Nasty, Brutish, and Short (Leviathan, Part 2)

In Part 2 of our discussion on Hobbes's Leviathan, editor David Johnston discusses his personal history with Hobbes and the Leviathan, common challenges first-time readers face, his favorite line from the book, his approach to teaching the work, the details of the book's famous engraved title page, and more.

David Johnston teaches political philosophy at Columbia University, where he has served as Nell and Herbert M. Singer Professor of Contemporary Civilization and Joseph Straus Professor of Political Philosophy. He is the author of A Brief History of Justice, The Idea of a Liberal Theory, and The Rhetoric of Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes and the Politics of Cultural Transformation, and is the editor of a collection of readings entitled Equality and coeditor of Machiavelli on Liberty and Conflict.

To learn more or purchase a copy of the Norton Library edition of Leviathan, go to https://seagull.wwnorton.com/LeviathanNL.

Learn more about the Norton Library series at https://wwnorton.com/norton-library.

Have questions or suggestions for the podcast? Email us at nortonlibrary@wwnorton.com or find us on Twitter @TNL_WWN.

Transcript

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[Mark:] You are listening to the Norton Library Podcast, where we explore classic works of literature and philosophy with the leading scholars of the Norton Library, a new series from W. W. Norton that introduces influential texts to a new generation of readers. I'm your host, Mark Cirino, with Michael Von Cannon producing. Today, we present the second of our two episodes devoted to Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan as we interview its editor, David Johnston. In Part One, we discussed Hobbes, his notion of government and religion, and the various elements of this sprawling work. In this second episode, we learn more about David Johnston's history with Leviathan, how he teaches it, his favorite line, and of course, his hot take. David Johnston teaches Political Philosophy at Columbia University. He is the author of A Brief History of Justice; The Idea of a Liberal Theory; and The Rhetoric of Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes and the Politics of Cultural Transformation. David Johnston, welcome back to the Norton Library Podcast.

[David:] Thank you.

[Mark:] Great to see you again, and I look forward to discussing more about Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan. First, I just want to draw attention to the actual edition, which is beautiful. Do you have any comments about the design? Did you have any input into this color scheme, which is so striking?

[David:] Well, I didn't actually have input into the color scheme, but I think they did a fabulous job with this cover. I think they did a fabulous job; Norton did a fabulous job with the entire production: the size of the book, the color, uh you know, the – the compactness on the inside, the – the typeface, the presentation—highly legible and highly compact, which is a great accomplishment. This book was about 400 pages in its original edition. It's a very, very long book, and – and that's the – these are very large pages, the original edition, so that's a lot of words, and, uh, they – they did a great job.

[Mark:] And it's readable too, readable font and it's...

[David:] Very legible, very readable.

[Mark:] ...quit user friendly. So, do you remember when you first encountered Hobbes?

[David:] I do remember when I first encountered Hobbes. Um, when I – I first encountered Hobbes when I was in college, I think I was 19; 18 or 19.

[Mark:] Was it Leviathan?

[David:] It was Leviathan. It was not a particularly good edition. Now I didn't – I didn't know [Laughter] that when I first encountered it but going back and looking, it was not one of the better editions, even at the time. Um, of course, this is much, much better than that. But I struggled with the book; I didn't have a fancy secondary education, uh, didn't really learn to read all that well—to be honest I learned that in college and in graduate school. But I struggled with it; I had a hard time figuring out what was going on.

[Mark:] So, what were the struggles that were impeding enjoyment or comprehension?

[David:] I – I just – I just couldn't figure out what was happening, you know. It was a strange kind of literature to me.

[Mark:] The overall plot, you were looking for the overall plot?

[David:] I guess I was looking for something like that [Laughter] which I – I couldn't find because I – I didn't know this kind of literature at all. I hadn't really read political philosophy before so...

[Mark:] Now—

[David:] ...it's the whole genre, not just Hobbes’s Leviathan.

[Mark:] Now your edition has—I can't speak to all editions—but your editions have these italicized sort of toeholds as the argument is proceeding. Do all—

[David:] Yeah.

[Mark:] Is that what Hobbes did, and?

[David:] Those are from the original edition of 1651, all produced exactly as they appeared in that edition.

[Mark:] So that – wouldn't you say that tends to help newer readers to some of the complexities of Hobbes's argument?

[David:] Yes, I – I think it does. It helps divide things up a little bit; it identifies the subjects, you know, sometimes paragraph by paragraph, or not – not always—it's not as regular as that—but identifies the subject. And, um, the edition I read in college actually did not have that. They omitted that, which did not help.

