Hobbes, Slavery, and Despotical Rule

MARY NYQUIST Hobbes, Slavery, and Despotical Rule Though the violence that occurs in the absence of sovereign power is evident in interactions among nations, Thomas Hobbes prefers using the “savage” nations of America to illustrate the state of nature, which is temporally as well as conceptually prior to civil society. When invoking present-day America in conjunction with the state of nature, in all three of his major theoretical treatises Hobbes mentions that ancestors of contemporaneous Europeans once lived in comparably destitute, insecure conditions.1 In Leviathan, Hobbes suggests that civil war has the capacity to return civil society to its original state. Should the rights of sovereignty be removed, Hobbes argues, “the Commonwealth is thereby dissolved, and every man returneth into the condition, and calamity of a warre with every other man, (which is the greatest evill that can happen in this life).”2 In such passages, Hobbes stimulates a fear of losing all that civil society now offers. Fear, of course, is vital to Hobbes’s defense of the absolutist state. Yet the threatened loss of civil society’s benefits is clearly different from the unremittingly fearful conflict endemic to the state of nature. Hobbes’s fear is not quite so homogeneous as is sometimes supposed. Richard Tuck argues that for Hobbes human beings “are fundamentally self-protective, and only secondarily aggressive—it is fear of an attack by a possible enemy which leads us to perform a pre-emptive strike on him, and not, strictly speaking, the desire to destroy him.”3 While this formulation accurately reflects Hobbes’s own ordering, it bestows unproblematic reality on the antecedent danger to which fear and thereby aggression are legitimate responses, besides downplaying Hobbes’s references to a natural desire for dominion. Regarding Hobbes’s theorization of sovereignty’s origins, fear needs to be parsed, as it were, since in the form of irrational affect it is experienced only by those who consent to subjection. When considered from the vantage point of its holder, Hobbes’s sovereign power does not arise from an immediate A B S T R A C T Hobbes’s theorization of contractual absolutism relies upon a juridico-military doctrine relating to the enslavement of war captives, a doctrine that for Grotius has the authority of the law of nations. Although Hobbes’s appeal to this doctrine cannot be understood apart from contemporaneous rhetorical appeals to figurative “slavery,” his representation of a dramatic encounter involving the military victor’s power of life and death enables him to develop novel views of civil subjecthood and of the family, together with a defense of Atlantic slavery that is later appropriated by Locke. / R E P R E S E N T A T I O N S 106. Spring 2009 © The Regents of the University of California. ISSN 0734–6018, electronic ISSN 1533–855X, pages 1–33. All rights reserved. Direct requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content to the University of California Press at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI:10.1525/ rep.2009.106.1.1. 1 experience of fear, much less the visceral fear of murder that Leo Strauss notoriously claims to be for Hobbes “the root of all right and therefore of all morality.”4 In the chapter on the state of nature in Elements of Law, his first political treatise, Hobbes discusses the “right of nature” on which dominion grounds itself, a right at this point considered apart from the concept of sovereignty: A man therefore that hath another man in his power to rule or govern, to do good to, or harm, hath right, by the advantage of this his present power, to take caution at his pleasure, for his security against that other in the time to come. He therefore that hath already subdued his adversary, or gotten into his power any other that either by infancy, or weakness, is unable to resist him, by right of nature may take the best caution, that such infant, or such feeble and subdued person can give him, of being ruled and governed by him for the time to come. For seeing we intend always our own safety and preservation, we manifestly contradict that our intention, if we willingly dismiss such a one, and suffer him at once to gather strength and be our enemy. Out of which may also be collected, that irresistible might in the state of nature is right.5 Just as Hobbes extends the definition of war so as to include the anxious anticipation of open hostility, so self-preservation here embraces precautionary measures aimed at the continued enjoyment—elsewhere even the enlargement—of “present power.” To “take caution” is to preempt future, even hypothetical, threats by coercive means. Hobbes makes his originary ur-rule general enough to comprise what are later designated parental and despotic forms of dominion. It is, however, far from being sui generis, as would befit a precivil condition, an abstract metaphysical principle, or, for that matter, Hobbes’s originality. The struggle Hobbes depicts in this passage and elsewhere in his major treatises is modeled on a Roman doctrine of