Hobbes and the Person of the State | Professor Quentin Skinner

Nowadays when we speak about the state we generally use the word simply to refer to an apparatus of government; in common parlance, ‘state’ and ‘government’ have become virtually synonymous terms. My first lecture traces the emergence in early-modern political theory of the strongly contrasting view that the state is the name of a distinct person. Hobbes is seen as the major contributor to this way of thinking about public power. The central section of the lecture analyses his claim that the state is a ‘person by fiction’, as well as examining Pufendorf’s rival but closely associated view that the state ought to be conceived as a moral person. My lecture ends by attempting an assessment of the idea of state personality. Has anything of significance been lost as a result of our abandonment of the belief, central to so much early-modern and Enlightenment discourse, that the state is the name of a person distinct from both government and the governed?
Professor Quentin Skinner, Barber Beaumont Professor of the Humanities, Queen Mary University of London, gave the 2015 Agnes Cuming Lectures in the UCD School of Philosophy, University College Dublin, Ireland.
Skinner is the author of numerous books and articles on early modern political thought and is a founder of the ‘Cambridge School’ of the history of political thought. He has broad interests in modern intellectual history and has published on a number of philosophical themes including the nature of interpretation and historical explanation, and on several issues in contemporary political theory including the concept of political liberty and the character of the State.
About the Agnes Cuming Lectures in Philosophy
The UCD School of Philosophy, University College Dublin, has an annual/biannual public lecture series by prominent philosophers made possible by a bequest of Agnes Cuming, one of the first female philosophy graduates of University College Dublin.
Ms Agnes Cuming, daughter of a King’s Counsel, was born on 29 September 1890. She graduated from University College Dublin in the autumn of 1910.
There were two women in the 1909-1910 Degree class of 24. Her professors would have included Professor Magennis, Professor of Metaphysics; Fr. John Shine, Professor of Logic and Psychology, and Dr M. Cronin, Professor of Ethics and Politics, who were all appointed in 1909. She achieved First Class Honours in her BA Examination and shared first place in the class with Robert L. McKernan.
Ms Cuming was awarded the MA in 1911 and the Travelling Studentship in Philosophy in 1912, at the time beating Robert McKernan to the Scholarship. He was awarded a prize of £100. She was the first, and for many years the only woman to have reached Master’s and Travelling Studentship standard in UCD in Philosophy.
She attended St Anne’s College, Oxford, and was awarded the BSc after World War I, in 1920. She went on to become the Librarian of University College Hull.
Ms Cuming willed one-third of the residue of her estate to be divided equally between St Anne’s College, Oxford and University College Dublin. The interest from this share funds the Agnes Cuming Public Lectures in Philosophy.
In recognition of Ms Cuming’s commitment to Philosophy and to University College Dublin, the Philosophy Seminar Room has been renamed the Agnes Cuming Seminar Room.
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UCD Homepage: www.ucd.ie

[@GeorgiosMichalopoulos]

Amazing lecture, I esp. liked the last 10 mins when he discusses the legacy and relevance of Hobbes.

[@stephaniewaters1777]

Excellent lecture. Thank you

[@mohsentajdeh7891]

this is god-tier content. thx

[@levinb1]

Very nice lecture.

[@digdigdigo]

could someone put subtitles on this? i don't understand the names he mentions and the auto subtitles suck

[@Robsay01]

You suck u little twit. Go read and learn the names. It’s your fault.

[@thefirstmockingbirdofsprin4431]

😍🥰Genius💕💐💕💐

[@owlnyc666]

The Sovereign is a person that is a "representative" of the sovereign state which is he actual state, those who agree to be ruled by the representative of the state???🤔🤔🤔

[@enifu]

I currently have gotten as far in Hobbes' Leviathan for him to reveal his artificial man, which he does early on. but not yet his fictive man. From what I can tell, he finds his artificial man to be very real indeed. In fact moreso than he finds people, and I find the reference of the fictive man might be more apt to refer to this artificial man instead, but I shall read further and see how my understanding holds.

[@enifu]

Well, very quickly in Leviathan. Hobbes makes it quite clear that he sees organizations of people as people in and of themselves, and more substantial people than actual people, at that, so of course the person who the representatives represent is the State.

[@enifu]

I keep finding myself appalled with the emptiness Hobbes considers man and beast. For by his descriptions an animatronic man or beast would be no less than a real man or beast.

[@lucaskovacs7315]

lol. isn't that the point? Perhaps, pursuing a (kind of twisted) Rousseauian thought, our benevolent attributes have developed by the civic state, rather than an inherent part of nature. This is one way of perceiving that any assumptions or intuitions that man is NOT as Hobbes described it could presuppose a civic state in the first place.

[@linhngo7398]

I will never be a tradwife

[@doublenegation7870]

Quentin is a fantastic lecturer, but ultimately a little naive. When he tries to defend the thesis that states are still the primary agents in the world, he points to a number of things that states still do, e.g., patrol borders and enforce laws. But he overlooks the fact that states can do all these things while nevertheless *not* being the primary agents from and for the sake of which these means are carried out. When states are propped up internally by private financial interests and multinational corporations, and dummy the will of their constituents with propaganda, then they cease to be agents and rather become actors that act on behalf of the greater powers that have at once displaced their sovereignty and hijacked their apparatus. This seems to be the rule now, if not historically.

