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The Poetics of Political Thinking
By DAVIDE PANAGIA Duke University Press
Copyright © 2006 Duke University Press
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-8223-3718-8
Chapter One
Delicate Discriminations THOMAS HOBBES'S SCIENCE OF POLITICS
We have reason to fear that the multitude of books which grows every day in a prodigious fashion will make the following centuries fall into a state as barbarous as that of the centuries that followed the fall of the Roman Empire. Unless we try to prevent this danger by separating those books which we must throw or leave in oblivion from those which one should save and, within the latter, between the parts that are useful and those which are not.-ADRIEN BAILLET All enlightened men seemed to be convinced that complete freedom and exemption from any form of censorship should be granted to longer works. Because writing them requires time, purchasing them requires affluence, and reading them requires attention, they are not able to produce the reaction in the populace that one fears of works of greater rapidity and violence. But pamphlets, and handbills, and newspapers, are produced quickly, you can buy them for little, and because their effect is immediate, they are believed to be more dangerous. -BENJAMIN CONSTANT An Excess of Words The fluidity and speed with which words travel insuch public forms of writing as pamphlets, handbills, and newspapers is often considered a threat to the stability of a polity. "By the second half of the seventeenth century," Ann Blair notes, "the sense of crisis due to information overload had reached such proportions that printing, long praised as a 'divine' invention, had to be defended against the charge of bringing on a new era of barbarity." This fear of barbarity, intensified by the circulation of impolitic words and even more impolitic writings, is a sentiment shared by many figures from the seventeenth through to the nineteenth centuries and, indeed, even today. Whether couched in debates over literary canon formation, or contests over "poor writing" in academic journals and the popular media, the fear is that the misuse of words will corrupt our ability to judge properly. Constant's characterization of longer works able to sustain a reader's attention is contrasted with a popular disdain for pamphlets, handbills, and newspapers that occasion rapid and nonreflective judgments. In the hands of the wrong people-which is to say in the hands of the people at large-such literature inevitably produces instability and dissent. Jacques Rancière refers to this phenomenon as "the scene of the modern revolution, the revolution of the children of the Book." Coinciding with the democratic revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this literary revolution places great emphasis on judgment as a mode of political thinking and points to the emergence of public opinion as a legitimate form of political knowledge. In order to have knowledge, one must have correct opinions, or at least opinions not founded upon mistaken judgments. It becomes necessary, then, to invent and put into practice a series of institutional mechanisms that allow people to opine correctly. These mechanisms-like a literary canon-function to guarantee knowledge of other interlocutors; that is, by knowing how to read and knowing that others read as we do, we have access to an other's persona, allowing us to engage in (to use modern parlance) intersubjective communication.
The problem of the relationship between opinion and knowledge is the central problem Thomas Hobbes tackles in his Leviathan, and for him this is explicitly a problem of reading competence. Consider his introduction:
But there is another saying not of late understood ... Nosce teipsum, Read thy self: which was not meant, as it is now used, to countenance, either the barbarous state of men in power, towards their inferiors: or to encourage men of low degree, to a sawcie behaviour towards their betters; But to teach us, that for the similitude of the thoughts, and Passions of one man, to the thoughts and Passions of another, whosoever looketh into himself, and considereth what he doth, when he does think, opine, reason, hope, feare, &c, and upon what grounds; he shall thereby read and know, what are the thoughts, and Passions, of all other men, upon the like occasions.
Like Baillet, Hobbes invokes the metaphor of "barbarity" to predict the consequences of an incompetent reading public. But rather than concluding from this that barbarism produces a multiplicity of meanings, Hobbes makes barbarism an agent of the collapse of meaning. The "barbarous state" that results from the nosce teipsum is thus not "another" language but rather a place of nonlanguage. Reminiscent, as it is, of his infamous description of the state of nature in Leviathan (chapter 13), this account of the collapse of meaning emphasizes Hobbes's fear that such a barbarous state is a potential threat to the stability of any political system.
