Autor: Manent, Pierre

Buch: An Intellectual History of Liberalism

Titel: An Intellectual History of Liberalism

Stichwort: Hobbes 5; politische Ordnung durch Schwäche; Leviathan: Neutralisierung von Gnade; Demokratie: das einzig legitime Regime (Zustimmung); liberale Interpretation von Gesetz (total "äußerlich"); "negative Matrix": Klammer v. Souveränität und Demokratie

Kurzinhalt: Hobbes's thought is thus the common matrix of modern democracy and liberalism. It founds the democratic idea because it develops the notion of sovereignty established on each subject's consent. It founds the liberal idea because it develops the notion ...

Textausschnitt: 31a Hobbes creates the political order from human impotence; Aristotle created it from human capacities or strength. Unlike Aristotle's city-state, the Hobbesian body politic does not compose and adjust forces (virtue, wealth, freedom); it relieves weaknesses. Leviathan heals, at least in part, the ills of the "natural condition of mankind." Under Leviathan's hand, the subject finds himself like the faithful under the Church whose grace heals the ills of sinful nature. The body politic constructed by powerless men who conceive of an absolute power is not a city-state, limited by the natural order and thus vulnerable to the intervention of religion. Its genesis repeats and makes effective the gesture by which humanity conceives of the divinity and places itself under its protection. The meaning of the Hobbesian state is to be an artificial Providence.1 Just as the state of nature neutralizes sin by naturalizing it, Leviathan's absolute power neutralizes grace by making it artificial. (Fs; tblStw: Politik) (notabene)

31b By nature, men quarrel rather than love or help each other. This political problem is so difficult, and its solution so simple in Hobbes, that political discussion faces only clear-cut alternatives. Either the body politic exists and citizens live in civil peace, or it does not and citizens tear each other to pieces. Either the sovereign has the power necessary for fulfilling his mandate and then men enjoy the happiness compatible with their condition, or he lacks it and men experience the disorders and misfortunes of civil war. This means that the comparison between the respective merits of different political regimes seems altogether pointless to Hobbes. Admittedly, one can distinguish between democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy. But whether the sovereign is one, several, or everyone, what is important is that that sovereign have the right to demand complete obedience. Whether he is one, several, or everyone, the sovereign conceives of, promulgates, and enforces respect for the laws that seem to him good or expedient. They are laws only because they are the declaration of his will. One is no more free to disobey the laws in Venice or Lucca than in the realm of the Grand Turk. Of course, monarchy has a certain number of technical advantages based on the fact that a natural individual is the soul of the artificial individual that is the body politic. But the inflexible rule is this: that each citizen must consider the regime under which he lives as the best one. Indeed, he does not even attempt to evaluate it, and obeys in all good conscience everything that the sovereign orders him to do. (Fs)

31c However, whether a regime is a monarchy, aristocracy, or democracy, its legitimacy—which is also its mode of generation—is essentially democratic. The foundation of every regime is based on each citizen's consent. The sovereign's power does not belong to him by nature or by grace, it is always given by his subjects. By dismissing the old discussions about the best regime, by being particularly critical of ancient democracies, by scorning the monarchies in which Europeans lived, Hobbes contributed powerfully to the making of the modern democratic view. For its partisans, modern democracy is not one political regime among others; it is the only legitimate organization of men's life in common. Precisely because it is based on consent, its legitimacy—which is its goodness—is beyond any doubt. To whoever objects or grumbles, one can always answer: what are you complaining about? This is what you wanted. And even if you voted against, it is as though you had voted for, since you committed yourself to abide by the law of the majority. (Fs) (notabene)

32a Because Leviathan is external to individuals, and because they are the quanta of its power, the sovereign's absolute power is not in contradiction with his subjects' liberty. Whatever is outside the obedience of the law is free; where the law is silent, subjects can do whatever seems good to them. A quantum of power does everything it can do; it cannot cease to be a power to act. Wherever the sovereign interposes his law, with the threat of punishment, the subject obeys. But wherever there is no law he acts freely, since nothing prevents him from doing so. The law promulgated by the sovereign is only the device that prevents men/atoms from clashing with each other; it does not immobilize them. It is similar to those hedges that prevent one from parking on a neighbor's field, but not from walking on his path. Hobbes can be called the founder of liberalism because he elaborated the liberal interpretation of the law, a pure human device, rigorously external to everybody. Such a law does not transform or inform the individual atoms whose peaceful coexistence it is limited to guaranteeing. (Fs) (notabene)

32b Hobbes's thought is thus the common matrix of modern democracy and liberalism. It founds the democratic idea because it develops the notion of sovereignty established on each subject's consent. It founds the liberal idea because it develops the notion of the law as device external to individuals. It is not clear that the democratic idea of sovereignty and the liberal idea of the law are easily compatible, since in Leviathan these two notions only link up through absolutism. It is because unlimited sovereignty is external to individuals that it leaves them free space where the law is silent. If one abolishes absolutism, that is, the exteriority of sovereignty, then the law becomes, as Rousseau says, "the register of our wills." The law is no longer the external condition of my free action, it becomes the very principle of this action: the liberal notion of the law is dead. If, on the contrary, one wants to abolish absolutism while maintaining the liberal interpretation of the law, the very idea of unlimited sovereignty has to be renounced. This is what Montesquieu will do. (Fs) (notabene)

32c Yet the fact remains that our democratic and liberal societies seem to have overcome this contradiction. Perhaps not entirely, but such a contradiction is not fatal. The democratic idea of sovereignty and the liberal idea of the law are contradictory only in their positive aspects, not the negative ones. They have a common "negative matrix": they agree that man has no ends inscribed in his nature, and that the element of human action is not the good or goods. The two definitions, democratic and liberal, alternately prevailed; sometimes they emphasized the sovereignty of the collective will, sometimes the legal liberty of individuals. This contradictory compatibility of the two definitions helps to explain why our democratic and liberal regimes are both remarkably stable and subject to perpetual and rapid social change. (Fs)