Hobbes and the Ideal Citizen

Ken Taylor
Shouldn’t citizens have a say in how they are governed?

Josh Landy
Or is that just a recipe for endless extremism and dangerous division?

Ken Taylor
Is a ruler with absolute power really the only thing that can keep the peace?

Josh Landy
Welcome to Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ken Taylor
…except your intelligence. I’m Ken Taylor.

Josh Landy
And I’m Josh Land,. We’re coming to you from the studios of KALW San Francisco.

Ken Taylor
…continuing conversations that begin at Philosophers Corner on the Stanford campus, where I teach philosophy and Josh directs the Philosophy and Literature Initiative.

Josh Landy
Today we’re thinking about Thomas Hobbes and the Ideal Citizen.

Ken Taylor
Now Hobbes was a great philosopher, Josh, but he was also kind of you know, he was a kind of a provocative one. He said that life in the state of nature without the government intact would be—get this—solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. And that’s the only reason we need a state.

Josh Landy
Wait, did you say British? What’s wrong with being British?

Ken Taylor
Ididn’t say ‘British’, I said, ‘brutish’.

Josh Landy
Okay, that’s better. But you know, I still don’t buy Hobbes’ view, Ken. I mean, what is this stuff about the state of nature? He thinks the state of nature would be solitary, but human beings are naturally social creatures, you know. In a state of nature, maybe we’d live like chimpanzees or something in small social group.

Ken Taylor
I’m going to grant you that, you know, biologically speaking human beings are to a large degree social animals. But here’s something else we do that most animals don’t do. We fight with one another—like heck! I mean, that’s why Hobbes said that life would be brutish and short: without the state, I mean, if we lived in a state of nature, we’d be constantly in danger, come on, of being attacked by other humans, killed by other humans, robbed by other humans, you name it.

Josh Landy
No, I don’t agree with that. I mean, look, we’re not just social animals, Ken, we’re also cooperative animals. We band together to get things done. We work with one another to create stuff we couldn’t create on our own. I mean—and yeah, okay, we fight sometimes. But it’s not usually to the death.

Ken Taylor
You’re saying that from a very safe and secure perch in a highly developed state with tons and tons of arms—come on!

Josh Landy
Sure, but what are you getting at?

Ken Taylor
Well, come on. Just think about it. We have laws against things like theft and assault and murder. And you could get incarcerated for a long time if you’re caught breaking those laws. But without the state being ever vigilant, without its coercive power to punish wrongdoers—come on, all bets would be off, you got to admit that.

Josh Landy
You mean to tell me the only thing that’s stopping you from going around killing other people is that you could get locked up for it? I’m starting to ve a little nervous sitting next to you, Ken!

Ken Taylor
I wouldn’t go that far. But look, Josh, I have a question for you. Now, answer, honestly. Do you lock your doors at night?

Josh Landy
Of course I do—I live in San Francisco.

Ken Taylor
So even with all those laws and all that police and the court and the prison, you still fear other people, don’t you? And you would fear them even more—come on, admit it—if there were none of those things to protect you.

Josh Landy
I wasn’t necessarily advocating anarchy.

Ken Taylor
Okay, well, that’s a good thing.

Josh Landy
But Hobbes’ crazy view of the state of nature leads him to a crazy view of the state. He thinks there’s supposed to be a single ruler has all the power and… what about the rest of us? We’re just supposed to obey.

Ken Taylor
Well there. I’m going to agree with you. I actually think that living in Hobbes’ actual state, that would be the nasty and brutish thing. And if you disagreed with a ruler, maybe pretty short, too!

Josh Landy
That’s true. Yeah, you wouldn’t really be a citizen. I mean, you’d be a citizen in name, but that’s it—in reality, you’re basically a subject at the mercy of an all powerful ruler.

Ken Taylor
Now let’s get back to this British thing. Aren’t you British?

Josh Landy
Guilty as charged, my good man.

Ken Taylor
So aren’t you a subject? And aren’t you at the mercy of Her Majesty the Queen, Josh?

Josh Landy
I may be a subject of the Queen but I’m a citizen of the United Kingdom. The Queen has very little power, and I get to vote for my government.

Ken Taylor
Oh, yeah. How’s that working out for you these days, Josh?

Josh Landy
Don’t kick a man when he’s down, Ken! I mean, at least we have the right to choose our leaders and have some say in the laws of the land.

Ken Taylor
Well, you’re right. Hobbes has a very different idea about what it means to be a citizen. And as it turns out, so do ordinary citizens. So we sent our Roving Philosophical Reporter, Shereen Adel, to ask people on the streets of Oakland and San Francisco about their ideals of citizenship, she files this report.

Shereen Adel
What does it mean to you to be a citizen?

Speaker 1
The ability to do whatever you want to your heart’s content.

Speaker 2
I think to respect the laws and do your part to make sure that there’s a legacy left for people that come behind us.

Unknown Speaker
Being an active part of your community in a positive way. Looking out for your neighbors.

Unknown Speaker
Being a citizen means that you have the equal rights that other people in your community do and that the government would be willing to stand up for you the same way.

Shereen Adel
The word citizen comes from a French word that originally meant being an inhabitant of a city or town. But being an inhabitant does not always mean having rights.

Game of Thrones
We have to choose someone!

Samwell Tarly
Why just us? We represent all the great houses but whomever we choose, they won’t just rule over lords and ladies. Maybe the decision about what’s best for everyone should be left to… well, everyone.

