Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-p9bg8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T12:40:05.574Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Justice and the Question of Regimes in Ancient and Modern Political Philosophy: Aristotle and Hobbes*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2009

William Mathie
William Mathie
Affiliation:
Dalhousie University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
Image of the first page of this content. For PDF version, please use the ‘Save PDF’ preceeding this image.'
Type
Articles
Information
Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique , Volume 9 , Issue 3 , September 1976 , pp. 449 - 463
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association (l'Association canadienne de science politique) and/et la Société québécoise de science politique 1976

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 This question will depend upon the extent to which Aristotle and Hobbes are representative of ancient and modern political science. Certainly Hobbes understood his own enterprise to consist in the substitution of the first genuine civil science for a traditional understanding of political and moral things that was theoretically ill-founded and practically unsound, and regarded Aristotle as the exemplar and chief source of that tradition. Whether Hobbes was successful in establishing a new political science cannot be determined here; it can only be noted that many, though not all, historians of political thought have recognized Hobbes as a founder of modern political science and that his successors have generally found it necessary to confront Hobbes's account of political life either directly or indirectly.

2 Politics, 1253a9–18; Nicomachean Ethics, 1134a26–35, 1134b8–15

3 Politics, 1253a25–29

4 See, for example, Politics, 1276b1.

5 Ibid., 1278b9–15, 1328a36–1328b2

6 Strauss, Leo has remarked that we most nearly approach Aristotle's notion of the politeia when we use “regime” in the phrase, ancien régime; The City and Man (Chicago 1964), 45–8.Google Scholar

7 Politics, 1276b1–8

8 Ibid., 1276b21–34; see also Strauss, Leo, Natural Right and History (Chicago 1953), 125Google Scholar

9 Indeed the regimes and their partisans may disagree as to who the citizens are as well as what they are; Politics, 1275b34–39

10 See, for example, the statements of Thrasymachus in Plato's Republic (338D–337A) and of Callicles in the Gorgias (482C–484C).

11 I have examined Hobbes's treatment of the kinds of commonwealth in much greater detail in my doctoral dissertation, The Question of Regimes in Ancient and Modern Political Philosophy: Aristotle and Hobbes (Department of Political Science, University of Chicago, 1974), chap. 4.

12 Aristotle discusses political change and the preservation of regimes mainly in Book Five of the Politics. While it is notorious that all of Hobbes's political teaching is somehow addressed to the prevention of rebellion, the causes of the dissolution of the commonwealth and the means of its preservation form the explicit theme of two chapters in each of the three major statements of Hobbes's political science. The Elements of Law: Natural and Politic, ed. Tönnies, F. (London 1969)Google Scholar, 2.8 and 9, cited hereafter as Elements; Philosophical Rudiments Concerning Government and Society, ed. Lamprecht, S. (New York 1949)Google Scholar, 2.12 and 13, cited hereafter as De Cive; and Leviathan, ed. Oakeshott, M. (Oxford 1946)Google Scholar, 2.29 and 30.

13 Politics, 1301al9–25 (italics added)

14 De Cive, 2.12. Note the title of the chapter; throughout Hobbes speaks of sedition against “a commonwealth,” opinions contrary to “civil obedience,” “peace,” “civil society,” “all commonweals,” “government,” and identifies only the failure to distinguish a “people” from a “multitude” as a cause of sedition especially endangering one kind of government, the monarchical. At Elements, 2.8.3, and Leviathan, 2.29, p. 214, Hobbes again speaks of the special vulnerability of monarchy to a discontent arising out of “contention for precedence” which can receive a more common satisfaction through a share in ruling as provided by democracy. In Leviathan Hobbes blames the reading of Greek and Roman authors for the notion that a greater liberty or prosperity results from the popular form of commonwealth.

15 The Second Treatise, 19.226. Hobbes's interpretation of the folly of the daughters of Pelias who destroyed their father while “pretending or hoping” to restore him would seem to pertain to all such efforts. Elements, 2.8.15; De Cive, 2.12.13

16 That account is most clearly set out at Element, 2.8.1, but is also entailed by Hobbes's discussion at De Cive, 2.12.11.

17 Politics, 1302a17–1303a18

18 Elements, 2.8.1

19 At De Cive, 2.13.9, Hobbes speaks of the duty of eradicating opinions that would justify resistance immediately after discussing external defence of the commonwealth. At Leviathan, 2.30, pp. 219–20, the duty of teaching the rights of sovereignty is second only to the actual maintenance “of those rights entire.”

20 It may be noted that though regimes may be altered in a manner not involving the formation of factions – when, for example, a change of regime occurs that is neither intended nor anticipated – it is the overturning of regimes through factions that are of greatest interest to us as students of political science. While the discussion of faction (⋯ στ⋯σισ) complicates the discussion, it does not do so unnecessarily as Newman, W.L. thinks; The Politics of Aristotle (Oxford 1962), IV, 282 n. 25, and 284 n. 39.Google Scholar

21 Politics, 1301a26–28

22 Ibid., 1301b27

23 The “partial correctness” or more importantly the “partial incorrectness” of the notion of justice underlying a regime may be understood to be a cause of faction either in the sense that such a notion is not universally persuasive to all those inhabiting a given city, or in the sense that that notion fails to satisfy the actual requirements of proportional justice for a specific city at a certain time. The former understanding of the partially correct notion of justice as less than universally persuasive (suggested to me by David Braybrooke) will suffice for present purposes, I think, but it should be noted that Aristotle would argue a prima facie connection between the two senses: the lack of universal acceptance of a notion of justice within a specific city suggests the failure of that notion to realize what is proportionally just within that city's circumstances, though it is also the case that what is proportionally just may not be acknowledged to be such by some inhabitants of the city.

