Strauss and Watkins on Hobbes' Political Philosophy: A Review

STRAUSS AND WATKINS ON HOBBES 211
Thus, <strong>Watkins</strong> suggests that it is important for a theorist to offer
arguments which are available for reasoned criticism rather than to
immunize those arguments against such criticism. <strong>Watkins</strong> also
commends Hobbes for offering a system of ideas rather than an
unrelated set of propositions. <strong>Watkins</strong>’s suggestions are not novel,
but they are worth taking, even in a day when all values are regard-
ed as mere ad hoc rationalizations of desires.
Finally, I want to point out two areas where I think <strong>Watkins</strong> has
not vindicated Hobbes. First, in his discussion of Hobbes’s theory of
punishment, <strong>Watkins</strong> attempts to exonerate Hobbes’s purely
utilitarian theory of the charge that it could be used to justify “fram-
ing” <strong>and</strong> “punishing” an innocent party as a public warning to
others. <strong>Watkins</strong> succeeds in showing that Hobbes’s definition of
punishment could not be extended to cover such an act. However,
<strong>Watkins</strong> does not succeed in showing that Hobbes’s theory of utility
could not be extended to call for such an act.
Second, in his discussion of authorization, <strong>Watkins</strong> suggests that,
for Hobbes, authorization has occurred when the subjects have
transferred their names to the sovereign. Instead of the rights of the
subjects, the sovereign receives their names.
One of Hobbes’s favorite ways of characterizing sovereign[ty is to say that the
sovereign] bears the person of his subjects. What, given his thorough-going
nominalism, could Hobbes have meant by this? The answer which readily suggests
itself is this: His subjects have given him, not their persons but tokens of their
persons, viz. their names. And this is, in fact, what Hobbes meant. Each subject
authorizes his sovereign to represent him ‘or act in his name’ (160). *
This is an interesting suggestion <strong>and</strong> perhaps this is how Hobbes
should have authorized the sovereign. However, I think the attrac-
tiveness of <strong>Watkins</strong>’s suggestion plays heavily on the word
“nominalism.” Now Hobbes’s philosophy is “thorough-going
nominalism.” However, Hobbes nowhere gave any evidence that he
meant names could be transferred or that the giving of a name, even
as a token, would accomplish anything else. Indeed, such an idea
sounds like a “realist” view of names rather than a nominalist one.
On the other h<strong>and</strong>, Hobbes practices his nominalism as a kind of
“defineism” constructing great semantic chains of permutations on
the same fundamental idea, e.g., “endeavour” in Chapter VI of
Leviathan. Similarly, at the beginning of Chapters XIV <strong>and</strong> XXI,
Hobbes again constructs semantic chains beginning from “liberty”
as “the absence of externall Impediments.” The second link in the