Liberty, Rationality, and Agency in Hobbes's Leviathan (review)

David van Mill. Liberty, Rationality, and Agency in Hobbes's Leviathan. Albany: The State University of New York Press, 2001. Pp. xii + 253. Cloth, $59.50. Paper, $19.95.

David van Mill's provocative book is an ambitious and thoughtful argument by an author well-versed in Hobbes's writings and the secondary literature on them, intended to revolutionize our understanding of Hobbes's theory of rational agency. It is a shame that the text is marred by such egregious copy-editing that its unrelenting misprints, misquotes, inaccurate references, and grammatical infelicities so distract from van Mill's already complex argument that the reader is challenged to give that argument the attention it deserves. The press owes it to the author to correct these errors in the book's next printing.

In opposition to prevailing Hobbes scholarship, van Mill constructs from Hobbes's texts a spectrum theory of agency that identifies a full agent as one capable of autonomous rational action. Hobbes's famous definition of liberty as the absence of external impediments to motion applies to the motions of bodies but not to the actions of agents, for whom liberty requires reasonable and rational deliberation and choice. He sees in Hobbes a theory of internal conditions on freedom—including reasoned control of the passions, absence of fear, and compliance with disinterested norms in pursuit of worthy ends within a coherent life plan—which he likens to Kant's conception of autonomous agency.

Van Mill rejects game-theoretic interpretations of Hobbesian rationality (which he frequently characterizes as interested in maximizing "short-term utility" or the satisfaction of "immediate preferences") because they take rationality to be merely instrumental reasoning aimed at satisfying appetites or passions that are not themselves subject to rational assessment, apart from their coherence with the agent's other ends. Instead, rationality requires that one control one's passions, as can be seen, says van Mill, in Hobbes's analysis of madness as an "overvehemence" of passion. In particular, the passions are to be controlled by conforming one's conduct to the reasonable norms articulated by Hobbes's laws of nature.

Men could not do this if they were psychological egoists moved solely by consideration of self-interest, because the laws of nature require actions that may not always most conduce to the agent's self-interest; but, van Mill argues, Hobbesian men are not psychological egoists: "Hobbes's theory of volition . . . precludes him from supporting psychological egoism and also allows him to present a coherent moral theory." Hobbes offers an objectivist moral philosophy—a form of consequentialism—employing rules of thumb in the service of securing the social conditions necessary for the exercise of rational autonomy.

Having argued that Hobbes was concerned to facilitate this sort of robust freedom, and impressed by Judith Shklar's remark that liberalism aims to secure conditions for the exercise of personal freedom, van Mill proceeds to argue that Hobbes was a liberal—that the Hobbesian state separates public from private realms, insulating the private from legal regulation—and that in fact, men enjoy greater freedom under Hobbes's absolutism than they do under the modern state. Despite his careful and often ingenious argument for this surprising conclusion, one may doubt that any system in which the citizenry is not entitled to insist upon any limits whatsoever to legitimate governmental authority can be properly termed liberal. Of course, as van Mill notes, liberal systems may fail to honor the limits they theoretically recognize, but they do not deny, as Hobbes does, that there are any limits. Van Mill thinks the laws of nature provide limits. Yet, since the sovereign is the sole authorized interpreter of the laws of nature, and of what is to count as correct interpretation, Hobbes's theory provides no independently identifiable limits on the sovereign's authority, let alone familiar liberal limits.

Van Mill is well aware that much of...