[Mark:] So, how did you get from a befuddled teenager to somebody who is now drawn to Hobbes as a scholar?

[David:] Well, I became interested over time in Political Philosophy quite a lot. I started off, actually, at university, um, as a Physics major, um, and was thought you know – it was thought by people who knew me well that I would be a mathematician, in fact. But I was drawn more and more toward Political Science and Political Philosophy, and I read more and more, and I ultimately went to graduate school. Uh, I didn't really develop my strong taste for Hobbes until I was in graduate school in a PhD program. And there, uh, I took a –a seminar with a, you know, one of the most eminent teachers of the subject in the country at the time, um, which focused on Hobbes. Uh, I volunteered to give a presentation that, um, I sort of, in this class, I sort of—this characteristic of me I know now—but I just sort of popped up like, nobody else would, not shy at all, and just said, “Okay I'll do this.” And uh, and then I started working on a doctoral dissertation in which I was going to write about something completely different, really 19th century, but I thought well I have to look back and look at the preceding literature relevant to this. And I looked back, and I spent some time looking into and writing a little piece about Hobbes, not about Leviathan but what his earliest publication, and then I just got hooked.

[Mark:] You mentioned that your initial challenge is to reading the book, and I'm wondering if the challenge is on—the challenge for most of us picking up this book—would it be on a linguistic level or a structural level, the way the book is laid out, or conceptual. That what Hobbes is talking about just might be over our heads? What do you think will be the biggest stumbling block for the average reader?

[David:] For the average reader, I think there are two things: there are some linguistic challenges and there are some conceptual challenges. Uh, the linguistic challenges are not insuperable by any means, Hobbes was as – Hobbes as I said in the first podcast, was born in 1588. He grew up and matured in the era of Shakespeare; his language is basically Shakespearean language. So, Shakespearean language, you know, is 400 years old and is a bit archaic today, uh, we know many editions of Shakespeare's plays will have words identified and things like that. The challenge for Hobbes linguistically is no greater than the challenge of reading Shakespeare; it's about the same. Conceptually, there's also a challenge, if I could say. Uh, it's not that it's above our heads, it's just that Hobbes is living in a world that is conceptually completely different. The single most important thing about that that is alien to people today—it's hard to get your – get yourself around as it were, wrap your stuff around—is that that culture in which – the culture in which he's writing was so steeped in Christianity, various versions of it, remember this is over 100 years after the Reformation gets going, but splintered Christianity into various – various sects and schools and churches, but all very much steeped in Christianity, in the Bible, in various interpretations of the Bible and this was real...

[Mark:] Yeah.

[David:] ...for everybody in those days in a way it's not real for most readers today. It's not part of their immediate everyday lives. That's true for some readers today, but not most.

[Mark:] So, your strategy as an editor of the Norton Library Edition of Leviathan is to intercede with footnotes that explain sort of the linguistic challenges and the conceptual context?

[David:] Well, the footnotes primarily explain the linguistic challenges. Um the – the conceptual ones are a different order, and uh, it would have been – I try to prepare people for that in an introduction to this edition, uh, but I think it would have been very cluttered to try to clear that up along the way. So, I do do everything I can in this in this book to make the linguistic challenge is as easy to deal with as possible. Conceptual challenges, there is some explanation but it's – it's – it's a very big thing to try to do, and not – not – not doable in an edition of this sort without making it very cluttered.

[Mark:] Sure. Do you have a favorite line in Leviathan?

[David:] Well, I think my favorite line is – is the most famous line. There's a paragraph late in Chapter 13—Chapter 13 is about what Hobbes calls the “state of war,” which he thinks is a natural state of humankind, uh, absent a – a state or political community, political association—uh, and that – there's a long paragraph, or not long paragraph, there's a paragraph about all the inconveniences, as he put it, that is the bad things about being in the state of nature: um, no account of time, no industry, meaning by industry, no, um, you know, nobody has an incentive to do anything very productive because they're – they're always going to be afraid that someone will come and raid them and take it away from them. So, people just don't, you know, no commodious building, meaning people don't do that with buildings because someone will come and take it away from them, so forth. But he concludes that paragraph with: “And the life of man: [uh] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” “Nasty, brutish, and short,” is, of course, very famous, uh, and I think that's my favorite line.

[Mark:] Now, was that typical of his mindset and his attitude about human nature?