Edmure Tully
Maybe we should give the dogs a vote as well.

Unknown Speaker
I’ll ask my horse!

Shereen Adel
That’s a scene from the final episode of Game of Thrones. Though the show is fantasy, there are many historical examples where the idea that ordinary people could have a say in governance was laughable. But for every king and queen that balked at giving their subjects the right to vote, there were ancient societies that had really advanced ideas of citizenship

Josiah Ober
For a Greek citizen, it really was intimately engaged with wrapped up with your everyday life.

Shereen Adel
Josiah Ober is a political science and classics professor at Stanford.

Josiah Ober
It wasn’t simply a matter of government voting every four years or every two years, it wasn’t simply a matter of writing letters to representative.

Shereen Adel
Over 2500 years ago, Athenian citizens went to assemblies 40 times a year. Most of them were also picked from a lottery at least once in their lives to spend a year working full time in government. It’s like jury duty, but for a whole year. And they made decisions about everything,

Josiah Ober
Everything—war, peace, economic policy, welfare policy, how do we make sure that the streets stay clean? Should we build new warships—you name it.

Shereen Adel
And then they would go back to their homes and jobs and be responsible for implementing those policies. As workers, soldiers, property owners…

Josiah Ober
So the whole point of citizenship for a classical Greek was that you were not a subject in Aristotle’s terms; you ruled and you were ruled over in your turn.

Shereen Adel
But it wasn’t perfect. Not all people had equal rights. To be a citizen, you had to be a man with parents who were citizens. Women were not citizens. Many people were even owned as slaves. As political powers shifted and empires grew, gradually over a few 100 years, the ancient Greek system disappeared. But it is the basis for modern day democracy—except cities and states got a lot bigger.

Emily Chapman
So it’s much harder for people to interact with a wide range of members of the community in these sort of face to face interactions.

Shereen Adel
Emily Chapman is one of Josiah Ober’s political science colleagues at Stanford. She says, because people couldn’t spend the same amount of time participating in politics, voting became central to the idea of citizenship. But there are also other ways to engage.

Emily Chapman
Demonstrations, campaigning, donating one’s time to, sort of, organizing—those sorts of things are all crucial activities of citizenship.

Shereen Adel
But which activities are considered acceptable has changed over time—like protesting, for example.

Emily Chapman
You look at surveys among Americans in the 1960s, a lot of people basically say that it’s not an acceptable form of political participation. But then like over the course of a couple of decades, you see this shifting where people come, by the 1990s, to see protest as being a normal and legitimate way of exercising your rights or powers as a citizen to try and influence the public rules.

Shereen Adel
Chapman says one of the things that might influence people’s attitudes about protesting and demonstrating is that it’s open to everyone—even if the person doesn’t have official citizenship. And that can be a sign of a healthy democracy.

Emily Chapman
Even if it’s not a kind of formal role in decision making, I mean, in well functioning democracies, the rights of free speech are extended to noncitizens as well.

Shereen Adel
And that’s crucial for creating a culture in which democracy is able to flourish

Leonard Cohen
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

Shereen Adel
For Philosophy Talk, I’m Shereen Adel.

Ken Taylor
So Shereen, thanks for that amazing tour of both the history and current situation with respect to citizenship in many places around the world. I’m Ken Taylor with me as my Stanford colleague, Josh Landy. And today we’re thinking about Hobbes and the ideal citizen.

Josh Landy
We’re joined now by Alison McQueen, who is a professor of political science at Stanford University, and author of “Political Realism in Apocalyptic Times.” Alison, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Alison McQueen
Thanks so much for having me.

Josh Landy
So you’re a political scientist, and it makes perfect sense to me why you’d be interested in general and justifications for the state. But why do you find Hobbes in particular so interesting?

Alison McQueen
You know, I didn’t always. I thought Hobbes was the philosopher of doom and gloom. I had to write a paper on him in grad school. And I found that I wasn’t looking forward to it. And it was on one of those fall days in upstate New York that starts as summer and ends as winter. And it got to the end of the night. And I realized I’d become so engrossed in Hobbes that I hadn’t, I hadn’t recognized that the temperature just plummeted. And I took my temperature. And I realized I actually had mild hypothermia.

Ken Taylor
Thus began your love for Hobbes!

Alison McQueen
Thus began my love for Hobbes. I thought, this guy must have something going on.

Ken Taylor
That’s an awesome story. So we just heard from our Roving Philosophical Reporter lots of different ideas about what it means to be a citizen. But tell me what does it mean for Hobbes, since he, I mean, since he believes on this kind of absolute state, I’m curious about what’s a citizen in his view.

Alison McQueen
For Hobbes, to be a citizen is simply to be a subject. And so we heard from my colleague Josiah Ober that there’s this ancient tradition where you couldn’t be a citizen and a subject at the same time; to be a citizen meant to participate in politics. And for Hobbes, that’s just nonsense.

Ken Taylor
Wait a minute, that’s just nonsense. Why does he think that? I mean, the Game of Thrones quote, right? He sounds like one of these Game of Thrones, guys. Is that what he was, one of these Game of Thrones guys? Well, just consult my horse, you want to consult the people? Or was that the dog?

Josh Landy
So he thinks it’s ridiculous that people should have any say and how they’re governed.