war slavery, the significance of which to Hobbes’s theorization of sovereignty it is the aim of this essay to explore.6 I will argue that Hobbes’s appeal to war slavery, though integrally related to his state of nature, doesn’t so much reveal essential features of humanity as provide the juridical terms required for his contractualist construction of absolutism. Much confusion has resulted from a failure to grasp the ideological import and formal contours of Hobbes’s use of this juridico-military doctrine. Though his adaptation has its own highly distinctive characteristics, they recognizably belong to a scenario featuring the military victor’s life-ordeath decision-making power over those who have been vanquished. Derived from ancient Greek literature as well as from Roman jurisprudence, where it appears under the auspices of the law of nations, the doctrine that chattel slavery originates in military defeat and is therefore a life-preserving alternative to death is validated by Hugo Grotius in The Rights of War and Peace. Hobbes appropriates this doctrine in the passage quoted earlier, when, for 2 R E P R E S E N TAT I O N S example, the agent temporarily blessed with “irresistible might” is said to hold another captive with the power “to do good to or harm,” a moderate, potentially captive-friendly synonym for the juridical power of life and death (potestas vitae necisque), and again when the military “adversary,” said to be “subdued” (a military term), becomes the prototype for the infant or otherwise disadvantaged being who is detained. A similarly dramatic encounter is regarded from the captive’s point of view in Elements when Hobbes defends the legitimacy of covenants entered into through fear: “For who would lose the liberty that nature hath given him, of governing himself by his own will and power, if they feared not death in the retaining of it?” War slavery, the alternative to threatened death, is here signified by the loss of liberty and self-governance. Military victory and capture are even more clearly evoked by the query immediately following, which joins the victor’s power of life and death with the captor’s obligation to keep his word: “What prisoner in war might be trusted to seek his ransom, and ought not rather to be killed, if he were not tied by the grant of his life, to perform his promise?”7 Both questions bind the contractual character of the subject’s submission to the doctrine of war slavery and the militarized encounter on which it depends. Presupposing a legitimate, causal connection between military victory and enslavement, this encounter becomes what I want to consider Hobbes’s central ritualized drama, ideologeme, or, to use another figure, ruling conceit, by means of which he theorizes sovereignty’s origins. It could be argued that Hobbes’s naturalization of war slavery, like the state of nature for which it is perfectly outfitted, is the product of the resolutivecompositive method in vogue at the time. It doesn’t follow, though, that readers need abstract Hobbes’s originary, militarized encounter from the various historically specific institutions, debates, and events his writings engage.8 One important context for understanding Hobbes’s deployment of this particular juridico-military schema, namely, apologies for the use of force in the service of colonial expansion and the protection of national commercial interests, has been discussed by Tuck, though without critical reference to Hobbes’s major treatises.9 Even less consideration has been given to colonial slavery, for which, it has been argued, conquest and war slavery doctrines generally offer the legitimization that English jurisprudence signally fails to provide.10 Another national context, relevant only to Leviathan, has been discussed in studies of debates on de facto rule during the postregicide era, when Hobbes’s theorization of the commonwealth by acquisition becomes influential.11 Finally, early modern western European debates on sovereignty and natural rights provide yet another context in which issues relating to coercive force and the possibility of voluntary self-enslavement loom extremely large.12 This last context will initially receive most attention here, as it is indispensable to re-encoding Hobbes’s generative use of war Hobbes, Slavery, and Despotical Rule 3 slavery, re-encoding that is important to a more complete understanding of Hobbes as well as to a demythologization of his state of nature. It’s generally accepted that early modern debates on the nature and extent of subjects’ obligations vis-à-vis the sovereign are often articulated by means of patriarchalist tenets. Assertions regarding the essential sameness of paternal and sovereign power are characteristic of royal absolutism, which grounds the monarch’s prerogatives in those naturally enjoyed by the father. Students of early modern political theory are familiar with the different guises such patriarchalist analogies can assume. Despotism or slave mastery, however, has received remarkably little attention. This holds for absolutism’s varied attempts to accommodate slave mastery