Personality, authority, and self-esteem in Hobbes’s Leviathan

ABSTRACT

This paper offers a novel interpretation of the theory of the personality of the state put forward in Hobbes’s Leviathan. Hobbes’s account of political representation does not conceive of the state as a “purely artificial person” or “person by fiction,” as Quentin Skinner and David Runciman have argued. Rather, Hobbes regards the state as an artificial person that is closely analogous to natural persons. The state’s integrity as well as the limits of its legitimate authority are based on normative constraints on impersonation that apply to a person’s self-representation as much as to political representation by sovereign authority. These constraints, it is argued here, result from what Hobbes considers to be the proper measure of individual self-esteem, a measure that eschews both inordinate pride and excessive humility.

KEYWORDS:

• Hobbes
• Leviathan
• personality
• sovereignty
• self-esteem

Hobbes’s account of political representation is presented in the form of a theory of the personality of the state, which is developed mainly in chapter 16 of Leviathan.¹ In this chapter, Hobbes distinguishes between natural and artificial persons, and he goes on to draw a further distinction between different kinds of artificial persons. In some cases of artificial personality, Hobbes points out, the representatives “have their words and actions owned by those whom they represent.”² The represented are human beings who are themselves capable of authorizing representatives and of assuming authorship of the actions of the representatives. But there are also relationships of representation in which the represented entities are “things Inanimate,” like “a Church, an Hospital, a Bridge,”³ which are themselves incapable of authorizing representatives or of assuming authorship of the actions of their representatives.

Oddly enough, Hobbes never tells the reader of Leviathan how this classification of personality is to be applied to the state. Of course, the state cannot be a natural person. But this still leaves us with the question of what kind of artificial person the state is supposed to be. In what has become the orthodox view⁴ of the matter, associated with Quentin Skinner and David Runciman, the Hobbesian state must be an artificial person of the second kind, a “purely artificial person” (Skinner)⁵ or a “person by fiction” (Runciman),⁶ akin to the church, the hospital, or the bridge. Hobbes, according to the orthodox account, distinguished sharply between sovereign authorization and sovereign representation. While the sovereign is authorized by individual subjects, the sovereign does not represent individual subjects but rather the purely artificial or fictional person of the state. The people, as a result, can never speak up against the sovereign as individual subjects, as they are all obliged, by virtue of having authorized the state to act in their name, to own all the decisions of the sovereign representative of the state. The people cannot speak up as a politically united group, as the state or collective person of the group exists only insofar as it is represented by the sovereign.⁷

It will be argued here that it is wrong to claim that Hobbes took the state to be a purely artificial person or a person by fiction.⁸ The Hobbesian state cannot be the personification of a thing inanimate like a church, a hospital, or a bridge that is incapable of authorizing or assuming authorship of the sovereign’s acts. The person of Hobbes’s state, rather, is an artificial person of the first kind. It is nothing more than a set of direct relationships of representation between a sovereign and the subjects who authorize and own the sovereign’s acts.⁹

Under this interpretation, Hobbes’s theory of representation loses at least some of its authoritarian sting. It remains true that subjects have no formal legal recourse against sovereign decisions they hold to be unreasonable or unduly burdensome. If the sovereign directly represents subjects, however, his authority will nevertheless turn out to be limited. Hobbes holds that there are limits on what behavior I can own in bearing my own person or representing myself, limits that are given by what Hobbes takes to be the proper measure of self-esteem, one that eschews both inordinate pride and excessive humility. These limits equally apply to all cases in which I am to own or assume authorship of decisions that the sovereign claims to take on my behalf.

1. The orthodox view

It has often been pointed out that the language in which Hobbes talks about the personality of the state is not entirely consistent.¹⁰ Some passages in Leviathan lend support to the view that the sovereign represents the state but not the subjects who authorize the sovereign. For instance, Hobbes describes the sovereign chosen by the majority of the participants in a social contract as having “the Right to Present the person of them all.”¹¹ Here, the person that is represented by the sovereign seems to be a collective person. In the same vein, Hobbes claims that the people must be understood as “one Person, which person the Soveraign bears.”¹² This use of “person” in the singular also occurs in Hobbes’s description of the social contract. The participants in a social contract appoint a sovereign, Hobbes explains, “to beare their Person,” or the person of the commonwealth, not to bear their several individual persons.¹³ These locutions suggest that the person of the state, represented by the sovereign, is to be distinguished from the mere sum of the individual persons of the authorizing subjects.

There are other passages in which Hobbes seems to claim that a sovereign directly represents his individual subjects. Hobbes holds, for example, that “it is the Unity of the Representer, not the Unity of the Represented, that maketh the Person One,”¹⁴ which apparently implies that the sovereign represents their subjects, and not an artificial person of the state. What is more, to argue against any division of powers, Hobbes points out that it is impossible for a subject “to have his person represented by two Actors that by opposing one another”¹⁵ would divide sovereignty. In a discussion distinguishing limited and unlimited representation, Hobbes pronounces that “the Soveraign, in every Commonwealth, is the absolute Representative of all the subjects.”¹⁶

Skinner, in his seminal article Hobbes and the Purely Artificial Person of the State, which initiated the current debate on Hobbes’s theory of political representation, tried to overcome the problem of inconclusive textual evidence by focusing on Hobbes’s official definition of personality:

A Person, is he, whose words or actions are considered, either as his own, or as representing the words or actions of an other man, or of any other thing to whom they are attributed, whether Truly or by Fiction. When they are considered as his owne, then is he called a Naturall Person: And when they are considered as representing the words and actions of an other, then is he a Feigned or Artificiall person.¹⁷

Skinner argued that “strict grammar requires that the referent of the final ‘he’ should be ‘an other’, so that the artificial person must be the person represented,”¹⁸ and not the representative, even though this latter reading might seem to be more intuitive. What makes some entity an artificial person is the fact that it is represented by someone else. Natural persons, by contrast, possess their natural personality independently of any form of representation.¹⁹ As the person of the state is obviously an artificial person, Skinner went on to argue, it must be something that can fill the slot of the represented in a relationship of representation. But there are only two kinds of entities that can play that role. In some cases of representation, the person being represented, i.e. the artificial person, is also a natural person capable, in principle, of acting in her own name. There are other cases of representation in which the artificial persons are not natural persons but persons who cannot act unless they are represented, which makes them purely artificial in comparison to artificial persons who are also natural persons.

This category of purely artificial persons includes children and the mentally ill, as well as personifications of inanimate objects and figments of the imagination, like Hobbes’s church, hospital, or bridge.²⁰ Skinner held that the personality of the state must likewise fall into this category.²¹ If an artificial person is what is represented in a relationship of representation and if what is represented in a relationship of representation either has to be an artificial person that is also a natural person or a purely artificial person, the state obviously has to be a purely artificial person, represented by the sovereign.

