Jendrysik, “Land or Sea Beast”
MPSA 2004
9
The kings of England also failed to define the true powers granted to Parliament,
particularly the House of Commons. The weakness of English kings allowed the Commons to
contest for sovereign power. In reality, parliaments were the gift of kings to their subjects and
had no legislative or directing power. When parliaments claimed this power they become nothing
better than grand conspiracies.
60
In Hobbes’s picturesque language, government officials were
the nerves and tendons of the body politic. As such they exist only to act as the sovereign wills.
The true sovereign power, the king, had allowed his parliaments to forget that the real power to
make or break law resided solely in his person. In sum the kings of England failed to establish
themselves as the final indisputable source of law and judgment in all their realms and at all
times.
History of the Civil War in Behemoth
How does Hobbes explain the causes and course of the English Revolution in Behemoth?
Does his understanding of the events of the 1640 and 1650’s change or does his analysis remain
consistent? In one interpretation, “Behemoth represents Hobbes’s mature understanding of
political breakdown and the reestablishment of authority.”
61
Kraynak suggests that “the central
issue in Behemoth… is the question of who corrupted and seduced the people into becoming
practitioners of doctrinal politics.”
62
But as Lund suggests “we should avoid reducing his
analysis to a reliance on any single factor, whether that is human ‘wickedness,’ economic
interests, Puritan ideology or vanity and ambition.”
63
However, Lund goes on to suggest that “the
‘seducers’ who created ‘injustice’ and ‘folly’ out of the antecedent error of treating private
judgement as an unlimited civil right were mainly Presbyterian ministers and the more radical
Parliament men who took advantage of a context in which the citizens were ‘corrupted generally,
and disobedient persons esteemed the best patriots’.”
64
As I will demonstrate below, Hobbes
comes very close to indeed relying on this single factor, the role of the Presbyterian ministry
(equated with the extreme elements in the House of Commons), to explain the Civil War.
Hobbes’s understanding of human nature and human capacities may be the best place to
start in any analysis of Behemoth. For Hobbes, the great mass of people lack the ability to make
decisions for themselves. As in Leviathan men believe what they are told.
Common people know nothing of right and wrong by their own meditation; they
must therefore be taught the grounds of their duty, and the reasons why calamities
ever follow disobedience to their lawful sovereigns.
65
60
Leviathan, XXII, 163-4 and 167.
61
Stephen Holmes, “Political Psychology in Hobbes’s Behemoth.” in Thomas Hobbes and Political Theory, ed.
Mary G. Dietz (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1990), 120.
62
Kraynak, History and Modernity, 37 and also 48. Kraynak defines “doctrinal politics” as the process by
which ordinary subjects are turned into political partisans by preachers and political ideologues. Given Hobbes’s
beliefs about the willingness of ordinary people to believe what they are told by authority figures, such people have
a great and dangerous power to create public disaffection for their own nefarious purposes. MacGillivray provides a
useful list of the causes of Civil War delineated in Behemoth. (1) Presbyterians; (2) Papists; (3) advocates of liberty
of religion, or Independents and other sectaries; (4) men whose allegiance had been corrupted by the reading of the
classics; (5) great towns; (6) adventurers and wastrels; and (7) lack of understanding of the nature of authority and
obedience. See “Thomas Hobbes’s History,” 187. For the list as Hobbes states it, see Behemoth, 2-ff.
63
Lund, “Hobbes on Opinion,” 66.
64
Lund, “Hobbes on Opinion,” 68.
65
Behemoth, 144. Also see Behemoth, 39. For a discussion of this point see Lund, “Hobbes on Opinion,” 55.
Convention