<<<Actually, I think that Hobbes was rather keen on power. What he was scared of, and with good reason, was disorder. He'd seen armies marching all over his country, fighting battles and stomping all over the crops, looting and raping and generally carrying on, and he thought it was pretty scary. So would you. His idea was that any order is better than none, and to get that you need some power to overawe all the crumby little egoists--doesn't really matter who, Cromwell, the King, even Parliament, just so's someine gets a lid on things and enforces some set of predictable rules. "Sovreign power not so hurtful as the want of it," he writes (L, ch. 18).>>>
Leo Strauss thinks that Hobbes is primarily a political hedonist. What is the most powerful of all passions for Hobbes? The fear of violent death at the hand of others. Strauss argues that death "takes the place of _telos_" in Hobbes; using the fear of violent death as _the_ guiding idea, Hobbes deduces that the right to self-preservation is absolute and unconditional (Strauss, _Natural Right and History_).
>Hobbes' motto is: better the Stalinist terror than the Liberian civil war.
>And is he wrong, if those are the choices.
A good question. Hobbes might answer, "of course better Stalinist than dead." On the other hand, other parts of Hobbes's theory make the Stalinist terror _impossible_:
***** [I]n case a great many men together, have already resisted the Sovereign Power unjustly, or committed some Capitall crime, for which every one of them expecteth death, whether have they not the Liberty then to joyn together, and assist, and defend one another? Certainly they have: For they but defend their lives, which the Guilty man may as well do, as the Innocent. (Hobbes, _Leviathan_, Chap XXI) *****
Hobbes says the same in _De Cive_. I think that Hobbes is the *only* major Western philosopher who argues that *Guilty* men are entitled to join together and defend themselves against the State. Taken to its logical conclusion, Strauss argues, Hobbes's right to self-preservation leads to the abolition of capital punishment:
***** As regards capital punishment, Hobbes was consistent enough to grant that, by being justly and legally condemned to death, a man does not lose the right to defend his life by resisting "those that assault him": a justly condemned murderer retains - nay, he acquires - the right to kill his guards and everyone else who stands in his way to escape, in order to save his life. But, by granting this, Hobbes in fact admitted that there exists an insoluble conflict between the rights of the government and the natural right of the individual to self-preservation. This conflict was solved in the spirit, if against the letter, of Hobbes by Beccaria, who inferred from the absolute primacy of the right to self-preservation the necessity of abolishing capital punishment. (Strauss _Natural Rights and History_) *****
On this basis, there can be no State Terror, as long as individuals are able to join together in the interest of self-preservation & to gain enough power to overpower the agents of the tyrannical State (how, though? I don't think Hobbes thought about the prisoners' dilemma -- he was interested in philosophical questions of justified use of power, not tactical questions of how to exercise it). Hobbes's theory is not a sound basis on which the ruling class can build a National Security State either; Hobbes says: "When armies fight, there is on one side, or both, a running away: yet when they do it not out of treachery, but fear, they are not esteemed to do it unjustly, but dishonourably" (_Leviathan_, Chap. XXI). When soldiers can run away from combat without injustice, can the State wage war?
It seems to me that the Raison d'Etat cannot exist without the support of such "unreasonable" mores as habits of self-sacrificing courage & honor to the point of death (especially heteronomy of women and soldiers); importantly, Hobbes does not think that women and soldiers would act otherwise than he himself would, which is to say, damn such vain ideas as honor and value their own lives. Kant, on the other hand, partially exempts infanticides of illegitimate children and deaths in soldiers' duels from the purview of the Rechtstaat because he thinks that women & soldiers would & should obey the duties of honor rather than dictates of reason.
***** There are, however, two further crimes worthy of the death penalty, but it remains doubtful whether the _legislature_ has the authority to impose this penalty upon them. Both of them are actuated by a sense of honour, but the first involves _sexual honour_ whereas the second involves _military honour_. Both are true forms of honour, and it is a duty of the two classes of people involved (women and soldiers respectively) to uphold them. The first crime is _infanticide_ by the mother..., and the second is _murder of a comrade in arms_...in a duel. No legislation can remove the disgrace of an illegitimate birth; nor can it efface the stain which is left when suspicions of cowardice fall upon a subordinate officer who does not react to a humiliating encounter with a vigour surpassing the fear of death. It therefore appears that in cases of this kind, men find themselves in a state of nature. And while their _killing_ of each other should not be called _murder_..., it still remains punishable, although the supreme power cannot punish it with death. The child born outside marriage is outside the law (for marriage is a lawful institution), and it is therefore also outside the protection of the law. It has found its way into the commonwealth by stealth, so to speak, like contraband goods, so that the commonwealth can ignore its existence and hence also its destruction, for it ought not to have come into existence at all in this way; and no decree can remove the mother's disgrace if the illegitimate birth becomes known....
What, then, are the rights and wrongs of these two cases in so far as the are subject to criminal justice? Penal justice is here faced with a very difficult problem, for it must either declare that the concept of honour, which in the present case is no mere illusion, is null and void before the law and ought to be punished by death, or it must exempt the crimes in question from death penalty. And while the first course would be cruel, the second would be over-indulgent. The solution to this dilemma is that the categorical imperative of penal justice (whereby the unlawful killing of another person must be punished by death) remains in force, although the legislation itself (here also the civil constitution), so long as it remains barbarous and undeveloped, is to blame for the fact that the motives of honour obeyed by the people are subjectively incompatible with those measures which are objectively suited to their realization, so that public justice as dispensed by the state is _injustice_ in the eyes of the people. (Kant, _The Metaphysics of Morals_) *****
While Kant excepts soldiers from reason and has them follow the motives of honor, Hobbes is too reasonable & pleasure-loving to think that soldiers prefer honorable death on the battlefield to running for dear life.
Yoshie