Hobbes visits Canada's Wonderland

Hobbes's "Leviathan"

Thirty minutes’ drive north of Toronto in the city of Vaughan is Canada’s Wonderland, the largest amusement park in Canada.  Wonderland hosts two major roller coaster rides, “Behemoth” and “Leviathan”, both names of different titles belonging to the work of Thomas Hobbes, possibly the most original political philosopher ever to write in English (and Latin).  Hobbes’s thought – as this blog has elsewhere demonstrated – is at the foundation of Harper’s Conservative “movement”, and it forms the basis of Republican thinking in the United States, even though Hobbes himself was not a republican thinker, a point that the Quentin Skinner (the eminent English historian of political thought) makes quite clear.[1]  This piece considers the names of these two major roller coaster rides and their possible relationship with the ruling Conservative Party of Canada.

Where did the two names, Behemoth and Leviathan, come from?  Both are mentioned in the Bible (Job 40:15-24 and Job 41); one is a land monster and the other is a sea monster, respectively, but names derived only from the Bible do not make for good public fare in today’s multicultural Canada.  It remains possible that there is a great Toronto wit about enforcing Northrup Frye’s former classic, The Great Code (1981) which discusses these two “hulking brutes” (see also, notably, the frontispiece to his book) but I suspect something much more nefarious is afoot.[2]  Let’s look instead to Hobbes.

Hobbes published Leviathan, his classic work of political philosophy in 1651, two years after King Charles I lost his head.  And he published his Behemoth (a narrative of the English Civil Wars ending with the Restoration of the Monarchy) around 1668 in his “eightieth year”.[3]

Despite the fact that Hobbes wrote Leviathan before Behemoth, Behemoth (following the order of appearance in the Bible) was named the first giant roller coaster at Wonderland.  But consider the timing.  Canada’s Conservative Party under Harper was first elected to minority rule in January 2006.  Is it a coincidence that Behemoth was announced as Wonderland’s newest roller coaster ride in August 2007?  Harper was first elected to majority rule in May 2011.  Is it a coincidence that Leviathan (a bigger roller coaster ride than Behemoth) was announced 3 months after that election victory?

 

If we delve into Hobbes’s writing we can find interesting support for the idea of a roller coaster.  For example Behemoth begins with the very sentence “If in time as in place there were degrees of high and low …”[4]  But it is the analysis of Quentin Skinner in Hobbes and Republican Liberty (2008) that helps clarify Leviathan and its relevance to the subject matter at hand.  First of all, Hobbes was inspired by Galileo; and it is his detection of the motion of the heavenly bodies that provides the basic assumption at the root of all things (including Harper’s thinking): “the only thing that is real in the whole world is motion”.[5]

 

In an early work, De cive (1642), Hobbes defines liberty as “nothing other than the absence of impediments to motion”.[6]  He goes on to say that “the different ways man can move himself … the more civil liberty he may be said to possess.”[7]  In other words Hobbes’s theory of citizenship is based on motion, and his ideas as expressed in De cive are further developed and refined in Leviathan (1651), where freedom is applied to corporal bodies. [8]  Hobbes continues: ” …the liberty of the man, which consisteth in this, that he find no stop in doing what he has the will, desire or inclination to do.“[9] Again: “liberty is the absence of external impediments”.[10] If Hobbes had known the roller coaster, he might have used it as an example to represent his “no stop” ideas of individual liberty and motion, where there is always the threat of metaphoric violence. Instead it appears Canadian Conservatives have latched on to the great roller coaster to represent Hobbes’s ideas.

Another key Hobbesian notion is the idea of “the multitude” which comprise the fearful ‘Leviathan’ monster featured on the eponymous book’s frontispiece (see above image, for example, or the cover of the Penguin edition of Leviathan, edited by C.B. Macpherson).[11]  Gone now from Harper’s Canada today – certainly from Wonderland - is the Aristotelian notion of “society” (and the idea of man as a social animal), overturned by Hobbes.[12]  The commercial, frequently automated and rather technological character of Wonderland (Hobbes considered himself a man of science) is on par with the Conservatives’ version of mass “culture” which stands in opposition to our fading national ideals of the CBC, which plumbs our souls with high fiction and deeper facts. 

Today the Conservatives can trumpet consumer “choice” at Wonderland: you can ride – and be scared by - Behemoth, or, if you are old enough, you can ride - and be scared by – Leviathan; or both[13]  Or you can be scared by the myriad of other rides, thereby exercising, again, the freedom of “rational choice” (despite fright), a key tenet in Conservative thinking. [14] This fear is also central to Hobbes who, writing in the context of Civil War and of “every man against every man,”[15] spoke of “perpetual fear”[16] and “continual fear”[17] which is the reason why we today (excepting Justin Trudeau, until recently) lock our doors at night (and why Stephen Harper once shut himself in a storage closet).[18] It is this excitement of fear that draws us to Canada’s Wonderland, and it is fear on which the Conservative Party – and its leader - usually feeds.  Put another way: amusement parks can be compared to gambling for youth who thrive on thrill – and instead of sending young people to war (a constant threat) there is always the big roller coaster.

Apolitical critics might claim that my argument misses out on the significance of science fiction.  There was a “Behemoth” movie in 1959 and again in 2011, and there was a science fiction novel Leviathan Wakes published in June 2011.   But it is worth pointing out that the original sources using the combined names “Behemoth” and “Leviathan” prior to Canada’s Wonderland are the Bible and Hobbes – and no other roller coaster ride names in North America are as unique and deeply meaningful.  In other words, it is important to pay attention to how popular “culture” is laden with political implications, if not ideology,[19] and Canada’s ruling Conservative Party has its fingerprints all over Wonderland’s two major rides – with the special help of Hobbes.   

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[1] My argument is especially indebted to the recent work of Quentin Skinner, first published in 2008.  See Quentin Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 

[2] Northrup Frye, The Great Code: the Bible and Literature (Toronto: Academic Press Canada, 1982), p. 152.

[3] Thomas Hobbes, Behemoth or Long Parliament, ed. Paul Seaward (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2014), p.6.

[4] Ibid., p. 107

[5] Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty, p 109.

[6] Ibid., p. 109.

[7] Ibid., p. 117.

[8] Ibid., p. 128.

[9] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. A.P. Martinich (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2002), p. 158. Cf. Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty, p. 129.

[10] Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty, p. 130. And as Quentin Skinner ever so succinctly explains, Hobbes is the first to look at freedom “entirely as absence of impediments rather than absence of dependence”. Ibid.,, p. 157.

[11] See Horst Bredekamp, “Thomas Hobbes Visual Strategies” in Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s Leviathan, ed. Patricia Springborg. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 29-60.

[12] Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty, p 94.

[13] See Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, ed. J.M Bernstein (London: Routledge, 2010), p. 85.

[14] See Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty, p.137.

[15] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. A.P. Martinich (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2002), p. 95

[16] Ibid., p. 82.

[17] Ibid., p. 96.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research 1923-1950 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 216.