Dimensionamiento y proyecciones del mercado

Hobbes as an exponent of human equality argued that nature provided no rationale for inequality of rights and privileges, nor were human relationships natural, for all authority was based on consent. Consent meant submission willingly and voluntarily in exchange for protection of one’s life. Since women were as capable as men, they did not require any protection from men. Protection was

required by both the subject and the child, who were dependent on the sovereign and parents respectively. In the case of a child, it was the mother as a parent who constituted authority and guaranteed protection by virtue of giving birth to the child. The child in the process granted her its consent.

In the state of nature, every woman who had children became both a mother and a lord. A mother lost the right of authority over her child if taken prisoner, in which case she selected the person who would exert authority over her child in her absence. Hobbes described the idea of female subordination as a human creation. Male heirs were preferred to females, for they were naturally fitter for labour and danger. In a state of nature, the natural domination of the mother was accepted, because it was she who could declare the father of her child.

For Hobbes, the family, like the state, was an artificial or a conventional institution and had to be seen in strictly rational terms. It was a “civil person” by virtue of jurisdiction, not by virtue of marriage or biological parenthood. It was not based on natural ties of sentiments between generations, but, like the state, arose from the consent of its individual members. With regard to who would govern within the family, one would assume that given Hobbes’ position on the equality of sexes; he would grant joint rights and authority to both men and women. But this was not the case. He gave to the father exclusive jurisdiction within the family, thereby defending patriarchy. The wife/mother as a free and an equal individual disappeared with the constitution of civil society. The woman became subservient, losing her ability to consent and the right to participate in the political process. Though Hobbes accepted the idea of sexual and gender equality, revolutionary in itself by seventeenth-century standards, he did not reject nor attack patriarchy in the full sense.

Hobbes saw his commonwealth as a creation by the father(s). When discussing the problem of succession to the sovereign in the state, he acknowledged that it would pass from one male child to another, since males had greater wisdom and courage, and were naturally fit to rule. All these certainly contradicted his earlier attack on patriarchal claims. The reason for the shift could be that he did not want a conflict between the male and female once civil society was created. “Hobbes’ thought reflects and perpetuates a distinctively masculinist orientation to the realm of politics that continues to be male dominated and governed by masculinist presumptions in our time” (Stefano 1994: 31).

The significance of Hobbes’ political thought was the departure he made from patriarchalism of the mid-seventeenth century. He insisted that paternal power in the state of nature was not derived from fatherhood as such. Since the family’s importance was only because of its procreative functions, and if sovereignty was a product of procreation, then the mother was also an equal and full partner in the act of generation with claims over the child. By denying the patriarchal claims he dismissed the idea that all authority, including that of the parents, was natural. Subordination among human beings was a product of convention subject to consent.

CONCLUSION

The Leviathan of Hobbes has been recognized as one of the masterpieces of political theory, known for its style, clarity and lucid exposition. He laid down a systematic theory of sovereignty, law, human nature and political obligation. He accepted the views of the radical writers of the sixteenth century like Montaigne, and attacked Aristotelianism and Ciceronian Humanism. He discarded the notion that there was anything as “simply good”, for every individual would regard what pleased him as good, and dismiss that which displeased him as evil. The way to overcome this ethical disagreement was by acknowledging that each was justified in defending one’s self, and that

others could be harmed on grounds of self-defence. Self-preservation was a fundamental right of nature, and equally a basic law.

Hobbes argued that the state was established for human convenience, and obeyed on grounds of expediency. It was obeyed in most cases, since obedience was more agreeable than disobedience. It was a product of human reason, and hence reason and not authority had to be the arbiter in politics. He emphasized that the sovereign would define divine, natural or fundamental law, since it was difficult to obtain agreement among individuals, and thus made power, not right, the focal issue in politics (Hill 1972: 37). Hobbes saw the state as a conciliator of interests, a point of view that the Utilitarians developed in great detail. Hobbes created an all-powerful state, but it was no totalitarian monster. It had to guarantee peace, order and security, and was not interested in self-glorification. The state did not control or regiment areas that were politically irrelevant. Hobbes accepted the fact that there were many types of human activities that had to be left to the realm of the non-political.