Hobbes’s definition, however, appears to identify the artificial person with the representative and not with the represented. Without further backing from a more encompassing understanding of Hobbes’s aims and of the overall structure of his argument, Skinner’s analysis of Hobbes’s definition of personality can hardly be decisive. Skinner, at any rate, has distanced himself from the claim that Hobbes’s state is a purely artificial person and has come, instead, to endorse Runciman’s view that Hobbes’s state is a person by fiction.²²

The difference between the two views, however, is not all that important for our purposes. Runciman’s terminology picks up on Hobbes’s observation that representation can occur truly or by fiction. The first limb of the distinction, Runciman argues, applies to what I have referred to above as artificial personality of the first kind; that is, to cases in which those who are represented have authorized their representative. The second limb, by contrast, applies to artificial personality of the second kind, to instances in which the represented entity lacks the ability to authorize a representative. In such cases, Runciman claims, the attribution of the representative’s actions to the represented entity is fictional. He concludes that the state must be a person by fiction.²³

Hobbes, Runciman suggests, thought of the state as an institution with its own identity and continuity, an identity and continuity not tied to the personal identity of the sovereign representative. While he wanted to avoid conceiving of the state or the political community as a real person capable of acting on its own (and perhaps against the sovereign representative), Hobbes also wanted the state to be “something more than the random congruence of the multitude.”²⁴ Given these intentions, Runciman claims, Hobbes must have conceived of the state as a person by fiction, distinct from both the person of the sovereign as well as the multitude of authorizing subjects.

To attribute to Hobbes a concern with the stability and continuity of the state is plausible, but the observation that Hobbes was so concerned will suffice to vindicate the orthodox view only if there is no other interpretation of Hobbes’s theory of representation that can establish the unity and continuity of the state. The search for such an alternative conception, I believe, is also adequately motivated by a systematic difficulty for the Skinner–Runciman view that has not been satisfactorily addressed by either Skinner or Runciman, though they have both acknowledged it.²⁵

The sovereign, under the orthodox view, represents the state, not his subjects, and the state is incapable of owning or authorizing the sovereign’s acts. Hobbes, however, undoubtedly argues that subjects authorize the sovereign representative and that they have a duty to own the sovereign’s decisions;²⁶ these are claims that, at first glance, would seem to fit better with the view that the state is one of the artificial persons, in which the representative’s acts are authorized and therefore owned by the represented. If the Hobbesian state is to be a purely artificial person, we must explain how it is possible for individual subjects to come to have an obligation to own actions that are not undertaken in their name but in the name of the state as a purely artificial person or a person by fiction.

The answer to this question, as Skinner acknowledged,²⁷ will have to rest on Hobbes’s general account of the authorization of artificial persons. Hobbes holds that, “by Authority, is always understood a Right of doing any act: and done by Authority, done by Commission, or Licence from him whose right it is.”²⁸ In other words, to be able to act by authority, a representative must exercise someone else’s right to perform some act in their name. This notion of authorization is easily applicable to the first category of artificial person that Hobbes acknowledges. If the represented are natural persons, they can authorize their representatives directly, by granting the latter the power to exercise their own rights on their behalf. But who is to authorize the representative of a purely artificial person? A purely artificial person, as we have already seen, cannot authorize its representative because it is incapable of acting on its own.

Hobbes’s answer to the problem is that the authority of the representative of such entities is derived from a third party, namely from “those that are Owners, or Governours of those things” or human beings. A Church, for example, has legal personality insofar as a representative – Hobbes calls him a “Rector, Master, or Overseer” – can act on its behalf, but the church itself, because it is an inanimate entity, cannot authorize that representative. The authorization of the representative, in the case of purely artificial persons, requires that there be a third person who can authorize the representative, in virtue of holding a position of ownership over the purely artificial person to be represented by the representative.²⁹

The context of Hobbes’s remarks about the representation of inanimate things strongly suggests that he did not intend them to explain the nature of the personality of the state. Hobbes emphasizes, in the relevant two paragraphs, that the personification of inanimate things (or human beings incapable of acting on their own) can take place only after we have left the state of nature.³⁰ He describes the rights that allow some natural person or group of natural persons to authorize the representative of an artificial person of the second kind as rights of dominion. The idea seems to be that we, as holders of rights of private property, could decide, for instance, to assign a fund to a hospital which will then be used by an administrator or trustee of the hospital to pay for its upkeep. A dying parent, to give another example, might bequest property to a child in nonage, but appoint a guardian to administer the property for the child. However, rights of property that allow for such legal constructions do not exist, as Hobbes points out, outside of civil society. Speaking of the bridge, the church, and the hospital, Hobbes consequently affirms, without introducing any kind of qualification, that “such things cannot be personated before there be some state of Civill Government.”³¹

This comes rather close to an explicit disavowal of the orthodox view. Evidently, if purely artificial persons or persons by fiction cannot be personated before there is a government, as there are no rights of property in a state of nature that are assignable to such persons, rights which could then be exercised by a representative, it will follow that the state cannot be an artificial person of that kind. One might reply that Hobbes took the person of the state to be a special type of artificial person of the second kind: one that can be personated before there is a civil government while all other artificial persons of the second kind cannot, but there is no direct textual evidence in Leviathan for the claim that Hobbes held such a view.³²

2. The relational conception of personality

Recall that Skinner’s initial claim that the state is a purely artificial person rested on the assumption that an artificial person is what is represented in a relationship of representation. Because the state is an artificial person, but not a natural person capable of authorizing a representative, it must be a purely artificial person or, if we prefer Runciman’s terminology, a person by fiction. To avoid this conclusion, one might argue that an artificial person is the person who fills the role of representative in a relationship of representation, and not that which is represented. After all, Hobbes’s definition of personality claims that an artificial person is someone whose words or actions are considered as someone else’s. This approach, however, would force us to say that the sovereign is the person of the state, which is clearly false and appears to conflict with Hobbes’s repeated claim that the sovereign bears the person of the state.

We will not be able to extricate ourselves from this quandary as long as we assume that an artificial person must either be what is represented in a relationship of representation or else be the person who holds the position of representative in a relationship of representation.³³ Hobbes embraced a third option. What I take Hobbes to be saying, even though he does not always express himself clearly in using the term “person,” is that all persons, including natural persons, consist of relationships of representation.³⁴ Some of these relationships are relationships of self-representation (natural persons), while others are relationships of representation in which the representative acts for some other rational being or for some entity incapable of acting for itself (artificial persons). In none of these cases can the person be identified either with what is represented or with what does the representing. A person, for Hobbes, is always a relationship (or set of relationships) of representation.

Hobbes remarks that the word “person” originally signified the mask ancient actors wore on stage to impersonate their roles.³⁵ This use, according to Hobbes, has been transferred “to any Representer of speech and action, as well in Tribunalls, as theaters.”

So that a Person, is the same that an Actor is, both on the Stage and in common Conversation; and to Personate, is to Act or Represent himselfe, or an other; and he that acteth another, is said to beare his Person, or act in his name.³⁶

As this passage makes a claim about all kinds of persons, Hobbes’s understanding of natural personality can hardly have been based on the idea that natural personality differs from artificial personality in not involving representation. A literal reading of this passage would seem to imply that bearing a person is the same as wearing a mask or playing a role in front of an audience, and that role-playing or representing is taking place in cases in which someone acts in their own name just as much as in cases of artificial personality. Natural personality, put differently, consists in the capability of successful self-impersonation. The expression “bearing the person of x” does not refer specifically to cases of artificial personality. It describes a process that is constitutive of personality in all its forms.