Alison McQueen
It’s not so much ridiculous perhaps as dangerous. Once people have a say and how they’re governed, when they disagree with one another it is a swift road to civil war.

Josh Landy
And that’s what he’d seen in his own time, obviously, in England.

Alison McQueen
That is indeed what he’d seen. His country had lived through a brutal and disruptive civil war

Ken Taylor
Okay, I think of Hobbes as a really great philosopher. I think of him as one of the one of the founding fathers of modern political theory. But that seems like he let his imagination of the possibilities for human life be completely conditioned by the historical moment. I mean, seriously? Rhat there could not be? You look at— there were Roman citizens, there were Greeks…

Josh Landy
He knew about Ancient Greece.

Ken Taylor
He know about all that stuff. They didn’t collapse into civil war.

Alison McQueen
That’s right. But just think about how you might feel how you might be as a philosopher if you saw your country torn apart by one of the most gruesome conflicts of the time, where people were slaughtering their neighbors, families turning against families. Doing philosophy in an age of extremes leads to completely different conclusions than the ones we might reach today.

Ken Taylor
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about Thomas Hobbes and his view of the ideal citizen with Stanford political scientist, Alison McQueen.

Josh Landy
What qualities make somebody a good citizen? is obedience of virtue or could dissent be something we prize? And what kinds of citizens are the most dangerous to social harmony,

Ken Taylor
Obedience, citizenship, and absolute power—when Philosophy Talk continues.

Tom Petty
Yeah, the world would swing, oh, if I were king Can I help it if I still dream time to time.

Ken Taylor
Well, of course, it’s good to be king. But is it good to be a citizen under an all powerful sovereign? I’m Ken Taylor. This is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Josh Landy
…except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy and we’re thinking about Hobbes and his view of the ideal citizen. Our guest is Alison McQueen, from Stanford University, author of “Political Realism in Apocalyptic Times.”

Ken Taylor
So Alison, okay, so Hobbes did not see any distinction between being a subject and being a citizen, as you said, that doesn’t comport much with anybody. What are what are people in our roving report had to say they all had these ideas that seem very unhappy and so Okay, let’s start with Hobbes though, what would make someone a good or bad citizen for Hobbes, I’m guessing that to be a good citizen is kind of be like a sheep.

Alison McQueen
Well, you’re you’re right there to be a good citizen for Hobbes means virtually complete obedience to an absolute state. And that may seem really extreme. But Hobbes thought we faced a stark choice between on the one hand, the war of all against all in the state of nature, Life Without government, and on the other piece at the hands of an absolute sovereign. And I know what I choose out of those two,

Ken Taylor
well, if those are your only choices, but let’s go back to something Josh said in the beginning. Did anybody ever say to Hobbes, you know, the English Civil War that’s because, you know, there’s the Protestant And they got legs and all this turmoil and all these factions. That’s not the state of nature. It’s not that life in the state of nature would be nasty, brutish and short. It would be nasty, brutish, and short because we’re at that time at each other’s throats. But people aren’t always only at each other’s throats where have people always only been at ease? And that’s

Josh Landy
an interesting thing. Right? Because, you know, we’ve got He’s the first person in the world Moza in China came up with the idea of a state of nature but the Cubs the first person in the West, he wasn’t the only person to have an idea of state of nature. And you were so had a very different picture. We which is you know, Candyland hippie town, where his his Mad Max, like, you know, why should we think the state of nature is Mad Max?

Alison McQueen
Well, I think Hobbes asked us to think about some worldly analogues some examples of where we might be in a, in a condition like that. And one, you’re right Civil War, what he’d seen in his own time. Another was he thought, how states interact with one another on the world stage, it’s anarchy. They do whatever they can.

Ken Taylor
Well, that’s Yeah, well, that’s true. So okay, so states, but even they are constrained by one another, because they think they can’t do just anything. I mean, the state of states, there’s a war and it breaks out. And sometimes war is useful. But often few states want to avoid a war with the especially wars that they can’t win, that doesn’t drive them to create a state of state that has all powers. That would be weird. I mean, I’m just trying to figure out how, how much of Hobbes Hobbes philosophy to pens on what seems to me like a questionable assumption.

Alison McQueen
Well, it might help us to make it less questionable if he if we think what he actually means by war in the state of nature. And one of the things he says is, I don’t mean that people are at each other’s throats all the time. What I mean is that in the absence of any kind of guarantee of peace, there’s always the threat of war. So think about living in that circumstance of permanent anxiety, always worried that war could break out. And Hobbes asks us to think about whether that’s really a condition that makes for a good life. And it’s

Josh Landy
something I’d go back to something you were saying earlier, Ken, you know, we lock our doors. Yeah. I mean, if if there were no, a course or authority, no arbiter of our disputes, then how could I be I would be terrified at night, and my terror might lead me to, I don’t know, recruit some security and pretty soon Oh, yeah. But armies?

Ken Taylor
Yeah, let’s, let’s grant something states are good things by and large. Maybe they screw something they screw things up. Because, you know, if you worried about the war of all against all, well, the war of all States against all states, that’s much more destructive than a bunch of snarling individuals who you know, because the state like supercharges, board making power, okay, let’s, let’s get let’s but states are by and large, good things. Okay. I grant that I like living in a state, I don’t think I want to live in a stateless world. So the alternative, some anarchists think that the state states aren’t good things we should we should abolish the state. I don’t think the only option alternative to Hobbes is anarchy. Right? So there’d be lots of justifications for states and states different from the kind of state Hobbes envision short of anarchy? Don’t you agree with that?

