Hobbes on the power to punish

ABSTRACT

Hobbes’s account of the sovereign’s right to punish in Leviathan has led to a longstanding interpretive dispute. The debate is prompted by the fact that, prima facie, Hobbes makes two inconsistent claims: subjects (i) authorize all the acts of the sovereign, and are hence authors of their own punishment, yet (ii) have the liberty to resist such punishment. I argue that attending to Hobbes’s surprisingly neglected account of power yields a novel interpretation of his theory of punishment. Hobbes, it turns out, is working with two conceptions of power: potestas, a juridical power, and potentia, a factual power. Each power grounds one of the ‘inconsistent’ claims above: potestas founds the authorized condemnation by the legal system, and potentia the factual enforced penalty, which is not directly authorized and can be resisted.

KEYWORDS:

• Right to punish
• potentia
• potestas
• right of resistance
• sovereignty

Acknowledgments

The author is thankful to Shterna Friedman, Paulo MacDonald, Wladimir Barreto Lisboa, Maria Isabel Limongi, Alfredo Storck, Samuel Zeitlin, Luciano Venezia, João Gabriel da Silva Pinto Filho, Thomaz Spolaor, Allan Cardoso, and Ricardo Crissiuma for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. The author is also grateful to the anonymous reviewers of History of European Ideas for their thoughtful and insightful feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See section two for a reconstruction of the debate.

2 Translations were, to Hobbes, opportunities for improvement. See Eric Nelson, ‘Translation as Correction: Hobbes in the 1660s and 1670s’ in Why Concepts Matter: Translating Social and Political Thought, ed. Martin J. Burke and Melvin Richter (Leiden: Brill, 2012).

3 Few scholars discuss Hobbes’s theory of power as potentia and potestas. Among them, none considers the case of the power to punish. See Luc Foisneau, ‘Le vocabulaire du pouvoir’, in Hobbes et son vocabulaire, ed. Yves Charles Zarka (Paris: Vrin, 1992); Yves-Charles Zarka, Hobbes et la pensée politique moderne (Paris: PUF, 2001); Maria Isabel Limongi, ‘Potentia e potestas no Leviathan de Hobbes’, doispontos 10, no. 1 (2013); Sandra Field, ‘Hobbes and the Question of Power’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 52, no. 1 (2014) and, also by Field, Potentia: Hobbes and Spinoza on Power and Popular Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).

4 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, The English and Latin Texts. The Clarendon Edition of the Works of Thomas Hobbes, ed. Noel Malcolm, vol. 2 and 3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012 [1651/1668]): 18.14, 276/277. Citations to Leviathan refer to the title of the work followed, whenever applicable, by chapter, paragraph, and page. Latin Leviathan receives a complete citation only if the paragraph is different from English – otherwise, the page number is indicated after the English pagination. The spelling of citations in English is modernized.

5 Leviathan, 18.3, 264–6. See also Leviathan, 14.29, 214.

6 Leviathan, 14.8, 202.

7 Leviathan, 21.12, 336.

8 Leviathan, 21.13, 338.

9 Leviathan, 28.2, 482.

10 Leviathan, 28.2, 482. See also Leviathan, 21.14, 338.

11 Leviathan, 28.2, 482.

12 On the reception in general, see Jon Parkin, Taming the Leviathan: The Reception of the Political and Religious Ideas of Thomas Hobbes in England (1640–1700) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

13 Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, A brief view and survey of the dangerous and pernicious errors to church and state, in Mr. Hobbes’s book, entitled Leviathan (Oxford: Printed at the Theater, 1676), 138.

14 Reverend John Bramhall, ‘The Catching of Leviathan, Or the Great Whale (1658)’, in The Works of the Most Reverend Father in God, John Bramhall, D.D., Sometime Lord Archbishop of Armagh, Primate and Metropolitan of All Ireland, vol. 4 (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1844), 583.

15 Alexander Ross, Leviathan drawn out with a hook, or, Animadversions upon Mr. Hobbs his Leviathan (London: Tho. Newcomb, 1653), 25.

16 Filmer, Robert, ‘Observations on Mr. Hobbs’s Leviathan [1652]’, in Robert Filmer, Observations Concerning the Original and Various Forms of Government (London: R.R.C., 1696), 177. Nowadays, Alan Ryan’s argument follows this line of thought. Ryan, ‘Hobbes’s political philosophy’, The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes, edited by Tom Sorell (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 241.