[David:] So, his attitude about human nature is controversial, or at least a not fully understood thing. He's thought of as having a very negative conception of human nature, and that's true in a way, but people forget, I think, that that conception of human nature is a conception of human nature in the absence of any authority, in the absence of any order. Um, he basically says human beings are fearful, uh, and likely to want to anticipate violence against them by – by imposing violence on others. And they are vain, um, and want to be, you know, want to – their self-esteem to be built up by being – by being praised by others and kowtowed to by others, and so forth. None of these seems to me to be the slightest bit unrealistic in the – I think in poli-psychology. If – if there's one thing about Hobbes that really absolutely endures, it's his conception of human nature, but human nature looks awful in the state of nature. In a – in a settled political community with a settled authority, people work together, they're very productive, uh, and – and so on. We're used to being in a state of a relatively settled society. Uh, none of us, or hardly any of us who's going to read Leviathan is used to being in the middle of a civil war that's gone on and on for years and killed hundreds, in his time the civil war killed hundreds of thousands of people in a population of just a few million people, it was hugely destructive. We're not used to that.

[Mark:] David, one of the things that occurs to me about Leviathan, it's so dense and complex and multifaceted, when you teach this book, do you teach just fractions of it? Do you teach the whole thing? What is your approach to including this on your syllabi?

[David:] Well, I teach it in two different ways. Uh, it's a very, very long book. It's completely in – in a survey course in which you're dealing with multiple authors, I mean unless you're down to three or four authors, if you—which I is not the way I do it—in a survey course dealing with more than that, it's just impractical to assign the whole book, it's much too demanding on students. So, uh, in that kind of context, one has to assign selections. Um, but I do teach every, not every year but every two or three years, I will teach a seminar on Hobbes’s Leviathan, on Hobbes, in which we read the entire text cover to cover. Uh, and we will go slowly analyze all its various parts. Uh, and you know, people will come away not with a comprehensive understanding of the book but with a – enough understanding so that if they want to continue and get a comprehensive understanding, they really can do that.

[Mark:] And is there's something about reading him cover to cover that unfolds an aspect of this book to, let's say, graduate students or students reading in the 21st century, that's particular, that is sort of common to the reading these days?

[David:] Well, let me respond to the first part of your question in a in a slightly elliptical way. I think reading this book cover to cover is the only way to really read it. Uh, I think that is true of a handful of books in the history of political ideas. I will mention two, uh, of which I think it's especially true. One is Plato's Republic; I think you cannot understand what Plato is doing in the Republic by reading selections. It has to be read cover to cover otherwise you're going to have a mistaken impression of what he is doing. The other writer who has to be read cover to cover, it seems to me, is one not – not as familiar to people Hegel, the German philosopher of the early 19th century. You cannot understand what he's doing unless you get to the end. It's a very daunting thing; his first and most major book, The Phenomenology of Spirit is, I think, even longer than Leviathan, but you can only do that with that. I think that is also true of Hobbes; you can understand the argument only if you really read the full thing. Uh, someone can tell you other parts, and you can kind of fill in the blanks, but you're not really going to get the full thing without doing that.

[Mark:] I thought you were going to mention Machiavelli.

[David:] You know it's not in – in my view that's not quite true of Machiavelli. Firstly, the most famous work is The Prince, Il – Il Principe, and that's a tiny little book, less than 100 pages in most editions. So, no – no difficulty reading Il Principe cover the cover. It's true that with Machiavelli, to really understand Machiavelli’s thought, it’s important to read The Discourses. And The Discourses is a much longer work, written a few years after The Prince. Uh, and to truly understand Machiavelli’s thought, one does have to read that book fully. But one could get a lot of things—Machiavelli is not a systematic phil – he's not a philosopher at all. So, Plato, Hobbes, and Hegel all were – are thought of...

[Mark:] I see.

[David:] ...as philosophers; Machiavelli is not a philosopher. So, the – he doesn't have a systematic philosophy. One of the things these three people do—they're not the only ones but it – but it's rare—is not only do they have a complex argument to develop, but they have a complex conceptual universe to develop of their own. Plato redefines ideas in The Republic. He takes ideas that were commonplace in Athens at his time, and he tells us, tells the reader we should think about these ideas differently from the way we do: the most famous one of course being justice. The book of Republic is a book all about Justice. He's telling us we should think about justice in a completely different way from what we're used to and so on down the line. Same is true of Hegel, same is true of Hobbes. Many things he –he – he says we should – we need to think about these things in – in a different way, so he defines concepts a little differently. That's why there's a whole systematic philosophy here.

[Mark:] So, when you present selections of Leviathan, are you doing it to juxtapose Hobbes with another philosopher that you might be presenting, or are you sort of giving the greatest hits of Leviathan?