or conquest to patriarchalism as well as for resistance theory’s emphasis on the sameness of tyranny and slave mastery. Hobbes, it is agreed, adopts two tenets of contractualism and resistance theory: the human origins of sovereignty and the constitutive power of consent. Given the extraordinary impact, historically, that Hobbes’s contractual absolutism has had on a variety of ideological formations, it is important to understand his peculiar assimilation of paternal to what he calls “despoticall” power and the synthesis of both with contractualism. As Hobbes construes it, the submission that constitutes natural (what Leviathan calls “acquired” as opposed to “instituted”) sovereignty is most apparent in the overtly militaristic context that is specific to despotic rule. For this reason, I shall argue, despotic rule provides Hobbes with the model for other modes of sovereignty. Commentators have been intrigued by Hobbes’s stress on maternal power, occasionally making Hobbes a protofeminist advocate of Mutterrecht. Traditionally, Hobbes observes, fathers, not mothers, institute civil society, with the result that men have dominion over their children. Yet in the state of nature, mothers hold the power of life and death over their offspring. Hobbes takes this idiosyncratic position primarily in order to advance the contractualist basis of his theory of absolutism, which cannot affirm the naturalness of paternal, and hence monarchical, power. Contractualism alone is not responsible for the mother’s extraordinary power, however. A naturalization of paternal power provides no grounds for opposing the state of nature to the state of civil society and therefore none for arguing that absolute sovereignty be acceded to out of fear. If fathers were naturally capable of providing dominion (which on occasion Hobbes suggests they are, though not when evoking the state of nature), the state of nature would not be quite the chaotic, combatant-face-combatant state that Hobbes so relishes portraying, with the result that civil society would not appear so entirely, irresistibly advantageous. In all three major treatises, Hobbes presents Amazons as historical exemplars of maternal right, exemplarity that would be disturbingly negative for his contemporaries, in addition to being related to his mention 4 R E P R E S E N TAT I O N S of “America” in connection with the state of nature. When Hobbes refers to Amazons, he specifies those of ancient Greek record; in De Cive for example, he says, “women, in the person of the Amazons, did at one time wage wars against their enemies and handled their offspring as they pleased, and there are several places today where women have sovereign power.”13 Hobbes need not specify contemporaneous “savage” societies, because precivil societies, of which the ancient Amazons are in any case exemplars, generally have wellestablished links with female rule, while the present-day Americas and, occasionally, Africa, are frequently associated with Amazons. A state of nature in which sexually promiscuous women are solely responsible for determining both paternity and the continued existence or nonexistence of their offspring would have filled most of his European readers with fascinated horror, horror that Hobbes’s dispassionate, scientifically neutral language merely intensifies. Despite extensive consideration of parental power, Hobbes has markedly little interest in conjugal relations per se. But this way of putting it doesn’t do justice to Hobbes’s striking disregard of the marital unit, of wives, and of patriarchal mothers. Remarkably, Hobbes doesn’t so much as mention either wife or mother when defining the family as a unit in De Cive’s following statement: “The father of the family, the children and the slaves [servi], united in one civil person by virtue of paternal power is called a FAMILY.”14 That this isn’t merely an oversight is evident when the same formulation reappears in later editions, as well as in Leviathan, where, again, wives and mothers don’t merit so much as a casual nod. Hobbes asserts that with regard to the “Rights of soveraignty,” a large family is structurally the same as a little monarchy, “whether that Family consist of a man and his children; or of a man and his servants; or of a man, and his children, and servants together: wherein the Father or Master is the Soveraign.”15 Why does the mother, so prominent in the state of nature, disappear from the patriarchal family of civil society? Uneasy with this state of affairs, for which run-of-the-mill masculinism does not appear to account, commentators have often tried to ignore or obscure it. Alternatively, Hobbes’s perplexing omission of wives and mothers inspires Carole Pateman to posit her own conjectural history of the conquest by men of women, who thereby become their servants.16 In what follows I offer a very different understanding of Hobbes’s family, which, I propose, is female-free precisely insofar as it correlates subjecthood with servitude. Owing in part to an emphasis on patriarchalism that neglects the claims of despotism, the absence of wives has not