17 Pufendorf, Samuel. Le droit de la nature et des gens, ou Systeme general des principes les plus importans de la morale, de la juriprudence, et de la politique (1672), tome second, translated by Jean Barbeyrac (Basle: Emanuel Thourneisen, 1750), 452. Pufendorf, it seems, did not read the Latin Leviathan. The Dutch translation, published in 1667, was the only one available at Pufendorf’s library. See Noel Malcolm, ‘Editorial Introduction’, in Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, The English and Latin Texts. The Clarendon Edition of the Works of Thomas Hobbes, ed. Noel Malcolm, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2012), 164–5.

18 Leviathan, 28.2, 482.

19 Howard Warrender, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: His Theory of Obligation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957), 197; J. W. N. Watkins, Hobbes’s System of Ideas: A study in the political significance of philosophical theories (London: Hutchinson University Library, 1965), 136–7; David Gauthier, The Logic of Leviathan: The Moral and Political Theory of Thomas Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969); 148; Richard Tuck, Natural rights theories: their origin and development (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 125; Claire Finkelstein, ‘A Puzzle about Hobbes’s Right of Self-Defense’, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 82, no. 3–4 (2001): 332–61; Dieter Hüning, ‘Hobbes on the Right to Punish’ in The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s Leviathan, ed. by Patricia Springborn (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 231–2; Susanne Sreedhar, Hobbes on Resistance: Defying the Leviathan (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 16.

20 Alan Norrie, ‘Thomas Hobbes and the Philosophy of Punishment’, Law and Philosophy 3, (1984): 299–320; David Heyd, ‘Hobbes on Capital Punishment’, History of Philosophy Quarterly 8, no. 2 (1991): 119–134, 120–4; Ryan, Hobbes’s political philosophy, 239; Alice Ristroph, ‘Respect and Resistance in Punishment Theory’, California Law Review 97, no. 2 (2009): 601–32; Michael J. Green, ‘Authorization and the Right to Punish in Hobbes’, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 97 (2016): 11339, 124.

21 Zarka (Hobbes et la pensée politique, ch. X) solves the puzzle by relying on the ethics of the sovereign, who constrains herself to the law.

22 Leviathan 28.6, 484.

23 Rosemarie Wagner. Laws Living and Armed: The Legal and Political Theory of Thomas Hobbes, Ph.D. diss. (University of California, Berkeley, 2019), 84.

24 Thomas S. Schrock, ‘The Rights to Punish and Resist Punishment in Hobbes’s Leviathan’, Political Research Quarterly 44, no. 4 (1991): 853–89, 871, 887.

25 Arthur Yates, ‘The Right to Punish in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 52, no 2, (2014): 233–54.

26 See Field, Hobbes and the Question of Power, 79–83.

27 Malcolm acknowledges Hobbes’s intent to improve Leviathan in its translation to Latin but does not consider his political argument to have undergone substantial changes. To him, the most important alterations were the omissions relating to protection and obedience and the actions of rebels. The ambiguity in the translation of the word power is not mentioned. See Malcolm, Editorial Introduction, 186.

28 One minor difficulty facing this interpretation is the use Hobbes makes of potestas on two occasions in Leviathan (Leviathan, 3.4, 40/41; and Leviathan, 5.17, 72/ Latin Leviathan, 5.15, 73). Both passages refer to the possession of the causes to produce an effect, a common use of the word.

29 I am referring here, following David Runciman, to ‘artificial persons’ as representatives. To him, there are three kinds of persons in Hobbes’s Leviathan: natural, artificial, and by fiction. The last only becomes a person through representation. Accordingly, the state, a person by fiction cannot have any power which does not arise from the acts of the sovereign representative. My position lies between Abizadeh’s and Skinner’s views on the place of sovereignty, for the first argues it belongs with the sovereign and the second with the state. See Runciman, ‘Debate: What kind of Person is Hobbes’s State? A Reply to Skinner’, The Journal of Political Philosophy 8, no. 2 (2000), 268–78; Skinner, From Humanism to Hobbes: Studies in Rhetoric and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), chapter 12 (Abizadeh is cited on page 359, in n. 152); and Abizadeh, Sovereign Jurisdiction, 408–12 (where Abizadeh accords with Skinner in his former debate with Runciman, I agree with the last – as did Skinner later in From Humanism to Hobbes, 358, in n. 137).

