The State &
Its Critics HOBBES · LOCKE · ROUSSEAU · MARX · RAWLS · NOZICK

Hobbes wrote Leviathan in exile in Paris during the English Civil War — a war in which both king and parliament had lost the power to keep the peace. The book is the first great work of modern political theory: materialist, individualist, geometric in ambition.

The argument

1. By nature, all are roughly equal in body and mind.
2. Equality breeds equal hope of acquisition; resources are scarce; cooperation is unreliable.
3. Without a common power to keep all in awe, men are in a state of war — not constant fighting, but constant readiness to fight.
4. In this condition, no industry, no agriculture, no science, no leisure — only fear and danger of violent death.
5. Reason therefore prescribes laws of nature, the first of which is to seek peace.
6. Peace requires that we mutually transfer our right to all things to a sovereign — by covenant, in awe of which all are kept.
7. The sovereign's power must be absolute; for divided sovereignty is no sovereignty, and we are back to war.

The frontispiece

Hobbes's book is famous for its title page: a giant king, sword in one hand, crozier in the other, towering over a landscape. His body is composed of small figures — the citizens whose covenant he embodies. Above: Non est potestas Super Terram quae Comparetur ei. ("There is no power on earth comparable to him." — Job 41:24)

What's living, what's dead

Hobbes's authoritarianism is unfashionable; his analysis of why we need authority remains the foundation. Schmitt, Oakeshott, Skinner — the great twentieth-century commentators — read Hobbes as the first to take political artifice seriously. The state, on Hobbes's view, is a human creation answerable for its work.

Property

The famous argument of Chapter V. The earth is given to mankind in common. But every person owns themselves and the labour of their body. By mixing labour with what is held in common, one makes it one's own — provided "enough, and as good" is left for others, and that nothing spoils.

Money loosens the spoilage proviso — gold does not rot. Locke is sometimes read as licensing inequality; sometimes (by C. B. Macpherson) as the theorist of "possessive individualism."

Consent

Government's authority derives from the consent of the governed. Tacit consent — using roads, trading under laws — counts. So does, controversially, the right of revolution: when government violates its trust, "the people are at liberty to provide for themselves by erecting a new legislative." (§220)

The American echo

Locke's vocabulary — "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" (Locke wrote "estate") — runs straight into the Declaration of Independence (1776). The Federalist Papers cite him by name. The Bill of Rights, the Fifth Amendment's protection of property, the very habit of justifying state action in terms of consent — all are, in part, Lockean.

The Atlantic shadow

Locke also held shares in the Royal African Company; the chapter "Of Slavery" in the Second Treatise is uncomfortable reading. Modern interpreters (Bernasconi, Mehta) have argued that Lockean liberalism was, from the beginning, entangled with empire and racial hierarchy. The argument is alive.

Rousseau is the most contradictory of the great moderns. Composer, novelist, autodidact, exile, paranoid, friend then enemy of every philosophe in Paris. The Social Contract is the political manifesto; Émile the book on education; the Discourses the historical-anthropological vision; the Confessions the first modern autobiography.

The general will — la volonté générale

Not the will of all (the sum of private interests), but the will the citizens have when they aim at the common good. Legitimate law expresses the general will. To be forced to obey it is to be "forced to be free" (I.7) — the most contested phrase in the book; read either as Kantian autonomy or as totalitarian seed, depending on the reader.

The argument

1. Original humans were free; no one had legitimate authority over another.
2. Civilisation — property, division of labour, comparison — produced inequality and dependence.
3. Existing political orders ratify that inequality: chains.
4. Legitimate political order can only arise from the agreement of the people themselves.
5. That agreement constitutes a "general will" aimed at the common good.
6. The state is legitimate to the extent that its law expresses the general will, and citizens are then both subjects and sovereigns.

Aftermath

Rousseau died eleven years before the French Revolution. The Jacobins read him devotionally; Robespierre kept a copy of The Social Contract in his pocket. The terror was carried out partly in his name — though Rousseau, who hated cities and crowds, would have been appalled.

Three layers

1. Materialist conception of history — the mode of production conditions political and intellectual life. Hand-mill gives feudal lord; steam-mill, industrial capitalist.
2. Critique of political economy — labour theory of value; surplus value extracted in the wage relation; the falling rate of profit; commodity fetishism.
3. Theory of revolution — capitalism produces its own gravediggers in the proletariat. The state withers as classes dissolve.

Alienation — 1844 Manuscripts

Under capitalism, the worker is alienated from: (a) the product of their labour, (b) the act of labour itself, (c) their species-being (productive cooperation), and (d) other workers, who become competitors. Alienation is the key category of the early Marx; it links his philosophical anthropology to his political economy.

Why he is here

Marx is not, strictly, a political philosopher in the Locke or Rawls sense — he says little about institutional design after the revolution. But his critique reframed the question. After Marx, no liberal theorist could ignore the question: do formal liberties matter when material inequalities make them unusable?

Twentieth-century inheritances

Lenin, Stalin, Mao — each is a chapter; none uncontested. The Frankfurt School (Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse) developed Marxian critique of culture without revolutionary politics. Analytical Marxism (Cohen, Roemer, Elster) re-tooled Marx with formal methods. He remains a rolling argument.