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The rhetoric of Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes and the politics of cultural transformation
Book Reviews
730
Dworkin’s ‘aesthetic hypothesis’ maintains that interpretation consists in giving the ‘best’ reading of a text: ‘an interpretation of a piece of literature attempts to show which way of reading. .the text reveals it as the best work of art” While it is clearly possible to dispute the truth of this as an account of interpretation generally’, in a legal context this would mean that judges in hard cases must interpret the legal materials in order to give the best reading of the country’s political tradition. The major problem with this is that it denies the significant role of authority, whether legislative or socio-economic, in law. Most significantly, if the constraints on legal interpretation are provided purely by canons of interpretation, there is no possibility for critism ofjudicial unsurpation of the functions of elected legislatures. The remaining parts of ‘A Matter of Principle’, explore some familiar Dworkinian themes, in which he seeks to defend a liberalism based on a conception of equality: ‘the right to treatment as an equal’. This more egalitarian form of liberalism allows him to defend practices which seem prima facie illiberal, such as reverse discrimination. In Part Six, ‘Censorship and a Free Press’, Dworkin extends his earlier concern about the appointment of Supreme Court judges overly deferential to the legislature, and the consequent decline in First Amendment freedoms9 The essays in A Matter ofPrinciple are clearly accessible to readers without knowledge of law or political philosophy. Indeed may of the essays were originally short pieces for the New York Review of Books, hence the journalistic feel to the book. While this egalitarian style seems an adjunct to Dworkin’s political philosophy, one cannot help but feel that there is a general lack of detailed analysis in his writings. This is a feature which to the reviewer’s mind leaves Dworkin a poor relation of the European tradition of legal thought exemplified by leading positivists such as Kelsen, Hart and Raz. David Jabbari University of Reading
NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.
Ronald Dworkin, Law’s Empire (Fontana, 1986). J.A.G. Griffiths, The Politics of the Judiciary (Fontana, 1971). Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (Duckworth, 1977). Ronald Dworkin, A Matter of Principle (Harvard 1985), pp 161-2. Ibid., p 28. Ibid., p 31. Ibid., p 149. Compare the deconstructive method of literary criticism advocated by Jacques Derrida. 9. See Ronald Dworkin, ‘Reagan’s Justice’, New York Review of Books (9 November 1984).
The Rhetoric of Leviu~k~n: Thomas Hobbes and the Politics of Cultural Transformation, David Johnston (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), xx + 227 pp., $25.00. Johnston’s concern is not with Hobbes’s specific use of language in Leviathan, but with the book as a ‘political act’ and with Hobbes’s developing ideas about the relative
Book Reviews
731
importance of scientific discourse and the ‘speaking pictures’ of rhetoric in effective political philosophy. As Johnston reads Hobbes’s development, in the Elements and De Cive, Hobbes’s political aims were subordinated to his concern for scientificdemonstration. These works were aimed at educated elites influential enough to make them effective by introducing them into the universities. Hobbes becomes disenchanted with this approach however, and increasingly concerned about the distance between his scientific model of human nature with its natural rationality leading to egoistic calculations of advantage and the relative irrationality of actual human behavior. So, in Leviathan Hobbes reverses his earlier priorities. Political aims now take precedence over scientific ones and Hobbes addresses himself to the task of ‘cultural transformation’, of bringing human beings as they are closer to his scientifically ‘true’ vision of human nature. Leviathan then, though by no means abandoning science, is primarily a rhetorical work directed at a mass audience and intended to reshape its attitudes and opinions. Leviathan is not so much a work of science as polemic in favor of science and rationality. Johnston’s perspective is important and salutary in a number of ways. It brings to the fore some important developments in several central elements of Hobbes’s thought, especially in his conceptions of human nature and reason, and encourages rethinking the importance of history and historical causation for Hobbes. Also by avoiding the Platonism typical of so many commentaries and placing Leviathan in the context of developments in seventeenth century English society and politics, Johnston forces a consideration of Leviathan as a unitary work rather than as consisting only of its first two books. Indeed, Johnston quite correctly sees the religious and theological discussions of Books III and IV as central to Leviathan’s project. There are, however, some serious problems with Johnston’s account, both in the overall thesis and in its detailed execution. Certainly Johnston is right in insisting on the importance of recognising the rhetorical character of Leviathan if we are to understand it and in claiming it to be, in some sense, a political act. However, in seeing Leviathan as intended directly to affect mass opinion, Johnston leans on the now discredited view that England experienced an educational revolution which vastly expanded literacy in midcentury. More recent scholarship has shown this revolution to have been more talked about than accomplished. As one might expect in a period of political turmoil, literacy among the lower orders decreased during the thirties and forties.’ More directly to the point, Hobbes never believed there to have been a general audience available for direct address. A number of comments in post-Leviathan works express Hobbes’s belief that the masses generally followed the gentry and clergy in forming their beliefs. Speaking of men of ‘good education’ in Behemoth Hobbes notes that ‘they are few, in respect the rest of men, whereof many cannot read’, those who can read have no leisure and, in any case, never contemplate ‘anything but their particular interest; in other things following their immediate leaders.. . the preachers, or the most potent of the gentlemen that dwell among them’.2 And in Leviathan, in a passage that Johnston overlooks, Hobbes says directly that ‘It is. . . manifest, that the instruction of the people, dependeth wholly on the right teaching of youth [young gentry and intending clergy] in the universities’.3 Also Johnston’s discussion of Hobbes’s treatment of religious and theological issues, while suggestive in many respects, reveals an uncertain grasp of some issues and an insufficient grounding in seventeenth century conventions of Biblical interpretation. For example, he conflates what were then the importantly separable issues of the immortality of the soul and of eternal life. And on occasion he expresses surprise that Hobbes reverts to Old Testament texts to interpret New Testament events though, given the general understanding of the Old Testament as essentially prophetic of the events of the New, such typological readings were the common coin of interpretation. Despite its many virtues
Book
732
then, and the importance of the direction in which it pushes Hobbes scholarship, book must be read with caution.
Reviews
this lively
Paul J. Johnson California
State
University,
San Bernardino
NOTES
1. See David Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart Eng/and(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), Chap. 6. Also David Cressy, ‘Levels of Illiteracy in England 1530-1730’ in Harvey J. Graff(ed.), Literacy and Social Development in the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 105-124. For an up-to-date general discussion of the state of the question see Harvey J. Graff, The Legacies of Literacy: Continuities and Contradictions in Western Culture and Society (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1987), pp. 149-163. (For a fuller discussion see my ‘Leviathan’s Audience’ in Thomas Hobbes, Metaphysique et Politique, Michele Malherbe (ed.) (Paris, Vrin, 1989). 2. Behemoth or The Long Parliament, Ferdinand Tiinnies (ed.), second edition (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1969) p. 39. 3. The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmsbury, William Molesworth (ed.) (London: John Bohn, 1839), vol. III, p. 331.
Rethinking the French Revolution: Marxism and the Revisionist Challenge, George Comninel, Foreword by George Rude (London & New York: Verso, 1987) xiii +225 pp., g8.95/$13.95 P.B. For five generations of Marxists, the French Revolution constituted the sheet anchor of their ideological commitment. What happened in France between 1789 and 1794 was a bourgeois revolution-the bourgeois revolution. Historical materialism was the means by which this insight had been acquired, and the logical consequences flowing from it in their turn constituted the best defence of historical materialism as method. This was poor reasoning, but it made good politics, and in any event Marxists were not alone in treating the Revolution as the moment par excellence of the conquest of power by the bourgeoisie. The consensus around this view was first seriously dented in our times by Alfred Cobban over thirty years ago,’ but it was not until French historians domesticated and developed the Anglo-Saxon critique of the ‘revolutionary catechism’ that things began seriously to unravel. Largely thanks to the work of Francois Furet and his colleagues, it is no longer remotely possible to treat the experience of the 1790s as unproblematically ‘bourgeois’ (though not everyone would wish to concede to the extreme advocates of the Anna/es school that it was not even a revolution. .). Most Marxist scholars have admitted as much-or, at least, they have acknowledged the results of research on eighteenthcentury France that points to a much more complex and open-ended account of developments there.’ This new book by George Comninel, a Canadian sociologist, is an attempt to concede that the old view is truly defunct and to construct out of the evidence an alternative account that remains consistent with Marxist methods without doing violence to the