30 Thomas Cooper’s Thesavrvs Lingvae Romanae et Britannicae (London: Henry Denham, 1578) and Thomas Thomas’s Dictionarium Linguae Latinae et Anglicanae (London: Richardum Boyle, 1587) seem to conceive the two Latin words as interchangeable. The Thesaurus describes potentia as ‘Power: might: puisance: force: habilitie: great rule: authoritie’ and potestas as ‘Power: authority: office: do minion: rule. Also habilitie: facultie: leaue: counsaile: reason.’ Thomas’s Dictionarium follows the same path and does not distinguish might from authority. It defines potentia as ‘Power, might, puissance, force, great rule, authoritie’ and potestas as ‘Power, authoritie, office, dominion, rule: also ability, faculty, sufferance, permission, leaue, libertie, license, opportunitie, counsel, reason.’ The Dictionary of syr Thomas Eliot knyght (London: Thomæ Bertheleti, 1538) gets closer to a distinction by not translating potestas as ability or faculty, which is used to describe potentia (‘power, puissance, habilite, gret rule’). He yet adds ‘counsayle’ to ‘power, auctoritie … and reason’ when putting forth the meaning of potestas. This distinction, however, does not comprehend Hobbes’s philosophically meaningful conceptualization.

31 In The Elements of Law and De Cive, might (potentia) was a general source of power with a correspondent obligation for the sovereign. Thomas Hobbes, Human Nature and De Corpore Politico [The Elements of Law]. Oxford World’s Classics, ed. J. C. A. Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994 [1640]), 22.9, 129; 14.10, 80; 14.13, 80-1; and 20.1, 109; and Thomas Hobbes, On the Citizen [De Cive], Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, ed. Richard Tuck and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998 [1642/1647]). / ‘De Cive’, in Opera Philosophica, quae Latine Scripsit, Omnia, vol. II, ed. Guilielmi Molesworth (London: Bohn, 1839), 8.10, 253/105-6; 1.14-15, 167/30-3; and 5.12, 215/74. For a consistent analysis of the changes in Hobbes’s conception of power, see Field, Hobbes and the Question of Power and Field, Potentia, Ch 2.

32 Leviathan, 7.12, 260/261. While Hobbes’s inspiration for potentia is not discussed in the literature, his sources to think about potestas are well documented. According to Luc Foisneau, Hobbes takes advantage of early modern discussions about the Roman Church’s auctoritas and the state’s summa potestas which are based on a distinction introduced by Cicero between the auctoritas of the senate and the potestas of the people. Moreover, Daniel Lee and Arash Abizadeh mention potestas as an important term in medieval debates about political power and property rights which were inspired by a Roman juridical doctrine discussing imperium and dominium. Foisneau, Le vocabulaire du pouvoir, 93–4; Daniel Lee, Popular Sovereignty in Early Modern Constitutional Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016) and Arash Abizadeh, ‘Sovereign Jurisdiction, Territorial Rights, and Membership in Hobbes’, in The Oxford Handbook of Hobbes, eds. Al P. Martinich and Kinch Hoekstra (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

33 Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1953): 194; John Dunn, ‘The Significance of Hobbes’s Conception of Power’, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 13, no. 2–3 (2010): 417–33.

34 Carlo Altini, ‘Potere e potenza in Hobbes. La prospettiva meccanicistica tra filosofia naturale e filosofia politica’, Scienza & Politica XXXI, no. 60 (2019): 19–33.

35 Field, Hobbes and the Question of Power, and Field, Potentia, Ch. 2. Stanley Benn also aims to compare the role of potentia in Hobbes’s different works. He, however, does not establish potentia as relational in Leviathan, nor does he explore the potentia of the sovereign – even though he recognizes its existence. Benn, ‘Hobbes on Power’, in Hobbes and Rousseau: A Collection of Critical Essays, eds. Maurice Cranston and Richard S. Peters (New York: Anchor Books, 1972).

36 Different analyses of potentia and potestas in Leviathan are presented by Foisneau, Zarka, and Limongi. Foisneau argues that the state only possesses potestas. To him, Hobbes refers to sovereign potentia only for rhetorical reasons: to express the force the sovereign has. Zarka claims potestas is potentia enfolded in right (ius). In addition to missing the importance of the bond of obedience between sovereign and subject, Zarka’s account fails in distinguishing the right of nature from potestas, explaining his difficulty with the right to punish (cf. above n. 21). Limongi’s interpretation has similar consequences, for, like Zarka, she equates ius and potestas. Potentia, in her reading, is physical power and potestas a power with juridical effects. The right of nature, to her, is potestas. See Foisneau, Le vocabulaire du pouvoir, Zarka, Hobbes et la pensée politique moderne, 91, 117 and 174 n. 4. Limongi, Potentia e potestas no Leviathan, 148–9, 198.

