Jendrysik, “Land or Sea Beast”
MPSA 2004
5
States built on incorrect premises, such as England, become unable to control the power of
opinion. Such states prove unable to maintain order, because they were founded on premises that
guaranteed disorder.
Hobbes presents a veritable “laundry list” of the causes of disorder in chapter 29 of
Leviathan: “Of those things which Weaken or tend to the Dissolution of a Commonwealth.” But
even before that point he laid down a number of propositions about the sources of civil conflict.
First he claims that the very nature of human thought processes allows for the “creation” of
beliefs against the proper authority (or the sovereign). The human mind proves the first and most
important source of disorder. Thoughts follow each other in a natural progression, without
conscious volition, and produce dangerous, disordering political conclusions.
23
The source of
disorder lay in the power of the human mind to invent personal opinions (by the exercise of
conscience) and then debate over those opinions as though they are infallible religious or
political doctrines applicable to all other human beings.
24
Hobbes notes that men believe what
they did not see and create definitions out of thin air. They foolishly give in to fear of things that
did not exist. Men have the ability to believe the impossible. This ability to create impossible
new definitions and hold them as universal truths helps produce civil war. Human creativity has
disordering consequences.
25
Such “created” beliefs are often the product of unclear or muddled definitions that allow
for dangerous debate about the nature and meaning of political and religious authority. By
extension, debates over political meanings inevitably become debates over the legitimacy of
claims to authority.
26
Lack of clarity (and power to enforce agreement) in political and religious
definitions gives ambitious men opportunities to challenge existing meanings and thereby
undermine existing authority. When men ground their disputes with authority in conscience,
political and religious strife become inevitable. Conscience is dangerous because of the air of
reverence attached to the term.
27
Hobbes notes that conscience permits men to “appeale from
custome to reason, and from reason to custome, as it serves their turn.” The result is “that the
doctrine of Right and Wrong, is perpetually disputed, both by the Pen and the Sword.”
28
Lack of
agreement on final truths, because of the self-justification provided by conscience, produces
disorder.
29
In revolutionary England the struggle over political and religious definitions, opinions
and doctrines created what Sheldon Wolin called an “anarchy of meanings.”
30
For Hobbes
radical Protestant dogmas that empowered each man to interpret and understand the Bible, and
by extension political questions, play a critical role in fomenting discontent and rebellion. Men
erroneously take their “dreams” and “private fancies” to be “God’s commandments.” As a result
men despise “the Commandments of the Commonwealth [state].”
31
Because men naturally love
“liberty” and “dominion” over their fellows,
32
the perversity of human nature makes private
judgment a deadly danger to a commonwealth. If a commonwealth is weak and sovereignty
unclear, men struggle with other men to enforce particular private judgments upon them. Men
wish to judge their own cases and judge those of others as well.
23
Leviathan, III, 21.
24
Kraynak, History and Modernity, 16-ff.
25
Leviathan, V, 36.
26
Leviathan, IV, 31 and V, 36.
27
Leviathan, VII, 48.
28
Leviathan, XII, 73-74.
29
Lloyd, Ideals as Interests, 221.
30
Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1961), 257.
31
Leviathan, XXVI, 199.
32
Leviathan, XVII, 117.
Convention