The Political Animal: Hobbes’s Critique of Aristotle

• In Event: Early Modern Responses to Socratic Political Philosophy

Abstract

According to Hobbes, there is one doctrine, which pervades classical and scholastic thought, that is especially wrong and problematic: the claim that human beings are political animals by nature and that they are born fit for society. In the very second paragraph of the first chapter of De Cive, Hobbes marks his break with traditional moral and political thought by asserting that the majority of those who have written “on public affairs” have erected their civil doctrines on the “widely accepted” but “nevertheless false” axiom that man is naturally social (De Cive 1.2). Hobbes traces the origin of this most problematic premise to Aristotle: not only does he quote the Greek in De Cive, “ζῷον πoλιτικόν,” but he also explicitly argues against Aristotle’s classification of certain species as political in both De Cive and Leviathan (De Cive 5.5; Lev. 17.6-12; cf Aristotle, Politics 1253a1–39). Throughout his three political treatises, Hobbes insists that society is unnatural to man and that in the absence of an artificially established coercive government, human beings are led by their fundamentally selfish and competitive natures to a war of all against all (Elem. I.14.2-6; De Cive Ep. Ded., 1.2; Lev. 13). To Aristotle’s claim that men are political animals by nature, Hobbes responds that “nature dissociates men” (Lev. 13.10). But Hobbes does not deny that men are in some sense naturally social; in fact, it is precisely the character of their sociality that is problematic, and which stands in the way of peaceful society. The prevailing scholarly position acknowledges Hobbes’s deliberate break with Aristotle without discussing it thoroughly. This paper articulates Hobbes’s critique of the Aristotelian thesis and his alternative account of human sociality. I articulate the connection between Hobbes’s view of sociality and his denial that justice exists by nature. Finally, I consider the ways in which the Hobbesian view continues to shape the patterns of social interaction in liberal democracy and the extent to which it may inadvertently contribute to our epidemic of loneliness.

Author

• David Futscher, University of Texas at Austin