Leviathan, Introduction by C.B. Macpherson. (E 0)

대부분은 발췌이나, [ ]안은 생각 메모입니다. 

펭귄 클래식 판을 사용했으며, 다음은 맥퍼슨이 쓴 해설을 정리한 글입니다.

앞으로 영어본, 한국본을 각각 발췌하여 올릴 계획입니다. 

한국본은 나남출판사의 진석용 씨가 번역하신 책을 사용했습니다.

 

 Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes. Penguin Classics.

Feb 25

1.    Introduction by C. B. Macpherson.

 

 

Hobbes, Analyst of Power and Peace.

Equity and Justice.

Right, obligation, power.

Civil war. (Peace)

Science (infallible, true) ; Galileo.

 

Science of bourgeoisie(market) society.

In our world the bourgeoisie states are being increasingly challenged, … It is ironic that we are just beginning to appreciate Hobbes’s science of politics when its applicability is becoming more and more limited. [This introduction was written in 1985. Beginning to appreciate?? “now” certainly sounds inappropriate.]

Can learn why bourgeois society is now so challenged.

 

Life, Times, and Influence.

 

Thomas Hobbes. 1588-1679 (age 91)

 

Timid, avoiding political storms such as reign of Charles 1, the Civil Wars, the Commonwealth and Protectorate, and the Stuart Restoration [I don’t really know any of the well.]

Preached and set out the rational ground for obedience. But displeasure to both Parliament and King.

Denied the justification whether it is divine or customary.

 

Moved to Paris 1640. Published Leviathan in London,1651, presenting to Charles 2 in Paris. English royalist circle in Paris, French Catholics were angered by Hobbes’ open attack on Papacy. Fled back to England, London, living inconspicuously.

 

Oxford, age 14, B.A. after five years.

Tutor to the son of William Cavendish, Earl of Devonshire.

 

Insecure finance and Social hierarchy. Continental tour, enthusiasm to firm, apparent, geometry and new science of 17^th century.

 

Methodology.

From classical humanist to mechanical philosopher.

Commitment to civil peace. By which whatever means and whatever allegiance be obtained.

Classical studies. (~ 1628)

Greek and Roman poets. Thucydides, down to earth view, danger of democracy.  Warning against any disaffection with established government. Observe man rather than draw history from the abstract first principle.

Empirical ; Francis Bacon.

Searching for more solid basis than any that Bacon’s experimental and inductive thinking seemed to offer. Ingrained desire for security.

 

Geometry ; Galileo.

Certainty of the method of Geometry and the uncertainty of current moral and political theory. - Euclid

Member of Mersenne, made a pilgrimage to Florence to meet Galileo. Deductive

The hypothesis was that everything, including human sensation, is caused by motion, or more accurately by differences of motion;

-> Short Tract of First Principles

 

Hobbes had become obsessed by the idea of motion.

Explain nature, man, and society in terms of motion.

 

Old prevailing view, rest was the natural state of thing – nothing moved until something else moved it.

Galileo postulated that motion was the natural state – things moved unless something else stopped them. [This idea extends to anti-duhring]

 

Of Body, which would set our the first principles of motion; Of Man, which would consider man as one kind of body in motion and would explain explain his sensations, desires, and behavior as results of his internal motion and the impact on it of external motions; and Of the Citizen, which would show what these motion would necessarily lead to and how their result might be altered for the better by knowledge of these laws and by rational forethought.

 

Rift between King and Parliament was alarming.

1640. Elements of Law, Natural and Politic. – Human nature and De Corpore Politico.

1641.  De Cive more formal set of the second part (De Corpore Politico.)

1647. Republished De Cive with addition.

1651. While working on Leviathan to reach wider audience, and to deal with central problem of political power and obligation more fully, English translation of De Cive – under name of Philosophical Rudiments concerning Government and Society- came out.

 

Hobbes was not an isolated thinker. Several attacked because they thought it dangerous because of the widespread acceptance it was attaining among the reading class. Considerable evidence that Hobbes’ central political idea ingested into mainstream of serious political thinking in his lifetime.

 

Reincarnated in John Austin, in respect of the doctrine of sovereignty.

Jeremy Bentham, hedonistic calculus has obvious Hobbesian roots.

Locke. Poor and confused man’s Hobbes.

Hobbes had been too prescient, had set down as an absolute prescription for civil peace something the like of which could not be attained until the bourgeois revolution had been completed in 1689.

 

- Method and Postulates

More specific hypothesis than the general one about motion.

Inclusive method than the deductive method of geometry.

Self evident simple proposition.

Two-part method. ‘Resolutive (require simple basic propositions) and Compositive (build complex ones from the basic propostion)’ method

When logically compounded, would provide a casual explanation of the complex phenomenon.

 

Observable things to be explained was the compound effect of some simple unobservable factors, and then search in one’s imagination for such factors as would, by would strict logical combination, necessarily produce the result.

 

What makes a political society tick?

If it is tickling bad, why?

