority that speak to specifically religious types of transcendent interest; one from religious duty, and the other from an interest in salvation; here we'll speak only to the first of these transcendent (religious) interests. And because for Hobbes "the laws of morality—the laws of nature—are identical to the laws of God discernible by unaided natural reason," "a demonstration that his principle of political obligation is compatible with the realization of one's interest in fulfilling one's duty to God, will automatically show that the principle is compatible with one's interest in fulfilling one's moral duties." While we can't here wholly recapitulate Hobbes's methodical redescription of religious duty as a transcendent interest, a critical component of this process involves recognizing that, in the end, so to speak, "what we believe must be a function of whom we believe," if only because, for example, "the Scriptures do not obviously yield a single, determinate body of doctrine," and religious truth is in no way contingent upon the idiosyncracies of motley private judgment. At least this is the case for any specific religious beliefs outside of, or more specific than that which we can come to know of our natural duties from the laws of nature:

The laws of God discoverable by unaided natural reason are just the laws of nature, considered as commands from a deity who exists, who has given laws and rules of conduct, and who offers rewards and punishments. In his natural kingdom, God governs those who acknowledge his providence by the dictates of 'right reason,' these laws of God, which concern the natural duties of one man to another. These duties...may be 'contracted into one easie sum, intelligible even to the meanest capacity, and that is, "Do not that to another, which thou wouldest not have done to thy selfe."' This is all that natural reason tells us about our duties to God in the treatment of one another, and everyone who has use of natural reason will agree about this.

Again, bereft here of details, Hobbes argues that differences involving our duties to God with respect to specific modes of worship and other forms of religious praxis cannot by their very nature (that is, properly understood by the means of natural reason), conflict with the commands of political authority, for on close examination we discover that

...God demands no particular sort of worship such that if the political authority prohibited it, we would be duty-bound to disobey him. There are no grounds in natural reason for preferring some other religious practices to any which the political authority may command us to observe.

What is most important in these matters is the indubitable fact that

We can know that we have a duty to endeavor to obey the laws of God (which command justice, mercy, humility, in sum not doing to others as we wouldn't be done to), and we can know something about 'the honour naturally due to our divine sovereign,' namely, that we should offer prayers, thanks, public worship, considerate speech, and obedience to God's laws. This is all our natural reason tells us about our duties to God. In particular, it doesn't specify determinate ceremonies, gestures, utterances, or postures as required to fulfill our duties to God. Natural reason can't, for example, tell us which prayer book to use, whether to pray facing the east, standing or kneeling, in Latin or in English, with pomp and circumstance or Spartan simplicity. What our natural reason suggests is that it doesn't matter which of these we use in our worship because whichever words and actions we intend to convey honor, do convey honor. Thus we have no natural reason not to worship as the political authority commands us to.

Hobbes displays an almost mystical attitude here (after all, whatever behavior we exhibit to the outside world, only God has knowledge of what is in our hearts and minds, that is, of our true intentions and motivations) toward the myriad modes of ('external') religious praxis in an attempt to negate the denominational expression of what Freud termed the "narcissism of little differences." Furthermore, "although natural reason cannot give us the whole truth about our duties to God, Hobbes insists that what it does tell us is true, and nothing further that revelation or prophecy [both being outside the province of unaided natural reason] might tell us about our duties to God can contradict what we have learned by natural reason." One can only admire the audacious and consistent quality of Hobbes's argument, even if we suspect not a few of his readers would have found it scandalous, or at least far from persuasive.

As part of the struggle to counter the insidious and socially disruptive effects that invariably follow widespread and recalcitrant misconconceptions of what our true moral and religious interests are, Hobbes believed we could shape socialization and educational processes so as to cultivate a correct conception of the rational kernel of these interests, thereby contributing to their proper satisfaction and directly facilitating a stable, enduring, and peaceful social order. Such a moral education enables us to learn the correct exercise of reason and thus attain an awareness of the due scope, hence limits, of private judgment, including an ability to harness our passions toward the end of social harmony and peace. The uninhibited exercise of passions in conjunction with uncircumscribed private judgment is responsible for the sorts of social strife and collective violence we have every reason to avoid, and so we are motivated to find sufficient reason(s) to agree to surrender our right of "absolute" self-governance and locate "absolute" political authority in a sovereign body:

[U]ndivided sovereignty is required to produce, through education, private judgment, it is a necessary condition of stable social order. The most important function of unified authority is to produce unanimity in opinion or uniformity in judgment.... Divided authority, which both produces and expresses a division in the opinions and judgments of supporters, entails division of power. Because what one believes is a function of whom one believes, multiple authorities will produce multiple judgments [an analogous contemporary exemplification being the battle of experts in the courtroom]; and differences in judgment are then expressed by allegiance to different authorities [an analogous contemporary exemplification found in the Islamic world]. Thus the power of a ruler is simply the by-product of his authority, which both reflects and conditions consensus in judgment.

