Autor: Strauss, Leo

Buch: Natural Right and History

Titel: Natural Right and History

Stichwort: Hobbes; Reduktion auf soziale Tugenden -> politischer Hedonismus (Burke); Epikur (Epicurus);

Kurzinhalt: ... if virtue is reduced to social virtue or to benevolence or kindness or "the liberal virtues," ... This substitution is the core of what we have called "political hedonism."

Textausschnitt: 188a If virtue is identified with peaceableness, vice will become identical with that habit or that passion which is per se incompatible with peace because it essentially and, as it were, of set purpose issues in offending others; vice becomes identical for all practical purposes with pride or vanity or amour-propre rather than with dissoluteness or weakness of the soul. In other words, if virtue is reduced to social virtue or to benevolence or kindness or "the liberal virtues," "the severe virtues" of self-restraint will lose their standing.1 Here again we must have recourse to Burke's analysis of the spirit of the French Revolution; for Burke's polemical overstatements were and are indispensable for tearing away the disguises, both intentional and unintentional, in which "the new morality" introduced itself: "The Parisian philosophers ... explode or render odious or contemptible, that class of virtues which restrain the appetite. ... In the place of all this, they substitute a virtue which they call humanity or benevolence."2 This substitution is the core of what we have called "political hedonism." (Fs)


188b To establish the meaning of political hedonism in somewhat more precise terms, we must contrast Hobbes's teaching with the nonpolitical hedonism of Epicurus. The points in which Hobbes could agree with Epicurus, were these: the good is fundamentally identical with the pleasant; virtue is therefore not choiceworthy for its own sake but only with a view to the attainment of pleasure or the avoidance of pain; the desire for honor and glory is utterly vain, i.e., sensual pleasures are, as such, preferable to honor or glory. Hobbes had to oppose Epicurus in two crucial points in order to make possible political hedonism. In the first place, he had to reject Epicurus' implicit denial of a state of nature in the strict sense, i.e., of a prepolitical condition of life in which man enjoys natural rights; for Hobbes agreed with the idealistic tradition in thinking that the claim of civil society stands or falls with the existence of natural right. Besides, he could not accept the implication of Epicurus' distinction between natural desires which are necessary and natural desires which are not necessary; for that distinction implied that happiness requires an "ascetic" style of life and that happiness consists in a state of repose. Epicurus' high demands on self-restraint were bound to be Utopian as far as most men are concerned; they had therefore to be discarded by a "realistic" political teaching. The "realistic" approach to politics forced Hobbes to lift all restrictions on the striving for unnecessary sensual pleasures or, more precisely, for the commoda hujus vitae, or for power, with the exception of those restrictions that are required for the sake of peace. Since, as Epicurus said, "Nature has made [only] the necessary things easy to supply," the emancipation of the desire for comfort required that science be put into the service of the satisfaction of that desire. It required, above all, that the function of civil society be radically redefined: "the good life," for the sake of which men enter civil society, is no longer the life of human excellence but "commodious living" as the reward of hard work. And the sacred duty of the rulers is no longer "to make the citizens good and doers of noble things" but to "study, as much as by laws can be effected, to furnish the citizens abundantly with all good things ... which are conducive to delectation."1 (Fs)