Jendrysik, “Land or Sea Beast”
MPSA 2004
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resistance based on divine sanction are wrong.
Where the King is head of the Church, and by consequence (to omit that the
Scripture itself was not received but by the authority of Kings and States) chief
judge of the rectitude of all interpretations of Scripture, to obey the King’s laws
and public edicts, is not to disobey, but to obey God.
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It therefore follows that “all this stubbornness and contumacy towards the king and his laws is
nothing but pride of heart and ambition, or else imposture.”
89
All resistance to a legitimate (in
Hobbes’s terms) ruler is either sinful pride or bad faith (or perhaps madness). Men either resist
out of a mistaken belief in their own abilities or out of a desire for power masked by delusion,
either of themselves or others.
Hobbes simplifies politics. How? By declaring that all those who disagree with him are
either sheep that simply follow authority figures or seditious traitors who wish to overthrow the
existing structure of society. Everyone, except Hobbes, acts in bad faith. This tendency, which is
evident in Leviathan, becomes the central idea of Behemoth.
In Behemoth we can see no growth, no change, and no new insights. Instead we see the
triumph of a theory. For Hobbes’s theory to work, power over opinion must be combined with
the power of coercion. This idea is consistent in both Leviathan and Behemoth. Kraynak notes
The defect of traditional forms of authority lies not with any particular political
sovereign, nor with the social and economic bases of authority, but with opinions
of justice and right, regardless of who espouses them or what interest they
support.
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For the common good rulers must control opinion and must have the ability to punish those who
hold competing opinion. By becoming a “monopolist of meaning” Hobbes’s sovereign was an
“antidote to Babel.”
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Loss of control over public opinion must be avoided at all costs.
Behemoth may be best understood as an attempt to provide a powerful and
persuasive historical illustration of certain theoretical truths; since men’s wills
follow their opinions, sovereignty ‘hath no foundation but in the opinion of the
people’, and in order to maintain peace and order, the people cannot believe they
carry unlimited right to private judgment from nature into civil society.
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Unfortunately Hobbes can only see the creation of absolute and arbitrary power, with the
leveling of all beneath the omnicompetent sovereign as the solution.
Hobbes writes history like a true intellectual. He assumes the primacy of ideas as
motivation and words as catalysts. And perhaps more importantly, he only accepts his own
understanding of ideas and categories as valid. The limitations of Behemoth are based in
Hobbes’s own prejudices. As MacGillivray notes
88
Behemoth, 53.
89
Behemoth , 53.
90
Kraynak, “Hobbes’s Behemoth”, 841.
91
Sheldon Wolin, “Hobbes and the Culture of Despotism,” in Thomas Hobbes and Political Theory, ed. Mary
G. Dietz (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1990), 22.
92
Lund, “Hobbes on Opinion,” 71-72.
Convention