"Hobbes is Not Who We Think He Is"

2024 MIDWEST POLITICAL SCIENCE ASSOCIATION MEETING | ROUNDTABLE: REVISITING SAMANTHA FROST’S LESSONS FROM A MATERIALIST THINKER 15 YEARS LATER “HOBBES IS NOT WHO WE THINK HE IS” Allan M. Hillani Philosophy, NSSR Samantha Frost’s Lessons From a Materialist Thinker is truly a lesson in how to think from a materialist standpoint. The major thesis of the book is announced in its very first sentence: “Thomas Hobbes is not who we think he is”. As I understand it, the claim doesn’t really concern the man born prematurely, in 1588, when his mother heard of the coming invasion of the Spanish Armada. The Hobbes that is known is a philosopher according to whom humans are egotistical machines who, if left free, will slaughter each other in an endless war, a war that can only be avoided by the imposition of a strong State whose unquestionable authority is the only hope for peace. It is not an uncommon experience to receive a puzzled face when I tell people I work on Hobbes. The question “why Hobbes?” have been asked so many times that I started simply answering “why not?”. True, the Hobbes that is known is not exactly a “sexy” thinker, the kind of author you would find casually cited in a positive lens. Quite the opposite, in fact. When Hobbes is mentioned by non-specialists it is to designate something quite despicable, the opposite of what the author means or proposes, a past that—thankfully—we have left behind. If Hobbes has been always a constant source for political thought, it was as an incarnation of what one should not defend—although in times of crisis he always seemed to come back from the dead to torment the living (the later instance was the resurgence of Hobbes in the context of the COVID pandemic). But even the specialized literature ends up reinforcing the idea that if Hobbes is not “bad” he is at least “boring”. Spinoza can be read as anticipating Gilbert Simondon’s notion of the transindividual, Leibniz’s monads could influence the sociology of Gabriel Tarde, Hegel can be interpreted as a psychoanalyst avant la lettre, but not Hobbes; Hobbes can only be analyzed within the strict limits of the English civil war. The task of reclaiming another Hobbes, one that does not fit this interpretive straitjacket, ends up questioning the very unity and coherence of thinker in question—and, consequently, the very unity or coherence of any biocultural creature, to use one of Sam’s concepts. This shift entails not simply claiming that, as Strauss puts it, writing is a dangerous act and that texts written in times of persecution might be contradictory due to the historical conditions of their production. For Strauss, every text had an “exoteric” dimension— official, “external,” according to expectations—and an esoteric one—a hidden, “true,” and potentially subversive message. The problem with this perspective is that it presents an instrumentality of thought that presupposes an author who is aware of himself and his ideas, and who would need—justifiably, in Hobbes's case—to erase his footprints if he wanted to stay alive and thinking. What it does not allow, however, is that the distinction between an esoteric and an exoteric dimension was also a mystery to the philosopher himself. Strauss did not makes reference to this fact, but the distinction between esotericism and exotericism was also relevant to none other than Karl Marx. In Theories of Surplus Value, Marx uses the distinction precisely to reveal the critical dimension of Adam Smith's work— an esoteric aspect somewhat obscured by the official (exoteric) version of his economic thought. The esoteric dimension of a work would therefore be its elements of truth, which are put in tension with the ideological systematization of the author himself. This distinction strikes me as productive when it comes to Hobbes. Not simply because his work is riddled with inconsistencies that seem to be there only because of the religious dogmas of the time. But above all, because it is necessary to distinguish the ideological and exoteric dimension of the Hobbesian political agenda from its analysis of political life, power relations, and the logic of human conflicts—all still quite pertinent, as Sam’s book shows. That, to me, is the reason why it's still pertinent to read him: not just because he's a historically relevant figure, because there's something in his description of “human nature” that is profoundly true, insofar as we understand the term as accounting for the natural and material condition of human beings who must engage with others and with their environment in order to survive. Bu so much for the Hobbes that is known and the one that is still to be discovered. I wanted to use my remaining time to talk about two topics that since reading Sam’s book have been on my mind—and given that reading Lessons From a Materialist Thinker was what tilted me to write a dissertation on Hobbes, these are things I have been thinking for a while now and would love to hear more from our materialist thinker here. The first concerns what a materialist politics and what a materialist ethics look like. The “new materialisms”—a strand of scholarship that owes its name to the book edited by Sam and Diana Coole—have advanced a lot in proposing a materialist analysis of political relations and in decentering the “human” and its supposed “free will” from political and theoretical considerations. But still, there seems to be very little written about what a materialist political action would look like and how it would differ from a “non-materialist” one. What is the politics that emerges when we decenter “human agency” in our own actions, often framed precisely within those terms? How can we understand what we do, what others do, and what we and others should do once we start to understand political relations as one of the forms in which matter is put in motion? The “normative” aspect seems a specially different one to consider. I tend to think that Hobbes’s description of the “natural condition of humankind” is a place to start. As I take to be one of Sam’s most interesting insights, this natural condition is one in which the condition of dependence and heteronomy of humanity is most explicit, and where the ethical question of how peace relations can be established not only between humans, but also between humanity and other species of the planet, becomes the most clear. I find in this a parallel with what Isabelle Stengers’s called “ontological politics,” which for her is a fundamentally diplomatic practice—and its diplomatic character is relevant given that diplomacy always takes place under the possibility of warfare and conflict. It would be nice if Sam could speak a little more about this, and I know that “heteronomy” is a notion that we have a shared interest in. The second point is, if I am allowed, a bit more critical. I am trained lawyer, and one of the thoughts I had during my first engagement with Sam’s book is how absent “legal” topics are—“right,” “law,” “person,” authorization,” “representation,” “duty,” all terms that are arguably central for Hobbes and that play a minor role (if a role at all) in her text. I believe there is an important reason for this: the literature on Hobbes is plagued by what I tend to call a “juridical ideology,” one that presupposes a coherent and free willing subject that is incompatible with Sam’s description of the Hobbesian subject. And I agree with this. However, then what could be a materialist analysis of law, rights, and personhood that would not fall prey to this juridical ideology? Sure, we can just claim that they are “fictitious” and ultimately not real, but I take this answer to not be satisfactory. Hobbes’s materialism has the distinct capacity of showing how the material is fundamentally symbolic as well as how the symbolic is fundamentally material. This is clear in his analysis of power, I think, where this semiotic component is inseparable from its “material” aspect. I think it is relevant as well in how Hobbes spent so much time and energy trying to understand the nature of the State not only as a material body politic but also as person with all the implications this thought has. It would also be a pleasure to hear from Sam how she sees this issue, and if she thinks it is an issue at all. To conclude, I think that one of the great lessons of these two materialist thinkers— and, I would add, of “materialism” in general—is that we are part of the relations we seek to understand. This entail a conception that is dual but not dualistic; it emphasizes differences, relations, movement without dissolving them in the indifference of “matter”. In doing so, this approach is especially important when it comes to political relations, so naturally grounded on the opposition between the “symbolic” and the existence of individual free willing agents. This is why materialism must be both critical and speculative, physical and metaphysical: it must allow us to recognize the relations we are in—and propose to change them—without putting ourselves outside them. This is the political imperative of materialism: to insist on our solidarity with the stuff of the world, to recognize our dependence on what is around us, and to propose forms to avoid the catastrophic consequences of our deliriant search for autonomy.