Leo Strauss and Natural Law: Hobbesian Natural Law

LOCKE LIKED TO DRESS IN HOOKER'S ROBES, but underneath he wore Hobbes's breeches, or perhaps better his soiled skivvies. Richard Hooker, Strauss notes, was safely within the Thomistic natural law tradition. Thomas Hobbes most definitely was not. And John Locke, more judicious, or perhaps more of a dissembler than the judicious Hooker, quoted Hooker while thinking Hobbes. Locke is the American political philosopher par excellence, and so when it comes to natural law Americans tend, like Locke, to be disguised Hobbesians and not, alas, Hookerian Thomists, much less just simple Thomists.

With this introduction of Hobbes's influence on Locke, Strauss launches into his criticism of Hobbes. Hobbes was notable for having extruded the core of modern science, that is "nonteleological natural science," and applied it to the realm of political philosophy, replacing the classical philosophical basis which he regarded "rather a dream than science," thus ushering in, as self-proclaimed father of political science, "modern natural right." The rejection of a teleological view of nature required a replacement, and Hobbes's mechanistic, atomistic view of random, arbitrary movement supplied no adequate replacement. (How can one know chaos?) So Hobbes replaced nature's teleology with human knowledge. (But is this not, on Hobbes's theory, chaos knowing chaos?)

[Hobbes's] notion of philosophy or science has its root in the conviction that a teleological cosmology is impossible and in the feeling that a mechanistic cosmology fails to satisfy the requirement of intelligibility. His solution is that the end or the ends without which no phenomenon can be understood need not be inherent in the phenomena; the end inherent in the concern with knowledge suffices. Knowledge as the end supplies the indispensable teleological principle. Not the new mechanistic cosmology but what later on came to be called "epistemology" becomes the substitute for teleological cosmology. . . . Of political philosophy thus understood, Hobbes is indeed the founder.

Strauss, 176-77.

But this Hobbesian "modern natural right" is a theory markedly different from that of the past; indeed, it represents a break from all classic natural right. "He presents his novel doctrine as the first truly scientific or philosophic treatment of natural law." Strauss, 168. Hobbes, Strauss tells us, "became the creator of political hedonism, a doctrine which has revolutionized human life everywhere on a scale never yet approached by any other teaching." Strauss, 169. (Strauss ignored Islam, a rival political theory, which is political theology, based upon the teachings of a professed prophet, and presents itself as more revolutionary, and even more dangerous, than anything Hobbes ever dreamed of. I say professed because Muhammad contradicted the natural law in a variety of ways in both his teaching and his life, and a prophet of God would not have violated the natural law. It presents an absolute impediment to a thinking man to the acceptance of Islam. But this topic is for another day.) But Hobbes is more. Hobbes is an advocate of "political atheism." His natural philosophy, mathematical and mechanistic at its core, is that of the materialists, the atomists Democritus and Epicurus, though guised in Platonic ideal form. "His philosophy as a whole," Strauss concludes, "may be said to be the classic example of the typically modern combination of political idealism with a materialistic and atheistic view of the whole." Strauss, 170. Thus Hobbes presents us with a new beast, a synthesis of two opposing world views, the Platonic and the Epicurean.

There are several core features of classic natural right that are rejected by Hobbes and supplanted by foreign concepts. First, Hobbes rejects the Aristotelian notion that man is by nature political or social. Here, Hobbes adopts an Epicurean view of man "that man is by nature or originally an a-political and even an a-social animal," and he draws out the political implications of that view. Strauss, 169. He also adopts the supreme Epicurean moral principle and identifies the good with the pleasant, or at least with self-interest. Hobbes "tries to instil the spirit of political idealism into the hedonistic tradition." Strauss, 169. It is an odd, bizarre and monstrous yin-yang combination of "idealism" and "anti-idealism." Strauss, 178. At heart, Hobbes appears to have accepted the methodological doubt, the fundamental skepticism, of Descartes, rejecting at the same time pre-modern or scholastic nominalism which maintained faith in ability of the mind to grasp accurately the reality of the cosmos. Strauss, 171 n. 7, 174-75. For Hobbes, "[t]here is no natural harmony between the human mind and the universe." Strauss, 175. (Is Hobbes a precursor to Kant? But it was Hume, not Hobbes, that Kant said awoke him from his dogmatic slumbers.) And his mechanistic view of the universe, even of man, likening his heart to a metal spring, is well-known. And with it came a resolute rejection of any notion of a final end, of a teleological view of the world or of nature, where the universe "is nothing but bodies and their aimless motions." Strauss, 172. Hobbes's mixture was explosive, revolutionary; it had all the instability of a barrel of nitroglycerine placed at the foundations of the moenia, the walls, of the City of God and the City of Man which saw the heavenly city as its ideal, so as to undermine them. Hobbes's vision, though "an unsupported hope," was a "vision of the City of Man to be erected on the ruins of the City of God." Strauss, 175.

