Hobbes and modern political thought

271 Pages·2016·0.859 MB·English

by  Yves Charles Zarka

HOBBES AND
MODERN POLITICAL THOUGHT

HOBBES AND
MODERN POLITICAL THOUGHT
Yves Charles Zarka
Translated and with an Introduction by James Griffith
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© Yves Charles Zarka, 1995 [year of publication of original text]
© editorial matter and organisation James Griffith, 2016
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CONTENTS
Translator’s Introduction vii
Foreword xiii
1 Journey: To the Foundations of Modern Politics 1
Part I Individual and State 13
2 Gracián’s Hero and Hobbes’s Antihero 15
3 The Hobbesian Idea of Political Philosophy 34
Part II Language and Power [Pouvoir] 51
4 Theory of Language 53
5 The Semiology of Power [Pouvoir] 72
Part III Fundamental Concepts of Politics 105
6 On War 107
7 On Law 123
8 On Property 146
9 On the State 168
10 On the Right to Punish 195
Part IV Hobbes According to Two Contemporaries 217
11 Hobbes and Filmer: Regnum Patrimoniale and Regnum
Institutivum 219
vi Hobbes and Modern Political Thought
12 Hobbes and Pascal: Two Models of the Theory of
Power [Pouvoir] 234
Conclusion 247
Bibliography 251
Index 257
TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION
Yves Charles Zarka is indeed one of the most important philosophers
in France, though he has been little recognised in the Anglophone
world, at least beyond Hobbes scholarship. He is currently the Chair
of Political Philosophy as well as director of the Centre de philoso-
phie, d’épistémologie et de politique at the Université Paris Descartes
(Sorbonne). He is also the director of several imprints at the Presses
universitaires de France, is the editor of the journal Cités, and has col-
laborated with Jürgen Habermas and Axel Honneth. As to his work
on Hobbes, he is the director of Vrin’s Œuvres de Hobbes, in addition
to several writings – including this book, La décision métaphysique
de Hobbes and L’autre voie de la subjectivité – as well as a number of
edited volumes. Thus, while his work on Hobbes is what he is primar-
ily known for in English, his research extends to political philosophy
broadly, both in its history and its current articulations.
Perhaps the fact that I feel the need to state that Zarka’s work
covers political philosophy in its historical and contemporary registers
explains some of the reasons why he is not as well known to English-
language readers as he could be. It does not seem to be a great stretch
to claim that Hobbes scholarship in the English-s peaking world has
been influenced by the work of Quentin Skinner, whose fundamental
philosophical positions lead him to ask ‘why [texts] were written in the
form in which we have them’.1 This question leads to detailed exami-
nations of the surrounding contexts of the material he examines; of
other texts of the time that may have influenced by, or been in imme-
diate conversation with, say, Leviathan; and so on.2 This approach is,
in its way, laudable, leading to any number of insights as to how and
why a certain text came to be written in the way that it did. However,
it is not the only approach to historically grounded philosophy, and
vii
viii Hobbes and Modern Political Thought
I would argue that it is a limiting and limited approach in its way as
well.
The limits to Skinner’s approach can be seen at the end of the same
sentence cited above, where he articulates a problematic approach to
the history of political philosophy: ‘what can I hope to learn from this
text about politics’.3 Such is not Zarka’s approach. For Zarka, what can
never be forgotten when reading the history of philosophy, political
or otherwise, is that ‘thinking philosophically always means thinking
from a certain point of view’ and that ‘thinking philosophically always
means interpreting’.4 That is, both the philosopher being read and the
philosopher doing the reading think from a perspective, a perspective
that is both an act of interpretation and itself requires interpretation.
Thus, reading the history of philosophy is itself a philosophical act, and
an act that requires historical precision.
It is for these reasons that Zarka understands his own position in The
Amsterdam Debate as being ‘antihistoricist’.5 If we take Skinner’s his-
toricism seriously as a philosophical position,6 then it is a philosophical
position that ‘refutes itself’ insofar as it ‘denies its interpretative char-
acter in order to make out that it is a pure restoration of the content
of a text’.7 In other words, for Zarka, Skinner’s approach, if it is itself
philosophical, forgets that it thinks from a certain point of view and
also fails to understand that it is interpreting in its thinking from that
forgotten perspective.
The other author from whom Zarka departs is Leo Strauss. While
Strauss is to some degree an ally of Zarka’s in the argument against his-
toricism, they are not involved in identical projects. Like Zarka, Strauss
argues that historicism is a self-d estructive historiographical position,
insofar as it takes up the essentially ahistorical position of asserting
that all past political philosophical texts can be reduced to their histori-
cal circumstances.8 However, for Strauss, classical and modern politi-
cal philosophy are distinguished through ‘the discovery of history’ in
the nineteenth century as a scientific discipline, where history can be
engaged, like nature, in the discovery of its laws.9 Because of this dis-
covery, modern political philosophy contains ‘the notion of a guaran-
teed parallelism between intellectual and social progress’ as the laws of
history unveil a movement towards, for instance, greater freedom and,
like the discoveries of the laws of nature, establish progressive floors
‘beneath which man can no longer sink’.10 Insofar as this parallelism
and movement fail, the notion of progress reaches a crisis and ‘leads
Translator’s Introduction ix
to the suggestion that we should return’ in the form of a repentance
with an eye towards redemption.11 It is for this reason that political phi-
losophy ‘is today in need of a critical study of its history’, and that this
history ‘presupposes that one understand the great thinkers of the past
as they understood themselves’ in order to redeem our own world with
a fuller knowledge of those political ideas that both inform our world
and should have been able to sink into inherited knowledge if progress
were not in crisis.12
For Zarka, if this return is not precisely the mark of historicism
insofar as it does not approach the history of political philosophy as
a relativistic engagement of a series of equally valid ideas engaged
from the distance of an objective observer, its interest in a repentant
return to that history fails to take up political philosophical concepts
in a philosophical manner. If Skinner fails to attend to both of Zarka’s
understandings of thinking philosophically, Strauss primarily fails to
attend to Zarka’s second understanding of thinking philosophically
because either he does not think or he refuses to acknowledge that
he is engaged in interpretation. Strauss’s careful historical analyses,
critical though they may be, still presuppose an understanding of the
philosophical concepts at hand as the thinkers themselves under-
stood them, and thus at least obliquely adjure responsibility for the
interpretation, the philosophical thinking in which they are engaged.
It is in fidelity to both his understandings of thinking philosophi-
cally that Zarka will explain, in La décision métaphysique de Hobbes,
that his interest is in ‘putting the whole of the work into motion, not
in order to repeat it, but in order to rethink it’.13 Whereas Strauss
does not claim to be engaged in the interpretive work of rethinking
the concepts of the history of political philosophy, for Zarka such a
philosophical or speculative approach to those concepts is indeed the
only way to give those concepts the full historical appreciation they
deserve.
That Zarka’s work offers a methodological alternative to the reading
of the history of political philosophy from what is more standard
in the English- speaking world means making his work more avail-
able to English speakers is important. That his alternative involves a
non-r eductive, speculative and philosophical approach to the history
of philosophy means he offers a philosophical methodology that
should be taken seriously in its own right. Finally, that, here, this non-
reductive approach shows us some of the crucial concepts that Hobbes