The Rights To Punish and Resist Punishment in Hobbes's Leviathan
Received: October 31, 1989 First Revision Received: July 9, 1990 Second Revision Received: August 9, 1990 Accepted for Publication: August 21, 1990 NOTE: I thank Stanley Anderson and Naomi Rosenberg for very helpful readings of an early version. Peter Digeser read more than one draft, his keen judgment repeatedly saving me from myself. Dean Mann and John Moore, as well as anonymous referees at the Western Political Quarterly, made incisive critiques of the penultimate draft. I alone, of course, am responsible for the flaws that remain. This work has been supported by a grant from the Research Committee of the Academic Senate at the University of California, Santa Barbara. I am grateful to Robert Faulkner, John Rogers, Brad Wilson, and Michael Zuckert for creating occasions on which to present versions of this paper. Questions about Hobbes's declaration of a preservationist right to resist unexceptionable punishment, administered by an unexceptionable government, must of course be distinguished from what Francisco Suarez called "the well-worn question of whether or not it is permissible for a private individual or his subjects to kill a tyrannical king" (1944b: 705-III.iv.1). To be sure, some will consider resistance to either kind of government, for any reason, primafacie contempt for Romans 13:2 ("Whatsoever ... resisteth the [higher powers], resisteth the ordinance of God"). Hobbes does not mention Romans 13:1-7 in the vicinity of his declarations of the right to resist (cf. Lev, 42, 100, 308 [589]). 2 Where it is said that "the essence [of a body politic] . . . is the not-resistance of the members" (II, i, 18); see also Elements (El), II, i, 7. On a relevant difference between De Cive (DC) and the Elements, see note 52, below. Tuck (1979: 119-30) traces the emergence of the right to resist in Hobbes's texts.
The Right to Punish in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan
there is an apparent ambiguity in Thomas Hobbes’s account in Leviathan1 of the source of the sovereign’s right to punish. Hobbes appears to both claim and deny that the prospective sovereign is granted the right to punish by prospective subjects. In claiming that the sovereign is granted the right to punish, we understand Hobbes to hold that the acquisition of the right follows from authorization—a process by which a representative is commissioned to act on the behalf of another person. In denying that the sovereign is granted the right to punish, we understand Hobbes to hold that the possession of the right is merely the product of the mass relinquishment of natural rights; the prospective sovereign alone does not relinquish any natural rights. The tradition has called attention to this apparent ambiguity in Hobbes’s account of the right to punish. As we will see, the traditional interpretation of Hobbes’s definitive account is that he retracts his view that subjects grant the sovereign the right to punish. The tradition generally recognizes that, for Hobbes, rights do not have corresponding duties. The sovereign’s exercise of the right to punish does not require the condemned subject to not interfere in the carrying out of his punishment; the condemned subject has a right to resist his punishment. However, the inevitable conflict between the respective exercise of rights is not where the problem with the right to punish lies. According to the tradition, the grant of the right to punish is vitiated by the retention of the right to resist violence. It is in response to an antinomy—an incompatibility between two equally plausible claims—within the social contract between subjects granting the sovereign the right to punish and subjects retaining the right to resist violence that the tradition understands Hobbes to reject the former. Because Hobbes holds firm to his view of the absolute
Reid on Hypotheses and the Ether; A Reassessment
In recent years historians of science have come to see that Thomas Reid’s Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man had a profound impact on the development of British methodological thought in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Larry Laudan has argued that Reid was “the first major British philosopher to take Newton’s opinions on induction, causality, and hypotheses seriously”; and that Reid was thereby instrumental in changing the character of British methodological discourse in the Enlightenment.(1) Geoffrey Cantor has examined in detail the influence of Reid’s critique of ether theories and hypotheses in the Essays on leading protagonists in the nineteenth-century debates surrounding the wave theory of light,(2) and Richard Olson has traced the origins of the scientific style of British physics in the Victorian period to the writings of Reid and other Common Sense philosophers. (3) As well as delineating Reid’s influence, Laudan, Cantor, and Olson have attempted to identify the problems to which he addressed himself in articulating his methodology, and they have analysed with some care the internal structure of his methodological views. Thanks to the work of these historians, therefore, we have a fairly comprehensive picture of Reid’s methodology and its fortunes in the nineteenth century.