Hobbes's intellectual effort may be viewed as his attempt to explore the continent discovered by Machiavelli, "that greater Columbus" of political philosophy, in whom we also see a combination of idealism and anti-idealism (his "realistic" revolt against "tradition," or "moral virtue" and the value of a "contemplative life," supplanting it by "patriotism or merely political virtue.") Strauss, 177-78. As Strauss views it, Hobbes's efforts were intended to fill a gap left by Machiavelli's corrosive theories:

It was the difficulty implied in the substitution of merely political virtue for moral virtue or the difficulty implied in Machiavelli's admiration for the lupine policies of republican Rome that induced Hobbes to attempt the restoration of the moral principles of politics, i.e., of natural law, on the plane of Machiavelli's "realism." . . . . The predominant tradition had defined natural law with a view to the end or the perfection of man as a rational and social animal. What Hobbes attempted to do on the basis of Machiavelli's fundamental objection to the utopian teaching of tradition, although in opposition to Machiavelli's own solution, was to maintain the idea of natural law but to divorce it from the idea of man's perfection . . . . This complete basis of natural aw must be sought, not in the end of man, but in his beginnings, in the prima natura or, rather, in the primum naturae.

Strauss, 180. For Hobbes, the most fundamental nature of man was passion, not reason. (Hume was to take this thought, and run with it.) "Natural law will not be effectual if its principles are distrusted by passion or are not agreeable to passion," thought Hobbes. "Natural law must," therefore, "be deduced from the most powerful of all passions." Strauss, 180. Accordingly, not justice, not right, but fear of death, especially violent death, becomes the source of all right. In a sort of morbid irony, death, or perhaps more accurately, the desire for self-preservation, becomes the source of political life. But it is not excessive an exaggeration to state, as Strauss does, that in Hobbes: "Death takes the place of the telos." Strauss, 181. Satan, we may remember as an important (though "unscientific") aside, is the Angel of Death.

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Ecstasis and Telos: Thomas Hobbes and His Monsters

THE MAN WHO THOUGHT he could square a circle, Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) is the man who gave birth to our modern materialist political philosophies. Although Hobbes ventured into many areas, including optics and geometry, he is best known for his works on political philosophy and the philosophy of law. In order of increasing precedence, Hobbes's three most important works in this area would be The Elements of Law (1640), De Cive (On the Citizen) (1642), and Leviathan (1651). It is these works which earned him lasting acclaim, and it is these works that have resulted in Hobbes being considered to be the founding father of modern political philosophy.

Hobbes may be characterized as a systematic Machiavellian. If Machiavelli skirmished against the prevalent notion of political philosophy based upon the Natural Law, Hobbes marshaled all his intellectual troops (in a vast misuse of talent, for God had endowed him well) in a sustained, brilliant, and systematic war against it. Hobbes entire theory of political philosophy "amounts at bottom to a denial of the natural law." Rommen, 73. Machiavelli and Hobbes, that "gloomy fellow traveler of Epicurus," were driven by the same dark, cynical materialistic spirit where hedonism seizes the day. There is no notion of the law as love in those men.

Without love it follows there is not to be found anything authentically human in the whole of their theories. Indeed, for Hobbes, the human heart was as if it were steel. "For what is the heart, but a spring?" Leviathan, intro. In Hobbes, there is no notion of man as spirit; man is machine. In fact, there is no such thing as spirit anywhere. "[E]very part of the universe is a body, and that which not body is no part of the universe. And because the universe is all, that which is no part of it is nothing (and consequently nowhere)." Leviathan, 46.11. Spirits, to the extent they exist, are "really bodies," as they have "dimensions," and so all is matter and there is nothing outside of it. Id.