24 Ibid., 1310a16

25 Noting that Hobbes “thinks in terms of inculcating his citizens with a theory, a ‘science’” Peter Winch has usefully compared Hobbes's account of the relation between education and politics with that given by Rousseau. Rousseau, Winch points out, is concerned with “a whole course of training, from childhood up” and would have thought the teaching of the theory of The Social Contract “futile” where not prepared for by that kind of training. See his “Man and Society in Hobbes and Rousseau” in Hobbes and Rousseau, ed. Cranston, M. and Peters, R.S. (New York 1972), 234.Google Scholar

26 Elements, 2.9.8; De Cive, 2.13.9; Leviathan, 2.30, pp. 224–25

27 Men must not ask whether the regime, or the typical or specific decisions and policies that issue from it, are just; they must rather ask only whether those decisions or policies issue from a legitimate source, i.e., from decision-makers established through consent. Mansfield, Harvey C. Jr, “Hobbes and the Science of Indirect Government,” American Political Science Review LXV (March 1971), 99Google Scholar

28 Consider, for example, De Cive, 1.1.4. According to Hobbes “men are continually in competition for honour and dignity … and consequently amongst men there ariseth on that ground, envy and hatred, and finally war …” (Leviathan, 2.17, p. 111). It might be conjectured that the elimination of envy could cause the state of nature to cease to be a state of war. See Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass. 1971), 143–45.Google Scholar

29 Elements, 2.10.4; De Cive, 2.14.1; Leviathan, 2.25, pp. 166–7

30 De Cive, “Preface to the Reader”

31 See especially Politics, 128a16–b35.

32 De Cive, 2.5.6

33 Leviathan, p. 5; compare Locke, Second Treatise, 7.96–98

34 De Cive, 2.6.9

35 Ibid., 2.10.2

36 Leviathan, 2.19, p. 122

37 De Cive, 1.3.13; Leviathan, 1.15, pp. 100–1

38 De Cive, 1.3.13

39 The complex character of this disagreement is spelled out by Cropsey, Joseph, “Hobbes and the Transition to Modernity,” in Ancients and Moderns, ed. Cropsey, (New York 1964), 225–6.Google Scholar

40 Leviathan, 1.15, p. 103; De Cive 1.3.26

41 De Cive, 1.1.3

42 De Cive, 1.1.4; Leviathan 1.13, p. 81

43 De Cive, 1.1.11

44 Leviathan, 1.15, pp. 94–6

45 Ibid., 2.21, p. 141

46 De Cive, 2.10.8

47 Ibid.

48 Ibid., 1.1.2 and note

49 Ibid., 2.10.9

50 Ibid., 1.1.2

51 Politics, 1281a30–31

52 For a preliminary indication of the complexity of the relation between political justice and distributive justice see Mathie, Question of Regimes, 89–102. I have tried to suggest there the grave difficulties that must be faced by the usual understanding of political justice as a part of distributive justice and I hope to complete a more nearly adequate account of this relation soon.

53 See, e.g., Nicomachean Ethics, 1169b30–1170a4

54 Leviathan, 2.19, p. 122

55 De Cive, 2.10.2

56 Leviathan, 1.13, p. 82

57 Ibid., 2.30, p. 221

58 Nicomachean Ethics, 1103a14–b25, 1129b14–30, 1180a19–27

59 Leviathan, 1.15, p. 103

60 Above I have tried to indicate the fundamental significance of equity for Hobbes's account of justice and the laws of nature generally. A corresponding significance attaches to equity as a kind of standard against which the sovereign's performance of his office may be judged. For Hobbes, the sovereign may be said to violate equity if he fails to provide his subjects with equal treatment in the courts of law, or pardons those who do injury to other subjects without the consent of those injured, or distributes the tax burden unfairly. De Cive, 2.13.10, 16–17; Leviathan 2.30, pp. 225–6. Equity is also, of course, the basis on which those charged to interpret the laws should proceed whenever the law is ambiguous as it often must be in Hobbes's view; indeed authorized interpreters of the law should proceed on this basis whenever “the word of the law does not fully authorize a reasonable sentence…” Finally one might note the increasing and even radical significance of equity in A Dialogue Between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Laws of England, ed. Cropsey, Joseph (Chicago 1971).Google Scholar See there, in particular Hobbes's philosopher's.acknowledgment that statute law may be contrary to equity though never unjust (p. 70) and the editor's discussion of Hobbes's revival of Bacon's practical politics. All of this evidence would seem to support the suspicion that equity has great practical as well as theoretical significance for Hobbes's political teaching.