been viewed as integral to Hobbes’s theorization of servants as paradigmatic subjects. Many aspects of Hobbes’s family, an originary “body politic,” result from his overdetermined construction of war slavery as a medium for the power of life and death, a medium that enables the covenant of obedience to appear as a Hobbes, Slavery, and Despotical Rule 5 form of self-preservation. Indebted to Grotius’s discussion of actual institutional slavery as a product of warfare, Hobbes’s investment in war slavery, I shall argue in the final section of this essay, also enables him to provide an implicit defense of Atlantic slavery in Leviathan.17 Liberty, Slavery, and Tyranny Discomfited First, we need briefly to consider the interdependency of theoretical and rhetorical ends as mobilized by what I would like to call the topos of slavery and tyranny, against which Hobbes develops his absolutism. Many of Hobbes’s most important moves seek to counteract the passions aroused by this topos as it is used by advocates of popular sovereignty. Both tyranny and its complement, figurative “slavery,” feature in Leviathan’s well-known diatribe against Greek and Roman authors for idealizing liberty and for glorifying tyrannicide. In the more famous of the two passages where this invective occurs, Hobbes argues that the effects of reading such authors are so pernicious that they result in a pathological, virtually psychotic state Hobbes diagnoses as “Tyrannophobia,” a self-destructively phobic response to absolute sovereignty. From this literature, Hobbes says, readers are led to imagine “that the Subjects in a Popular Common-wealth enjoy Liberty; but that in a Monarchy they are all Slaves.”18 Earlier, Hobbes claims that Aristotle and Cicero are mere ideologues rather than rigorous theorists of political institutions; instead of being drawn from “Nature,” the principles they espouse are simply those of the governments under which they live. This, Hobbes explains, is why Aristotle, transcribing these principles in Politics, confusedly opposes liberty and slavery as if they were constitutional attributes, with “liberty” a possibility only in democratic states: “And because the Athenians were taught, (to keep them from desire of changing their Government,) that they were Free-men, and all that lived under Monarchy were slaves; therefore Aristotle puts it down in his Politiques, (lib. 6.cap.2). In democracy, Liberty is to be supposed.”19 In reiterating this point about “slaves,” Hobbes invites readers to understand that far from being intrinsic, the connection between, on the one hand, liberty and democracy and, on the other, monarchy and slavery, is arbitrary in being historically contingent as well as ideological. But Hobbes is aware that a single act of analytic self-consciousness will not do much to dampen enthusiastic belief in the value of liberty. Numerous features of Hobbes’s absolutism are painstakingly concocted as an antidote to the madness that results from imbibing popular notions of freedom as “slavery’s” noble antonym or tyranny’s antagonist. For absolutists committed to undercutting contemporary claims regarding “tyranny,” objections to Aristotle’s Politics are de rigueur. Hobbes, however, 6 R E P R E S E N TAT I O N S turns opposition to Aristotle into a fine art. Whether in the field of natural science, ethics, metaphysics, or political philosophy, Aristotle’s immense authority has, it seems, created nothing but intellectual murkiness, which Hobbes sets about to dispel. The single most important feature of Hobbes’s critique is his rejection—formulated clearly in Elements and repeated in later texts—of the distinction Aristotle draws in Politics between despotic rule, oriented toward the satisfaction of the ruler’s needs, and political rule, held for the good of those who are governed.20 This distinction is crucial to early modern theories of resistance in providing a basis for the identification and castigation of tyranny. For this reason, it is unacceptable to Hobbes even in the simpler well-established form of the distinction, authorized by both Plato and Aristotle, between monarchy as a normative and tyranny as a deviant kind of rule. In Hobbes’s view, this distinction, along with those related to it, is totally specious; “monarchy” and “tyranny” merely register affective responses to what is perceived as good or bad government and are therefore expressive rather than demonstrative. These terms are without reference to distinct forms of government, since “one and the same monarch is given the name King to honour him, the name of Tyrant to damn him.”21 There would be little point to divesting tyranny of its authority, however, if its counterpart, political “slavery,” were to continue in office (quotation marks signal its figurative status). In the literature of resistance, rule resembling the slave master’s disgracefully seeks to reduce its freeborn subjects to the position of “slaves.” Though some proponents of popular sovereignty imply that monarchical rule of any kind tyrannizes, it is widely agreed that absolute monarchy necessarily “enslaves” its