Hobbes claims that “a Person, is the same that an Actor is.”³⁷ This might, once again, be taken to suggest that, in a case of artificial personality, the artificial person is he (or she) who is doing the representing in a relationship of representation; but this cannot be true, strictly speaking. Clearly, whoever does the representing in a relationship of representation is a representative or actor only insofar as there is someone or something else on whose behalf they can speak and be understood to do so by some relevant audience. Leaving aside the cases of the artistic representation in a stage play and of fraudulent claims to representation, there can be no actor without an author who will assume responsibility for the actor’s decisions or, alternatively, without some other entity to which liability for the actor’s decisions can be attributed by positive legal convention.

When Hobbes talks as though the artificial person were to be identified with the representative in a relationship of representation,³⁸ he is best understood, I conclude, as offering a shorthand expression of the relational account of personality. The relational account of personality does not carry the false implication that the sovereign qua natural person is identical with the person of the state. It claims, rather, that he (or she) who is the sovereign is a sovereign only insofar as they can successfully act in the name of others. We can say that the sovereign is the person of the state as long as we keep in mind that to say that someone is a sovereign is to say that they are a representative or an actor, and that this is to say that they stand in a certain kind of relationship to others, that there are others who are (and are known to be) willing and capable to assume authorship of the sovereign’s decisions. To say, with Hobbes, that the sovereign is he (i.e. the human being) who “bears” or carries the person of the state or the person “of them all”³⁹ is a succinct way of expressing the same idea. It is to say that there is someone whose actions – or, rather, some of whose actions – are not considered as his own but as belonging to every other member of society.

The relational account of personality holds that all persons, whether natural or artificial, are (bundles of) relationships of representation and that what is represented in any of those relationships is not itself the (or a) person. But what do actors or masks represent if they do not represent persons? According to the relational account of personality, there are two kinds of entities that are capable of being represented, and this leads to two broad categories of personality.⁴⁰ First, there are authors who may enter into author–actor relationships. Authors are human beings who are capable of self-government. They can either represent themselves by bearing their own person or authorize others to bear their person on their behalf. The mask remains theirs in either case. Hence, they are required, in either case, to own the actions performed in their name. Second, it is possible to personate inanimate things or animate beings incapable of self-government. Entities that lack a capacity for self-government are incapable of acting in their own name or of authorizing representatives to act on their behalf. They are capable of owning the actions of their representatives only once there is a positive legal system that allows us to assign positive legal rights to such entities, rights which may then be exercised in their name by appointed representatives. It should be clear that the state must be an author–actor relationship, an artificial person of the first of these two types. Hobbes cannot appeal to positive legal rights that are brought into existence by the state to construct the state.

Hobbes’s most elaborate explanation of the distinction between authors and actors and of the origin of actor–author relationships comes in the discussion of artificial persons whose actions are owned by those whom they represent:

Of Persons Artificiall, some have their words and actions Owned by those whom they represent. And then the Person is the Actor; and he that owneth his words and actions, is the Author: in which case the Actor acteth by Authority. For that which in speaking of goods and possessions, is called an Owner, and in latine Dominus, in Greeke kyrios; speaking of actions, is called an Author. And as the right of possession is called Dominion; so the right of doing any Action is called Authority and sometimes warrant. So that by Authority, is always understood a Right of doing any act: and done by Authority, done by Commission, or Licence from him whose right it is.⁴¹

The central claim Hobbes makes here is that being an author of actions is analogous to being a dominus or owner of a piece of property.⁴² To be a dominus is to have a power to dispose of a piece of property, within the limits of the law.⁴³ This includes the power to appoint someone else to dispose of that property on one’s behalf as well as the power to alienate it. If I appoint someone else to dispose of my property in my name, their actions will bind me as if I had taken them myself, for the simple reason that they are exercising my right of dominion. Assume, by contrast, I was to alienate some piece of property to someone else. In that case, I would no longer be bound to accept the new owner’s decisions as to what to do with the thing as my own, though I would be under an obligation not to interfere with new owner’s rightful use of my former property. Alienations of rights of ownership, in other words, do not constitute relationships of representation.

Hobbes claims that there is an analogy between authority, “the Right of doing any act,” and rights of property or dominion. It might have been more accurate to say that dominion is a special case of authority, of the right to do some act. The general claim is that, if someone acts by my authority, exercising my right, whether it be a right to property or some other right, then I must accept their decisions as my own and assume responsibility for them. The language of authority, of course, is put to use later on in the Leviathan to explain why we have to own the actions of the sovereign because they act in our name or by our authority.⁴⁴ For this argument to work out, the authority to do an act, the right the sovereign exercises in my name, still has to be mine for the sovereign actor to act by my authority or in my name, just as my property still has to be mine if I am to be responsible for how my private representative disposes of it. Only if this condition is met will I be liable to make satisfaction for the actor’s exercise of my right, either in the currency of my property or in the currency of my own behavior. Hobbes accordingly emphasizes that someone who acts by authority acts “by Commission or Licence from him whose right it is”⁴⁵ (and not from him whose right it was).

The orthodox view blurs this distinction between authorization and alienation. According to the orthodox approach, Hobbes wants to say both that our authority over our own acts has been alienated to the sovereign and that we are still bound by its exercise. Our authority over our own acts is first mysteriously reified into the fictional person of the state that can be held like a piece of property, and the dominion in that person is then alienated to the sovereign. As a result, the sovereign is not responsible to us for how he exercises the dominion of the person of the state. Because the sovereign acts in the name of the state, and because we are committed to assume authorship of all actions attributable to the state, we are nevertheless required to accept responsibility for the sovereign’s acts, no matter how arbitrary. The sovereign represents the artificial person of the state, not his subjects, but is still entitled to their unconditional obedience.

If an alienation of a piece of property cannot constitute a relationship of representation that makes the original owner liable for the acts of the new, however, the same must hold for the general case, for authority, the right to perform some act. We cannot be called upon to own actions done by a right that we alienated to the sovereign. If the sovereign acts by our authority, as Hobbes claims,⁴⁶ then the authority or the right by which he acts must still be ours.⁴⁷ The person of the state must be one of those artificial persons which “have their words and actions owned by those whom they represent.”⁴⁸ It cannot be Hobbes’s view, as Skinner claimed, consequently, that members of the multitude “have voluntarily ceded their right of self-government to be exercised by the sovereign on their behalf” and that they are consequently “under an absolute obligation not to interfere with their sovereign in the exercise of the rights they have transferred to him.”⁴⁹ A right that one has ceded or transferred cannot be exercised on one’s behalf, and one’s obligation not to interfere with someone else’s rightful dominion over a thing that one used to own does not give rise to a duty to assume responsibility for the new owner’s decisions.⁵⁰

We can avoid attributing such obvious confusions to Hobbes if we interpret him as endorsing the relational account of personality. When authors exercise the authority or right which they have over their own actions themselves, they act as natural persons. Artificial persons that consist of author–actor relationships rest on the very same foundation. They are derived, just like natural persons, from the authority that authors have over themselves. Instead of exercising their authority over their own actions by themselves, authors may let someone act in their name. An author, as what is represented in an author–actor relationship, is not a natural person, but rather a potential natural person, in virtue of a capacity for self-representation. This capacity for self-representation is precisely what makes an author into something that can either assume natural personality or fill the slot of the represented within artificial author–actor relationships.

