Strauss and Watkins on Hobbes' Political Philosophy: A Review

206 THE POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEWER
the passages concerning the making of the sovereign explains how
Hobbes could say both that the sovereign dictates the subject’s
morality <strong>and</strong> that the subjects themselves still rule. <strong>Watkins</strong> makes
heavy use of the power of attorney as authorized use of a name.
Hobbes’s political theory may be evaluated <strong>and</strong> criticized by ra-
tional st<strong>and</strong>ards.
In Chapter IX, <strong>Watkins</strong> collects the political implications which
may be drawn from Hobbes’s non-political philosophical ideas,
evaluates Hobbes’s theory by its openness to criticism, <strong>and</strong> suggests
portions of that theory which might be revised profitably.
<strong>Watkins</strong>’s list of political implications runs on for two pages, at
the end of which he says that Hobbes’s civil philosophy satisfies two
of Hobbes’s three requirements, i.e., that he demonstrate: (1) the
need for a sovereign; <strong>and</strong> (2) “that what makes anything a duty is its
being comm<strong>and</strong>ed by a sovereign authority” (16). In the second sec-
tion of this concluding chapter, <strong>Watkins</strong> turns to the third require-
ment: that Hobbes’s conclusions be known to be true. He notes that
one of Hobbes’s central principles—”that men have an overriding
fear of violent death” (166)—implies no sane man would knowingly
behave in a way leading to certain death. <strong>Watkins</strong> cites evidence
refuting this key principle of Hobbes’s theory <strong>and</strong> asks if this implies
that Hobbes failed in his political theory. <strong>Watkins</strong> argues that
Hobbes failed to achieve what he set out to do because it was im-
possible to succeed. In any event:
What Hobbes provided, notwithst<strong>and</strong>ing his tone of confident finality, was not
a frozen block of political theory, but an immensely rich, criticizable system,
open to revision <strong>and</strong> development at many points (170).
Thus, according to <strong>Watkins</strong>, it is praiseworthy that Hobbes’s theory
has so much content that it yields a large number of inferences some
of which may be tested <strong>and</strong> found to be false. To do otherwise might
have saved Hobbes from contradiction but only at the cost of reduc-
ing the usefulness of his theory.
The final portion of this final chapter is entitled “Taming
Leviathan.” In this section, <strong>Watkins</strong> criticizes three of Hobbes’s im-
portant political ideas. First, <strong>Watkins</strong> argues that civil war is only
one of two possible domestic political disasters: totalitarianism is the
other. The sovereignty of a periodically elected parliament may be