Friendship and Politics: Essays in Political Thought

8. Hobbes on Getting By with Little Help from Friends

With Friends Like These Hobbes’s political thought contains a sustained attack on friendship. At the outset of Leviathan, for instance, he draws immediate attention to the problems that friendships present. The book opens with the dedication “To My Most Honour’d Friend Mr. Francis Godolphin, of Godolphin.” Hobbes proceeds to concede that this book may not be so well received, for it is likely to offend all interested parties among his contemporaries. Hobbes insists that he is not writing for or about particular men in his own time, but rather about matters political in the abstract . Given that his depiction of human nature suggests that such 214 8 Hobbes on Getting By with Little Help from Friends Travis D. Smith 030 pt3 (195-284) 3/20/08 12:51 PM Page 214 impartiality must be reckoned extremely rare (L xxvi:21),1 Hobbes must either be concealing his partialities here or revealing his pride. Aware that the dedicatee may be put in an uncomfortable position as a result of this dedication, Hobbes gives him permission to try excusing himself from the anticipated notoriety of the book (L LD) at the same time that his name is tied to it forever instead of vanishing into relative obscurity. Whether or not this dedication would affect the fortunes of Mr. Godolphin, it alerts the reader to the precariousness of friendship, if the highest honor a friend may bestow threatens to bring its recipient disrepute and danger. Although Hobbes had a roster of enemies, he was also a man blessed with many learned personal friends.2 It is telling that he does not dedicate this most infamous work of his to any of them. Instead, he praises some of them later in the dedicatory letter of his less overtly political De Corpore. As I am averse to the sort of speculation that endeavors to reduce philosophy to biography, I do not in this essay attempt to draw conclusions regarding Hobbes’s arguments based on his personal history and correspondence. I do suggest, however, that the apparent discontinuity between Hobbes’s political teaching regarding friendship and his own experience of friendship (and that of most men, arguably [cf. L Intro: 4]) indicates that the present analysis will in part illustrate the extent to which Hobbes distorts the human condition in order to relieve it. It shows how that which is necessary in theory to render politics scientific in the modern sense is not entirely based on observing how men actually live rather than imagining how they should live. The question then becomes whether Hobbes’s approach, in which the worst is assumed about every man taken individually in order to design a regime portrayed as an achievable ideal, is not really deeply rhetorical rather than simply ideological. Reading his political philosophy as a deductive system, as Leviathan purports to be, it comes across as if the assault on friendship is something that falls out during the derivation of political science, something that follows from thinking first principles in politics through to their necessary conclusions. But when one considers the preponderance of examples that portray friendship negatively amid his historical reflections—whether pertaining to events in recent English history or to the history of the ancient world; whether recounted at length, as in Behemoth, or in the Hobbes on Getting By with Little Help from Friends T 215 030 pt3 (195-284) 3/20/08 12:51 PM Page 215 anecdotal references scattered throughout his treatises for the purpose of giving substance to his abstractions—it seems rather that Hobbes’s concern for the political problem of friendship is one of the principal motivations behind the construction of the system. In focusing on the subject of friendship in Hobbes, one can see how both types of knowledge Hobbes recognizes, science and experience, cooperate in the production of his political philosophy. This cooperation is evident in the examples he selects to illustrate the epistemological theory developed in the earliest chapters of Leviathan. Hobbes promises to reason systematically to the foundations of a commonwealth from the physical fundamentals of human nature. In the first chapter, having described the basis of Sense according to his materialistic metaphysics, Hobbes criticizes the theory of visible, audible, and intelligible species taught by “the philosophy-schools, through all the Universities of Christendom” (L i:5). His principal target here is not that modified Aristotelian theory or the idea of the...