Hobbes has provided his readers with a plethora of reasons for political obedience (owing to the variety of transcendental and other interests): from prudence, from natural moral duties, and from Christian duty. The sovereign authority for its part acts in keeping with the proper fulfillment of its subjects' interests, and thus on behalf of their individual and collective welfare and well-being or common good in a manner consonant as well with their natural moral duties. Hobbes rightly concluded that as long as our private appetites and aversions serve as the standard of good and evil, as the criteria for right and wrong, we will be consigned to a miserable state of nature in which peace is but a distant hope or dream, indeed, "Government by individual appetite—private judgment of good and evil—is the defining character of the state of nature."

Contrary to what most have assumed or asserted, Lloyd helps us to see that Hobbes was not driven by an overweening hostility to or "rational" distaste for religion as such, for he "believed in the truth of the basic doctrines of the Judeo-Christian tradition," as well as in the natural law moral philosophy bequeathed in part by that tradition. Not unlike its fundamental significance in natural theology, Hobbes was convinced of the indispensable role of the God-given faculty of reason on behalf of true religious faith, belief and praxis, all of which should exemplify the core moral principles attained by natural reason (i.e., the (moral) laws of nature) the foremost being expressed in the reciprocity theorem and the Golden Rule. Given the presuppositions and premises of Hobbes's argument, it is hard not to sympathize if not identify with his view that religion is not "inherently, or necessarily, subversive of order," but it is patently and dangerously no less disruptive of civil order and peace when "not authoritatively regulated by the state...." Some of his presuppositions and assumptions were quickened in the crucible of experience:

From where Hobbes stood, experience, both the personal experience of Hobbes's contemporaries on the Continent, and the historical experience of Christians, particularly of the wars of religion—taught quite clearly that Christians had difficulty maintaining peace in the face of religious differences, and so any expectation of toleration without contention, would be unwarrantedly optimistic.

Lloyd has meticulously described the many facets of Hobbes's ingenious and methodical rationalization of religious belief and praxis, as well as his redescription of prudential and transcendental interests generally, thereby precluding the possible grounds individuals might otherwise have had for refusing to renounce their (heretofore 'absolute') right to private judgment or, as citizens, justifiably disobeying sovereign authority. It goes without saying that the values and principles that make for Liberal sensibility clash with predominant features of Hobbes's absolutism, which we rightly judge repugnant and unacceptable. Nevertheless, and with Professor Lloyd, we might readily concede that Hobbes's "absolutism follows by a valid argument from premises that are by no means obviously false, absurd, unreasonable, or implausible."

Forthcoming: a discussion of Lloyd's Morality in the Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes: Cases in the Law of Nature (Cambridge, UK: Cambrige University Press, 2009).

The Moral & Political Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes: A Reconsideration, Part 2 (a)

Our second post reviewing S.A. Lloyd's two books on Hobbes will focus largely on Ideals as Interests... (1992). I've divided the discussion of this volume into two parts, (a) and (b), so Part 3 will commence our discussion of Morality in the Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes... (2009).

Among the many tantalizing conclusions reached by Lloyd we begin with one related to a principal topic woven throughout the text as evidenced in the title: "[Hobbes is] the first philosopher to offer a systematic philosophical analysis of civil disorder generated by transcendent interests." Such interests are not of course the only species of interests Hobbes treats, but it is his recognition of the ubiquitousness and powerful effects of transcendent interests that Lloyd brings to our attention. Transcendent interests are non-material and non-prudential (bearing in mind that the interest in salvation is defined as a transcendent form of self-interest), and thus beyond the interest in self-preservation. Transcendent interests are typically (thus not exclusively) moral and religious, and originate in beliefs, opinions, or doctrines passionately held. When such interests are more or less understood and exercised in a proprietary sense, they can be described as "private judgments." As Lloyd carefully explains in her latest book, while Hobbes had an abiding appreciation of the "defeasibility of the natural aversion to violent death, its susceptibility to cultural modification, and its subordination to the satisfaction of transcendent interests," this did not preclude the use of this "natural" aversion in his normative moral theory owing to a conviction that one of the constraints of such a theory is the desirability and likelihood of its justification and adoption (a 'reasonability' constraint?) to those subject to it:

Here the fact of the natural desire to avoid untimely death becomes important, because while it may be true that each person cares most about avoiding bodily death, it is highly probable that people would judge a moral theory that systematically required them to sacrifice their lives to be unreasonable. People are not to be required to behave as if their survival meant nothing to them, and to be subject to blame and moral censure for wanting to resist death. That is too much to ask of men, who, while rational animals, are nonetheless animals, subject to the demands of their animal nature [cf. the Buddhist who speaks about the natural power of a 'will-to-live' throughout sentient existence], who cannot be sure that they would, in the force of a mortal threat, even be capable of squelching thier impulse to defend themselves. Hobbes insists throughout his writings that, absent special obligations, the effort to defend one's life must be accounted blameless. To condemn a man for acting from this impulse, considering its naturalness, is to condemn him simply for being a man; and it is also to self-centeredly criticize God for having made men with the nature he did. This is why 'Among so many dangers therefore, as the natural lusts of man do daily threaten each other withal, to have a care of one's self is so far from being a matter scornfully to be looked upon.... It is therefore—neither absurd or reprehensible, neither against the dictates of true reason, for a man to use all his endeavors to preserve and defend his body.... But that which is not contrary to right reason, that all men account to be done justly and with right.' As this passage clearly illustrates, Hobbes's insistence that all men naturally and strongly desire their bodily preservation is in the service of the normative claim that we ought to allow as justified actions done from this motive. ...[W]e should acknowledge self-defense as morally permissible, ceteris paribus: 'That which is done out of necessity, out of endeavor for peace, for the preservation of ourselves, is done with right, otherwise every damage done to a man would be a breach of the natural law, and an injury against God.' Hobbes's concern in establishing the naturalness of a strong impulse toward self-preservation is...only to ground his claim that actions sincerely meant in defense of one's life are not to be judged blameworthy.

In other words, Hobbes's invocation of the right to self-defense and self-preservation is for fairly restricted purposes and is not reflective of a belief that such a reasonable or prudent self-interest invariably trumps all other possible interests or that it is simply our principal motivating interest. So while Hobbes recognizes and utilizes within his normative theory the apparently incontrovertible fact that people have "narrowly prudential interests in their physical survival and in 'commodious living,'" his foremost focus is on the socially disruptive force of what are typically "transcendent interests." It is "moral interests in fulfilling their individual duties and moral obligations, religious interests in fulfulling their duties to God, and 'special prudential' interests in achieving salvation," that move people to act that are best described (typically) as "transcendent interests." As Lloyd says, "Hobbes viewed certain disruptive, or competing, passionately held beliefs—beliefs upon which people are willing to act even at the expense of their self-preservation—to be the cause of disorder...." Hobbes's solution to the causes of this disorder eschews coercion, aiming rather at their correction "through a process of redescription and reeducation." An intimation of the "redescription" half of this solution is seen in the following:

Hobbes's recurrent attack on pride is an attack on the sort of pride exhibited in private judgment generally, and in religious judgment particularly—the pridefulness involved in taking one's own private opinion of right and wrong, good and bad, just or unjust, or one's own interpretation of Scripture, as right and reason, and then acting on it in defiance of constituted authority, and attempting to impose it over and against the judgment of others. Social disorder arises from diversity of opinion in conjunction with each person's insistence that his judgment is authoritative and this insistence bespeaks tremendous hubris. Pride becomes a central concept in Hobbes's analysis of social disorder.

In aiming to reconcile competing or conflicting (and thus socially disruptive) transcendent interests, Hobbes endeavors to provide "his readers with a sufficient reason, given all the interests they actually took themselves to have, for affirming and acting on a principle of political obligation that, generally and widely adhered to, could ensure the perpetual maintenance of effective social order." Hobbes's concerns and subsequent ambition in this regard resonate in our own time if only because Rawls's Political Liberalism is well known for

addressing a closely related problem, the problem of discovering how a just democratic system of social cooperation might reproduce its own support among those who affirm competing and irreconcilable comprehensive doctrines. Both philosophers are attempting to respond to the fundamental problems posed by pluralism: Hobbes to the problem of order simpliciter assuming brute pluralism, and Rawls to the problem of establishing a just social order that could endure within a reasonable pluralism. Both problems arise when people within a society either cannot or will not allow each person free reign to act on his or her own comprehensive doctrine.

