Political Theory

H01(b) - The Individual and the Community in Hobbes and Locke

Date: Jun 12 | Time: 08:30am to 10:00am | Location:

Chair/Président/Présidente : Timothy Berk (University of Toronto)

Discussant/Commentateur/Commentatrice : Lindsay Mahon Rathnam (Duke Kunshan University)

Locke's Trust Model of Government: a New Grounding for Fiduciary Political Theory: Madalyn Hay (University of Toronto)
Abstract: A recent turn in legal theory has focused on the potential power of the fiduciary obligation to constrain the power of government. These ‘fiduciary political theorists’ argue that the fiduciary obligation, the obligation to act in the best interest of another, could work as a new model for legitimating use of public authority and subject the use of public power to deliberative and consciences checks. When describing the history of this theory of government, most fiduciary political theorists acknowledge the role of Locke’s Two Treatise of Government in creating a fiduciary or trust model of government. However, Locke is usually cited in passing and there is little sustained attention on the details of his trust model of government. This paper accordingly promises a resurrection of the public trust model of government from within Locke’s thought. By paying closer attention to the specifics of Locke’s argument, we can extract a powerful model that balances the people’s power with the power of the government. By foregrounding the importance of the judgement of the people in Locke’s account, this paper will provide fiduciary political theory with a new grounding. Current theory focuses too heavily on the state’s ability to check its own power and ignores the power that the people have to act as a check on their own government. A model of public trust governance that is attentive both to the power of the people and the power of internal governmental checks can be stitched together from the account that Locke provides.

Please Glory Over Me: Ryan Griffiths (McGill University)
Abstract: Hobbes’s description of glory as a cause of war is a false truism. First rank, the home of glory, is dangerously scarce because vast numbers of us desire it, but only one can have it. Similarly, Fred Hirsch described harmful competition over intrinsically scarce positional goods in his influential Social Limits to Growth. Perhaps we would have fewer harmful conflicts if we regarded no one as above anyone else. The question is this: how can the pessimistic interpretation of the pursuit of glory fit with a huge range of everyday facts of glory competition? Everyday fact: award shows and sports championships are popular and we cheer for someone to win. Everyday fact: if you beat me at a task that I take myself to be expert in I will want you to be pleased with having bested me and rather take it as an especial affront if you do not seem pleased with having beaten me. It seems right to say that I want you to glory in beating me. The solution: rank is scarce, but the glory deriving from it is abundant, because glory (not rank) is non-rival and non-excludable. The winner’s rank is exclusively theirs, but we cannot be prevented from sharing in their glory (non-excludable), and sharing in their glory (non-rival) expands the total amount from network effects (think of victory parades). This turns out to be a worrisome fact about inequality, injustice, and peace, because it means we often want the already privileged to have more.

Hobbes on Individual Happiness (Felicity) and its Relationship to Politics: Vertika - (McGill University)
Abstract: What is Hobbes’s contribution to helping us understand the relationship between individual emotions and politics? To answer this question, I claim that Hobbes argued that it is intrinsic to human nature that people can only experience and advance their happiness or felicity when they feel secure and that a political society characterized by trust, security, and certainty is essential to fostering this sense of individual security and felicity. Thereby, the obsession with security is for the final end of felicity. That is why the classical explanation of Hobbes, who was obsessed with security at the expense of liberty, is wanting. This argument, however, has been made in different ways in the existing literature. For example, Richard Tuck has made a case for the utopian nature of Hobbes’s politics and argued that Hobbes aimed to bring about a utopian understanding of politics rather than a new political practice (Tuck 2004, 126). Robin Douglass (2016) has argued that Hobbes’s work combined realism and idealism and was centrally concerned with safety, trust and security. I propose that this paper will comprehensively explain Hobbes’s ‘realistic idealism’ and outline a vision of politics that the absolutist state, rooted in anxiety, stood for and what kind of policy implications we can draw from it today in the age of insecurity, mistrust, and uncertainty. Building on other philosophical interpretations of the concept of trust (Baumgold 2013; Odzuck 2017) and felicity (Abizadeh 2018, 139–79) in Hobbes’s philosophy, I argue that the purpose of Hobbes’s politics was to foster a climate of security and trust to allow the pursuit of happiness or felicity. My argument is rooted in the Epicurean premise, which I show Hobbes shares, namely, that a state of anxiety is the main obstacle to attaining felicity. I suggest that the “disagreeability of disagreement in Hobbes” (Bejan 2017, 82–111) is to prevent a politics of anxiety from taking over the pursuit of happiness. I reconstruct the psychology of anxiety in Hobbes by proposing to understand it as a passion in Hobbes that explains the relationship between different and conflicting passions in Hobbes. Summarily, I suggest that anxiety in Hobbes is the vacillation between hope and despair on the one hand and courage and fear on the other, with the end outcome being uncertain. The future-looking Hobbesian human being experiences the passion of anxiety in different permutations and combinations between hope, despair, courage and fear. The opposite of anxiety for Hobbes is felicity, a state of confidence in being able to fulfil one’s desires consistently (L: VI: 30). My interpretation goes beyond others who have emphasized not just security but also identified certainty to be the end of Hobbes’s state. (For example, Planinc 2010). I argue that the utopia Hobbes wants to establish with the absolutist state has the ultimate end of felicity. My argument on felicity will engage with and differ from one of the most sustained elaborations of Hobbes’s concept of the good (Abizadeh 2018) to suggest that felicity was the ultimate end of Hobbes’s ‘apolitical politics’. The most important insight from Hobbes, which I aim to highlight through this paper, is that individuals cannot be happy without a sense of security. I argue that contemporary institutions of social and political organization have much to learn from this insight into their responsibilities towards people. Distrust in institutions will lead people to believe in alternate actors who might claim to know the truth and herald ‘solutions’. We need to understand that precarity and despair can be one of the fuels of the success of propaganda, leading to somewhat of a ‘truth is dead’ era. Hobbes teaches us that human anxiety, though restless, can be mitigated by a sense of security, which can help foster a polity based on trust and enable people to pursue their felicity or happiness.