Crucially, however, an author cannot do both at the same time. It is impossible, Hobbes insists, to represent oneself wherever one is validly represented by someone else. I can no longer exercise my authority over my own actions whenever a representative, acting in my name, has already done so.⁵¹ This claim, of course, carries Hobbes’s infamous and seemingly authoritarian view that subjects can never justifiably complain about the actions of the sovereign, as it would be absurd to complain about actions that are to be regarded as one’s own.⁵² Still, Hobbesian authority, even if it comes to be exercised by a sovereign on our behalf, always remains conceptually related to self-government. Decisions that a representative claims to have taken on the behalf of others have to be compatible with the authorship of the represented. A representative whose actions fail to be attributable to its purported authors is no longer bearing someone else’s mask.

3. Personality and the proper measure of self-esteem

As has already been argued, the author–actor relationships between subjects and sovereign that constitute the person of the state cannot be explained in terms of a conception of authority that involves the vicarious exercise of rights conferred by positive law, as such rights exist only where there is a state. Sovereignty, therefore, must consist in the vicarious exercise of a natural authority we possess over our own actions. Hence, we need to ask whether there is a form of natural authority over one’s own actions that is independent of positive law and that can serve as a ground of political representation by coming to be exercised by the sovereign on our behalf. The obvious candidate is Hobbes’s right of nature, the “liberty each man hath to use his own power, as he will himselfe, for the preservation of his own nature.”⁵³

The standard interpretation of the right of nature has it that the right is limited only by the limits of one’s physical liberty.⁵⁴ This would entail that very few of a sovereign’s decisions, purportedly taken in our name, could ever fail the test of compatibility with our authorship. If the defender of the relational account of personality wants to argue that the sovereign’s power is limited by restraints imposed by the authorship of the represented, she needs to show that Hobbes’s notion of self-representation or natural personality is not normatively vacuous. In other words, it needs to be established that there are decisions I cannot take in exercising my own right of nature and that, as a result, I cannot be committed to accept as my own if they are taken by someone else who claims to act in my name. What I would like to suggest is that Hobbes’s theory of the laws of nature in chapters 14 and 15 of Leviathan imposes the requisite limits on the right of nature.⁵⁵

This claim about the laws of nature may seem to be an obvious non-starter. Hobbes famously argues that right or liberty and law or obligation are inconsistent in one and the same thing.⁵⁶ The laws of nature are improperly called laws in the state of nature, Hobbes points out, as they are only “Conclusions, or Theoremes concerning what conduceth to the conservation and defence” of human beings which bind only “in foro interno” but not “in foro externo; that is, to the putting them in act.”⁵⁷ This description is often understood to imply that the laws of nature simply do not bind in the state of nature.⁵⁸ If this interpretation were correct, the laws of nature, needless to say, could not serve as a practical standard for the valid exercise of one’s right of nature. One’s possession of a right of nature in the state of nature would mark the absence of restraints imposed by laws of nature, and if the sovereign exercises our right of nature in our name, then sovereign authority, or so it would seem, must turn out to be similarly unconstrained.

Note, however, that the laws of nature presented in Leviathan are connected to a list of virtues and vices, understood as dispositions to respect or to disrespect the laws of nature.⁵⁹ The laws of nature, Hobbes claims, prohibit actions proceeding from motives like injustice, ingratitude, stubbornness, cruelty, arrogance, or iniquity, and they demand that we develop the virtues contrary to these vices. Hobbes conceives of these virtues as virtues of sociability. It is a law of nature, for instance, to exhibit “compleasance”; that is, to “strive to accommodate [oneself] to the rest.”⁶⁰ To show contempt for others or to express the view, like Aristotle in putting forward his theory of natural slavery, that one is, by nature, “the better man” is to exhibit the anti-social vices of contumely and pride. Differences of rank, Hobbes argues, can never be natural. To the extent that they legitimately exist, they must rest on positive sovereign decision, as it is one of the sovereign’s prerogatives to assign titles of honor.⁶¹ Other laws of nature require that we show gratitude to those from whom we have received benefits and that we be willing to forgive past insults and injuries in the interest of future peace.⁶² The most important of the virtues of sociability that Hobbes is concerned to inculcate, of course, is trustworthiness. We are to avoid disappointing the expectations concerning our own conduct that we have encouraged in others and to be faithful to our promises.⁶³ The reason why Hobbes takes the cultivation of these virtues of sociability to be of crucial importance is clear. They condition one’s chances to acquire and maintain membership in a group formed for mutual assistance, and such membership is necessary with a view to self-preservation, given that no individual’s personal strength will suffice to offer reliable protection.

While it may seem unclear whether an inhabitant of the state of nature ought to observe the laws of nature in outer act, the text leaves little doubt that Hobbes takes his conception of virtue to apply to inhabitants of the state of nature. Hobbes argues that one can violate the law of nature not just in foro externo, by performing acts visibly contrary to natural law, but also in foro interno, through actions that proceed from vicious motives.⁶⁴ There is no good reason to deny that actions performed in the state of nature might be driven by cruelty, arrogance, iniquity, and the like, and Hobbes explicitly claims that actions that stem from any of these vices, and hence violate the law of nature in foro interno, “can never be made lawful.”⁶⁵ Though actions that violate the law of nature in foro interno do not usually qualify as crimes, they are still to be regarded as sins, according to Hobbes, because they express contempt for God as the source of the laws of nature.⁶⁶ If the laws of nature, in the state of nature, ground a distinction between sinful and non-sinful conduct, Hobbes cannot have held that they give no guidance whatsoever outside of civil society. He must have acknowledged a difference between following or not following the law of nature at least from the perspective of the individual conscience.⁶⁷

The problem of the state of nature is that it is difficult for us to ascertain whether someone else’s behavior complies with the law of nature in foro interno or not, because it will usually be impossible to infer the true motive of an action from an observation of the outer act. It might be necessary, to preserve oneself in the state of nature, say, to ambush an unsuspecting person. If I believe in good faith, given the situation, that I am pre-empting a potential threat to my own life, I am following the laws of nature in foro interno. I would not be following the laws of nature if I attacked only to satisfy a sadistic desire to humiliate others or to glory in my strength. If you see me acting violently, however, you will typically not be able to conclude that I violated the law of nature in foro interno; not unless you can demonstrate that my action could not have been motivated by a sincere attachment to the goal of self-preservation.⁶⁸