Alison McQueen
That’s right. So you might think about one of the alternatives that emerged in both Britain and America, the alternative of limited government? You know, look, we all agree that if we follow certain rules that will lead to peace. Why don’t we just agree on the rules that ought to be followed, and hold our leaders to account for following those rules as well, and we obey them only to the extent they follow those rules? Well, Hobbes thinks the problem with that is people are going to disagree on how to interpret those rules. And they’re going to disagree on whether the rules have been breached in a particular case. And when people disagree about that, you’re on a swift road back to civil

Josh Landy
law, you’re saying that a president might commit some kind of violations and some people might claim that the president didn’t violate the constitution? That’s crazy talk.

Ken Taylor
Look, surely there will be disagreements, right? Surely and some disagreements will surely get might truly devolve into a war of all against all. I mean, think of them America and its war over slavery and states rights and all that stuff in the union and whether it to be preserved. That was clearly a collapse of the constitutional order, or think of the former Yugoslavia, right? Where, when not to take collapse. It was a war of all against, I think of France in the 16th century. Right. So there are lots of examples that Hobbes is right. But here’s the question I guess I have for you. Okay, maybe you want a state that has a monopoly on? Let’s call it political power. I’m not sure what the sphere of the political is for hubs. But if I lived in a Hobbesian state, with a state tell me every govern every single aspect of my life, is it totalitarian in the way that you know, like Big Brother is totalitarian in 1984? Or is there just is he saying he’s got a monopoly on political power? But there’s other kinds of things that where the state has no business interfering?

Alison McQueen
That’s a really good question. For Hobbes, the state hat and its representative, the sovereign has the right to make war and peace, it has the right to pass laws as the right to punish you and reward you. Importantly, it has the right as well to dictate the meaning of Scripture, and to tell you how to worship no separation of church and state, no separation of church and state for Hobbes No. We do for Hobbes, importantly, retain one right that we can never give up. And that is the right of self defense. And so it leads to this interesting possibility that your state could put you to death for a crime could command you to die. And for Hobbes, you would be within your right, to try and wrestle the axe out of the executioner? What

Ken Taylor
about the right to marry who I want to marry, for example, which we take us as a personal freedom? Do I have or to go to school? Go to the University of my choice, right? So there’s lots of things in my life that I decide on the basis of my private, personal ambitions, desires, I’m trying to figure out where the state where the power, okay, it’s got all political power, but I want to know how I’d make a divide between the powers that it has as political and the powers that I have just over governing my life.

Alison McQueen
A lot of that for Hobbes will be contingent on how disruptive those decisions of yours would be for the society at large. If you live in a society with fraught disagreement over marriage and over who can marry whom, then you marrying someone who would be controversial,

Ken Taylor
like of the same gender as me, you’re of a different race. Yeah. Hobbs

Alison McQueen
asks us to take seriously that if that has public consequences. If that’s likely to be disruptive, it’s that’s likely to get people protesting on the streets, then the sovereign can dictate who you can marry.

Josh Landy
That’s fascinating. I mean, one of the things that that I’ve always been interested in, is, you know, the reaction to Leviathan. Bishop Bramwell called it a rebels catechism, right? And so we tend to think about Hobbes as crime coercive, right? Having a rather oppressive vision of the state. But if you think that in its context, you might think well, okay, yeah, you can’t marry someone in a situate you can’t be who you want in a situation where it might be a threat to the peace. But otherwise, you’re free to do what you want. Hobbes seem pretty egalitarian. When it came to gender. He thought that, you know, women and men were on an equal footing women could certainly be rulers. That’s right. You know, he was a contractor, and he thought that the state had to be legitimated by the, the implicit consent of this. So. So is it really as sort of tyrannical as it might seem? Yes,

Alison McQueen
it shocks us today, to imagine that some of Hobbes’s respondents actually thought that his theory wasn’t authoritarian enough, right. But if you think about it, the fact that he allows us that residual right of self defense, the fact that he thinks that government is in some way founded on a contract between free and equal individuals, that was for Bishop Brammo, the recipe for rebellion, and Hobbes is authoritarian theory.

Ken Taylor
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk, we’re talking about Hobbes and the ideal citizen. Lisa from San Francisco is on the line. Welcome to Philosophy Talk. Lisa, what’s your comment or question?

Unknown Speaker
Yes, yeah, I’m Italian American. And I want to give a shout out to the example of citizen action in Chile happening these days, not only in the very brave protests, but against what basically is a civil dictatorship because the Constitution under which they’ve been under for the past 30 years has been one that was drafted by a dictatorship government, but also the economic situation involved there. The economic neoliberal economic model under which they’ve been subjected to has privatized the entire country. So there are popular assemblies going on right now to where citizens throughout the entire country are meeting, or getting together gathering and talking in different neighborhoods and, and discussing the the formation of what’s called a constitutional assembly in order to create a new constitution. And this is happening right now. So that the whole idea of the common the whole idea of pushing back against this privatization model, which is privatize the entire country.

Ken Taylor
Thanks for Thanks a lot for the input like this, Lisa, this is this is she’s raising an interesting question. I’m going to bring it back to Hobbes with such kind of citizen activism citizen engagement citizen like resistance? Is there any grounds for that in a HUBZone? View?