[David:] The most fruitful I think jus – juxt – juxtaposition is Hobbes with Aristotle. Aristotle was Hobbes's whipping boy. Um, Hobbes has nothing good to say about Aristotle at all in Leviathan, and he has bad things to say about virtually every branch of Aristotle's philosophy: Aristotle's metaphysics, his ethics, his politics all come in for heaps and heaps of criticism, although there is one set of body of work of Aristotle that Hobbes doesn't really talk about in Leviathan, and that is Aristotle's Rhetoric. And one reason why he doesn't talk about it probably is that Hobbes indeed learned a great deal from Aristotle’s Rhetoric and – and was influenced by that and indeed borrows from it without attribution [Laughter] to Aristotle. The Rhetoric includes a good deal, a good number of the observations about human nature for which Hobbes is so famous: many of them you can find in Aristotle.

[Mark:] David, do you have a hot take about Leviathan; a counterintuitive comment that is against the prevailing winds?

[David:] Well, I don't know if this would fit that description or not fully, it's hard to say, but I think that there is no – there is no writer in the history of ideas that I know of—political ideas or other ideas for that matter—who has, in my estimation, a clearer, a more clear-eyed take on human nature and human behavior than Hobbes. He is often thought to have a very negative view of human nature, but in my view, he has a very clear-eyed view of human nature. He sees and doesn't shy away from all the warts and the bad features, as well as all the good features, which are there in Leviathan too. They're not as noticed, but they are there; uh, his praise for people, uh, is there. He's just so clear-eyed about that, and I think that is—whether that's really a sort of really controversial or counterintuitive—it is certainly under-appreciated about Hobbes.

[Mark:] So, the general consensus is what: he's, uh, a grouch, he doesn't think much of human – human nature?

[David:] Yeah, the general consensus is that, uh, he has a very negative view of human nature. He – he – he thinks that human beings are, by nature, quarrelsome, um, you know, tend to be violent, and so forth, and there's something to that but it's not the picture. It's not the full picture.

[Mark:] Is his view of human nature, is that, like, logically the cause for why a leviathan or single sovereign entity is necessary?

[David:] There's a short answer to that is – is yes. That is, there's a causal account in Hobbes of violence, civil war...

[Mark:] Mmm.

[David:] ...and so forth, which is based on human nature and human interaction, um, and that leads him to an account that is not all causal. There are other things going on including a legal-like argument, a philosophical argument, but the causal account of why we need a sovereign—an absolute and arbitrary sovereign—is based on his analysis of human nature.

[Mark:] Yeah, so this is a strange question to ask about a work of political philosophy, but are there other ways to appreciate or absorb this book that's not just by reading the book? Has it ever been appropriated or represented in any other form?

[David:] Let's put it this way: there are certainly plays, literature of other kinds besides plays, but especially plays, drama – works of drama that draw on Leviathan, that draw on the conceptions of human interaction in Leviathan. There are plays—many of them are archaic now. We don't – we don't – we don't watch them anymore or see that they're not performed often anymore. There are plays from his own time that dramatized things in Leviathan, uh, and there are plays that had competing dramatizations. That's a medium that – where – where – where you can find some things, but, um, but this is not easy to translate into other media.

[Mark:] Your Norton Library Edition of Leviathan spends some time on the title page of the original Leviathan, and I think it's just fascinating you say it's probably the most famous in the history of political ideas. Can you talk a little bit about that and why you devoted so much attention to it?

[David:] Yes, absolutely. This is – so we're talking now about the engraved title page. There are actually two title pages: there's the engraving—the one with the engraving...

[Mark:] Hm.

[David:] ...the illustration—and then there's another one which is the sort of formal title page with just the title and – and so forth. So, the engraving: when one teaches this book to students, this is one of the favorite things to look at. Uh, there's such a representation; it is so – it is so representative of the argument, it's quite amazing. Uh, this is not a visual podcast, of course not visual, but at the top of the – at the top of the top half of the engraving there's a picture of a large figure with a crown. It's actually an Imperial Crown on the head of that figure—not just a royal but an Imperial Crown—holding a sword in one hand and a – and a bishop staff in the other hand. 

[Mark:] Mmhm.

