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. 

On Harper's Mentor (Thomas Hobbes), Law and the Supreme Court

In a recent Globe and Mail article, columnist Lawrence Martin suggests that Harper’s “chief negator” is the Supreme Court – not the NDP or Liberals.[1]  While this is true a few broader (and some more of Hobbes’s philosophical) points are worth mentioning.  One is the fact that, thanks to Pierre Trudeau, we have a written Constitution, which now guides the Supreme Court in its decisions.  Originally conceived to prevent abuses of power in the provinces, it also now works to restrain “provincial” leaders at the federal level.

Another point is that Harper’s attitude to law is much different from his predecessors, who previously counted on the legislative and judiciary to do their business without improper browbeating by the executive.  Harper is not only being “excessive” and “unprecedented” in his run-in with the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, for which there has been no apology, he takes his cue from Hobbes, whose profound influence on our Prime Minister’s political thought is discussed elsewhere in this blog.[2]

 

Hobbes contends that law is a matter of sovereign decision-making alone: “law, properly, is the word of him, that by right has command over others.”[3] In other words there is little place for the Supreme Court in Harper’s intellectual framework, a feature which dates the Prime Minister more than it does Hobbes’s Leviathan, published in 1651 during the wake of the English Civil War. Hobbes also had no place for precedent and no regard for ancient law, so the Magna Carta figures little in his works, creating intellectual space for Harper to ignore its 800^th anniversary next year.[4]

Hobbes essentially argues that law has no special virtue because of it existing over time; it survives only because of sovereign consent: “When long use obtaineth the authority of a law, it is not the length of time that maketh the authority, but the will of the authority signified by his silence (for silence is sometimes an argument of consent).”[5]  This results in a tremendous amount of present-day-ism in Harper’s hyperactive agenda, as there is no wish for tacit consent over existing laws. Because Harper’s political thinking does not appreciate law over time our Prime Minister will likely remain obdurate towards native land claims and aboriginal title - and the Constitution itself, including its origins in the Magna Carta.  What I wish to stress is that Harper’s attitude towards law is born in part of Hobbesian political philosophy – not necessarily a hard-nosed temperament or, more recently, petulant thinking.

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[1] Lawrence Martin “Stephen Harper’s real opposition” Globe and Mail, Tuesday July 1, 2014, p. A9

[2] See my blog in the Book Review section entitled: “Hobbes’s ‘Leviathan’ and Harper. Alternatively entitled: “On Harper and Hobbes, Trade Secrets with China, and Ancient Canadian Wisdom”.

[3] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. A.P.Martinich (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2002), p. 119 (Ch. 15).  See Anne Pallister, Magna Carta: The Heritage of Liberty (Oxford: Clarendon Press,1971), p. 25.

[4] J.C. Holt, Magna Carta. Second Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 16

[5] Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 198 (Ch. 26)

On Harper and Hobbes, Trade Secrets with China, and Ancient Canadian Wisdom

This is to let Canadians know that Stephen Harper actually does adhere to a system of thought, albeit a very short-sighted one.  His political philosophy borrows most not from Machiavelli but from Thomas Hobbes, in particular his book Leviathan (1651) written in the wake of England’s Civil War. King Charles was executed in 1649, the House of Lords was abolished shortly thereafter, and the Puritan regime of Cromwell began organizing a new state, known as the Commonwealth. Meanwhile continental Europe terminated the Thirty Years’ War with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648.

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 15^th 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?

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[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.

Hobbes and an inside tweet on Harper

So that in the first place, I put for a general inclination of all mankind a perpetual and restless desire for power after power that ceaseth only in death.  And the cause of this is not always that a man hopes for a more intensive delight that he has already attained to or that he cannot be content with a moderate power, but because he cannot assure the power and means to live well, which he hath present, without the acquisition of more.

                                                                                           
                                                                Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 1651

Source: Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. A.P. Martinich (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2002), p. 75 (Ch. XI.2).