37 Leviathan, 10.1, 132.

38 Leviathan, 14.1:198/199.

39 Leviathan, 11.2, 150.

40 Leviathan, 11.1, 150.

41 Leviathan, 10.16, 134.

42 Leviathan, 10.2-12, 132-4; 8.1-13, 104-10.

43 Leviathan, 10.48, 142.

44 Leviathan, 10.17-46:137-42.

45 Leviathan, 6.39, 88/ Latin Leviathan, 6.32, 89.

46 Leviathan, 14.31, 216.

47 Leviathan, 13.5, 190/ Latin Leviathan, 13.4, 191. See also Leviathan 13.9, 195.

48 Leviathan, 10.3, 132/133.

49 Scholars frequently refer to the importance of the subjects’ opinion toward the sovereign or to the sovereign’s symbolic power. None, however, associates it with sovereign potentia. See, for instance, Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 227–8; Malcolm, Noel, Reason of State, Propaganda, and the Thirty Years’ War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 121; Abizadeh, ‘The Representation of Hobbesian Sovereignty: Leviathan as Mythology’, in Hobbes Today, ed. S. A. Lloyd (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 116; Robin Douglass, ‘The Body Politic “is a fictitious body”: Hobbes on Imagination and Fiction’, Hobbes Studies 27 (2014): 126–47.

50 See Leviathan, 25.2, 398.

51 Leviathan, 17.13, 260.

52 Authorization and (more generally) consent are, however, not the only sources of potestas. God’s potestas is sometimes created by consent (Leviathan, 35.4-5, 636-8/ Latin Leviathan, 35.3-4, 637–9 and Leviathan, R&C.10, 1136), but it may as well have its origin in his irresistible potentia (Leviathan, 31.5, 558). Moreover, dominion is owed to the mother in the state of nature because she provides education to her child (see Leviathan, 20.5, 310). Political potestas is not an exception, for Hobbes’s conception of sovereignty by acquisition relies on the potentia of a sovereign to produce the consent of future subjects. Consent is, as Kinch Hoekstra argues, a thin concept in Hobbes’s theory. Hoekstra, ‘The de facto Turn in Hobbes’s Political Philosophy’, in Leviathan After 350 Years, ed. Tom Sorrel and Luc Foisneau (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

53 Leviathan, 14.7, 200.

54 Leviathan, 18.4, 266.

55 Leviathan, 29.1, 498.

56 Leviathan, 14.21, 210 (on the margin). See also Leviathan, 18.13, 276.

57 Leviathan, 30.1, 520; 17.1, 254.

58 Leviathan, 21.21, 344/ Latin Leviathan, 21.18, 345; Leviathan, 21.25, 346; 27.24, 468; 29.23, 518; R&C.6-7, 1133-5.

59 Leviathan, Intro.1, 16. See also Leviathan, 28.26, 496; 29.15, 512; 18.14, 276.

60 Leviathan, 30.23, 542.

61 Leviathan, 18.19, 280, emphasis added. See also Leviathan, 30.29, 550; 10.36, 138; 18.15, 276; 15.21, 234; and Thomas Hobbes, Behemoth, or, The Long Parliament, ed. Paul Seaward (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2010), 206-7.

62 Leviathan, 10.17, 136, 10.52, 146; 28.24, 494; 30.24, 544-6.

63 Leviathan, 28.1, 482. See also Leviathan, 30.23, 542; 27.7, 456.

64 Leviathan, 28.6, 484.

65 Leviathan, 28.2, 482.

66 Latin Leviathan, 18.15, 279 (the translation is provided by Malcolm). The English version presents the same idea, but it does not cite power: ‘if he transfers the Militia, he retains the Judicature in vain, for want of execution of the laws’ (Leviathan, 18.16, 278). Hobbes probably changed this sentence to point out that the rights of the militia stem from sovereign potentia.

67 Leviathan, 28.5-6, 484.

68 Leviathan, 27.32, 478.

69 Leviathan, 28.13, 486.

70 Latin Leviathan, 30.16, 535.

71 Leviathan, 28.7, 484.

72 Leviathan, 15.3, 220/221. See also Leviathan, 17.1-2, 254/255.

73 Leviathan, 14.29, 214.

74 Leviathan, 21.15, 338.

75 Leviathan, 26.39, 442.

76 Leviathan, R&C.17, 1141.

77 See Leviathan, 29.20, 516.

78 Leviathan, 18.16-17, 278-80.

79 See, for instance, Leviathan, 18.9, 272. See also Malcolm, Reason of State, 114–5; Foisneau, Governo e Soberania: O pensamento político moderno de Maquiavel a Rousseau (Porto Alegre: Linus, 2009): 105–15. This was true also for Francis Bacon, in whose texts Hobbes might well have found inspiration. For an approach to Bacon’s concern with the commonwealth’s health in the face of civil war, see Samuel G. Zeitlin, ‘“The Heat of a Feaver”: Francis Bacon on civil war, sedition, and rebellion’, History of European Ideas, 47, no. 5 (2021): 643–63. For a more general account of Hobbes’s humanist studies, see Skinner, Visions of Politics: Hobbes and Civil Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002): Ch. 2, and Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996): especially Ch. 6.