While Hobbes can be seen to be in league with Cromwell, he
was in fact a Royalist (even when England’s Kings were Catholic). But his
political philosophy was indeed considered a “scientific” response to the
apparent need for legitimacy of authority while preserving liberty (the
latter being a dubious success). Hobbes’s central premise is that man is
anti-social, and that man in the state of nature (“where there is no common
power”) is approximately equal but always at war (“every man against every
man”).[1] Fear in the state of nature is commonplace,
which is why people lock their doors at night, and the life of man is
“solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short” (which perhaps sounds like aspects
of Africa - to which Harper has reduced foreign aid).[2] Man’s (natural) liberty, the anti-social, or
individualistic, assumption of the nature of man is the key reason why Harper is
no friend of ‘socialist schemes’ (like the Kyoto Accord) or the United Nations,
as well preferring the company of pandas to people.[3]
Hobbes’s solution to man’s disorder in the state of nature
is to unite the multitude in awe of one person, otherwise known as a
“COMMONWEALTH”, or in Latin “CIVITAS”, better known as the “great LEVIATHAN”.[4] One of the purposes behind the concept of the
great Leviathan was to convert the crowds into an undivided people, and here we
see some roots to Harper’s nationalism.[5]
Despite the fact that Hobbes was considered
“scientific”, inspired by Euclid and a friend to Galileo (late in his life), and
respected for his own mathematical often geometrical mind, which he saw as a
means of lifting mankind from the chaos of conflict, Hobbes actually reinvents
feudalism on a state scale, arguing for an (in effect, unequal) “relation
between Protection and Obedience”.[6] Similarly he seems to argue with logic, but
the sovereign Leviathan is a great source of fear nonetheless, not unlike in
Canada today where citizens are afraid to speak out against their great “Protector”.[7]
What Hobbes lacks in his political thinking is precisely what
is missing in Harper: the idea of social reciprocity. In other words Hobbes attempts to rebut
Aristotle, in particular his idea that “man is by nature a political animal”
(and that we each have a soul), arguing instead that man can be apolitical, or
passive, opening up room for deterministic dominance by the Leviathan, Canada’s
problem today.[8]
Hobbes’s case for “every man against every man” is also a seedbed for Harper’s prevalent
use of Game Theory and the classic problem of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, which
suggests that it is rational not to cooperate, which in turn is at the root of
Negative Political Advertising (because it works, at least in the short run).[9] Hobbes (unlike Montaigne) also has no
appreciation for the game of tennis (and he says so), because in tennis one is
expected to “serve” and “return”.[10]
Similarly Harper does not respect
Parliament (whose etymological root word is the French parler – “to talk”). When
Harper prorogued Parliament (twice), he turned to Hobbes who answered: “Force
and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues.”[11]
Canada’s Leviathan is again at work, and here perhaps I
digress but get to today’s point. The rather unannounced comprehensive trade agreement
with China (FIPA), signed in Russia on 9 September 2012 by Harper (note the signatory
context of two other countries with their own great Leviathans), granting China
“Foreign Investment Protection
and Promotion” in Canada is
now on the floor of the House of Commons – no thanks to the Prime
Minister. If Harper succeeds, Canada
loses – and China gains, true to our resource-based colonial status. Canada’s current federal Conservative Party (true
to its anti-social form) was born in 2003 on a broken contract, a scrap piece
of paper gone awry. Ten years later
Canada’s Conservative Leviathan shows unwillingness to make public in
Parliament a 31 year written contract with China (with no chance for abrogation
until the 15th year) – Harper can do business with the Chinese state
but not speak to Canadians. Why the slyness?
Parliament is no protection, and the great Leviathan is busy
protecting himself and China, but is he actually protecting Canadians? Does
this “Protector” in all his considerable secrecy really deserve “Obedience” –
or is Harper (borrowing from Descartes) a “Great Deceiver”? Here
is a point by Hobbes that Harper clearly has missed: “The obligation of
subjects to the sovereign is understood to last … no longer than the power
lasts by which he is able to protect them.”[12] In other words, there really needs to be a
“relationship” between the Canadian public and their Leviathan, quite possibly
an institutional one too, certainly if there is going to be any “Protection”, a
central flaw in both Hobbes’s and Harper’s thinking.[13]
Finally, in pursuit of this sense of “reciprocity” may I
suggest sporting lessons for our great Leviathan - not hockey, not Game Theory,
not tennis but canoeing lessons. The
canoe has traversed Canada like nothing else over the centuries, from our First
Nations, to our French and British explorers, to our Scouts and recreational groups
and families today.[14]
So let’s add to this and borrow not from
Hobbes but from Hume who makes the well-known case for two men rowing a boat in
his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of
Morals in 1751, an exact century after Leviathan
was first published, for the essence of the metaphor resonates especially well
for this country.[15] In other words canoeing is primarily about
equilibrium, balance, stability, agreement, convention and “common measures of
exchange” – all vital to Canada’s history and its original state of nature –
and to Canadians today.[16] It sounds like co-operation in Canada is even
natural, and this idea would be of benefit to one individual in particular. Are
you listening, great Leviathan?
[1] Thomas
Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. A.P. Martinich
(Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2002),p. 97 (xiii, 13); p. 95 (xiii, 8)
[2] Ibid.,
p. 96 (xiii,9).
[3]
Christian Nadeau, Rogue in Power: Why Stephen
Harper is Remaking Canada by Stealth, tr. Bob Chodoas, Eric Hamovitch and
Susan Joanis (Toronto: Lorimer, 2011), p. 110.
Nadeau is apparently the first to write on the link between Hobbes and
Harper, but I find the work generally uninspired.
[4]
Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 129 (xvii,13)
[5] Quentin
Skinner “Hobbes on Persons, Authors and Representatives” in Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s Leviathan,
ed. Patricia Springborg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 163.
[6]
Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 523 (“Review
and Conclusion”, 17)
[7] Johan
Tralau, “Leviathan, the Beast of Myth: Medusa, Dionysos, and the Riddle of
Hobbes’s Sovereign Monster” in Cambridge
Companion to Hobbes’s Leviathan, p. 77.
[8]
See Tom Sorrell “Hobbes’s Moral Philosophy” and Cees Leijenhorst “Sense and
Nonsense about Sense: Hobbes and the Aristotelians on Sense Perception and
Imagination” in Cambridge Companion to
Hobbes’s Leviathan. See also Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon, The Basic Works of Aristotle (New York:
Modern Library, 2001), p. 1129 [Aristotle, Politics,
Book 1, Chapter 2].
[9]
For Hobbes and Game Theory see Jean Hampton, Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995).
[10]
For Hobbes on tennis, see Leviathan,
p. 156 (xx,19). It would appear that
Hobbes is writing with Montaigne in mind.
[11] Ibid., p. 97 (xiii,13)
[12] Ibid., p. 166 (xxi,21)
[13]
Hampton, Hobbes and the Social Contract
Tradition, p. 203.
[14] See
for example Bruce Hodgins, John Jennings, Doreen Small (eds), The Canoe in Canadian Cultures (2001).
[15] David
Hume, Hume’s Moral and Political Philosophy,
ed. and intro. Henry D. Aiken (New York: Hafner Press/Macmillan, 1948), p. 278.
[16] Ibid.
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