citizens. Hobbes is by no means the first to try to counter the powerful appeal of such argumentation; Robert Filmer, too, challenges his contemporaries’ inflammatory use of “slavery,” a word not found in either biblical or classical literature, as he points out. Yet in Elements Hobbes goes to its source, Aristotle’s doctrine of natural slavery. The principle that some are born to rule, others to serve not only vitiates Politics, Hobbes claims, but has provided a pretext for restless competitiveness. Hobbes counters Aristotle by insisting that for the sake of social harmony, nature declares we are to consider one another equals.22 Although later writers and activists use the principle of natural equality for egalitarian purposes, Hobbes subjects this principle to absolutist ends. In the contexts Hobbes creates for it, the equality he posits as a universal, natural condition is scarcely an improvement on the subjection into which Filmer has everyone born, since it gives rise to nothing but dispossession, violence, and instability. Natural equality, while throwing into relief the artificiality of civil society, precludes easy, unreflective recourse to the topos of slavery and tyranny, though to understand how this works requires further analysis. Hobbes, Slavery, and Despotical Rule 7 Like “tyranny,” “slavery” is for Hobbes a term his opponents use in an incendiary, expressive fashion. Proponents of mixed government, Hobbes says in Elements, “in hatred” of absolute subjection call it “slavery.” “And supposing it were so,” he asks rhetorically, “how were this condition which they call slavery eased thereby?” Given the indivisibility of sovereignty, Hobbes argues, not at all: “They are as absolutely subject to [their representatives] as is a child to the father, or a slave to the master in the state of nature.”23 In this and related passages, Hobbes registers his response to the pervasiveness of contemporary appeals to the topos of slavery and tyranny. Hobbes does not operate solely on rhetorical terrain, however. Both “slavery” and tyranny are evacuated conceptually, which is one of the most stunning accomplishments of Hobbes’s theory of representation as well as of his systematization of sovereign power. As the preceding citation indicates, Hobbes denies the validity of any distinctions among despotic, paternal, and political rule. Just as categorically as Aristotle asserts the difference of despotic from either paternal, conjugal, or good political rule, Hobbes asserts their essential sameness (omitting conjugal rule), claiming in Leviathan that “the Rights and Consequences of both Paternall and Despoticall Dominion, are the very same with those of a Soveraign by Institution; and for the same reasons.”24 Central to Hobbes’s theorization of sovereignty, “dominion” is a term given great rhetorical power by the role it plays in contemporaneous debates. When applied to political relations, which are believed to be naturally free, “dominion” is a term of opprobrium for proponents of republicanism or popular sovereignty; it signals the perversion of such relations by rule that is or has become arbitrary. Referring, properly, to the master’s proprietary rule over his slaves within the domus, “dominion” has no business, as it were, in the public sphere, where “free” adult citizens govern themselves. An important feature of Hobbes’s neutralization of this radical take on “dominion” is his use of “servant” rather than “slave” for the Latin servus. Though the Latin term is open to either translation, context determining the choice to be made, in early modern debates on sovereignty its vernacular deployment is highly charged. The significance of Hobbes’s usage, consistent throughout Elements and Leviathan, both of which were written in English, has unfortunately not been captured in the authoritative, Cambridge edition of De Cive, which translates servus as “slave.”25 Though intended to underline the similarities Hobbes creates between servitude and chattel slavery, this translation obscures not only the strategic character of Hobbes’s transvaluation of servitude, for him the positive counterpart of what populists anathematize as “slavery,” but also the relations Hobbes constructs between servitude and institutional slavery. The transformation of “slaves” into “servants”—of which, as will be seen, bound servants, considered slaves by Hobbes, are a subset—is very much connected with Hobbes’s leveling of all forms of 8 R E P R E S E N TAT I O N S subjection. De Cive proclaims the essential sameness of dominion and subjection wherever they occur, calmly, evenhandedly obliterating any differences among children, servants, and political subjects. “Children,” Hobbes goes so far as to assert, “are also released from subjection in the same ways as subjects and slaves [servi]. Emancipation is the same thing as manumission and disowning is the same as banishment.”26 To liken the parental act of disowning to the act of banishment, effected by the state, is to remain within the conventions of patriarchal absolutism. Explicitly to correlate emancipation and manumission is