In the state of nature, such demonstrations, of course, are hard to come by. It will rarely be the case that an act of aggression cannot be interpreted as an act of pre-emptive self-defense. Still, Hobbes does not claim that it is always impossible, in the state of nature, for an observer to infer disrespect for the law of nature from outer behavior. Though he admittedly tends to waver on the point,⁶⁹ Hobbes clearly suggests in several passages of Leviathan that there could be cases in which it will be perfectly possible for us to see that a particular course of action is incompatible with the respect for the laws of nature in foro interno. The unwillingness to forgive a past insult when faced with an offer of peace,⁷⁰ the breach of a contract in which the other party has already performed,⁷¹ or the killing of a mediator who has come to negotiate for peace⁷² would, for example, allow an observer to conclude that the agent is disrespectful of the law of nature.⁷³ Some actions can be judged to violate the law of nature, even outside of civil society.⁷⁴

Hobbes’s right of nature should be interpreted accordingly. The right of nature, it will be recalled, is “the Liberty each man hath, to use his own power, as he will himselfe, for the preservation of his own nature.”⁷⁵ This formulation suggests that the right does not give us permission to perform acts that manifestly contravene the laws of nature, acts that cannot possibly be interpreted as undertaken in pursuit of self-preservation. Hobbes claims, rather, that we are at liberty to do whatever someone in our position might reasonably believe conduces to self-preservation. We are immune from blame if our behavior is not manifestly inconsistent with a sincere desire to preserve ourselves, but the right of nature does not provide a justification to disrespect the laws of nature, whether in foro interno or in outer act.⁷⁶

Our natural authority over our own acts, our ability to act in our own name, is therefore subject to a normative constraint. I will act by my authority – I will be capable to act in my name or to represent myself in social intercourse with others – only as long as my behavior can be understood to express a sincere concern for my self-preservation; that is, only as long as it is consistent with virtue, understood as an unfeigned and motivationally efficacious disposition to seek peace, which results from a proper understanding of one’s own authentic interest in self-preservation and the limitations of one’s personal strength. If my observable behavior is inconsistent with the presumption that I am willing to give peace if others are willing to do the same and to stand by my word, because I am blinded by exaggerated self-esteem and take myself to be their natural superior, others will rightly judge that I am unfit to participate in a social contract and to be received into civil society.

In case I am so ostracized, I will be incapable to bear my own person or to act in my own name. To be capable to bear my own person or to act in my own name is for me to be able to commit myself to others; that is, to give them my word and to receive uptake for my promises.⁷⁷ Without the capability to bear my own person, so understood, I cannot participate in a social contract and become a member of a civil society. To be a member of a civil society, in turn, is the condition, according to Hobbes, for the possession of legally enforceable claim-rights against others, such as the right to be free from the coercive interference of others or the right to possess and to dispose of private property. The ability to act in one’s own name in the exercise of such positive legal rights depends on one’s prior ability to commit oneself to others in the social contract; and that ability, to repeat, requires that one’s observable behavior not be manifestly incompatible with the laws of nature. Successful self-impersonation demands respect for the laws of nature, as it would result from a proper measure of self-esteem.

An agent who is capable of self-impersonation will be disposed to defer to the positive laws enacted by a sovereign. Once there is a civil society, it becomes possible reasonably to entrust one’s concern for self-preservation to the positive laws and to treat these laws as pre-empting one’s own piecemeal judgments on what is conducive to one’s self-preservation. Once it is possible reasonably to entrust one’s concern for self-preservation to the positive laws, it is also necessary, from the perspective of the virtuous person, to do so, as the peace afforded by general obedience to the laws of civil society cannot possibly be less conducive to self-preservation than war.⁷⁸

A rational agent’s commitment to the laws of nature in foro interno nevertheless remains their primary allegiance even within civil society. Our right of nature is inalienable and is not transferred to the sovereign in the social contract. The sovereign, rather, is authorized to exercise it in our name. Our concern with self-preservation does not permit us to promise, in the social contract, to obey a ruler come what may. We must remain judges, in the last instance, of how best to procure our own self-preservation.⁷⁹ This inalienability of natural right has both a normative and a psychological dimension. What we cannot do by our own authority or our own right, to act in ways clearly inimical to our self-preservation and manifestly disrespectful of the law of nature, a sovereign cannot do in our name; but what we cannot do by our own right, we cannot do at all if we are disposed to respect the laws of nature.

Hobbes claims that human beings are motivationally incapable voluntarily to act against what they perceive to be their greater good.⁸⁰ If people fail to act in line with the law of nature, they do so because they lack an adequate grasp of their greater good or of the conditions for its realization.⁸¹ Self-preservation is the only authentic good.⁸² To act so as to realize the greater good, therefore, is to do what maximizes one’s chances of self-preservation, and what maximizes one’s chances of self-preservation, Hobbes claims, is to be disposed to follow the laws of nature in foro interno.⁸³ To also spread this message, Hobbes believes, is the best safeguard against tyranny. Because we are motivationally incapable voluntarily to act against what we perceive as our greater good, a correct understanding of our own good and of the conditions of its realization will make it impossible for us to accord authority to a sovereign who manifestly fails to act in ways of which a rational agent could take authorship.

Throughout Leviathan, Hobbes attacks ancient political philosophy,⁸⁴ scholastic theology,⁸⁵ the belief in miracles and fraudulent claims to prophecy,⁸⁶ and the inordinate pride engendered by aristocratic conceptions of personal honor⁸⁷ as delusions that prevent us from remaining focused on the goal of self-preservation, that carry us to disruption of the peace and disrespect for the laws of nature. Hobbes expects that once we are freed from the influence of these delusions through proper instruction in “the Science of what is Good, and Evill, in the conversation and Society of man-kind,”⁸⁸ we will become disposed to follow the laws of nature in foro interno.

The success of this educational project would, of course, eliminate spurious motivations for disobedience to sovereign authority,⁸⁹ but it would equally eliminate spurious motivations for obedience that are bound to arise from the slavish humility that tends to go along with a lack of self-esteem. Certain common justifications for claims to absolute authority will no longer be motivationally efficacious in a community of subjects who are perfectly virtuous in the Hobbesian sense. The relational account of the personality of the state implies that subjects ought to defer to a sovereign only if they are capable of owning the decisions he takes in their name. It therefore rules out claims to authority grounded on, for example, the idea that political authority is God’s punishment for the wicked and is to be patiently endured even in cases in which it tyrannizes us. It rules out the idea that one ought to be willing to sacrifice oneself for the greater glory of one’s religion or nation. It leaves no room for the view that one could have an unconditional duty to obey a ruler, even when the ruler fails to offer protection, because one chose to alienate one’s authority over oneself to the sovereign. Once such spurious justifications for obedience are no longer available, a sovereign’s claim to represent their subjects must fail to find recognition whenever a sovereign takes decisions subjects could not have taken in their own name.

One might object here that the resulting lapses of authority will be restricted to the sovereign’s relationship of representation to only a few of their subjects. The sovereign’s claim to represent me, Hobbes appears to suggest at times, will only fail if obedience would endanger my own self-preservation, but not in case the sovereign’s decisions endanger others. Hobbes argues that I have a right to resist a sovereign’s attempts to deprive me of physical liberty, but he also claims that I have a duty not to interfere with the sovereign’s attempts to do the same to others.⁹⁰ Such reasoning might be taken to imply that I have a duty to own even the most tyrannizing sovereign acts as long as they do not endanger me personally.