Many of Hobbes’ critics felt the need to control government by the superior authority of society. Lawson (1657) and Whitehall, contemporary critics of Hobbes, demanded the need to bind the rulers by law, else they would usurp little by little. All of them feared the consequences of arbitrary power. Clarendon and Whitehall asserted that Hobbes had no idea of practical politics, and that his theorem of government was artificial. All his critics insisted on the need to provide for a limited and constitutional authority. Locke himself scorned Hobbes’ prescription of providing absolute authority without adequate safeguards to prevent the abuse and misuse of power.

Many of Hobbes’ critics denied the reality of the state of nature, both as a statement of fact or as a hypothesis. If individuals were so asocial, they would never have been able to come together to establish a civil society and government. If they could do so, then they would have never gone without it. His critics insisted that Hobbes’ depiction of the state of nature was unreal, grossly exaggerated and even misleading. Bramhall (1658: 503) commented that the Hobbesian conception of human nature was a libel on individuals, for he characterized them worse than bears and wolves. Eachard (1672: 14) felt that humankind, contrary to Hobbes’ analysis, was tolerably tame and that society did not reflect the wickedness that Hobbes wanted us to believe. Clarendon was confident that God did not make human beings lower than animals. According to his modern interpreters, Hobbes showed human beings to be morally neutral by nature, for it was possible to achieve happiness by one’s own efforts, without God’s grace. Happiness and goodness were entirely matters of an individual’s ability to form society and control it rationally.

Furthermore, Hobbes’ notion of absolute state sovereignty was developed at length by Austin and Bentham. He pointed out that Aristotle failed to identify a tenable conception of sovereignty, and mistakenly supposed that laws could be sovereign, for it was not individuals, words or promises but arms that made the force and power of laws. The unsociability of human nature—a facet of human personality—had be taken into cognizance while delineating a theory of sovereignty. Therefore, a human being backed by swords and arms was the true sovereign in a commonwealth. Unlike Aristotle, Hobbes did not see the existence of the state in terms of its guarantee of a good life, but in terms of the security and safety it provided. Relationships between humans were not those of friendship, but rivalry. The significance of Hobbes lies in the fact that he set aside, rebuked and rejected the dominant Aristotelian tradition which looked upon social and political relations as natural, and peace and accommodation as part and parcel of normal functioning. “For two centuries after him self-interest seemed to most thinkers a more obvious motive than disinterestedness, and enlightened self-interest a more applicable remedy for social ills than any form of collective action” (Sabine 1973: 437). Hobbes did not establish the link between social and political factors and the

fact that political practices were shaped by social relationships. As a result he was able to clearly identify and establish the ambit of the political (Wolin 1960: 257) “For Hobbes, the political in a society comprised three elements: the authority whose unique office it was to superintend the whole and to exert directive control over other forms of activity; the obligations which rested on those who accepted membership; and the system of common rules governing publicly significant behaviour” (Wolin ibid: 259).

Hobbes’ greatest contribution was his philosophy of individualism, making him not only a thorough-going modern thinker, but also a person in line with the times to come. Furthermore, he emphasized that human beings without a government would be in a permanent state of insecurity, viewing war and conflict as permanent and normal conditions. In the process, “Hobbes treats the problems of politics as an aspect of a universal human dilemma involving freedom and security” (Minogue 1973: xvii).

At an international conference held in Helsinki in 1987, an important consensus emerged among scholars that the proposition of a world state might be absurd and premature, for nation states would continue as long as humanity remained concerned with the right of self-preservation and the need to secure commodious living. These observations vindicated the essential postulates of Hobbes’ paradigm, and reiterated its relevance for times to come (Airakaninen and Bertman 1989).

In summation, the twentieth century with its complexities and problems has made it possible to appreciate the concerns that Hobbes exhibited namely power, peace and science. There was an interest in trying to understand the “power relations, necessary, possible and desirable between men”, for Hobbes was the first to lay down the science of power politics (Macpherson 1968). We share Hobbes’ concern in trying to devise ways and means for ensuring order and commodious living. Above all, we share and appreciate his method of science. However, the modern world values the rule of law, rather than the person who really wields it, and in this sense Hobbes’ prescriptions were pre-modern. The modern view of power is also different, as Parsons remarked, power in modern society is more like money. It is a functional category like others thus differing considerably from Hobbes’ notion. Moreover, with the democratic revolution of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, struggle for power has been replaced with struggle for recognition, thereby drastically modifying the role of the singular, personalized sovereign. But for understanding this historic transformation of humankind, an understanding of Hobbes is an essential prerequisite.

6