Alison McQueen
No, there’s there’s really not. And as we’ve, as we’ve seen, I think Hobbs has this context matters for explaining his intuitions. If you live through a civil war, you might be willing to put up with a lot of authoritarianism, in the name of peace. And you might think one of the one of the assets that Hobbes might have seen giving the political leader, the sovereign, all these rights to police public discourse and public action, is that actually, none of us would know whether our CO citizens, our CO subjects were unhappy with the regime, because no one would be talking about Yeah.

Ken Taylor
So look, Hobbes then is very far, his notion of a citizen is very far from anything that’s in the ether of our common political life. But there’s a strange thing that you said, which, which I kind of puzzle about this, you said, he’s like, the the kind of official philosophical beginning of the social contract tradition, which is, at the core of American political thinking of our founding fathers and all that sort of stuff. You know, it gives rise to Jefferson saying it’s with the consent of the governed, and when, and and we have the right to withhold that consent. I mean, that clearly doesn’t come from Hobbes. Right. So where does it come from? And why do we think of Hobbes? I mean, is hubs the beginning of political liberalism? Is he not a political liberal? Is he some kind of halfway house? He seems like a strange dude in the history of political thought?

Alison McQueen
Yeah, it may seem surprising that he makes any contribution to liberalism at all right? And perhaps we can see he does so inadvertently,

Unknown Speaker
by themselves.

Alison McQueen
He certainly is certainly the first real canonical thinker to offer a social contract argument. They’ve been in the ether, but he takes it and he puts it on steroids. So he gives us this argument, it’s a powerful argument that government is legitimate if it arose, or could have arisen from the consent of free and equal parties. And that becomes one of the cornerstones of the liberal tradition. And you’re right, it motivates Jefferson, it motivates the other American founders.

Ken Taylor
Where does he get the idea? He seems to have the idea that once you consent, once we consent, that’s it, it’s over, you can’t withdraw your consent, that consent can’t be violated, then once you consent, then you start obeying. I mean, we’re I mean, that doesn’t seem to follow. Why. Why does he think of? Well, I don’t think Hobbes is a philosopher devoid of imagination, who doesn’t ask himself hard questions, I think of him as really a first rate philosopher. So where where does he get this thought that? Well, once you consent, that’s it.

Alison McQueen
I think it might help to, to reframe the place of the social contract argument in his thought, it’s not that he’s seen as a historical matter, we were all wandering around in the woods and and decided to enter into an agreement to form a government with one another, and then we’re bound for all time afterward. You can think of it as a nice thought experiment you can do if you’re sitting in your society, and you’re thinking, Oh, these laws look a bit onerous, or the sovereign is asking me to do things that I’m not sure about. He asks you to think to yourself, imagine what life would be like without government, and it would be really terrible. And could you imagine a situation where you might consent to be ruled by an absolute state to get out of that condition of war? And so it’s a nice chat. But

Ken Taylor
wait a minute, wouldn’t I want some constraints on that stage? When I want to say, yeah, that’s that you even said that right of self defense doesn’t abandon. All right. Well, the right to speak my mind. Right. Okay. I, I may not, you may not have to do what I say. But you have to hear what I say. Why not?

Alison McQueen
Well, that that’s not a thought Hobbes had but it is a thought that someone writing a generation later did right.

Ken Taylor
Exactly. So I’m trying to figure out why. What I again, I don’t want to just attributed to Hobbes, his lack of imagination that he didn’t I just wondering what in his mind prevented him from going those extra steps.

Alison McQueen
I think what prevented him was just how bad he thought the state of nature was, how bad the Civil War had been. And if he thought if we can all acknowledge what a terrible condition that is, then

Ken Taylor
I got I got you. So we got a caller Arianna pieces. Think for me. Okay, thanks.

Unknown Speaker
Yeah, I think that one poor point to make is that the state has the right to legitimize its own violence. And so it also enhances anxiety and encourages people to overly rely on the state to produce solutions to very layered problem. So we see, like the problem of education where people have to have money To have a good education, we see a media that does inform and controls and creates a consumerist populace and where capitalism supersedes democracy. And if it were a good government, and if it were reforming it, hopefully it will be in the process of being reformed as people become engaged citizens, but as it is now, within this late stage model, we have people who are complacent. Yeah, who are willing to let the planet die. Other teeth are

Ken Taylor
Ariana. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks for the input. I’m gonna try and give ourselves a chance to respond. I’m going to put a kind of tighten the question just a little bit. I mean, Arianna is pointing out some ways in which states can be radically imperfect, and can do really bad things. You know, I mean, if you’re in a, if you’re in a monarchy, you can have a tyrannical king. And you might think, it doesn’t seem as though hubs thought about the ways in which states can go wrong, especially when you endow them with this absolute sovereignty. It doesn’t seem as though he gave much thought about like how to constrain the state power.

Alison McQueen
That’s exactly right. If we want to think of Hobbes as doom and gloom on the nature of humanity, he was an incorrigible optimist about

Josh Landy
political leaders, he thought they were gonna be great, right?

Alison McQueen
He thought they would be ennobled by the office.

Ken Taylor
Oh, my God, they got it. That’s somebody said that about a current occupant of a high office, that person would grow into it. You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. We’re thinking about citizenship and the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, with Ellison McQueen from Stanford University.