This line of interpretation overlooks that it may be difficult, precisely in those cases in which the sovereign’s actions manifestly violate the laws of nature, for me to draw any meaningful distinction between dangers to myself and dangers to others. A sovereign who, for instance, is unwilling to make peace with internal or external enemies when it is necessary as well as possible to do so equally endangers all his subjects.⁹¹ A sovereign who randomly punishes subjects not engaged in open rebellion before they have been found guilty of a violation of declared law makes himself the enemy of all his subjects, which must defeat the sovereign’s claim to act by their authority.⁹² A sovereign who explicitly engaged in certain forms of discriminatory treatment – who, for example, refused to accord to some group of subjects the equal protection of the law or to arbitrate impartially in their conflicts with other members of society – could not expect those adversely affected by such treatment, or those who may fear to become the object of similar discrimination in the future, to continue to accept his decisions as their own.⁹³

A rational subject, concerned with self-preservation and respectful of the law of nature will be motivationally incapable to assume authorship of a ruler’s decisions if the ruler’s behavior is manifestly inconsistent with a presumption of respect for the laws of nature in foro interno. Such incapability can never lead to a violation of duty on our part. A social contract, however unlimited in all other respects, cannot bind us to a form of deference that it would be motivationally impossible for a rational subject to exhibit. The only way for a ruler who continuously and manifestly violates the laws of nature to motivate reasonable subjects to conform to his decisions is to rely on brute threats of violence. A ruler’s chances to rule for long without being able to count on the willing deference of his subjects are slim, however, and they will be even slimmer the more developed their Hobbesian virtue.

This limitation of sovereign power is fully compatible with the legal illimitability of sovereign authority, and with the claim that sovereign authority must be given “without stint.”⁹⁴ When Hobbes claims that a sovereign cannot be accused of injustice by his subjects, he does not intend to deny that it may be doubtful whether a purported sovereign’s claim to personate us is true. He also does not deny the trivial truth that I must ask myself whether I have adequate reason to recognize the sovereign as acting by my authority. Hobbes’s point, in claiming that a sovereign can never be accused of injustice, is that no state could take the view that my judgment that the sovereign fails to act by my authority cancels my obligation to obey. My judgment, after all, may result from superstition or inordinate pride. If the state recognized that individuals possess the normative power to strip its instructions of their legal bindingness merely by voicing their dissent to a sovereign decision, the state of nature could never end.⁹⁵ If a sovereign authority is to serve its purpose, it must refuse to entertain complaints against its claim to act in our name.

Nevertheless, subjects would violate their own personality if they recognized as authoritative decisions which they cannot reasonably own. The fact that virtuous subjects are unable so to violate their own personality entails that legal limitations on sovereign power are dispensable in an enlightened community. Suppose I rightly believe that respect for the law of nature no longer requires or even permits me to defer to my sovereign, who has begun manifestly to disregard the law of nature. As a rational subject, committed to respect for the laws of nature, I will cease to defer to the sovereign’s instructions and act as commanded only if I judge, from case to case, that such conformity is required by my interest in self-preservation. It may still be prudent, if faced with a sovereign who is no longer acting in my name, to pay outer obedience, but the person of the state, from my point of view, no longer exists. The state could not survive for long if such breakdown of representation affected a large proportion of the actor–author relationships of which it is composed. The state, to be stable, must exhibit an integrity of character which is analogous to that of a virtuous individual.

4. Conclusion

Hobbes’s argument for sovereignty, to conclude, cuts both ways. When the sovereign bears my person, I cannot validly represent myself because the sovereign has already decided in my name. According to the relational account of personality, there is only one mask that belongs to me, and the sovereign, if political representation is to serve its purpose, must be free to decide where and when to wear it.⁹⁶ At the same time, though, I can have no duty to own the decisions of a ruler who manifestly fails to impersonate me and my fellow subjects. If a sovereign’s observable behavior defeats the presumption that they respect the laws of nature, I will be unable, as a rational agent, to assume authorship of the decisions the sovereign claims to take in my name. The laws of nature, immutable and eternal, are the sole ground of political obligation. The sovereign’s power, despite being legally absolute, is therefore not unlimited. It may founder on the limits of a subject’s authority over himself or herself. What grounds Hobbesian political authority, ultimately, is a proper measure of self-esteem, a measure that eschews both inordinate pride and excessive humility, that is built on a proper appreciation of our authentic interest in self-preservation as well as the limits of our personal strength, and that embeds a correct understanding of the conditions of the possibility of peaceful social life and successful self-impersonation.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Andreas Blank, Sandy Berkovsky, and especially the two anonymous reviewers for Intellectual History Review for their extremely careful and constructive comments on earlier versions of this piece.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lars Vinx

Lars Vinx is a University Lecturer in Jurisprudence in the Faculty of Law at the University of Cambridge who works in legal and political philosophy as well as in constitutional theory. Dr Vinx has a strong interest in the history of political and constitutional thought, with a focus on the constitutional theory of the Weimar Republic and on early-modern political thought.

Notes

1 Hobbes, Leviathan, 111–15.

2 Ibid., 112.

3 Ibid., 113.

4 I adopt the designation from reviewer #1 and am grateful for the helpful suggestion.

5 See Skinner, “Hobbes and the Purely Artificial Person of the State”; Skinner, “Hobbes on Representation”; and, more recently, Skinner, From Humanism to Hobbes, chaps 2, 9, and 12.

6 See Runciman, Pluralism and the Personality of the State; Runciman, “What Kind of Person is Hobbes’s State?”; Runciman, “Hobbes’s Theory of Representation.”

7 See Runciman, “Hobbes’s Theory of Representation,” 18–26; Quentin Skinner, “Hobbes on Representation,” 177–9.

8 The discussion on Hobbes’s theory of the personality of the state initiated by Skinner has given rise to a rich literature that it is impossible to exhaustively discuss in one article. For analyses that are supportive of the orthodox account of the personality of the state in Hobbes as fictional, see Abizadeh, “Hobbes’s Conventionalist Theology”; Abizadeh, “The Representation of Hobbesian Sovereignty”; Brito-Vieira, The Elements of Representation, 145–208; Crignon, “Representation and the Person of the State”; Douglas, “The Body Politic”; Fleming, “The Two Faces of Personhood”; Holland, The Moral Person of the State, 1–26; Newey, The Routledge Guidebook to Hobbes’s Leviathan, 172–85. Some authors, however, have questioned the view that the state is a purely artificial person or person by fiction. Notable interventions critical of the orthodoxy include Martinich, “Authority and Representation,” and Olsthoorn, “Leviathan Inc.” Somewhat more hesitant criticism of the orthodoxy is offered in Sagar, “What is the Leviathan?” and Springborg, “Quentin Skinner and Hobbes’s Artificial Person of the State.” My aim here is to strengthen the critical case by showing how it might fit in with Hobbes’s theory of natural law and his understanding of the relationship between sovereign and subjects.

9 The account of the personality of the state developed here aligns with the views presented in Olsthoorn, “Leviathan Inc.,” and Martinich, “Authority and Representation,” in that I concur with Olsthoorn and Martinich that the sovereign directly represents subjects, not a fictional or purely artificial person of the state.

