Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Rousseau by John Plamenatz (review)

The three essays that compose this work were to be presented as lectures at Cambridge in 1975. Because of Plamenatz’s death, however, this did not occur and they were only published in 2012.

Plamenatz presents Machiavelli as both a moralist and a political realist. His insistence that the term ‘virtu’ carries both moral and nonmoral connotations without implying a negative double standard for politics is compelling, though of course not original. He notes that today we employ both senses when talking about politicians, the latter being equivalent to successful statecraft. The difference between Machiavelli and us, he claims, is less one of substance than style.

Plamenatz’s treatment of Hobbes is ambiguous. As with Machiavelli, he again sees the moral/nonmoral divide as of central importance. Focusing on Hobbes’s fool, who denies the objective reality of the principles of justice, he demonstrates that for Hobbes the common claim that morality collapses into prudence is simply inconsistent with the text. Although he claims that Hobbes is more confused and less straightforward than he is usually taken to be, Plamenatz’s textual analysis attempts to show how self-interest and subjectivity become an albeit thin version of the moral point of view under the conditions of security afforded by the state. Intimations of early Rawls are clear.

Initially, at least, Plamenatz presents Rousseau favorably as a genuinely novel and significant theorist. He adopts Rousseau’s ideas of nonmoral (natural or negative) liberty and moral (social or positive) liberty, not only maintaining the importance of both but also attributing the latter to Rousseau as his greatest innovation. As social beings, we are subject to laws and are therefore free only if we conform to them rationally and willingly. Such laws are moral only if they have objectivity and universality. These considerations are for Rousseau the grounds for the unification of reason, freedom, and morality.

Plamenatz denies that his is a comparative study, though it is clear that the question of the nature of freedom in society is a unifying theme. For Machiavelli, the goal of statecraft is the establishment of a republic wherein the active citizens—always a subset of the population— are free in the sense that they participate in crafting the laws to which they are subject. Hobbes’s still pervasive concept of liberty as freedom from external restriction is independent of a context of rule-governed behavior or even meaning, whereas Rousseau presents positive or social freedom as emergent from the pre-societal freedom of our natural condition. Thus, although the three essays are described as independent studies, there is a kind of dialectical development of the idea of positive or social freedom intimated through the whole. This is not to say, however, that Plamenatz endorses positive freedom. On the contrary, although he acknowledges the coherence of this sophisticated ideal and agrees that it follows necessarily on the acceptance of Rousseau’s account of social man, he denies the universality of Rousseau’s assumptions and as a result rejects the necessary connection between freedom and morality. This is unsurprising, for the grounding of positive freedom rests on a normative account of human nature, a concept alien to Plamenatz’s thinking. So in the end he concludes that Rousseau’s version of moral autonomy, his greatest innovation, rests on a mistake.

The standards of linguistic analysis are prominent in these essays. Thus, beyond internal coherence and clarity, Plamenatz employs what might be termed ‘plausibility’ regarding human motivation as the measure of the practical worth of a political philosophy. This de facto deference to extant political reality is the source of his normative standards. One might hope that philosophy does not in the end leave everything as it is, but such a hope suggests novelty and perhaps progress in human self-understanding. Here no such wisps of idealism intrude. Plamenatz treats political theory as a self-contained inquiry not dependent on more fundamental aspects of philosophy. This stance is justified by...