"No More Wonder”: Hobbes’s Reworking of Conspiracism

• In Event: Reworking Paranoia

Abstract

It is generally agreed among Hobbes scholars that Leviathan treats the superstitious beliefs and apocalyptic prophecies that surged in England around the time of the English Civil War as plain “madness” or as resulting from a faulty cognition. On this account, Hobbes—much like contemporary liberal critics of the paranoid style—contrasts the gullible followers of these doctrines with the rational and self-interested subjects that shall populate the absolute state that he recommends.
This paper shows, however, that for Hobbes, superstitious and conspiracist beliefs are the result not only and not always of a faulty cognition that leads to the consumption of bad knowledge (like spirits and monsters) which must be debunked; they are also a rotten fruit of an otherwise admirable intellectual passion. That passion is curiosity - the desire to know causes. Curiosity is driven to dangerous excess in the conditions of political uncertainty, tormenting people’s psyches and making them susceptible to superstitious doctrines. Yet, curiosity is also a passion that Hobbes admires; it is the beginning of scientific discovery, and it is pertinent to the rational and self-interested subjects that are to populate the Hobbesian state. In other words, Hobbes does not only debunk conspiracism. He also pluralizes it, finding that it involves some politically generative aspects.
Hobbes addresses the threat of superstitious beliefs and the undecidability of curiosity by rehabilitating curiosity and making it fit for his absolute state. This “rehabilitation” involves erecting a political structure (aka the Leviathan) where laws would gratify the wish to know causes, and would make curiosity healthy rather than pathological. However, I argue that Hobbes’s catering to curiosity about causes may not be enough to stave off conspiracism and superstitious beliefs, because people have other affective motivations—besides the compulsion to know causes—to turn to superstitions and conspiracy theories. One such motivation is the hunger for everything exciting and new. This appetite—also known as wonder—is dismissed by Hobbes, who vulgarizes and feminizes it, but its political promise is enacted by one of Leviathan’s most marginal figures: old wives, whose appetite for spirits, demons, and conspiracies is a politicized hunger that questions the given (their private despots in the house).

Author

• Noga Rotem, University of Washington