Jendrysik, “Land or Sea Beast”
MPSA 2004
16
Behemoth as concretely specified causes of the English Civil War.”
99
If we are concerned with Hobbes’s consistency of “style” or of explanation, we can ask:
are the methods and categories he employs in this account consistent? For Hobbes events matter
and indeed exist only insofar as they conform to the demands of his theory. Thus, he can ignore
much of what happened during the Civil War and focus only on those events that support his
initial construct. Both Leviathan and Behemoth are indeed histories, but they are ideological
histories not simply narratives of events; they are, in many ways, reconstructions to fit already
existing patterns.
100
Experience is devalued in favor of ideas. History becomes then, merely a
tool to be wielded for the purpose of demonstrating the correctness of theory.
David Johnston saw Hobbes as looking forward to a cultural transformation of his fellow
human beings as the route to the order of an eternal commonwealth. But Hobbes never suggested
that the nature of men as power seeking and violent was subject to change. Instead his program
of education and sovereign control over religious dogma and political activity was designed to
convince men to accept external (sovereign) control over the sources of belief that lead men to
resist the sovereign power. Hobbes had a simple goal. He wanted to narrow the range of
permissible thought and contain the production of ideologies that led to the civil war. Absolute,
undivided sovereignty ended the disordering novelty of new political and religious ideas. It
created and maintained unchangeable and narrow political definitions. Lloyd stated that the goal
of the Hobbesian sovereign was the reconciliation of competing interests.
101
A more correct
interpretation suggests that Hobbes was interested in ending the sources of competing interests,
once and for all, in favor of an enforced harmony.
102
Much like Plato, Hobbes wants to empower philosophers to rule. What better way to
demonstrate the necessity for a modern philosopher king than to show that ideas control reality?
Actual events do not matter since those events are merely interpretations of ideas. All that
matters is theory – thus geometry as the model for a political science. These rules and that
science are those provided by Hobbes in Leviathan and applied in Behemoth.
So what is the relationship between Leviathan and Behemoth? Quite simply they are the
same work. One is theory, the other practice. But, Behemoth fails because in it, Hobbes shows no
development, no change from his fixed ideas. Because events matter less than theory, because
experience is devalued and replaced with ideas, Hobbes cannot adequately explain the events or
outcome of the Civil War. He cannot provide us with an understanding of why events happened.
He can, and does, most effectively provide us with a delineation of the causes of the Civil War as
he sees them. But because he is so wedded to his theory as created in Leviathan he cannot move
beyond a deterministic model in Behemoth. Nor can he provide any ideas for the reformation of
England beyond the application of absolute power.
99
Lloyd, Ideals as Interests, 205.
100
While it can be argued and indeed the reader might agree, the all history is reconstruction, I believe that
Hobbes’s histories are particular and unique examples of this tendency.
101
Lloyd, Ideals as Interests, 222.
102
This may be the meaning of the frontispiece of Leviathan. If we compare the top and bottom of the
frontispiece we see a harmonious world under Leviathan, a divided and disordered away from him. For discussions
of the frontispiece see Lloyd, Ideals as Interests, 224-6; and Aloysius P. Martinich, The Two Gods of Leviathan:
Thomas Hobbes on Religion and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), Appendix C.
Convention