730
Dworkin’s ‘aesthetic hypothesis’ maintains that interpretation consists in giving the ‘best’ reading of a text: ‘an interpretation of a piece of literature attempts to show which way of reading. .the text reveals it as the best work of art” While it is clearly possible to dispute the truth of this as an account of interpretation generally’, in a legal context this would mean that judges in hard cases must interpret the legal materials in order to give the best reading of the country’s political tradition. The major problem with this is that it denies the significant role of authority, whether legislative or socio-economic, in law. Most significantly, if the constraints on legal interpretation are provided purely by canons of interpretation, there is no possibility for critism ofjudicial unsurpation of the functions of elected legislatures. The remaining parts of ‘A Matter of Principle’, explore some familiar Dworkinian themes, in which he seeks to defend a liberalism based on a conception of equality: ‘the right to treatment as an equal’. This more egalitarian form of liberalism allows him to defend practices which seem prima facie illiberal, such as reverse discrimination. In Part Six, ‘Censorship and a Free Press’, Dworkin extends his earlier concern about the appointment of Supreme Court judges overly deferential to the legislature, and the consequent decline in First Amendment freedoms9 The essays in A Matter ofPrinciple are clearly accessible to readers without knowledge of law or political philosophy. Indeed may of the essays were originally short pieces for the New York Review of Books, hence the journalistic feel to the book. While this egalitarian style seems an adjunct to Dworkin’s political philosophy, one cannot help but feel that there is a general lack of detailed analysis in his writings. This is a feature which to the reviewer’s mind leaves Dworkin a poor relation of the European tradition of legal thought exemplified by leading positivists such as Kelsen, Hart and Raz. David Jabbari University of Reading
NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.
Ronald Dworkin, Law’s Empire (Fontana, 1986). J.A.G. Griffiths, The Politics of the Judiciary (Fontana, 1971). Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (Duckworth, 1977). Ronald Dworkin, A Matter of Principle (Harvard 1985), pp 161-2. Ibid., p 28. Ibid., p 31. Ibid., p 149. Compare the deconstructive method of literary criticism advocated by Jacques Derrida. 9. See Ronald Dworkin, ‘Reagan’s Justice’, New York Review of Books (9 November 1984).
The Rhetoric of Leviu~k~n: Thomas Hobbes and the Politics of Cultural Transformation, David Johnston (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), xx + 227 pp., $25.00. Johnston’s concern is not with Hobbes’s specific use of language in Leviathan, but with the book as a ‘political act’ and with Hobbes’s developing ideas about the relative
Book Reviews
731
importance of scientific discourse and the ‘speaking pictures’ of rhetoric in effective political philosophy. As Johnston reads Hobbes’s development, in the Elements and De Cive, Hobbes’s political aims were subordinated to his concern for scientificdemonstration. These works were aimed at educated elites influential enough to make them effective by introducing them into the universities. Hobbes becomes disenchanted with this approach however, and increasingly concerned about the distance between his scientific model of human nature with its natural rationality leading to egoistic calculations of advantage and the relative irrationality of actual human behavior. So, in Leviathan Hobbes reverses his earlier priorities. Political aims now take precedence over scientific ones and Hobbes addresses himself to the task of ‘cultural transformation’, of bringing human beings as they are closer to his scientifically ‘true’ vision of human nature. Leviathan then, though by no means abandoning science, is primarily a rhetorical work directed at a mass audience and intended to reshape its attitudes and opinions. Leviathan is not so much a work of science as polemic in favor of science and rationality. Johnston’s perspective is important and salutary in a number of ways. It brings to the fore some important developments in several central elements of Hobbes’s thought, especially in his conceptions of human nature and reason, and encourages rethinking the importance of history and historical causation for Hobbes. Also by avoiding the Platonism typical of so many commentaries and placing Leviathan in the context of developments in seventeenth century English society and politics, Johnston forces a consideration of Leviathan as a unitary work rather than as consisting only of its first two books. Indeed, Johnston quite correctly sees the religious and theological discussions of Books III and IV as central to Leviathan’s project. There are, however, some serious problems with Johnston’s account, both in the overall thesis and in its detailed execution. Certainly Johnston is right in insisting on the importance of recognising the rhetorical character of Leviathan if we are to understand it and in claiming it to be, in some sense, a political act. However, in seeing Leviathan as intended directly to affect mass opinion, Johnston leans on the now discredited view that England experienced an educational revolution which vastly expanded literacy in midcentury. More recent scholarship has shown this revolution to have been more talked about than accomplished. As one might expect in a period of political turmoil, literacy among the lower orders decreased during the thirties and forties.’ More directly to the point, Hobbes never believed there to have been a general audience available for direct address. A number of comments in post-Leviathan works express Hobbes’s belief that the masses generally followed the gentry and clergy in forming their beliefs. Speaking of men of ‘good education’ in Behemoth Hobbes notes that ‘they are few, in respect the rest of men, whereof many cannot read’, those who can read have no leisure and, in any case, never contemplate ‘anything but their particular interest; in other things following their immediate leaders.. . the preachers, or the most potent of the gentlemen that dwell among them’.2 And in Leviathan, in a passage that Johnston overlooks, Hobbes says directly that ‘It is. . . manifest, that the instruction of the people, dependeth wholly on the right teaching of youth [young gentry and intending clergy] in the universities’.3 Also Johnston’s discussion of Hobbes’s treatment of religious and theological issues, while suggestive in many respects, reveals an uncertain grasp of some issues and an insufficient grounding in seventeenth century conventions of Biblical interpretation. For example, he conflates what were then the importantly separable issues of the immortality of the soul and of eternal life. And on occasion he expresses surprise that Hobbes reverts to Old Testament texts to interpret New Testament events though, given the general understanding of the Old Testament as essentially prophetic of the events of the New, such typological readings were the common coin of interpretation. Despite its many virtues
Book
732
then, and the importance of the direction in which it pushes Hobbes scholarship, book must be read with caution.
Reviews
this lively
Paul J. Johnson California
State
University,
San Bernardino
NOTES
1. See David Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart Eng/and(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), Chap. 6. Also David Cressy, ‘Levels of Illiteracy in England 1530-1730’ in Harvey J. Graff(ed.), Literacy and Social Development in the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 105-124. For an up-to-date general discussion of the state of the question see Harvey J. Graff, The Legacies of Literacy: Continuities and Contradictions in Western Culture and Society (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1987), pp. 149-163. (For a fuller discussion see my ‘Leviathan’s Audience’ in Thomas Hobbes, Metaphysique et Politique, Michele Malherbe (ed.) (Paris, Vrin, 1989). 2. Behemoth or The Long Parliament, Ferdinand Tiinnies (ed.), second edition (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1969) p. 39. 3. The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmsbury, William Molesworth (ed.) (London: John Bohn, 1839), vol. III, p. 331.
Rethinking the French Revolution: Marxism and the Revisionist Challenge, George Comninel, Foreword by George Rude (London & New York: Verso, 1987) xiii +225 pp., g8.95/$13.95 P.B. For five generations of Marxists, the French Revolution constituted the sheet anchor of their ideological commitment. What happened in France between 1789 and 1794 was a bourgeois revolution-the bourgeois revolution. Historical materialism was the means by which this insight had been acquired, and the logical consequences flowing from it in their turn constituted the best defence of historical materialism as method. This was poor reasoning, but it made good politics, and in any event Marxists were not alone in treating the Revolution as the moment par excellence of the conquest of power by the bourgeoisie. The consensus around this view was first seriously dented in our times by Alfred Cobban over thirty years ago,’ but it was not until French historians domesticated and developed the Anglo-Saxon critique of the ‘revolutionary catechism’ that things began seriously to unravel. Largely thanks to the work of Francois Furet and his colleagues, it is no longer remotely possible to treat the experience of the 1790s as unproblematically ‘bourgeois’ (though not everyone would wish to concede to the extreme advocates of the Anna/es school that it was not even a revolution. .). Most Marxist scholars have admitted as much-or, at least, they have acknowledged the results of research on eighteenthcentury France that points to a much more complex and open-ended account of developments there.’ This new book by George Comninel, a Canadian sociologist, is an attempt to concede that the old view is truly defunct and to construct out of the evidence an alternative account that remains consistent with Marxist methods without doing violence to the