In The Kingdom Of God
(Other Writ, Charles I, Correctitude, Royalism, Stuarts)Hobbes, in the first place, is not here arguing for one form of government more than for another. He prefers monarchy; but his special point is that in every form, monarchic, aristocratic, or democratic, there must be a “sovereign” — an ultimate, supreme and single authority. Men, he says, admit the claim of a popular State to “absolute dominion,” but object to the claim of a king, though he has the same power and is not more likely, for reasons given, to abuse it. The doctrine which he really opposes is that of a “mixed government.” As “some doctors” hold that there are three souls in one man, others hold that there can be more souls than one in a commonwealth. That is virtually implied when they say that “the power of levying money, which is the nutritive faculty,” depends on a “general assembly”; the “power of conduct and command, which is the motive faculty, on one man; and the power of making laws, which is the rational faculty, on the accidental consent, not only of those two last, but of a third”: this is called “mixed monarchy.” “In truth it is not one independent commonwealth, but three independent factions; nor one representative person but three. In the Kingdom of God there may be three persons independent without breach of unity in God that reigneth; but where men reign that be subject to diversity of opinions, it cannot be so. And therefore if the king bear the person of the people, the general assembly bear the person of the people, and another assembly bear the person of a part of the people, they are not one person, nor one sovereign, but three persons and three sovereigns.” That is to say, the political, like the animal organism, is essentially a unit. So far as there is not somewhere a supreme authority, there is anarchy or a possibility of anarchy. The application to Hobbes’s own times is obvious. The king, for example, has a right to raise ship-money in case of necessity. But who has a right to decide the question of necessity ? If the king, he could raise taxes at pleasure. If the parliament, the king becomes only their pensioner. At the bottom it was a question of sovereignty, and Hobbes, holding the king to be sovereign, holds that Hampden showed “an ignorant impatience of taxation.” “Mark the oppression ! A parliament man of £500 a year, land-taxed 20s.” Hampden was refusing to contribute to his own defence. “All men are by nature provided of notable multiplying glasses, through which every little payment appeareth a great grievance.” Parliament remonstrated against arbitrary imprisonment, the Star Chamber, and so forth; but it was their own fault that the king had so to act. Their refusal to give money “put him ( the king ) upon those extraordinary ways, which they call illegal, of raising money at home.” The experience of the Civil War, he says in the Leviathan, has so plainly shown the mischief of dividing the rights of the sovereign that few men in England fail to see that they should be inseparable and should be so acknowledged “at the next return of peace.”
Men did in fact come to acknowledge it though not for some generations, and then by virtually transferring sovereignty from the king to the parliament. A confused state of mind in the interval was implied in the doctrine which long prevailed, of the importance of a division between the legislative, executive, and judicial powers, and in the doctrine that the British constitution represented a judicious mixture of the three elements, aristocracy, monarchy, and democracy, whose conflicts were regulated by an admirable system of checks and balances. Whatever truth may have been expressed in such theories, they were erroneous so far as inconsistent with Hobbes’s doctrine. A division of the governmental functions is of course necessary, and different classes should be allowed to exercise an influence upon the State. But the division of functions must be consistent with the recognition of a single authority which can regulate and correlate their powers; and a contest between classes, which do not in some way recognise a sovereign arbitrator, leads to civil war or revolution. Who is the sovereign, for example, was the essential question which in the revolt of the American colonies, and in the secession of the Southern States had to be answered by bullets. So long as that question is open, there is a condition of unstable equilibrium or latent anarchy. The State, as Hobbes puts it, should have only one soul, or as we may say, the political organism should have the unity corresponding to a vital principle.
The unity of the Leviathan seemed to imply arbitrary power. Since the king had the power of the sword, said Hobbes, he must also have the power of the purse. The logic might be good, but might be applied the other way. The true Englishman was determined not to pay the money till he knew how it was to be spent; and complained of a loss of liberty if it was taken by force. Hobbes’s reply to this is very forcible and clears his position. He agreed with Johnson that the cry for liberty was cant. What he asks, in his De Cive, is meant by liberty ? If an exemption from the laws, it can exist in no government whatever. If it consist in having few laws, and only those such as are necessary to peace, there is no more liberty in a democracy than in a monarchy. What men really demand is not liberty but “dominion.” People are deceived because in a democracy they have a greater share in public offices or in choosing the officers. It does not follow that they have more liberty in the sense of less law. Hobbes was putting his finger upon an ambiguity which has continued to flourish. Liberty may either mean that a man is not bound by law or that he is only bound by laws which he has made ( or shared in making ) himself. We are quite aware at the present day that a democracy may use the liberty, which in one sense it possesses, by making laws which are inconsistent with liberty in the other sense.
Leslie Stephen : English Men of Letters — Hobbes
Sir Leslie Stephen was, of course, the author of Virginia Woolf, but we mustn’t hold that against him.
