Hobbes, Desire, and the Democratization of Rhetoric

Abstract

This article considers the modern melding of rhetoric and democracy by looking at the approach to rhetoric in the early-modern figure Thomas Hobbes. While other scholars have considered Hobbes's approach to rhetoric in terms of humanistic, Ramistic, and Aristotelian influences, I look at it in light of the psychagogic tradition of rhetoric still active in the Renaissance. Reading Hobbes in light of the psychagogic tradition makes his approach to rhetoric less equivocal or contradictory than is often supposed, even as it helps us see in Hobbes's work a concerted effort to democratize rhetoric. I conclude that the real tension Hobbes presents us with is not found in his approach to rhetoric, which is relatively consistent, but rather in what his work suggests about the tensions of a democratized rhetoric.

Acknowledgments

I want to thank Katya Haskins and the anonymous reviewers for their excellent feedback, the result of which is a much improved article. The first version of this article was written for a panel on Hobbes organized by the late Jim Aune at the 2010 Rhetoric Society of America conference. This, its final version, is dedicated to Jim's memory.

Notes

1. As I will be regularly referring to several of Hobbes's texts, in parenthetically citing them I use an abbreviated title and page number format, where L represents Leviathan, DC represents On the Citizen (an English translation of De Cive), DH represents On Man (an English translation of De Homine), E represents Elements of Law, and B represents A Briefe of the Arte of Rhetorique. For De Cive, in general I rely on the Tuck and Silverthorne translation (Hobbes 1998); however, in some instances, for specific wording I use the translation (apparently falsely) attributed to Hobbes printed in Man and Citizen edited by Gert (Hobbes 1991). When using the latter I will note it with the phrase “translation attributed to Hobbes.”

2. I note at the outset of my argument here that I do not intend to claim that psychagogia was the exclusive source of Hobbes's conception of rhetoric as a manipulative psychological power, primarily affective rather than deliberative in force. As Richard Tuck has argued, Ciceronian ideals were widely challenged in Hobbes's day by a Tacitus-inspired interest in the “techniques of manipulation” in politics. Indeed, such political philosophy, in addition to rhetorical precepts, no doubt shaped Hobbes's approach to suasion. Still, from the perspective of rhetoric's histories it is important to argue that Tacitian teachings alone do not adequately account for Hobbes's account of rhetoric and eloquentia. On Hobbes and Tacitian critiques of Cicero in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, see Richard Tuck's introduction to Hobbes's Leviathan (Hobbes 1996, xiv–xx), as well as Tuck's (1993) Philosophy and Government.

3. See Sorrell (1990) for an extensive discussion of the way in which Hobbes's conception of rhetoric in the Briefe represents a departure from Aristotle's conception of rhetoric as the antistrophos of dialectic.

4. Hobbes's poor view of popular audiences is discussed in Johnston (1986, chap. 5). Howell (1961) notes that the idea that logic was meant for learned audiences whereas rhetoric was best for popular audiences was a commonplace of the English Renaissance.

5. Hobbes writes at the opening of Leviathan, “Nature (the Art whereby God hath made and governes the World) is by the Art of man, as in many other things, so in this also imitated, that it can make an Artificial Animal” (9). Hobbes here seems to be saying that art imitates nature—in keeping, for example, with Sidney's (1989) general argument in the Defence of Poesy, lines 157–201. However, the rest of the paragraph makes clearer what this opening line suggests: human artifice imitates God's artifice, which means that humans imitate God. This line of thinking, of course, would have been quite familiar to Christian Europe, given biblical notion of the imago dei, but Hobbes asserts it in a somewhat unorthodox fashion to justify the construction of the “Common-wealth, or State (in latine Civitas) which is but an Artificial Man; though of greater stature and strength than the Naturall, for whose protection and defence it was intended” (L, 9).

6. See Zappen (1983, 75–78).

7. Karl R. Wallace (1967) notes that Bacon does not share the assumption of Pico della Mirandola that the imagination was “more mindlike than sensory.” Pico described the imagination as working alongside reason to perform broader cognitive operations (72). Bacon, on the other hand, saw the imagination merely as a kind of sensory register, upon which reason could operate, but not that which reason organically operated with.

8. Bacon's reading of Aristotle in this regard was not entirely strained. As Hawhee (2011) and O'Gorman (2005) each show, pathê and phantasia played a vital role in Aristotle's account of the topics in the Rhetoric.

9. The argument I make here is itself not about Hobbes's historical development—that is, I am not interested in arguing that at some historical point he “broke” with history in favor of science. Rather, it is philosophical in nature: conceptually, I argue that Hobbes's approach to rhetoric is fundamentally scientific. For two different discussions of science and history in Hobbes, see Skinner (1996, chaps. 6–8) and Johnston (1986, chaps. 1–2).

10. The aspects of physics are listed in the introduction to De Cive as “Time, Place, Cause, Power, Relation, Proportion, Quantity, Figure, and Motion;” and of the study of “man” as “imagination, memory, understanding, reasoning, appetite, will, Good and Evil, Moral and Immoral, and other such topics” (13).

11. See Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1359b, 10–15. See Leviathan, chapter 15, p. 107, for one instance of Hobbes's refutation of the “political animal” thesis of Aristotle.

12. Consequently, Hobbes is able to present speech as but the first and foremost step in a technological continuity that passes through writing and culminates in his own day in printing (L, 24). Each is a human word invention, each an expression of the human will to signify.

13. This is a consequence of Hobbes's nominalism. “Error,” he says, can occur apart from speech, but not falsity, for error is a matter of miscalculation—which can happen, it seems, in mental discourse apart from speech (L, 36)—whereas falsity depends on the additional attribution of meaning possible only through speech.

14. Indeed, Hobbes goes so far as to suggest that such copiousness is a product of God's judgment at Babel, where not only the “diversity of Tongues” erupted but these tongues over time “grew every where more copious” (L, 25).

15. Indeed, parataxis, as Harwood (1986, 28) has shown, is a form of rhetorical addition of which Hobbes is fond.

16. I realize that consent is a term of controversy in democratic theory. The basic distinction I am drawing here between consent and assent need not take up these controversies. A Hobbesian sense of assent is virtually unqualified in its submission (save for a direct threat to one's own life). In contrasting to this Hobbesian sense of democratic “consent” I mean only to point to the way in which submission in a democracy, whether to a law, a state authority, or an election result, is always qualified. Laws are sometimes broken in the name of democracy, authorities defied, and election results deemed “undemocratic.” Hobbes writes in the Leviathan that all political societies depend on arbitrators, the judgments of which must stand (32–33); true enough. But the way in which those judgments stand constitutes a critical difference between more democratic and more authoritarian societies.