There is also a curious and noteworthy mistranslation: Hobbes translates the Latin nosce teipsum as "read thy self," when the more appropriate translation is "know thy self" and is recognizably the Latin translation of the Greek dictum of Apollo's oracle at Delphi. The Latin verb nosce is the second person singular present tense of the transitive verb noscere (third declension-nosco/noscis/novi/notum), which literally means "to know" and is the root of our English cognize and recognize (it also forms the root of the French connaître and the Italian conoscere). Hobbes's mistranslation is curious particularly because we know, from accounts of his humanist education, that he was a renowned classicist fluent in both Latin and ancient Greek, along with modern French and Italian. Given this, it can only be the case that Hobbes intended to replace "to know" with "to read," and that he did so for certain specific reasons. One reason is the one he states: namely, that the expression nosce teipsum is being misused so as to allow people the liberty to claim a general knowledge about how things are from the position of their solitary self. Another possible reason complicates Hobbes's stature in the canon of political thought: it might be the case that Hobbes's political "subject" is as much a reading subject as a "subject of rights."
The rise and development of a modern science of politics in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was an attempt to regulate the flow of opinion by inventing various mechanisms of translation that transformed barbarous opinion into politically relevant knowledge. In this chapter, I reexamine Hobbes's appropriation and use of the term representation in political discourse. Today, we recognize and are bombarded by transubstantiating devices of representation such as the opinion poll or the advice of the political consultant-a professional persona invented to make sense of the "information overload" that opinion polls generate. Thomas Hobbes did not have the luxury of public opinion polls, or the kinds of pie graphs and flow charts found in any issue of USA Today. Nonetheless, the proliferation of nonauthorized opinion was a real problem for him-indeed, it is the problem addressed in Leviathan. Surrounded by the excesses of the English Civil War and faced with such barbarous speech as that of Gerard Winstanley, William Walwyn, Abeizer Coppe, and others, Hobbes saw it fit to invent a device that would convert opinion into knowledge. This invention comes in the form of a con-science: a kind of political knowledge that invites an aesthetic language of "representation" into a uniquely modern political vocabulary. Because Hobbes grants the individual the power to form representations through imagination and artifice, he makes room for these representations to count as something other than mere images. In other words, Hobbes admits that there can be no natural laws of "truth" governing a polity; this is why his polity is, importantly, artificial. It thus becomes critical that citizens formulate representations and solicit approval of them from others, thereby creating something like a common public opinion. On this rendering, the practice of representation and the solicitation of approval through judgment become the cornerstones of consent.
I place great emphasis on several features of Hobbes's argument and, indeed, on the figure of Hobbes himself. I first consider a question that has, as of yet, not been adequately pursued: what would it mean for such a committed nominalist as Hobbes to also be a polyglot? The entirety of book 1 of Leviathan, ending with the crucial chapter (16) on representation, is typically characterized as a discussion of the right use of words. In this regard, many scholars note that Hobbes is a nominalist who devises a science of politics. But Thomas Hobbes was also someone who spoke more than four languages fluently and spent a substantial amount of energy pursuing translations of ancient texts (the most famous of these being his classic translation of Thucydides's The Peloponnesian War). My point is that discussions of Hobbes's nominalism must account for his ability to call any one thing by several names. The fact that Hobbes's polyglot education made him aware of the multilingual character within any particular language complicates his relationship to the nominalist outlook conventionally attributed to him. Or, to put the matter differently, Hobbes reverts to and endorses nominalism as one would, in our day, revert to and endorse the device of the opinion poll: nominalism is a techne-a device of representation-that functions to halt the flow of barbarous speech. Hobbes's nominalism, then, does not consist in a rejection of universals per se but instead lies in the affirmation of particulars. Though concepts may be general and universal, their manifestation in the world is the result of particular judgments, and the choices resultant from individual discriminations are of immediate political import.
