Hobbes, Sovereignty, and Early American Literature by Paul Downes (review)

Try a Google search using just the term Leviathan and you will see doctored versions of the frontispiece for Thomas Hobbes’s infamous mid-seventeenth-century work of political philosophy. Prominent websites as well as low-traffic blogs display the faces of presidents and elected officials pasted on top of the head of Hobbes’s monster to signify terrifying abuses of power. Paul Downes’s Hobbes, Sovereignty, and Early American Literature hinges on the idea that these (mis)uses of Hobbes’s touchstone text have a long, revealing history. Since the publication of The Leviathan (1651), Downes reminds us, writers of different political persuasions have anxiously inveighed against Hobbes, using pejorative epithets and simplified statements about his concepts of the commonwealth and the state of nature. In doing so, Downes argues, detractors subscribe to the belief that we, at some point, have “cleansed [ourselves] . . . of the arbitrary and absolutist power that Hobbes is accused of defending” (1). Aiming to counter this assumption, Downes makes two clever rhetorical moves in his book. He finds a faith-based, artificial, and diffuse sovereignty in The Leviathan, which he treats as akin to post-Marxist and posthumanist democratic theory, and he posits a sobering link between critiques of Hobbes and the grounds of race-and class-based structures of inequality in North America from the colonial period to the present.

Downes’s two rhetorical moves in Hobbes, Sovereignty, and Early American Literature shape each of his nine chapters, which include deconstructive readings of literary works, letters, and visual artworks. These chapters are designed to follow Hobbesian thought across the Atlantic so as to underscore how Hobbes’s ideas in fact invite an egalitarian future, while caricatures of these ideas limit democratic possibilities. The chapters, however, do not always follow a strict chronology. A chapter capped off by a reading of Hans Christian Anderson’s early-nineteenth-century Danish classic “The Emperor’s New Clothes” and a concise chapter on Hobbes’s reception in North America up through the Revolutionary period, for instance, precede a chapter on Puritan works by Thomas Hooker, John Wise, John Cotton, and Edward Taylor. The book’s second half, however, does take readers, in order, from roughly the middle of the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century. In this portion of the book, Downes’s position on Hobbes fortifies as he compares Hobbes’s works to modern Anglo-American texts. Downes uses Benjamin West’s unfinished painting Treaty of Paris (1783) to illustrate the difference between the liberal contractual sovereignty espoused by John Adams and James Madison and the noncontractual sovereignty advanced by Hobbes. He interprets Nathaniel Hawthorne’s representation of tarring and feathering in “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” (1832) as a messy sign of Hobbesian sovereignty, contra the contractual representation of sovereignty found in Jonathan Trumbull’s painting Declaration of Independence (1819). The last two chapters are on slavery. Downes draws on details from Hobbes’s life to dispute personal and ideological connections between the Englishman and slavery, which have been made by recent detractors in postcolonial and transatlantic studies. He also includes substantial discussions of T. W. Higginson’s account of Nat Turner’s insurrection and Frederick Douglass’s 1845 autobiography. He spends most of his time in these last chapters, though, unpacking passages in The Leviathan to show how Hobbesian sovereignty suspends the question of justice when it comes to the life and death matters of resistance to slavery. Neither Hobbes’s state of nature nor his commonwealth, for this reason, can be said to promote slavery.

Many features of Hobbes, Sovereignty, and Early American Literature are worth emulating. Downes’s incisive close readings of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” and “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” examine the viewpoints of primary and ancillary characters to reveal how each story registers the instability of sovereignty in allegorical and historical forms, respectively. Analyses of The Leviathan also offer news way of thinking about Hobbes and early American literature. This is true, for instance, of the...