Prescription and Description in Political Thought The Case for Hobbes

In seeking a basis for political obligation in the “facts” of human nature, Hobbes has created a major problem for students of political theory. Recent scholarly debate has suggested that we understand Hobbes either as a descriptive and analytic theorist, or as a normative theorist. While this logical distinction has didactic value, it is apt to produce a misunderstanding of the dynamics of political thinking. All discourse does not rest upon logic: we must distinguish political argumentation, which often goes beyond the confines of logic by manipulating our factual perceptions, from disinterested philosophical debate, which aims at clarity. Hobbes manipulates his readers' perceptions in such a manner as to preclude a number of assumptions underlying traditional moral arguments for political disobedience. While moral argument (at least of a sort) is possible, it is not necessary to the argument of the Leviathan. Hobbes grounds political obligation on one situational and two psychophysiological postulates: man's most fundamental concern is self-preservation; his passions lead him into situations of conflict which give rise to intense feelings of fear; this fear has an “enlightening value,” transforming human behavior from the merely reflexive to the contrived. Terror hence provides a strategy of fear-avoidance, a logic of survival to which the individual must conform in order to avoid future encounters with death. Thus, while Hobbes's answer to the problem of political obligation is nonmoral in the traditional sense, it is more than merely prudential. Hobbes's conception of homeostasis as informed by fear is, like morality, both universal and imperative. The natural law binds not because it is “good” but because its violation is too frequently accompanied by an all-consuming terror which the ordinary man cannot withstand.