A watch-repairer can take the watch apart.

But you can take society apart in Imagination, or hypothetically. ‘as if they were dissolved’

Hobbes believed that the simple forces to which he had in imagination reduced the motions of man were thus self-evident. [Fallacy of compositon..]

Innate impulsion to to avoid death. ‘Every man shuns … death and this he doth, by a certain impulsion of nature, no less than that whereby a stone moves downward.’

All voluntary actions as results of appetites and aversion.

 

In most Scientific theories, the order in which it is presented is different from the order in which It was discovered.

 

Opens with mechanism by which the human being operates.

Ch1-5: Sense, Imagination, Train of Imagination, Speech, and Reason.

Ch6: Impulsions (Appetite and Aversion)

Ch7-11: Groundwork for the deduction of how men must behave, what kind of a political society they must maintain to ensure peace and commodious living.

 

- The Theory of Human Nature in Society.

Ch4 ~ Ch5 Behavior of men toward each other.

 

Some Assumption not explicit.

Appetites - desires.

External Voluntary actions are result of deliberation, calculation of incessant internal impulsions that are changing and different in different men.

 

Human motivation: (1.1) Not many appetites (1.2) Appetites change, and are different in different men (1.3) Appetites are incessant (1.4) Appetites are of different strength

 

Man’s power: (2) ‘The power of Man is his present means, to obtain some future apparent good.’  + (1.3), (1.4) = (3) Every man must always seek to have some power, although not every man is self-impelled to seek as much power as tohers have, or to seek more than he now has.

Two kinds of power: Original or natural / instrumental or acquired.

 

“Eminence” of faculty of mind or body, By comparison, not itself.

 

(4) That every man’s power resist and hinders the effect of other men’s power. Ch10.  (5) all acquired power consists in command over some of the powers of other men.

‘The Value, or Worth of a man, is as of all other things, his Price; that is to say, so much as would be given for the use of his Power…’

First step to transform man’s need for power from harmless to harmful thing.

(6) That some men’s desires are without limit.

It is only if some men’s desires are without limit that the other men are necessarily moved to resist having some of their powers transferred (and the only way they can resist is to get into the struggle for power).

(7)’So that in the first place, I put for a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of Power after power, that cases only in Death. And the cause of this, is not always that a man hopes for a more intensive delight, that he has already attained to; or that he cannot be content with a moderate power: but because he cannot assure the power and means to live well, which he has present, without the acquisition of more’ [결국 다수의 무한한 욕망이 아니라, 특정 소수의 무한한 욕망이, 그 욕망을 충족시키는 권력의 유한함 때문에, 권력을 향한 경쟁이 끊임없이 펼쳐진단뜻.]

Man’s need for power has now become a necessarily harmful thing.

The fact that his conclusion about man’s competitive search for power is reached by way of generalizations about men in society is significant, for it means that Hobbes was using is significant, for means that Hobbes was using a mental model of society which, whether he was conscious of this or not, corresponds only to a bourgeois market society.

 

Nature and Contract.

Two basic proposition about human nature in society.

1.    Men are necessarily engaged in an incessant struggle for power over others.

2.    Every man shuns what is evil, but chiefly the chiefest of natural evils, which is death; and this he does, by a certain impulsion of nature, no less than that whereby a stone move downward.

 

평등한 인간, 필연적(그 필연성이 유한한 자원이든, 유하한 권력이든, 근데 결국 권력이 곧 유익함을 목적으로 하는데, 그 유익함이 자원의 영향을 받을 가능성이 매우 크니까. 궁극적으론 같은 말일듯)으로 경쟁하는 합리적 경제 주체.

 

 

 

자발적 운동의 내재적 기원.

 

- State of Nature, Right of Nature, Law of Nature, and Social Contract.

 

State of Nature

Potential disintegrative force of the omnipresent individual struggle for power, which characterized existing society, was such as to lead to repeated breakdowns of it through resort to violence; and that, since this would increase the danger of violent death, reasonable men could be shown the need to hand over to a sovereign whatever power the sovereign thought necessary to prevent this.

Ch13. In the state of nature. Impossible Civilized life, and any life risky.

 

Right of Nature

‘the Liberty each man have, to use his own power, as he will himself, for the preservation of his own Nature; that is to say, of his own Life; and consequently, of doing any thing, which in his own Judgment, and Reason, he shall conceive to be the aptest means thereunto’

 

Law of Nature.

Is a percept, or general rule, found out by Reason, by which a man is forbidden to do, that, which is destructive of his life, or takes away the means of preserving the same; and to omit that, by which he thinking it may be best preserved.

Ch16. The reasonable man, if he were in a state of nature, would see that he had to give up the right he would there have-provided everyone else would do so at the same time,

 

This clearly require an agreement or contract. But it would be no use agreeing just to give them up. They would have to transfer them to some person or body who could make the agreement stick, by being authorized to use the whole combined force of all the contractors to hold them to it.