It follows that since for Hobbes there is no spiritual world which maybe known, there is no supernatural world, nor even (as we know it) a God to refer to to establish a Natural Law, much less an Eternal Law. And the principles of morality, if they are to be found at all, are to be found by the observation of mechanistic nature. So Hobbes endeavored upon the quest to build a theory of morality upon the basis that the word was a "machine-body, a 'Leviathan.'" Levering, 93.

Man, which is machine, constructs an "artificial man," "that great LEVIATHAN called COMMONWEALTH, or STATE (in Latin CIVITAS)" on the same mechanical basis. Leviathian, intro. That State, Hobbes says, may be called the "mortall God," from whom there is no appeal. Indeed, "there is no law outside this 'Leviathan," and its laws may are the "will and appetite of the state." Levering, 94; Leviathan, 46.32. Law is passion coupled with power, the sinews and claws of a dragon, the lizardly body of a Great Beast. This Leviathan includes both the State and the Church, and so is frequently cartooned holding both the King's sword and a Bishop's crozier.



Hobbes worships this "mortall God," and asks us to do likewise, though it be but an image of his mind and a creature of man's hands. In a truly perverse way, Hobbes argues that God Almighty requires such worship. "The laws of God, are none but the laws of nature, whereof the principal is that we should not violate our faith, that is a commandment to obey or civil sovereigns." Leviathan, 43.5. What does this mean other than that in Hobbes's view, God's first request of us is to idolize the State?

The most uninformed Christian will known that the first principle of the natural law is to do good, and to avoid evil. He will know that God's principal commandment is to love Him, and his second is like unto it: we are to love our neighbor as our self. He will know that there is no place in Scripture where we are asked to worship Caesar. One can see how far Hobbes is from any Christian sentiment, much less the Christian faith.

What would justify being dissolved in the gastric juices of such monster? Why would men subject themselves to the beast "like wormes in the entrayles of a naturall man"? Hobbes argues that one is worse outside the monster, than in its belly. Outside Leviathan, one would be in a state of nature (status naturalis), where there would be no life in common, no art, no industry. Nothing but self-seizing as to others and self-defense as against others, a life "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" lived in a state of constant war, "all against all," and all living in constant fear of violent a death. Leviathan, I.13. Outside Leviathan homo homini lupus, "Man to Man is an arrant Wolfe." De Cive; Leviathan. What sort of anthropology is that? Besides this, even Calvin seems an incorrigible optimist.

In Hobbes's view, confronted with his dismal prospects in the state of nature (status naturalis), individual men in the interests of self-preservation covenant together to form "articles of peace," a social compact by which men leave the state of nature and enter into the status civilis, hence forming the State. And through that State comes law. "The reckless rationalism" and individualism of Hobbes "found expression both here and his demand that in speculation one must start by viewing men as beings that have shot forth from the earth like mushrooms, as at once full-grown." Rommen, 75.

For Hobbes, law is found emanating from one place, the State. Laws are not based upon Nature, nor are they based upon Reason. They are based upon raw will. For this reason, Rommen calls Hobbes's legal doctrine "the theodicy of Occam secularized, and the extreme consequence of the proposition that law is will." Rommen, 76.

In his Biblical Natural Law, Levering concludes his discussion of Hobbes theory on law thus:

Their authority as 'laws' flows ultimately not from a teleological 'nature', or from an autonomous 'reason,' let along from divine providence, but from the actual exercise of power by a specific ruler of a specific commonwealth. Natural law has here moved clearly from the biblical self-giving ecstasis, rooted in the teleological dynamism toward communion inscribed by God, to self-asserting power.

Levering, 98.

Hobbes is profuse in the citation of Scripture. One ought not be misled by Hobbes's penchant for scriptural reference as any indication of a sincere belief in God. His doctrine was palpably inconsistent with any belief in God. He was, as Professor Jesseph concludes, "a sly, ironic, and interesting atheist," and not a "bizarre, confused, and ultimately incoherent Christian." Douglas M. Jesseph, Hobbes's Atheism, 26 Midwest Studies in Philosophy 140, 164 (2002). With good reason did Bishop Bishop John Bramhall (1594-1663) in his Catching of Leviathan characterize Hobbe's great work as a “Rebell's Catechism.” Were Hobbes right, the State would be nothing other than Satan's non serviam writ in law. If Hobbes were right, he would be wrong: the State would not be Leviathan a sea monster, but a serpent, that same serpent that reared himself in the Garden of Eden.