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Leviathan Restored: A Reply to Carmichael

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2009

C. B. Macpherson
C. B. Macpherson
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
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Abstract

Professor Carmichael's critique appears to demolish my reading of Hobbes so completely, and contains such minute reasoning, that readers will be apt at least to carry away the impression that there can be no smoke without fire. In this case, there is. As I shall show, Carmichael's most confident judgments, and his essential arguments, are without foundations.

Type
Article Commentary
Information
Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique , Volume 16 , Issue 4 , December 1983 , pp. 795 - 805
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association (l'Association canadienne de science politique) and/et la Société québécoise de science politique 1983

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References

1 Carmichael, D. J. C., “Macpherson's, C. B. ‘Hobbes’: A Critique,” this JOURNAL 16 (1983), 61–80.Google Scholar

2 In alleging (62) that these critics found my corroborative evidence “conspicuously implausible” he seems to have been thinking mainly of William Letwin's criticism, without noticing my reply to it in American Political Science Review 68 (1974), 1730–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Hobbes, Thomas, Elements of Law, Part I, chap. 8, sect. 4; edition of Ferdinand Tönnies (London: Simpkin, Marshall, 1889), 26.Google Scholar Carmichael's assertion that this “does not refer to, or imply any universal opposition between each man and all others” (footnote 25) is hard to credit. How else could “power simply,” which is surely every man's power, be defined as the excess of one man's power above another's? Compare the passages from the Rudiments quoted below at footnotes 6 and 7.

4 Carmichael, “Macpherson's ‘Hobbes’,” 72.

5 See Tönnies' preface to his edition of the Elements of Law, vii, and Hobbes, Thomas, Six Lessons, in Molesworth, William (ed.), English Works, Vol. 7 (London: J. Bohn, 1839–45), 335–36.Google Scholar

6 Hobbes, Thomas, Rudiments, author's preface to the reader, 11 (my page references to the Rudiments are to S. P. Lamprecht's edition [New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1949],Google Scholar which he published under its original Latin title De Cive).

7 Ibid., 11, emphasis added.

8 Ibid., 12.

9 Hobbes, Thomas, Opera Latine, Vol. 2, ed. by Molesworth, William (London: J. Bohn, 1839–45), 147.Google Scholar

10 Carmichael, “Macpherson's ‘Hobbes,’” 72.

11 Ibid., 64.

12 Ibid., 65.

13 Ibid.

14 Ibid., 66.

15 Hobbes may be said to have dealt with Carmichael's arguments from individuals A and B in his remarks quoted above at footnotes 8 and 9.

16 Carmichael, “Macpherson's ‘Hobbes,‘” 67.

17 Ibid., 68.

18 Ibid., 69.

19 Carmichael even contends (69) that Hobbes's definition of a man's value as his price, that is “so much as would be given for the use of his Power” (Leviathan X. 16) does not imply a market in which men's powers are actually bought and sold, on the ground that in the definition “the ‘value’ of a man is not the price which is paid in fact, but rather ‘so much as would be given.’” This overlooks the fact that things don't have prices unless there is a market in which they are actually bought and sold. Incidentally, in Hobbes’ s discussion of valuing in the Elements the statement is:” For so much worth is every thing, as a man Will give for the use of all it can do” (Elements, Part I, chap. 8, sect. 5, 27; emphasis added).

20 Carmichael, “Macpherson's ‘Hobbes,’” 70.

21 Macpherson, C. B., The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962), 39.Google Scholar

22 Carmichael, “Macpherson's ‘Hobbes,’” footnotes 19, 22.

23 Ibid., 63; compare with 73, 77.

24 Ibid., 73, 76.

25 Ibid., 63, 80.

26 This is more apparent in the Rudiments, where he opens with a quick sketch of his view of existing society as the source of his view of human nature, than in the Elements or Leviathan where, starting with his physiological/psychological analysis, he takes us through only the compositive part of his whole chain of reasoning. But the society he was recomposing, in the Elements and Leviathan, was the possessive market society he had seen at the beginning.