 

It was the transfer of these rights and power that would constitute the obligation of the individual to the recipient authority. The person or body of persons to whom these rights were transferred would be the sovereign. And it would have to be left to the sovereign to decide how much of man’s power the sovereign would need to leave, for otherwise the sovereign could not be sure of enough power to enforce the contract and maintain peace.

 

Unless acknowledged the same full obligation to sovereignty, constant danger of relapsing towards a state of nature. They should therefor, in their own self-interest, acknowledge full obligation to the sovereign.

 

- The Sovereign State justified.   

Objections.

Practices; past examples. Due to past ignorance

Miserable conditions of subjects. Sovereigns would not try to damage their subjects, because the sovereign’s strength consists in the vigor of the subjects.

The sovereign’s job to procure ‘the safety of the people’, not bare preservation, contentment of life.

Not welfare, individualism. Every man has a property in his own person; the sovereign’s job is to provide the conditions in which each man can make the fullest use of it.

Ex) Taxation

Rest of Hobbes’ economic thinking displayed in ‘Of the Nutrition, and Procreation of a Commonwealth.’ Hobbes fully grants capitalist model. He takes labor is a commodity, which proposition is the central criterion of capitalism. ‘a mans Labour also, is a commodity exchangeable for benefit, as well as any other thing’ And he derides the precapitalist concepts of commutative and distributive justice, on the grounds that they are meaningless as soon as one realizes that the value of everything, including human beings, is determined by the market. Hobbes not only accepted market determination of values as a fact, he accepted it right, in the sense that he could see no other moral basis for establishing the value of anything. [사실 가치 척도나, 상품의 출현, 혹은 생산물의 분배 방식이 아니라, 이기적이고 합리적인 인간의 출현을 인지한 데서 자본주의적 인간의 탄생을 보았고, 이런 합리적이고 이기적인 인간을 단위로한 전체 사회를 조직하는 방식을 고민했단 점에서 홉스의 저작들이 보다 의의가 있는 게 아닐까. 자본주의 사회의 조직방식, 논리적으로 필연적인 정당성을 설명하는 데 있어, 자본주의와의 관련성을 너무 직접적으로 설명하다보니, 끼워맞춘 감이 있다.]

 

- Hobbes’ Bourgeois Equality

Valid only as models of bourgeois man and society. Simple physiological motions and forces were generalization from the behavior of men in society. [Can really the London and Paris on seventeenth century defined as Capitalism society in which reasonable, self-interested man generally populate?] Hobbes was alert to the role of the bourgeoisie in bringing on the Civil war.

 

To prevent the future civil war, Analyzed the bourgeoisie.

 

How can we reconcile Hobbes’ acceptance of bourgeois morality, and his prescription of a state designed to protect and facilitate a life of competition, with the contemporary bourgeois dislike or neglect of Hobbes doctrine?

 

He was so impressed with the divisive and destructive force of the competition for power which he put in his model, that he failed to see that the model also necessarily generates a class differentiation which can be expected to produce a class cohesion, at least in the class which is on its way up to the top.

 

Omitted the possibility of such cohesive class. [계급 갈등이나, 자본가 계급의 단결로 완성되는 절대 권력의 국가체. 자본가 계급이 국가, 민족 국가를 지배 도구로 필요로 했다는 것은 어느 정도 이해하는데, 자본가 계급이 노동 계급에 반하여서 국가를 수호할 때는 일치하는 이해관계를 갖고 있어도, 여타 이익에 관련해서는 필연적으로 여전히, 자신의 몫을 극대화하기 위해 남의 몫을 빼앗아야 하는, 자연 상태에 있으므로, 이들의 연합을 토대로 형성되는 국가체, 절대 권력 체는 맥퍼슨이 말하는 것마냥 안정적이라 하긴 어려울 것 같다. Class cohesion? 홉스가 이를 인지하였는지, 그렇지 않았는지는 책을 봐야 알 것 같다. 기존의 내 관심이나, 책을 읽는 동기와는 별개의 것. 마르크스와 너무 직접 연관을 찾으려는 느낌이 너무 강하다. 우선 나는 부르주아 발흥기의 근대적 인간을 예견했다는 점에 초점을 두는 게 적절할 듯.]

 

All men have innately an equal need of continued motion that he deduced equal right and hence the capacity for equal obligation. Unless he acknowledged fundamental sense equal, some would make a moral claiming unlimited superiority.

The need for a universal political obligation, he had to have the postulate of equality.

 

- Hobbes Justified

When guided by self-interest, some changed circumstances could seem profitable. Hobbes admits. ‘as long, and no loner, than the power lasting, by which he is able to protect them. For the right men have by Nature to protect themselves, when none else can protect them, can by no Covenant be relinquished.’

Individual self interest, however rational and however long-run, is not a sufficient cement to hold a society together.

The rational self-interest of Hobbes’ appetitive, calculation individuals, it may be objected, is bound to set up a perennial disposition to neglect or deny obligation to the sovereign.