10 For an overview of the relevant passages in the Leviathan, see Olsthoorn, “Leviathan Inc.,” 28–9. The careful discussion of Hobbes’s language of personality in Martinich, “Authority and Representation,” helpfully compares the usage of Leviathan with that in other texts of Hobbes’s.

11 Hobbes, Leviathan, 121.

12 Ibid., 128. See also 252.

13 See Hobbes, Leviathan, 120–1. Skinner argues, furthermore, that the person created by Hobbes’s social contract has its own name, namely “civitas” or “commonwealth.” See Skinner, “Hobbes and the Purely Artificial Person of the State,” 198–9.

14 Hobbes, Leviathan, 114.

15 Ibid., 130.

16 Ibid., 156.

17 Ibid., 111.

18 Skinner, “Hobbes and Purely Artificial Person of the State,” 187.

19 See Ibid., 187–92.

20 See ibid., 192–6.

21 See Ibid., 196–204.

22 See Skinner, “Hobbes on Persons, Authors, and Representatives,” 158; Skinner, “Hobbes on Representation,” 178; Skinner, “From Humanism to Hobbes,” 341. The terminological shift is an apparent concession to Runciman, “What Kind of Person is Hobbes’s State?,” 277–8. A helpful overview of the Skinner–Runciman debate and further development of the view that the state is a “person by fiction” can be found in Fleming, “The two Faces of Personhood.”

23 See Runciman, “What Kind of Person is Hobbes’s State.”

24 Ibid., 272–3. See also Runciman, “Hobbes’s Theory of Representation,” 21.

25 Though Skinner and Runciman concede that there is a question here (see Skinner, “Hobbes and the Purely Artificial Person of the State,” 202–3; Runciman, Pluralism and the Personality of the State, 11–12; Runciman, “What Kind of Person is Hobbes’s State?,” 273), they have not, to my mind, addressed it satisfactorily. Skinner initially claimed that the right of the participants in the social contract over the person of the state is analogous to a mother’s dominion over her child in the state of nature. This rather fanciful proposal has no very direct textual support. Runciman, on his part, brushes the difficulty away without making much of an effort to address it. The difficulty for the orthodox view I discuss above has likewise been emphasized by Olsthoorn, “Leviathan Inc.,” 29.

26 See, for example, Hobbes, Leviathan, 124.

27 See Skinner, “Hobbes and the Purely Artificial Person of the State,” 185.

28 Hobbes, Leviathan, 112.

29 Ibid., 113: “But things Inanimate, cannot be Authors, nor therefore give Authority to their Actors: Yet the Actors may have Authority to procure their maintenance, given them by those that are Owners, or Governours of those things.”

30 See Hobbes, Leviathan, 113.

31 Ibid. Speaking of the guardianship of minors or the mentally ill, Hobbes reaffirms the point: “this again has no place but in a State Civil, because before such estate, there is no Dominion of Persons.” Commentators have missed the importance of this point for understanding Hobbes’s view on the personality of the state. See, for instance, Douglass, “The Body Politic,” 140, who thinks that this “sheds little light on precisely what it means to be represented by fiction.” But Hobbes’s point strikes me as perfectly straightforward: representation by fiction is representation of entities that lack the capacity to authorize their own representatives, and it can take place only in civil society because it requires a positive legal framework.

32 Reviewer #1 argues that the discussion of the person of God in Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 42, 339–41, “makes it clear how a fictional person may be represented and how those who authorize this personation are not themselves thereby represented.” The discussion in chapter 42, however, does not explicitly call the person of God a person by fiction. All that the relevant passages show is that Hobbes at times uses the term “person” to refer to what is represented and not to the representative, which I am happy to concede. Abizadeh, in “Hobbes’s Conventionalist Theology,” argues that Hobbes implies in chapter 16 of Leviathan (see pp. 925–9) that the person of God is a person by fiction. Abizadeh observes that Hobbes’s claim (see p. 114) that the person of the true God can be represented is inserted into the text right after a sequence of examples of persons by fiction. He concludes that Hobbes meant to intimate the person of God is a person by fiction. Even if this exegetical conjecture was correct, the resulting classification of the person of God as a person by fiction would not provide any reason to think that the state must also be a person by fiction. Hobbes makes it clear, in the passage at hand, that “the Gods of the Heathen” are capable of representation by reference to the property “which men from time to time dedicated” to their worship, and he concludes that, “before introduction of Civill Government, the Gods of the Heathen could not be personated” (pp. 113–14). The representation of the “Gods of the Heathen,” therefore, is not a suitable model for the personality of the state. If Hobbes’s true God is to be personated in the same way as the “Gods of the Heathen,” as Abizadeh suggests, then the person of the true God will indeed be a person by fiction, but it will, in that case, likewise fail to be a model for the person of the state. The latter, as has been argued here, needs to be constructed from the state of nature; that is, without reliance on rights of property grounded in positive law. Reviewer # 2 argues that if Hobbes holds that the Church is a person by fiction, then he must also hold that the state is a person by fiction, as he claims that the Church is identical to the state. This objection fails to recognize that the term “church” can refer both to a particular church (the Church of Ely or the Church of Peterborough) or the universal (or, in Hobbes’s case, the national) Church (compare Springborg, “Quentin Skinner and Hobbes’s Artificial Person of the State,” 10–15). The reference to “a Church” (p. 113) in chapter 16 of Leviathan evidently refers to particular churches, like the parallel references to “a bridge” and “a hospital.”

33 Patricia Springborg has argued that the ambiguity here is intended by Hobbes and that an interpretation of Hobbes’s theory of the personality of the state should not aim to resolve or eliminate it. See Springborg, “Quentin Skinner and Hobbes’s Artificial Person of the State,” 21.

34 The idea that Hobbesian personality is relational is implicit in Abizadeh, “Hobbes’s Conventionalist Theology,” 922–5. Abizadeh agrees that an author is not a person but rather a “self” and goes on to describe the process of personation as the playing of a role (one’s own or someone else’s) in a social context.

35 On Hobbes’s use of the theatrical metaphor, see Brito-Vieira, The Elements of Representation, 75–144.

36 Hobbes, Leviathan, 112.

37 Ibid., 112.

38 See, for example, Hobbes, Leviathan, 62, 111–2.

39 Ibid., 114, 120–1, 128, 131.

40 Ibid., 111–13.

41 Ibid., 112.

42 Medieval authors sometimes attributed to human beings a dominion over their own actions. See, for example, Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, IaIIae, qu. 1, a. 2, c.: “Illa ergo quae rationem habent, seipsa movent ad finem, quia habent dominium suorum actuum per liberum arbitrium, quod est facultas voluntatis et rationis.”

43 On the notion of dominium, which, in medieval and early modern sources may refer both to property and to political authority, see Burns, “Scholasticism,” 140–6.

44 Hobbes, Leviathan, 122: “for they are bound, every man to every man, to Own, and be reputed Author of all, that he that already is their Soveraigne, shall do, and judge fit to be done.”