Josh Landy
What kind of qualities would an absolute ruler need in order to heal today’s deep partisan divide? Do you agree with Hobbes that absolute state authority is the answer to political division? Or is the Unite idea of an absolute ruler absolutely outdated

Ken Taylor
Hobbes and a modern political state when philosophy talked it continues?

One by one bowing to the crown. Is that really how an ideal citizen ought to behave? I’m Ken Taylor, and this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything

Josh Landy
except your intelligence. I’m Josh Laddie, our guest is Stanford political scientist, Alison McQueen. Today we’re asking about hubs, citizenship and the state.

Ken Taylor
So Alison, okay, I’m going to concede I’m not a hubs in, but I can concede that hubs is vunerable, absolute power of the state, made some sense, maybe lots of sense, given the times in which he was writing, given the problem that he saw, you know, how do we prevent the equivalent of the English Civil War from breaking out all over again, everywhere? But really seriously, do they have any relevance, any relevance whatsoever to today’s political realities?

Alison McQueen
Well, I think they do. I mean, as you pointed out, the existential threat of Hobbes’s time, was the Civil War, tearing Britain apart, the existential threat of our time, is climate change. And so we see people today, this group that’s gaining increasing strength of people who call themselves eco authoritarians, who think we face a stark choice, we face a stark choice between planetary emergency and collapse on the one hand, and effective rule by experts and maybe even political, strong men on the other.

Josh Landy
And of course, it’s not just the Eco authoritarians, there’s plenty of just you know, plain old fashioned authoritarian did

Ken Taylor
a show recently on the allure of authoritarianism. And I will grant you that authoritarianism has a certain allure, I will grant you that

Josh Landy
and you might say in Hobbes, in terms especially in times of crisis, where where people cannot even agree even on the facts, right, but

Ken Taylor
to say it has an allure is not to say it’s an I look, here’s something I’ve said before, I deeply believe that we in Western liberal democracies have deluded ourselves for a long time, partly because of the outcome of the the world wars in the Cold War. We thought, oh, look, we won, our ideals won they triumph. And in some ways, they did triumph in some ways they did, but mainly because those states that tried the other ideal is the contingencies of his history Hitler made. I mean, if you’ve watched that movie lifeboat was was made at the beginning of the war with Alfred Hitchcock. It puts really the question urgently. Who’s got it? Who’s got the better idea? The Germans? Or are they are the Allied powers? And it’s not at all clear. I mean, Hitchcock is toying with the ideas that the Germans have it right because that German Sergeant on that boat is the guy in control who can get things done. Right, and other people are bickering and they can’t unite and all this stuff. Okay. And then Hitler made the stupid mistake. He didn’t listen to his generals at Moscow. Sterlington, six or eight. I can’t remember divisions to reinforce he had smash the Red Army in the West, but he made this mistake. Okay. contingencies. What’s your point, Ken, that my point is Is there it’s not obvious to me that democracy liberal democracy is the better is the more more effective, more effective form of social life, social political life than these totalitarian regimes? I don’t think history is settled that I grant you that. But I don’t think there’s much of a case to be made that it’s been settled in favor of the authoritarians.

Josh Landy
So even if even in an emergency, as Allison was saying, climate change is an emergency, right? You wouldn’t

Ken Taylor
be really reluctant to do that. So tell me why I’m wrong to think this.

Alison McQueen
I don’t necessarily think you are wrong. So one of the reasons we could read Hobbes is because we want to see the strong case for authoritarianism made by one of the best philosophers in the canon. But another reason to read Hobbes is to figure out why we might be committed to very different ideals. I mean, I read Hobbes, and I disagree with him utterly, but it gives me it gives me someone to fight with, it gives me a reason to think about what the grounds are for liberal democratic commitments and how I would defend them against a thinker with arguments as powerful as

Josh Landy
I get. Proust said, The best way to figure out your own position is to read someone really smartly disagree

Ken Taylor
with Yeah, we got a caller, Larry from Fremont. Welcome to Philosophy Talk. Larry, what’s your comment? Your question?

Edmure Tully
Hi, I have some comments about Hobbes view of the citizen versus the sovereign, it seems to he is separating these things. What if the citizen is the sovereign, but the sovereign does not run the country, the sovereign hires highly paid consultant to run?

Ken Taylor
What do you make of malaria to say that?

Alison McQueen
Well, this is the big development that happens after Hobbes his time that there isn’t a distinction between citizen and sovereign, that you get the rise of an idea of popular sovereignty, the sovereign is us. And that puts on us the responsibility to think about how we want to wield political

Ken Taylor
power, there is a germ of that idea, even in hubs, right? Because we’re in the state of nature. No, not nobody has any authority over us and the women get authority over us. If we say, together, hey, let’s have a state, let’s get the whale to govern us.

Alison McQueen
That’s exactly right. And what we also say, is, we are from now on going to view ourselves as the author of that state’s actions. And so when the state shows up at your door, in that Leviathan society to arrest you for a crime, you’re not supposed to say to yourself, well, this is all a bit much. You’re supposed to say, there’s no justice here, when

Ken Taylor
you get it, I say, This is what I agree to. I can’t ever say, Wait a minute. I don’t know. I’m not sure I agree that that and then don’t doesn’t the state have to like defend that? Yes, that’s what you agreed?

Alison McQueen
No, you don’t, because part of what you agree to for Hobbes is to alienate your own will and your own judgement about what is necessarily in peace, and give it up to the leader who’s going to represent you.

