Hobbes and the Principle of Publicity
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Richard Flathman’s book Thomas Hobbes has many virtues, not least that it presents a Hobbes concerned above all with the rational integrity of the case that is made for absolute or near-absolute sovereign authority. “It is,” says Hobbes in a passage that Flathman highlights as a celebration of individuality, “unreasonable . . . to require of a man endued with Reason of his own, to follow the Reason of any other man.” Now, in context, this is an observation about the responsibilities of priests and teachers: “[F]or there is none should know better than they, that power is preserved by the same Vertues by which it is acquired; that is to say, by Wisdome, Humility, Clearnesse of Doctrine, and sincerity of Conversation; and not by suppression of the Naturall Sciences, and of the Morality of Naturall Reason; nor by obscure Language; nor by Arrogating to themselves more Knowledge than they make appear; nor by Pious Frauds; nor by such other faults as in the pastors of God’s Church are not only Faults, but also scandalls, apt to make men stumble one time or other upon the suppression of their Authority.” But it applies equally to the prerogatives of the sovereign. It may have been true of the inhabitants of Hobbes’s England that “not one perhaps of ten thousand knew what right any man had to command him.” But the answer was to teach them the basis of that right by guiding them, as active intellects, through reasoning supportive of political obligation that might as well have been their reasoning, rather than requiring them simply to submit passively to conclusions reached as a result of the reasoning of another. In this chapter, I want to take further this theme of respect for individual intellect, so prominent in Richard Flathman’s presentation of Hobbes. I would like to do so, too, in a way that advances Flathman’s agenda of forcing a confrontation (though not necessarily a hostile confrontation) between Hobbes’s thinking and ours, or in the words of Flathman’s editor, “between Hobbes and the architects, critics, reformers, and everyday participants of modern liberal democracies.” The connection is as follows: One of the most interesting positions constitutive of contemporary philosophical liberalism is a view about the relation between political order and truth. Liberals, particularly in the Enlightenment tradition, believe that political order can be sustained without myths or lies, without false consciousness, and without ideology (in the pejorative sense of that term). Enlightenment liberals are committed to what John Rawls has called the “principle of publicity”: A condition of a society’s being well-ordered is that “[t]he political order does not . . . depend on historically accidental or established delusions, or other mistaken beliefs resting on the deceptive appearances of institutions that mislead us as to how they work.” I believe that Thomas Hobbes accepted a version of this principle and that philosophically it is a fact of the first importance about his theory of politics that he did so. The principle of publicity can be applied wholesale or piecemeal. Its piecemeal application amounts to a requirement that particular laws always be accompanied by reasons that show exactly why the law is justified, that is, reasons that show what its purpose is and what assumptions, factual and moral, underlie it. Laws should be persuasive, not merely coercive. Hobbes certainly accepted that: “It belongeth to the Office of a Legislator, . . . to make the reason Perspicuous, why the Law was made.” I want to concentrate, however, on the principle of publicity in its wholesale application, that is, as it applies not just to particular laws but to the whole apparatus of state authority. For it is undeniable that Hobbes also accepted the principle in its wholesale application. He thought it essential for subjects to understand the true grounds of sovereignty, authority, and political obligation and to submit themselves to sovereign authority for the right reasons, not just for any old reason and not just as the upshot of any old propaganda that the sovereign and his counselors concocted. He accepted this, and he regarded his own mission qua philosopher as a contribution to this particular aspect or incident of authority. But it is less clear why Hobbes accepted the principle of publicity. Why did he think it important in a well-ordered society for people to be undeceived about the nature and justification of their political arrangements?
Source Publication
Skepticism, Individuality, and Freedom: The Reluctant Liberalism of Richard Flathman
Source Editors/Authors
Bonnie Honig, David R. Mapel
Publication Date
2002
Recommended Citation
Waldron, Jeremy, "Hobbes and the Principle of Publicity" (2002). Faculty Chapters. 1619.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/1619
