Hobbes, War, Movement

Abstract

While informed by Foucault's understanding of power in terms of war and circulation, this article challenges Foucault's static reading of Hobbes. Contextualising Hobbes's political thought within the scientific ideas that he was inspired by, this article reveals that there is more to Hobbes than the static, depoliticising image of the contract. Hobbes's political thought is premised upon an ontology of movement; that is, his account of political order pivots on a double movement in which war constitutes the very possibility of social and political relations as well as of their continued reproduction via circulation. It is this conceptualisation of order that makes Hobbes's liberal political thought genealogically significant. And it is the model of a play of (re)productive movements—in certain respects close to Foucault's own conception of power—that can be used productively for thinking about governance and resistance today.

Notes

2. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality I (London: Penguin, 1998), p. 102.

1. Michel Foucault, Society Must be Defended (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 16.

3. Foucault, Society Must be Defended, op. cit., p. 59.

4. Ibid., p. 92.

5. Ibid.

7. Ibid., p. 97.

6. Ibid., p. 95.

8. Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 30.

 9. Ibid., p. 15.

10. Ibid.

11. Ibid., p. 267.

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid., p. 275.

14. Ibid., p. 22.

15. Ibid., p. 351.

16. Ibid., p. 102.

17. Michael C. Williams, too, argues that Hobbes's aim is to construct “a recognisably liberal politics of toleration and self-creation”. However, since Williams seeks to contextualise Hobbes's political theory within the Realist tradition, it will not be further elaborated upon here. See Michael C. Williams, The Realist Tradition and the Limits of International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 35, 38–39.

18. George Kateb, “Hobbes and the Irrationality of Politics”, Political Theory, Vol. 17, No. 3 (1989), pp. 355–391.

19. Ibid., p. 356.

20. Ibid., p. 383.

21. Ibid., p. 366.

22. William Connolly, Political Theory & Modernity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 26–27.

23. Ibid., p. 29. This point is also made by Williams. See Williams, op. cit., p. 33.

24. Ibid.

25. Ibid.

28. Ibid., p. 30.

29. Quoted in Connolly, op. cit., p. 35.

26. Kateb, op. cit., p. 368. Williams, too, stresses the importance of belief in this regard, and in Hobbes's political theory more generally. See Williams, op. cit., p. 30.

27. Connolly, op. cit., p. 34.

30. Aristotle, Physics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 186–187; Thomas Spragens, The Politics of Motion: The World of Thomas Hobbes (London: Croom Helm, 1973), pp. 56–58.

31. Aristotle, op. cit., pp. 170–171; Martin Schönfeld, The Philosophy of the Young Kant: The Precritical Project (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 22.

32. Spragens, op. cit., pp. 57–59.

33. Aristotle, The Politics (London: Penguin, 1992), pp. 59–60; Richard Kraut, Aristotle: Political Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 59, 247–248.

34. Galileo, Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences (New York: Macmillan, 1914), p. 215.

35. Loralea Michaelis, “Hobbes's Modern Prometheus: A Political Philosophy for an Uncertain Future”, Canadian Journal of Political Science, Vol. 40, No. 1 (2007), pp. 103–104.

42. Hobbes, “De Cive”, in Bernard Gert (ed.), Man and Citizen (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 1991), pp. 98–99.

36. Spragens, op. cit., p. 105.

37. Aristotle, op. cit., 9. See also John Watkins, Hobbes's System of Ideas (London: Hutchinson, 1973), p. 32.

38. Thomas Hobbes, “De Corpore”, in The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic. Human Nature and The Corpore Politico, p. 194. See also Spragens, op. cit., pp. 105–117; Watkins, op. cit., pp. 31–32.

39. Hobbes, “De Corpore”, op. cit., pp. 188, 194, 199–200.

40. Ibid., p. 200.

41. Spragens, op. cit., p. 152.

43. Spragens, op. cit., p. 107.

44. Ibid., p. 177.

45. For an account of Galileo's influence, see, for example, Spragens, op. cit.; Harvey's influence is discussed in Watkins, op. cit.

49. Harvey, op. cit., p. 42.

46. Hobbes, “De Corpore”, op. cit., p. 197.

47. Richard S. Westfall, The Construction of Modern Science: Mechanisms and Mechanics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 188.

48. William Harvey, On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals (1628), pp. 22–23, 34, 42.

50. John Rogers, The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age of Milton (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1996), p. 29.

51. Hobbes, “De Corpore”, op. cit., p. 226.

52. Ibid., pp. 227–228.

53. Harvey, op. cit., pp. 23, 25, 35.

54. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 35.

55. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, op. cit., p. 18.

56. Ibid., especially lecture three.

57. Ibid., p. 20. Foucault relies on Canguilhem's elaboration of the milieu: Georges Canguilhem, “The Living and its Milieu”, Grey Room 03 (Spring 2001), pp. 7–31 (p. 8).

58. It should be noted that Descartes had already put forward a theory of the ether. However, according to Descartes, the universe is a plenum, and all space, including the ether, is matter. His theory thus remains premised on the impossibility of action at a distance: all transmission of motion must occur via impact. See Westfall, op. cit., pp. 33–34, 119, 120, 121.

59. Schönfeld, op. cit., p. 67; Westfall, op. cit., pp. 140–143, 157.

60. Canguilhem, op. cit., pp. 1–2.

61. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, op. cit., p. 29.

62. Hobbes, “De Corpore”, op. cit., p. 214.

63. François Jacob, The Logic of Life: A History of Heredity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 33.

64. Connolly, op. cit., p. 19; Williams, op. cit., pp. 22–25.

65. Connolly, op. cit., p. 19.

66. Ibid., pp. 18–20.

67. Hobbes, Leviathan, op. cit., p. 9.

68. Idem, “De Corpore”, op. cit., p. 197.

69. Idem, “De Cive”, op. cit., p. 268.