Even people who have never read a page of Hobbes have probably seen the frontispiece of Leviathan.
It’s a body, made up of bodies. (Yeah, there are other bits down below. We’ll talk about those another time perhaps.)
As Michel Foucault reminds us, bodies carry cultural meanings. Bodies embody meaning. Simply: Bodies are places where we put meanings.
The meanings that an author or a culture attributes to the properties “having a body” or “being like a body” can change over time. So for Hobbes, what did it mean for the state to be like a body?
Two related things, I would say. First, a body has a creator. And second, a body has — or at least is capable of having — an ordering that is both harmonious and intentional. It is also capable of suffering disorder or disease. Usually not, however: Even Voltaire, who thought God was mostly indifferent to us, still marveled that God had so arranged the internal organs that they did not harm one another and that, in day-to-day life, a healthy person was nearly unaware of them.
The creator of the human body, of course, is God. God created man in his own image, so of course the body was built according to a perfect prototype. Subsequent infirmities are the result not of God or of his design, but of the Fall of Man. There is a harmonious ordering — created by a designer — and there is a constant danger of disorder. Both have normative valences.
As above, so below: The state and its laws were not created by God, but by a legislator, who stands in God’s place. A wise legislator will create a harmonious social ordering through an exercise of the will or the intention.
An interesting contrast can be made with naturalistic evolution. In it, the body is arranged not by a single, intentional design, but by selection according to reproductive fitness given various (and changing) environmental constraints. The result does appear harmonious, at least very often it does, but it is in no sense the product of an intentionality. And, as theory predicts, there are places where the harmony isn’t quite perfect — there always will be, too.
That’s what it means, to me, to have a body. So… if the state is like a body — yes, that’s a big if — we might suggest that it is at least a somewhat unintentional product, bringing with it hernias and hiccups that a fully informed and conscious designer would never have allowed. We can’t deny, of course, that there do exist consciously willed fashionings of the state-body, but the overall design just can’t be ascribed to any one legislator, not even in the most totalitarian regimes.
Good post Jason. It’s subtle and very nicely written and clarifies an aspect of Hobbes that certainly isn’t in the forefront of my mind when I read and think about his writing. What you wrote is also a bit slippery too. I find myself nodding in agreement without clearly understanding what I’m agreeing with. A feeling almost. Or a shade of color that completes a picture.Report
I’m being Hayekian, as is my wont. Some institutions are the products of human action, but not of human design. Much of the state is like that, I think. Evolution is the product of actions, but not of intentionality, and it produces things with the appearance of design. The same is true with the state — it is the product of actions, but much of it is not intentional. Though it still has the appearance of design.Report
“We can’t deny, of course, that there do exist consciously willed fashionings of the state-body, but the overall design just can’t be ascribed to any one legislator, not even in the most totalitarian regimes.”
A couple questions/qualifications:
(1) Does anyone believe that all aspects of the state can be controlled? Do liberals believe this? (I’m asking Jason and any self-described liberals to weigh in here.)
(2) Isn’t what we call “the state” comprised of only those institutions that we do actively create? I agree with your points here (I’m a Hayekian as well), but I’m curious whether you’re making a category error.Report
Does anyone believe that all aspects of the state can be controlled? Probably not, except perhaps that theists may think them controlled by God.
Still, I find in politics frequent appeals to ideal act theories — theories, in Derek Parfit’s system, that “[say] what we should all try to do, simply on the assumptions that we all try, and all succeed.”
In the real world of course we don’t all try, and those of us who do try don’t all succeed. This to my mind causes the failure of many ideologies and policies, including radical pacifism, drug-warriorism, and many forms of anti-immigration thinking.
What this means is that state actors form an intention based on claims about how great life would be if only we had a state of the type Hobbes seems to envision — fully designed, fully subject to will — and the results, in the end, are the same: unintended and underappreciated consequences, which we are tempted to dismiss because we find them metaphysically annoying.
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Isn’t what we call “the state” comprised of only those institutions that we do actively create?
I find it very difficult and in a way meaningless to consider those institutions apart from their effects, both intended and unintended. Possibly this doesn’t count as an answer, I know.
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This one is good. Well done.Report
There’s a great comparison of the state to a body in Coriolanus- the mob is held to be like members of the boy attacking the stomach for taking the food directly instead of giving it to them. I’m pretty sure Hobbes didn’t have Shakespeare in mind though. I think it was a common metaphor.Report
Correction: “members of the body”Report