Ken Taylor
You’re making the state sound like a really awful thing. I really, I’m like, Who would want to live that way? Okay, I know, the alternative is worse. But I want to ask you something else about the state i because one of the things I think about the state, and legitimate state is the state is cool, because it’s this fear of extended cooperation within political life, especially when we agree about means and ends. I mean, that’s hard, but we deliberate about them. And then we agree about them. And then all of a sudden, I’m not on my own. But our collectivity can provide health insurance for all of us. Dream on dream on some collectivity, we say we’re going to we’re going to mutually benefit each other. So that’s a that’s an extended sphere of rational cooperation of living together. The state facilitates that hop seems to believe something like that, because in the state, he says, in the state of nature, there’s no navigation, there’s no industry, there’s no arts, right? In the state, there are these things. So what’s up with that? Right?

Alison McQueen
You’re right, amazing things happen when we get together, and we create this entity called the state. And Hobbes in that way, that’s where our power resides. For Hobbes, there’s nothing natural about the state. It is a product of artifice, we make it right. And it allows us to do these extraordinary things as you point out, but it’s only going to allow those things to happen, if it can effectively project political force, and if it can do so, to ensure peace.

Josh Landy
How much of this depends on something you were saying earlier about the belief in the goodness of the monarch, right or the or of the sovereign? I mean, Hobbes, as you were saying earlier, has seems to be irrepressibly optimistic about that, that once you once once you take office, you’ll realize that your own flourishing and security depends on everyone being happy, and so you’ll become a good monarch and maybe he was thinking of Elizabeth the first or something like that, but hadn’t you seen a bunch of English monarchs not being so great? I mean, you know, I wouldn’t mind me living maybe in a society like this right where maybe I alienate my, my will to the state and the state gets things done because it’s bigger than the sum of its parts. If I could trust that the leader of that state was going to do what’s best for all of us. Did Hobbs really think that we could trust that?

Alison McQueen
I think he did. But I don’t think we have to think that along with Hobbes. So if we want to subject Hobbes to the ultimate test, what we should ask of Hobbes is whether the solution of absolute sovereignty is worse than the problem. It’s meant to solve the anarchy of the state of nature. And he thought he thought the solution was better than the problem that was meant to solve. We don’t share that.

Ken Taylor
Well, I don’t know about this. I mean, let’s try that a little different. I think I see where you’re going. But okay, there’s the state of nature. Let’s suppose Hobbes is right, that’s really terrible. There’s the there’s a solution to the state of nature, absolute political authority in the hands of the state. That’s better than that. But it’s something between the state of nature which is awful, and absolute authority, unquestioned authority, which is also awful, isn’t there some middle ground that gives us a state but with limited powers with constraints on it such that I can have I get a subject I gather a subject has there’s many different things that a subject is but a subject does not have a complaint against the sovereign. Right, you are subject you are not citizen, you are not equal. You don’t make the laws you obey. A subject does not have a complaint against the sovereign. A citizen has a complaint against the state, right. That’s why we have this idea of political rights that can’t be abridged, even by the state, even by the majority, that he didn’t even he didn’t. That’s exactly

Alison McQueen
right. That seems like a very intuitive idea to us that Hobbes’s theory has a missing middle, right? Right. And that middle could be filled in with forms of limited government or divided rule, systems that give citizens a lot of ways to hold their leaders accountable. Now, one thing to think about is there weren’t in Hobbes’s time, a lot of examples of states like that that had remained stable over time. Maybe Hobbes would have reached a very different conclusion, if he’d been able to see for instance, the fate of Britain, or America. Yeah. But

Ken Taylor
John Locke saw a lot of the same things. But he’s like, he’s like the avatar of limited government and all that. Right. So what’s the difference?

Josh Landy
From right to rebellion? Yeah.

Alison McQueen
Yeah. For John Locke. The lessons of the Civil War were very different. It was a it was a lesson in the dangers of absolute rule. Exactly. Charles, the first absolute rule had partly led to the civil war in the first place. And Locke very astutely, insists that our solution to the problems of the state of nature ought not to be worse than the problem. It’s meant. So one

Ken Taylor
was a grouch. Or something. Was was, you know, there were some philosophy like Hume was a bomba, volunteen Uh, well, if it was, was how to grow. Last thought, was he a grouch? Or was he an optimistic dude or what we might

Alison McQueen
think he was, but actually, he was a pretty fun guy.

Ken Taylor
Well, that puzzling note. Take, I gotta tell you, this is business has not been nasty or brutish. It has been too short, though. Thanks for joining. Thank you. I guess it’s been Alison McQueen. She’s a professor of political science at Stanford University. She’s author of political realism and apocalyptic time. So Josh, what are you thinking? Now? We didn’t get to talk to Allison about the apocalypse. That’s. But anyway, what are you thinking?

Josh Landy
Now? I don’t know. I mean, obviously, there’s a lot in in hubs that I can agree with. But the idea that we should think from a position of the worst is very interesting, like, what what’s the worst that could happen? If we didn’t live into the system with Yeah, and you know, the, the idea that maybe we should be thinking about valuing life, right, that what the problem with the state of nature is, lives are going to be held cheap. You know,

Ken Taylor
one of the things I love about doing shows, episodes like this, and teaching stuff, like Hobbes, and all these great dead thinkers is that we are so locked in the present. So many of our imaginations are kind of a sterile presentism. We don’t think ideas emerge from anywhere. But the idea of political liberalism emerged over time. And it began with a thinker who was not at all a political liberal, but that dialectic of history led to political liberalism. And I think it’s so important for people to understand that that all everything in the human world emerges. It’s not just, it doesn’t just ever come like fully formed from one person’s head.