[David:] This is a symbol of the fact that Hobbes thought that the sovereign—whatever that might be, whatever person or body of persons that might be—has to hold both – both, what was called in those days, temporal power and spiritual power; that is the power over political matters and the power over we – what– what we think of as religious matters. There's a whole town below him; there's a – a walled town, uh, with a church very prominent on one side and a fort – a fortress – fortified building on the other side. Again, that's representing military and, uh, ideological power, actually. So, the – the religion is so important him because it's the basic ideology of his day, uh, and the ideological quarrels were quarrels about how to interpret the Bible and how to interpret Christianity. Those were the foundational ideological quarrels. In the lower half of the illustration, you see on the left-hand side five panels, one above, you know, each above the other on the left side, and five panels on the right side. Panels on the left side all represent military power. They're all symbols of military power, starting with a battle scene at the bottom and a fort on the top: you know, uh, settled power. Um, on the right-hand side, the bottom—this is interesting not – not known well enough I think in general—that bottom panel is a scholastic disputation. That is the form of argument in the Church in Scholasticism, which Hobbes vehemently opposed. Scholasticism is a school of thought. But that isn't – it is – it is a representation of an ideological battle going on, a formal ideological battle, and at the top, of course, a church: settled religious power.

[Mark:] What is the extent of Hobbes’s input into all of these designs?

[David:] So, the designer, uh, the – the engraved title page: uh, we believe nowadays through modern scholarship, the – the designer is pretty clearly identified as someone who was living in Paris at that time. And Hobbes was living in Paris that – in Paris at that time. And we don't have any direct records of their interaction, but their places of residence, I believe, are known, and it is almost certainly the case that they – that the designer, the engraver, consulted with Hobbes, that Hobbes gave him his ideas. It's – it's – it's – it's inconceivable that the engraver could have done this illustration without direct input from Hobbes.

[Mark:] What's the significance of the thunderbolts on the right side of it?

[David:] So, the thunderbolts, which are in the middle of the right-hand side—the ecclesiastical power side as Hobbes would put it or the religious authority side—so those refer to various kinds of disputes that Hobbes discusses at great length in Chapter 42, the longest of the chapters. You know, these are basically bolts from heaven affecting the arguments, trying to establish people's views and wipe out people's views if they're heretical or wrongful.

[Mark:] I was also interested, David, in your notes on the text for those of us who are not Hobbes scholars, just what primary sources are when you're working with this book and trying to establish a correct edition. How much of original manuscripts are available in – with respect to Leviathan?

[David:] There is one true first edition of 1651; that true – that's the print edition.

[Mark:] Where is that that?

[David:] That – well, there are many copies of that, I'm sorry; one edition, there are a number of copies. I think there are several hundred extant copies. Um, I actually personally own one; uh, they're pretty expensive, but I have one. Uh, the Columbia University Library has one. Uh, there's one in Miguel Library in Montreal, etc. There are a number of them in England. Uh, a number of them are in private hands, some are in libraries. These copies have variations, though. So, it's one first edition; in these days what they would do—you don't find variations like this in modern 20th-century editions—but at that time, what they would do is they would – they would set up type, has to be set up manually of course; they would print a certain number of pages; they would bind the pages together into a sheath, as it were, and that would be one; and then they would have to do it over again later as they were printing additional copies, and sometimes there were changes that got made. So, there are minor variations there, even within this first edition. Then there is one, and only – only one, manuscript edition. It is not the manuscript from which the first edition was written, uh, was set up, uh, that's lost, but it's a manuscript that was written on – on a, um, animal skin—vellum as it's called, usually calf skin, very fancy—for presentation. It is believed that it was made for presentation to the Prince of Wales. It was a version of the book, and it varies in some ways from the printed version, only in fairly small ways but in some significant ways. Uh, so there's that – there's that copy. And – and that copy was written by somebody else, an amanuensis, someone who was a professional copier as it were. Uh, but there are corrections in that, small corrections by Hobbes in his own hand.

[Mark:] In 1651, given the technology available at the time, would this have been widely circulated?

[David:] The book appeared on a list of books, and the list I believe, if I recall correctly, was called the list of the most vendible books in England. That is: bestseller list.

[Mark:] Yes. [Laughter] Most ven—

[David:] So,1651 version, uh, it appeared on the list of the most vendible, most salable books in England. Uh, I don't think we know the exact print run of it. It wasn't written for mass consumption, but it was – but it was published – there were probably at least 2,000 copies published, and that's big circulation for those days. Very few people read books like this. He says himself in a later work, “I wrote this for gentlemen.”

[Mark:] Ahh.

[David:] That would be the audience. Um, those are people who were – had an education, if not quite up to his, but at least the same type of education as his. Uh, those were the people who would read this, but that's a lot of people for that time.

[Mark:] Well, David, I hope your Norton Library Edition is also on the most vendible list of the year. It was such a pleasure to have you on to talk about your edition of Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan. David Johnston, thanks so much for joining us.

[David:] Thank you, Mark.

[Mark:] The Norton Library Edition of Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan, edited by David Johnston, is available now in paperback and e-book. Check out the links in the description to this episode for ordering options and more information about the Norton Library, including the full catalog of titles.

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