Freedom's Progress?: A History of Political Thought,
by Gerard Casey
Proponents of liberty cannot escape confronting the issue that came to
full fruition in the Enlightenment: liberty and tyranny both found freedom as a
result. Classical liberals cannot just point to Locke and Jefferson
as the offspring. In this post I will examine the Enlightenment’s
evil twin – as represented in Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Thomas Hobbes
His ideas…are especially
challenging to any libertarian who would wish to see the state minimised or
eliminated. That said, there are elements of his thought that any
liberal would welcome.
Casey offers that more than
half of Leviathan is about religion, and some take this as the
most important part of his work. One can glean Hobbes’ view on
religion by the following:
Hobbes’s overall thought was
fundamentally materialist…. For Hobbes, all that ultimately exists is matter in
motion. …even the extremely complex social and political world too was
explicable in materialistic terms.
Hobbes treated all of nature –
human nature as well as non-human nature – as a vast system of mechanical
causes from which purpose was to be excluded.
No room for religion there; no
man created in God’s image; no possibility of an afterlife; no reason to think
beyond the immediacy of the moment; no reason to consider the means to an end;
no reason to consider any ends other than he who dies with the most toys
wins.
Hobbes, like many thinkers of
his time, was enamored with the logic of mathematics and applying this logic to
human action and behavior. We today would call this the axiomatic
method: starting with as few axioms as possible – and using only pure reason –
producing “a rich and complicated set of theorems (deductions), all
interconnected and all derived, in a strict logical chain, from the basic
axioms.”
Two things can go wrong: first,
one can make a mistake in reasoning; second, one’s axioms might not be as
axiomatic as one believes. One cannot read this and not ask, “what
about Austrian Economics?” Casey addresses this:
This isn’t to deny that any
given empirical science may have at its theoretical heart a core of
conceptually interrelated elements as, for example, does Austrian economics; it
is simply to reject the ultra-rationalist idea that the axiomatic method
is the scientific method par excellence.
I will leave it to those who
are far more qualified in both understanding the conceptual underpinnings of
Austrian Economics and Hobbes’ methodology to separate one from the other. On
the surface, it seems clear to me that Austrians, unlike Hobbes, accept that
not all values are material – a factor that will greatly reduce error by Austrians. But
this might explain the different conclusions, and not necessarily offer an
explanation as to why such deductive reasoning is or is not a valid
tool. Perhaps it is not any more complicated than challenging the
axioms….
Hobbes finds man to be “spontaneously
self-seeking, acquisitive and aggressive.” Although man is not only
these things, it is on these things that Hobbes builds his
philosophy. Based on this, Hobbes offers that there is no such thing
as right and wrong, no such thing as civic virtue, no such thing as justice or
injustice. No room for natural law here.
For this reason, the
all-powerful state is necessary – to keep man from acting as he would in his
natural condition. Casey examines the significant contradiction in
Hobbes’ thought: if this is man’s nature, from where will the man come who can
rule properly? More fundamentally: if this is man’s nature, how will
man ever be able to come to agreement (contract) on bringing that man to power?
Casey summarizes Hobbes as
follows:
Where we have Leviathan, we
have no distinction between morals and law. …Hobbes rejects any robust
conception of natural law or any idea that custom, tradition and habit have any
normative force except insofar as the sovereign condescends to enforce it, either
explicitly or tacitly. …there is no distinction between society and
state. Without Leviathan, there is no state; without Leviathan,
there is no society. Hobbes rejects the idea that sovereigns can be
subject to the law.
Casey concludes that Hobbes’ philosophy
has turned into today’s generally accepted reality.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
As a human being, a real
scumbag:
He was self-centered, vain,
self-pitying, narcissistic, and he yoked all these unattractive traits to an
irrepressible lust for self-publicity.
And this is before he abandoned
each of his five children to an orphanage – where two-thirds of all babies died
within the first year. Is this relevant to his thought?
In Rousseau’s vision, the State
becomes father to all and all citizens become children in the State orphanage.
While this was the fate
Rousseau desired for us, for himself Rousseau wanted a world that was fit for
him, a heaven that was deserving of his presence and a God worthy of his
love. Further, Rousseau perhaps best demonstrated the progression
from the medieval man to the progressive:
Whereas the medieval period had
been an attempt to come to grips with our world by means of reason and
revelation, and the early modern period had kept reason while ditching
revelation, Rousseau’s romanticism went one better than the early moderns and
ditched both revelation and reason, seeking and finding its home in sentiment
and feeling.
To suggest that Rousseau’s writing
was confused and confusing might be an understatement; yet one cannot
underestimate his influence on all political thought since: Robespierre, Kant,
Hegel, Schiller, Shelley, Mill, Marx, Levi-Strauss, Foucault, and Derrida –
each can be labeled a follower or admirer.
A child of the liberation of
Enlightenment, Rousseau offered what can be described as an attack on the
entire Enlightenment project – an attack on reason and
science. Preferring feeling to intellect, tradition to
enlightenment, and faith to science, it all sounds so stereotypically
traditional…missing only one ingredient: God.
Casey describes Rousseau’s
notion of the General Will as “simply baffling…incoherent.” It is
what we each would will if we only knew what was good for us;
the difference of what we think we want versus what we really (unknowingly)
want. Thus, Rousseau’s notion that man must be forced to be
free makes perfect sense – it is just that we do not understand what
being free means.
Thus, Rousseau provides cover
for Marxists – we are unknowing tools of a capitalist ideology – and devout
feminists – believers in the sexist mind-control of the
Patriarchy. To Casey, Rousseau is both authoritarian and
totalitarian:
Rousseau is a, if not the,
source of the damaging regime of social engineering that has dominated liberal
western thought, in particular since the middle of the twentieth century.
Conclusion
For Rousseau, man in the state of nature is neither social nor
anti-social, neither moral nor immoral; he is, rather, asocial and amoral.
Man without God is this: little more than an animal in the
wild. Subtracting God from man: Hobbes and Rousseau finalized what
the Renaissance began. These two, perhaps more than any others, have
influenced our age.
By their fruits we know them.