But as Lloyd proceeds to point out in Morality in the Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, "although their [i.e., Hobbes and Rawls's] problems are related, it is their approaches to a solution that distinguish them...." And Lloyd's genius consists in an analytically lucid, nuanced, and original appreciation of Hobbes's approach, an approach that generally speaking and in brief,

involves identifying commonly acceptable resources for settling doctrinal disagreement, and then arguing that these support a unique conception of religious duty fully compatible with civil obedience. Through this process Hobbes aims to move all of his intended audience from their idiosyncratic beliefs to a single comprehensive doctrine, and then to use the full force of the state's power to enforce and to reproduce allegiance to that comprehensive doctrine.

Hobbes's solution is clearly illiberal and one of the reasons that, although we may justifiably view Hobbes's moral and political philosophy at various points to be directly or by implication "proto-Liberal," we lack sound reason(s) for calling Hobbes a Liberal.

Hobbes sought to enunciate a principle of political obligation (i.e., 'a statement of the conditions under which subjects or citizens are to obey the commands of the government of the commonwealth of which they are members') that his readers could find sufficient hence compelling reason to affirm and subscribe to so as to atttain the ends of perpetual domestic peace and order. The foremost price to be paid for peace and commodious living in such a commonwealth is agreeing to constraints on our unfettered liberty, including curtailment of our capacity to dominate others. And here Hobbes does appeal to our basic prudential interests, that is, "the interest in self-preservation and thus in the security of our persons, and the interest in 'commodious living' [which 'requires the possession of personal property and the enjoyment of a certain minimal degree of liberty']." And this appeal is minimally rational insofar as it depends on a principle of reciprocity, for if

each person who has an interest in securing his own preservation and commodious living has a reason from narrow prudence to want others to adhere to the principle [of political obligation], then each has a natural duty not to reserve to themselves any right that they would not be content to have others reserve as well, in this case a right to violate the principle they want others to observe.

While the Hobbesian principle of political obligation is, to put it mildly, stringent, obedience being owed to a sovereign "in all things wherein their obedience is not repugnant to the laws of God," it is clear that a key assumption or condition of such obedience is the ability of the sovereign (or the state) to protect its citizens, to provide them with the security that satisfies the aforementioned interest in self-preservation and commodious living. A state unable or incapable of providing for the "protection and security of its citizens" in effect "extinguishes" obligatory obedience and citizenship, for "if an association can't protect, then either it is not a commonwealth or your are not a member of it, but in neither case are you obligated to obey its political authority."

The Moral & Political Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes: A Reconsideration (Part 1 of 3)

In a book I plan to discuss in more depth anon, Larry May's Crimes Against Humanity: A Normative Account (2005), we find a conception of "moral minimalism" beholden to arguments from Hobbes used to justify jus cogens norms that, in turn, support basic moral and legal principles in international criminal law, principles that sanction fairly widespread agreement in notions of moral and legal responsibility in the pursuit of international criminal justice. Intrigued and inspired by May's original if not philosophically persuasive resort to Hobbesian moral reasoning, I decided to look afresh at Hobbes's moral and political philosophy not only because of May's novel invocation of Hobbes, but because it goes against the grain of references to and reliance upon allegedly Hobbesian ideas and reasoning in modern international law and politics, be it descriptively and normatively by unabashed Realists on the one hand, or critically by those who fancy themselves part of what Hersch Lauterpacht termed the "Groatian Tradition in International Law," on the other, representatives respectively of the traditions of legal positivism and natural law philosophy.

In my re-examination of Hobbes's moral and political philosophy I learned of two remarkable works by S.A. (Sharon) Lloyd: Ideals as Interests in Hobbes's Leviathan: The Power of Mind over Matter (1992), and Morality in the Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes: Cases in the Law of Nature (2009). Together these books make a critical and original assessment of Hobbes's moral and political thought in a manner that is analytically perspicuous, philosophically sophisticated and exegetically thorough, so much so that one can state emphatically, with Lloyd, that this is "not your father's Hobbes." In brief, these books dethrone the regnant intepretations of Hobbes's moral and political philosophy, interpretations exemplified, for instance, in such otherwise justly influential works of political thought (or 'theory') by C.B. Macpherson, David Gauthier, Jean Hampton, and Gregory Kavka. Moreover, Lloyd enables us to see precisely why "two of the most celebrated analytical approaches to present-day political philosophy—namely, Rawls's Political Liberalism, and Gauthier's Moral Contractarianism," cannot rely on the "real Hobbes...to support [their] admittedly philosophically interesting projects," both Gauthier and Rawls having "claim[ed] Hobbes as their first illustrious ancestor."