Josh Landy
And I’ll say this as a literature person. It involves imagination. You know, Hobbes needed to imagine a totally different kinds of world and and write and think through metaphors, even though he didn’t like metaphors officially, but he was full of metaphors, and it’s full of these imaginary scenarios. And that’s how he got to where he where he ended up

Ken Taylor
this cover continues at philosophers corner at our online community of thinkers where our motto is with no apologies to Descartes Cogito ergo Blago, I think, therefore I blog and you can become a partner in our community just by visiting our website, Philosophy Talk, ORG.

Josh Landy
And if you have a question that wasn’t addressed in today’s show, or if you’re bedeviled by a conundrum in your life and could use some philosophical insight, we’d love to hear from you. Email us at conundrums at Philosophy Talk dot ORG.

Ken Taylor
And now… Nasty—well, maybe. Brutish—sometimes. Short—as fast as possible. It’s Ian Shoales, the Sixty-Second Philosopher.

Ian Shoales
Ian Shoales. When Thomas Hobbes was coming up, western ways of thinking were moving away from the long efforts to reconcile the old Greeks with modern Christian thinking. After all, the bloom had come off the Christian rose. Many Christians weren’t even Catholic any more. The modern world was heaving into view, a world still in fear of God, sure, but growing more connected to kings, ships, and goods than dogma. Writing in the 17th Century, Thomas Hobbes claimed that unchecked freedom could lead us into wars that could kill us all. If we acknowledge our vainglory, we can use our autonomy to trade liberty for the security of authority, to LEVIATHAN, as it is termed in his magnum opus. In it, Hobbes is said to have invented the modern state, and to make the claim that the best use of our freedom is to lose it in the consent to be governed. This was a time of chaos in England. Protestants and Catholics, Roundheads and Cavaliers, Civil War. Fearing for his safety, Hobbes had moved to France in 1640. Ahead of publication, he presented a copy of LEVIATHAN to Prince Charles, living in exile, hoping for his favor. But his suggestion that subjects had the right to abandon rulers who could not protect them offended the prince’s advisers. Barred from the court, and under suspicion by France for his attacks on the Church, he moved back to England in 1751, making peace with the new England, under the regime of fanatically anti-Catholic Oliver Cromwell. The rule of Oliver Cromwell seems to both prove and disprove Hobbes. Liberty led to chaos, which led to Cromwell, who became the state, which led to a major war in Ireland, a land grab from Catholic farm owners, an influx of carpetbagging Protestant English, and the birth of the Troubles, as the Irish so whimsically term them. Then came the Restoration, and Hobbes returned to favor with the new king Charles II. He scandalized the bishops, but the king liked his wit. Then in 1666, the House of Commons made a bill against atheism, making Hobbes feel a little threatened, him being a rabid materialist and all, but he burned a few papers that he thought might compromise him, and morphed into a wise and witty old man, the kind that everybody wants at the dinner party. He lived to be 91. In his late eighties, he wrote his autobiography in verse, in Latin. This is the sort of thing that kings use to expect from their learned subjects. Now the state just wants everybody to shut up. So Hobbes might have invented the state, and obviously he was leery of religion. Did he also invent the Deep State? He proved to be adept at avoiding clutches and thriving in both chaos and statehood. The question he posed of liberty versus security proves still to be the governmental rub. Also, do we even always know if we’re free or not? Are we free to do a thing, or just allowed to do it? Liberty at a whim seems to be the deal these days. Ask the seekers at our borders. And today we face special challenges to Leviathan. You would think President Trump would be the perfect embodiment of the Hobbesian state. The problem is, he seems to be the best of the state mingled with the worst of the governed. That is, he is vainglorious and impulsive, and there is no state to rein in his whims. Well there is, but he ignores it. And that’s not all the flies in the ointment of the Hobbesian utopia that never came to be. Take Brexit! The decision to join the European Union was a decision made by states to join a larger state for the purposes of trade. Then England, the state, based on a vote by its citizens, the governed, decided to leave the Union, in a move now known as Brexit. That break has become bogged down in the weeds created in England by the commingling of states, but should it finally come to pass, there would be many obstacles. Not the least of which: the Republic of Ireland would remain in the European Union. Northern Ireland would leave along with rest of the UK. So 2020 might set the stage for trouble we could have nipped in the bud back in 1640. So yes, it may be true that without the benefit of state, lives can be nasty brutish and short, as Hobbes famously wrote. But states themselves, as history shows, are also nasty and brutish. They just last a little longer, that’s all. I gotta go.

Ken Taylor
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Josh Landy
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Ken Taylor
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Josh Landy
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Ken Taylor
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Josh Landy
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Ken Taylor
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Josh Landy
The conversation continues on our website, Philosophy Talk dot ORG, where you too can become a Partner in our Community of Thinker. I’m Josh Landy.

Ken Taylor
And I’m Ken Taylor. Thank you for listening.

Josh Landy
And thank you for thinking.

Leviathan
Leviathan is everywhere. Leviathan is everyone. And Leviathan is coming.