Conventional readings of Hobbes present him as proffering a theory of government that relies on coercion as the principal guarantor of legitimacy. By looking at his conceptions of power, freedom, and the role of political representation therein, readers of Hobbes insist that his is a frightening vision, potentially leading to unspeakable excesses of power. Admittedly, there is ample textual evidence for such a reading, especially when reading Hobbes in the midst of the kind of political climate that the cold war occasioned. Archetypal instances of such symptomatic misreadings include the following:
Liberalism does not in principle have to depend on specific religious or philosophical systems of thought. It does not have to choose among them as long as they do not reject toleration, which is why Hobbes is not the father of liberalism. No theory that gives public authorities the unconditional right to impose beliefs and even a vocabulary as they may see fit upon the citizenry can be described as even remotely liberal. Of all the cases made against liberalism, the most bizarre is that liberals are really indifferent, if not openly hostile, to personal freedom. This may follow from the peculiar identification of Leviathan as the very archetype of liberal philosophy, but it is a truly gross misinterpretation which simply assures that any social contract theory, however authoritarian its intentions, and any anti-Catholic polemic add up to liberalism. (Judith Shklar) Hobbes, and those who agreed with him, especially conservative or reactionary thinkers, argued that if men were to be prevented from destroying one another and making social life a jungle or a wilderness, greater safeguards must be instituted to keep them in their places; he wished correspondingly to increase the area of centralized control and decrease that of the individual. (Isaiah Berlin)
In each case, Hobbes's "contract" is a sacrificial act where citizens give up their liberties for the greater good of social and political stability. Shklar's "liberalism of fear" impugns Hobbes with a version of totalitarianism, and Berlin's classic description of Hobbes, though sympathetic to his concept of "negative liberty," is equally disturbed by the presence of absolutism. To be sure, it is not that these positions are inchoate, but rather that their cogency rests on a reading strategy that relies on an absolutist architectonic of power. But such a conception of power seems inappropriate given that Hobbes's metaphysics is more complex than the architectonic metaphor allows. These symptomatic misreadings of Hobbes are symptomatic principally as a consequence of an equally misbegotten reading strategy: one that eschews the at once aesthetic and, indeed, poetical dimensions of Hobbes's political thought.
In his day, Hobbes was renowned not only for his philosophical rigor but, most vividly, for his command of style and rhetoric, and it was the combination of poetic language with powerful ideas that made him both famous and infamous. In light of this, Hanna Pitkin's assertion that "Hobbes' discussion of representation is confined almost entirely to chapter 16 of his major work, Leviathan. Thus the context is one of political rather than, say, esthetic thought," is curious, to say the least. Why is the context political and not aesthetic? Or rather, what is at stake in distinguishing between these two modes of thinking? Given Hobbes's influential defense of discrimination as the quintessential faculty for judging representations, could it not be the case that the political and the aesthetic are intimately related in his treatment of representation? In emphasizing the poetic dimension of representation, I hope to show that there is a substantive aesthetic component to Hobbes's political thinking that cannot be easily separated from matters of political import. Indeed, the representational mechanism Hobbes devises brings out the aesthetic and political richness of his artistic innovations for thinking through a science of politics.
Thomas Hobbes in Translation
If I am not mistaken, the distinguishing character of Lucretius (I mean his soul and genius) is a certain kind of noble pride, and positive assertion of his opinion.... From his time to ours, I know none so like him, as our poet and philosopher of Malmesbury.-JOHN DRYDEN
Much has been made of Thomas Hobbes's relationship to Renaissance humanism. The growing literature-which includes such immediately notable scholars as David Johnston, Victoria Kahn, Noel Malcolm, Quentin Skinner, Nancy Struever, Richard Tuck, and others-inaugurates what might best be described as a historiographical revision of Hobbes's stature within the canon of political thought. The writerly Hobbes, as Michael Oakeshott describes him, is "a self-conscious stylist" whose idea of thinking "was not only conceived as movement, it was felt as movement." Hobbes's concern for style is characteristic of his writings in general; he was indeed someone who used arguments as much as he was an expositor of a philosophical outlook and, as one scholar notes, his "fascination with the axiomatic method and its explanatory potential did not in any sense constitute a rejection of the rhetorical tradition that had shaped Hobbes's thinking during the first forty years of his life." Conventional readings of Hobbes criticize his apparent insistence that the relationship between signifier and signified is fixed and that this fixing is coercively imposed by the sovereign. He is further criticized for at once attacking the use of ornate language and littering his own Leviathan with metaphors of all sorts. Indeed, the title of the work is a metaphor intended to describe the body politic. Quentin Skinner has argued that such "unwisely condescending accusations" are mistaken, because "what these critics fail to register is the degree to which Hobbes's use of ornatus in Leviathan mirrors a new-found willingness to endorse a humanist understanding of the proper relationship between reason and eloquence."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Poetics of Political Thinking by DAVIDE PANAGIA Copyright © 2006 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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