The Radical Promise of Thomas Hobbes: The Road not taken in Liberal TheoryNotesThe Radical Promise of Thomas Hobbes: The Road nottaken in Liberal Theory 4:2 | © 2000 James R. Martel James R. Martel, Amherst College.[1]1. There is no doubt that Hobbes is a thinker who presents many challenges even to those who finds him enticing.[2] His calls for absolutism, his seeming disregard for the abuses of power, his gloomy and harsh tone all seem to have earned him his sobriquet as the "beast of Malmesbury."[3] But it has become increasingly accepted that there is something in Hobbes that transcends his tone and beckons us to give him a second look. Generally speaking, those who treat Hobbes in this manner find in his writings a basis for the kind of democratic individualism that is more often attributed to Locke.[4] Thinkers like George Kateb or Richard Flathman make persuasive cases that a politics rooted in Hobbesian thought can be attractive, ethical and moral. They argue that a better understanding of him can serve to reinvigorate the spirit and practice of liberalism itself.[5] I would like to partially align myself with this endeavor but hold myself as being a bit more suspicious of liberalism in general. I think that attempts to fit Hobbes into the existing rubric of liberalism, however broadly defined, limits our understanding of him.[6] Instead, I would like to propose rethinking the origins of liberalism itself by looking at Hobbes on his own, as if later liberalismhad never happened.[7]2. The difficulty with thinking about Hobbes in terms of liberalism is that we almost inevitably read Hobbes through his later liberal interpreters. Hobbes becomes for better or worse a kind of "proto-liberal" anticipating the doctrines of later thought.[8] This is a tempting conclusion to make because Hobbes and later liberals share such an extensive vocabulary. Common terms such as "sovereignty," "natural law," and "social contract" seem to suggest great continuities. 3. In order to think about Hobbes afresh, I want to compare Hobbes with that great architect of liberalism, John Locke. In particular, I want to compare them in terms of how their respective epistemologies and religious views lead to tremendously different politics. Locke is often portrayed as the "kinder, gentler" Hobbes or someone who thankfully dispatches with Hobbes' gloom and pessimism altogether. Kirstie McClure, who does not share Flathman's appreciation of Hobbes, suggests as much when she writes of Locke:For Hobbes, Hume, and Rousseau, the natural condition of humankind principally referred to its worldly characteristics, or behavior as observed or inferred by human agents; Locke's account of natural humanity had as its central reference the createdcondition of the species. Where they, in other words, emphasized what they found to be the actual or descriptive characteristics of the species -- its physical passions, worldly desires and material interests -- he began with an image of humanity as it was divinely constructed within and in relation to a larger created cosmos. [9]4. For McClure, Locke's abandonment of Hobbes' harsh manner of accounting everything according to some petty and self-interested calculation is the source of his morality and what allows Locke to be more than simply a thinker of mere self-interest. This reading of Locke is also what attracts Richard Ashcraft who insist that Locke's notions of property are not to be read (as C.B. MacPherson does, linking Locke to Hobbes) as a doctrine of selfishness but rather as a genuine concern for collective moral principles. Ashcraft tells us that for Locke, a meaningful sense of community is given to us only by the fact that we are all God's "workmanship;" we do not work for ourselves, but for God. For both Ashcraft and McClure, it is Locke and not Hobbes who offers us a hope for genuine democracy and community, if only we can come to see the genuine promise in his doctrines.5. While I agree with McClure that Locke does impose a more traditionally religious aspect to Hobbes' apparently secular language, I do not agree that this means that Locke has more progressive promise than Hobbes (or even that Hobbes is somehow an atheist). Quite the opposite. I think that it is Locke who presents us with a deeply problematic basis on which to form a political order precisely because of his return to ancient and classical eschatologies. I argue that it is Hobbes, despite hiscalculations and gloom, who offers us the best platform on which to base a progressive and democratic subjectivity. I also arguethat Locke, in his religious vision and in his invocation of "natural law" as the basis for the organization of human society, brings back a doctrine that Hobbes, perhaps better than anyone else of the early moderns, explicitly rejected. Locke revives the Aristotelian doctrine of natural hierarchies and the necessity of our obedience (both individually and collectively) to higher laws and external rules. While Locke's system does not call for the kind of greedy selfishness that MacPherson criticizes, it also doesnot offer us a collective harmony since it presupposes hierarchy and at the same time depoliticizes relationships, rendering them "natural" and hence untreatable. A return to Hobbes' epistemology, with its explicit break from Aristotelian dogmas and with its promotion of a new ethos of personal and collective responsibility, might lead to the kind of progressive democracy that Lockean liberalism promises but never seems to deliver.[10]Hobbes and religion6. Hobbes' rejection of classical doctrines about nature, power and higher laws marks him as one of the most radical and important of early modern thinkers. But in rejecting these doctrines is Hobbes also rejecting Christianity (or more accurately its English Protestant variants) itself? Christianity after all has a strong Aristotelian influence and it too posits the need to conform to a higher law. And if he does reject Christianity, where does Hobbes get his ethical values (if any) from?7. The question of whether Hobbes is an atheist has been raging since his own lifetime. Some contemporary scholars have argued that Hobbes disguised his atheistic doctrines with religious trappings so as to preserve the secular core of his theory.[11]Certainly there is ample evidence that Hobbes suffered from a reputation as an atheist after Leviathan was made available in England. After the royal