another thing altogether. For unlike the correspondence between children and subjects, which is conventional, that between children or subjects and servi constitutes an assault on the very conception of individual and collective national identity promulgated by classical republicanism and its popular derivatives. This, I am arguing, is an assault Hobbes is fully prepared to mount. Yet the correlation of children and citizens with servi gives political subjecthood what would seem to be a decidedly negative character. How does Hobbes contend with servitude’s negative associations for his readers, privileged Europeans, some of whom are involved, whether directly or indirectly, in Atlantic slavery and who, in any case, are masters of servants? To approach this question we need to examine the role played by analogical discourse. Hobbes shares with his contemporaries the assumption that what holds true of the child vis-à-vis parental rule must also hold of the citizen vis-à-vis political rule. Claims made with reference to those subject to the rule of the father consequently apply analogically to citizens of the commonwealth. For liberalism generally and for John Locke most systematically, the paradigmatic familial subject is the male child who is to outgrow his need for governance, at which point he will achieve parity with his father. Such children, who are naturally free, are understood to have the position of liberi, that is, freeborn Roman children whose status within ancient Rome is very precisely constructed in opposition to those who are enslaved. Generally speaking, patriarchal absolutism subverts this bipolarity by aggrandizing paternal power. Hobbes, following this practice, enjoys provocatively trivializing differences between liberi and enslaved; in Elements he also simultaneously reduces and amplifies paternal power over liberi: “For both the state had power over their life without consent of their fathers; and the father might kill his son by his own authority, without any warrant from the state.”27 Hobbes, this indicates, makes use of patriarchalist conventions but also insists on the father’s subjection to the state. In addition, he assimilates both paternal and sovereign dominion to the slave master’s, which in both Elements and De Cive is given priority. Given the growing prevalence in mid-seventeenth-century England of literature making use of the topos of slavery and tyranny, it is not surprising that Hobbes, Slavery, and Despotical Rule 9 Hobbes wants to rid his opponents of their favorite figural identity, that of freeborn citizens unjustly threatened with degradation to the status of “slaves.” Hobbes, however, chooses a different approach from that earlier explored by Jean Bodin, who develops a thoroughgoing critique of slavery as an institution. Hobbes, I am proposing, makes slave mastery the prototypical form of sovereignty. One of his greatest challenges is therefore to render the relation between lord (dominus) and servant or slave (servus) an acceptable analogue to that between political sovereign and subject. Substituting “servant” for “slave” is certainly one very effective means of purging “slavery” of the vitriolic aspersions ordinarily cast on it. Hobbes goes well beyond this, though: servitus is made an unobjectionable, ordinary, perhaps honorable, condition. Even when servitude unambiguously resembles the condition of chattel slavery, Hobbes gives it a neutral or even positive spin. This process of transvaluation is evident whenever Hobbes gives analogies between children or political subjects and servants a rationally detached character. It occurs frequently in De Cive, where claims made regarding what is conventionally regarded as chattel slavery are systematically applied to political subjecthood, whose benefits are stressed. In discussing the master’s absolute dominion over the servus, for example, Hobbes argues that though the servant cannot claim his own property against his master, he does have a right to hold individual property vis-à-vis his fellow servants. Such “dominion” vis-àvis fellow servants is of interest to Hobbes only insofar as servants are analogous to citizens. Nor is it an aspect of servitude normally considered in early modern political literature, whereas the subject’s property rights are, naturally, of paramount importance. Hobbes doesn’t rely entirely on analogy but openly asserts that regarding the sovereign representative, civil subjects have no more claim upon their belongings than do servi, “for those who have a Lord [Dominus] do not have Dominion, as was proved at VIII.5. And the commonwealth by its formation is the Lord of all the citizens.”28 Hobbes’s language assures his readers that there is nothing at all shameful about such conditional ownership, as it is simply the necessary outcome of subjection to an absolute sovereign. Because the advantages of membership in a commonwealth vastly outweigh its drawbacks, civil subjection’s likeness to servitude is to be regarded dispassionately, as a neutral fact of existence. Far from being, as advocates of political resistance proclaim, an