A pedagogical incarnation of what Lloyd rightly labels "the standard philosophical interpretation" of Hobbe's moral and political reasoning is here illustrated in a widely adopted text in the undergraduate Political Science curriculum, Glenn Tinder's Political Thinking: The Perennial Questions (6th ed., 2004):

No one has so masterfully argued that people are essentially estranged as Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), the mordant and witty English philosopher. The natural human state, Hobbes maintained, is one of war 'of every man against every man,' When there is no central government 'to overawe them all,' then 'men have no pleasure, but on the contrary a geat deal of grief in keeping company.' Life in such a state, Hobbes asserted in one of the most famous phrases in the literature of political theory, is 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.'

There are, so to speak, two levels of estrangement in Hobbes's philosophy. The surface level is psychological. People are estranged because they are essentially egotistical. One is concerned above all with the preservation of one's own life; one also seeks such things as wealth and prestige. None of these benefits can be gained without power. Thus Hobbes attributed to human beings 'a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.' We care nothing about others except as they can help or hinder us in reaching our private goals. Such ego-centeredness is not perverse, nor is it avoidable; it is our true nature. To be human is to be concerned exclusively personal interests and personal power.

David L. Norton's exposition of eudaimonistic political theory: Democracy and Moral Development: A Politics of Virtue (1991), likewise reproduces the standard portrait, albeit with more subtlety, as Hobbes is held historically responsible, along with Machiavelli, for "realpolitik's derivation of morality from politics—its 'politicization of virtue:'"

In Hobbes's conception, moral life in civil association is a matter from beginning to end of the selfish acquisition of material goods and power, with such concessions to others as are necessary to the selfish enterprise. For Hobbes there are no upper limits to the intelligent pursuit of material goods and power, no limit beyond which more of these things is recognized as debilitating to persons who continue to pursue them. [....] The notion of sufficiency in material goods and power makes no appearance in Hobbes because the wolf is always at the door. Behind civil association is the state of nature, to which civil association is ever in danger of reverting, and in which life is 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.'

Finally, the "standard philosophical interpretation" of ideas putatively of Hobbesian provenance is axiomatic within the Realist school of international law and relations, as summarized in an important article by Allen Buchanan and David Golove:

Typically, the Realist characterizes international relations as a Hobbesian state of nature, with the following features: (a) There is no global sovereign, no supreme arbiter capable of enforcing rules of peaceful cooperation. (b) There is (approximate) equality of power, such that no one state can permanently dominate all the others. (c) The fundamental preference of states is to survive. (d) Given conditions (a) and (b), what is rational for each state to do is to strive by all means to dominate others in order to avoid being dominated (to rely on what Hobbes calls 'the principle of anticipation'). (e) In a situation in which each party rationally anticipates that it is for others to dominate, without constraints on the means they use to do so, moral principles are inapplicable. (Allen Buchanan and David Golove, 'Philosophy of International Law,' in Jules Coleman and Scott Shapiro, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Jurisprudence and Philosophy of Law, 2002: 872-873).

The three examples above help illustrate the continuing power and occasionally pernicious influence of the "standard philosophical interpretation" of Hobbes's moral and political philosophy, distinguished by its adherents' allegiance to the following characteristic features:

that Hobbes intended to derive a necessary form of political organization from fundamentally egoistic, even preservation-centered, human nature; that Hobbes was a materialist, moral subjectivist or relativist, and atheist; that political obligation is prudentially based; that might makes order and, correspondingly, that fear of death and the desire for self-preservation are the strongest motivating passions; and that the state of nature represents a prisoner's dilemma.

When not systematically revealing their shortcomings, Lloyd decisively refutes the arguments that animate this standard interpretation to devastating effect, leaving in its stead a far richer portrait of Hobbes as a profound, prescient and, yes, moral political philosopher deserving of reconsideration.