45 Ibid., 112.

46 Ibid., 124.

47 This explains why Hobbes repeatedly emphasizes, throughout Leviathan, that sovereign power is inalienable. See Ibid., 127, 153, 231–2. If the sovereign acts by an authority that s/he does not own, s/he cannot have the power to alienate that authority, or any powers implied by it.

48 Hobbes, Leviathan, 112.

49 Skinner, “Hobbes and the Purely Artificial Person of the State,” 207.

50 Of course, these points were made long ago by Gauthier, The Logic of Leviathan, 99, 120, 126. See also Martinich, “Authorization and Representation,” 382–4.

51 See Hobbes, Leviathan, 122–4.

52 See Ibid., 124, 148.

53 Ibid., 91.

54 Hobbes’s right of nature is a liberty to act in accordance with one’s own judgment and Hobbes defines liberty, immediately after having introduced the right of nature, as

the absence of externall Impediments: which Impediments may oft take away part of a mans power to do what hee would; but cannot hinder him from using the power left him, according as his judgment and reason shall dictate to him. (Hobbes, Leviathan, 91)

55 The view presented here is not quite the same as that put forward in Lloyd, “Authorization and Moral Responsibility.” Lloyd rightly observes that Hobbes argues that subjects might be bound to own acts of sovereignty that are sinful in the eyes of God, even while he rejects the view that subjects will be held morally responsible by God for these sinful acts. My argument, though it is perfectly compatible, as far as I can see, with Lloyd’s observations, is concerned, by contrast, with situations in which it is no longer possible for subjects to own or to reasonably defer to the actions of their sovereign.

56 See Hobbes, Leviathan, 91.

57 Ibid., 111.

58 See, for example, Jean Hampton, Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition, 89–92.

59 Hobbes, Leviathan, 100–11. For discussion of Hobbes’s theory of virtue, see Mary G. Dietz, “Hobbes’s Subject as Citizen”; David Boonin-Vail, Thomas Hobbes and the Science of Moral Virtue.

60 Hobbes, Leviathan, 106.

61 See Ibid., 126.

62 See Ibid., 105, 106–7.

63 See Ibid., 100–3.

64 Ibid., 110.

65 Ibid., 110. See also Ibid., 202. Kinch Hoekstra points out that these claims seem hard to bring into line with the view that the laws of nature do not bind in the state of nature. See Kinch Hoekstra, “Hobbes on Law, Nature, and Reason,” 112–13.

66 See Hobbes, Leviathan, 201–2.

67 See Ibid., 244. Further on Hobbes’s political theology see Vinx, “The Political Theology of the Secular State.”

68 Hobbes, Leviathan, 202: “But of Intentions, which never appear by any outward act, there is no place for humane accusation.” Hobbes concludes that

the Civill Law ceasing, Crimes cease: for there being no other Law remaining, but that of Nature, there is no place for Accusation; every man being his own Judge, and accused only by his own Conscience, and cleared by the Uprightnesse of his own Intention.

69 At times, Hobbes explicitly claims that it is impossible to violate the law of nature in foro externo. See Hobbes, Leviathan, 90, 202.

70 See Hobbes, Leviathan, 106.

71 See Ibid., 96–8, 102. Reviewer # 2 objects that Hobbes holds that agents in the state of nature are always entitled to reject any covenantal obligation, by appeal to the fear the other party may not perform, and that Hobbes thus refuses to recognize that there could be manifest violations of the law of nature in the state of nature. But that is not what Hobbes claims, however popular that reading of his argument may be. Hobbes does state, to be sure, that a covenant is void “upon any reasonable suspition” (p. 96) of non-performance on the part of the other party. But in his discussion of “the Foole,” Hobbes explicitly affirms that one cannot reasonably invoke the fear of non-performance, in the state of nature, in cases in which the other party has already performed (see p. 102), and whether that is the case must surely be a publicly ascertainable fact.

72 See Hobbes, Leviathan, 108–9.

73 See Ibid., 108. My point here is indebted to Dyzenhaus, “Hobbes and the Legitimacy of Law,” and Malcolm, “Hobbes’s Theory of International Relations.”

74 Compare the character of the “explicit fool” in Hoekstra, “Hobbes and the Foole,” 622–6.

75 Hobbes, Leviathan, 91.

76 Susceptibility to blame is to be distinguished, for Hobbes, from liability to formal accusation. Hobbes claims that King David is susceptible to blame for his treatment of Uriah (see Hobbes, Leviathan, 148), though he cannot be accused of it in a court of law. Individuals in a state of nature are likewise immune from formal accusation or trial, but not from blame, and they are consequently not immune from being refused entry into associations for mutual protection.

77 See Hobbes, Leviathan, 101–3, 105–8. Reviewer # 2 doubts that the ability to personate oneself will be undermined by conduct that manifestly violates the law of nature. “Surely warmongers retain the ability to make promises, even if they are not presently inclined to keep them?” Manifest warmongers, of course, can speak the words that would ordinarily amount to the making of a promise of peace, but their promises are unlikely to receive uptake from those to whom they are made, which is a failure of self-representation. If I am not trusted, I cannot successfully commit myself to others, and I will therefore be unable to reap the benefits of social cooperation that depend on reciprocal commitment.

78 Hobbes, Leviathan, 111: “And consequently all men agree on this, that Peace is Good, and therefore also the way, or means of Peace.” The point is also clear from Hobbes’s first two laws of nature. See Ibid., 92.

79 See Ibid., 93, 96, 98. For more detailed discussion of the limitations to sovereign authority that flow from the inalienability of the right of nature, see Sreedhar, Hobbes on Resistance; Ristroph, “Sovereignty and Subversion.”

80 Hobbes, Leviathan, 93: “ of the voluntary acts of every man, the object is some Good to himselfe.” Also Ibid., 98: “For man by nature chooseth the lesser evill […] rather than the greater.”

81 See the discussion of the causes of crime in Hobbes, Leviathan, 202–6.

82 See Ibid., 46, 69–70.

83 This is the most straightforward reading of the claim that the laws of nature are “Conclusions, of Theoremes concerning what conduceth to the conservation and defence of themselves” (Hobbes, Leviathan, 111). The view also seems to be implied by Hobbes’s response to the fool. See Ibid., 101–3.

84 See Hobbes, Leviathan, 149–50, 458–62.

85 See Ibid., 462–74.

86 See Ibid., 287–306.

87 See Ibid., 107.

88 Ibid., 110.

89 For Hobbes’s educational project see Hobbes, Leviathan, 124–5, 232–7.

90 See Ibid., 150–2.

91 See Ibid., 106, 151–2.

92 See Ibid., 214–21. Note that Hobbes explicitly claims that punishing the innocent is a manifest violation of the law of nature (see Ibid., 148, 192–3, 219).

93 See Ibid., 109, 237–8.

94 See Ibid., 121–9.

95 For further discussion of this point, see Vinx, “Constitutional Indifferentism and Republican Freedom.”

96 Consequently, Hobbes claims that the “Liberty of a Subject, lyeth therefore only in those things, which in regulating their actions, the Soveraign hath praetermitted” (Hobbes, Leviathan, 148).