[@alfonsogonzalestoribio1754]

I agree, capital creates the social conditions from which the state operates, not the other way around.

[@friednoodlesz]

I agree more with skinner's view. I dont think it's fair to call him naive, these are just different theories on where agency lies.

[@doublenegation7870]

@@friednoodlesz that's just a declaration of relativism, not an argument.

[@SK-im7if]

If states are propped up by already existing internal, partisan and private entities, that seems much more like an example of a regime change (perhaps from democratic to oligarchic modes of system) rather than an argument for states not being the primary political players in international politics.

[@ArkAnudDinYaSin]

I must say u frame ur argument quite strongly tbh. Good effort. The rebuttals r also great. What if we go essentialist, can the financial interests exist and execute the functions of the State without the State? So that ur argument that Quentin’s “Primacy of the State” submission is naive can stand? I don’t think so. The parasites ability to direct the host does not invalidate the host’s existence as a host. Most definitely one can not any longer speak to the host’s intentions without referring to the parasite’s intentions, but to assume away the host is to imply the host is optional while we know it to be not. The financial institutions and MNCs cannot exist without the State. States guarantee their existence.

[@enifu]

I don't agree with the definition of the state. I question whether a monopoly on violence can ever be legitimate.

[@quinbrady]

Well Hobbes is the first liberal legalist. He left the theological ideas supporting traditional absolute sovereignty behind by moving to a completely a priori conception of the State of Nature, and prefiguring the legal interests of citizens from there. get to Chapter 13, and think about what Hobbes is really saying when he begins his 'no commodious buildings, no industry for the fruit of it would be uncertain...solitary brutal and short.' Of course he goes too far for modern ears, but he'd just lived through a time when a full quarter of the population of Britain had died in war and associated depravities like famine. After which the winner of that revolutionary war went over to Ireland and went about slaughtering and enslaving, all of which began with the execution of Charles I. Further ideas about liberal theory went backwards (Lockean theology) before they went forwards (Benthamite utilitarianism). The monopoly of violence is Weber's formula and it, like Hobbes, seeks to define the state in minimal legal terms. Have you got another definition that satisfies that amoral criterion? I'd be interested in hearing it, but would probably direct you to Lon Fuller's 'King Rex' fable to outline just how difficult the task of legal definition is. Hobbes is harsh for modern ears, but the state he outlines isn't necessarily despotic or the plaything of the sovereign.

[@enifu]

The prototype state was the early family. The government was the head of household. This person naturally arranged things so that everything suited and served him. Eventually they discovered you could impress people outside the family into serving the head of household and the developing tastes of the rest of the family. These were the first slaves. Eventually the family discovered that they needed more input into things. This was the prototype House of Lords which was the basis for the American Senate. Eventually the slaves grew so numerous that they could threaten violence so they were given a voice too. This is the prototype House of Commons, and the basis for the American House of Representatives. There you go, one outline of a state, no morality involved and a better description of the situation than Thomas Hobbes.

[@enifu]

Hobbes does two things. He outlines how states came about and does in my opinion a poor job of it. This state is not necessarily despotic. Then he goes to describe his ideal state which with all the conditions impressed upon it, to save individuals from themselves by serving as a hedge, necessarily is despotic.

[@quinbrady]

+Robert Claypool Hobbes wasn't doing anthropology though. He wanted an a priori basis for the legal authority of executive power i.e. something to sociologically underwrite his 'covenants without swords are just words' description. In chapter 13 comes up with a formula for that, which doesn't need historiological inputs, and therefore doesn't raise further questions. Hobbes was quite old and learned by the time he wrote Leviathan, and it is not his only work. He'd previously written 'De Cive', which tried to build up a formulation and historical justification of civic and legal rights, and he'd knocked out Behemoth as a social justification of Charles I's power against the Cromwellian parliamentarians. At some level he decided both of those failed. He'd watched most of the English Civil War from France, was classically educated and an old man who'd seen his country lose around a quarter of its population in a clash of ideas centred around juridical-political understandings.

[@quinbrady]

So he sought to produce a philosophy of legal authority that wouldn't give rise to further legal questioning like: 'what sort of family, the English, French or Ottoman kind?' He sought ways to reconcile Plato's ship analogy into his own times, which is the point where he talks of the passengers of a floundering ship having to throw they cargo overboard on equal terms because of equal danger, because he'd just witnessed lots of English people claiming paternal rights to authority and seen exactly how costly that had been; England's ship had sunk for a lot of people and property itself had been erased through the paternalistic authority of 'The Great Protector' Oliver Cromwell. They're just two of the kinds of conflicts that drop out of your anthropological pseudo history, which Hobbes expressly wanted to avoid. Hobbes is seeking a philosophical justification for the power to make the sort of law Lon Fuller outlines in his "King Rex" parable. That sort of 'pacts sunt servanda' authority

[@tommyodonovan3883]

"The State is the monopoly of violence." -Obama