abhorrent condition to be avoided at the cost of life itself, servitude becomes in Hobbes’s representation an unremarkable condition of subjection experienced by servi who are analogically citizens. One of Hobbes’s most effective strategies for divesting liberty of its glory and “slavery” of its capacity to stigmatize is his conceptualization of “liberty” as freedom of movement, the basis of the distinction he draws in Elements and De Cive between the unbound and the bound servant. (In both Elements 10 R E P R E S E N TAT I O N S and Leviathan, the term “slave” is associated with the bound servant). Insofar as impediments to bodily movement are “external and absolute,” Hobbes asserts in De Cive, all servants and subjects who are not in bonds or prison are “free.” Measured against the exalted notions eloquently advanced by his opponents, such liberty is pitifully diminished. The following passage, in which Hobbes chastises those who pine after some grander, imaginary “liberty,” reveals the ruthless logic of Hobbes’s identification of civil subjecthood and servitude, conceptualized very much as chattel slavery usually is but for the servant’s freedom of movement upon entering into a covenant of obedience: And this is what civil liberty consists in; for no one, whether subject or child of the family or slave [servus throughout; my addition], is prevented by the threat of being punished by his commonwealth or father or Master, however severe he may be, from doing all he can and trying every move that is necessary to protect his life and health. I find no reason for a slave to complain on the ground that he lacks liberty, unless it is an affliction to be restrained from harming himself and to keep the life which he had lost by war or ill fortune or even by his own idleness, together with all his food and everything needful for life and health, on the condition of being ruled. Anyone so restrained by threats of punishment from doing all he wants to do is not oppressed by servitude; he is governed and maintained. In every commonwealth and household where there are slaves [servi] what the free citizens and children of the family have more than the slaves is that they perform more honourable services in commonwealth and family, and enjoy more luxuries.29 More starkly than in Leviathan, Hobbes here endorses the essential sameness of civil subjects, children, and unbound servants. In the circumstances Hobbes imagines, the servant—whether initially held captive “by war or ill fortune or even by his own idleness”—has nothing to complain about since whatever discipline his master imposes constitutes an alternative to the termination of life, which is the sovereign’s prerogative (“unless it is an affliction to be restrained from harming himself and to keep the life which he had lost”). The shift from servus to a generalized “anyone so constrained” shows that the experience of an originary captivity isn’t consistently at issue, though. Actually at stake is radicalism’s bipolar opposition between “slavery” and “liberty,” which Hobbes methodically undoes so as to subvert its powerful affective associations and to establish servitude as a positive model for civil subjecthood. By implying in the penultimate sentence that the servus is also a member of the commonwealth, Hobbes theorizes civil society in such a way that citizenship is not the contrary of servitude. The disciplinary restraints and liberties enjoyed by citizens and servants differ merely in degree, not kind. In this passage, differences among civil subjects, children, and servi are erased. Given the focus on servitude, along with the conventionality of the Hobbes, Slavery, and Despotical Rule 11 analogy between children and subjects, the effect of this tripartite equivalence is to invite Hobbes’s primarily male propertied readers to apply what is said of servitude in general to their own condition as subjects: “Anyone so restrained by threats of punishment from doing all he wants to do is not oppressed by servitude; he is governed and maintained.” It must be emphasized, though, that at the moment this analogy takes over, servitude becomes figurative. For although the male citizens who are Hobbes’s civil subjects have at one time literally been children, they are not—and fully know they are not—literally captives, prisoners, or servants, much less slaves, even if they might temporarily suffer such fates. To a large extent, Hobbes’s servitude is just as figurative—just as dependent on a self-consciously metaphorical application of institutional servitude’s attributes to civil subjects who consider themselves “free”—as is that to which Hobbes’s radical counterparts repeatedly appeal. Preservation of Life, Civility, and Servitude Because Hobbes is committed to theorizing the state’s coercive power, servitude originating in military defeat nevertheless remains a constant, nonfigurative point of reference for his construction of civil subjecthood. Crucial as is resistance literature’s rhetorically powerful deployment of the slavery and tyranny topos to understanding Hobbes’s theorization of servitude, it doesn’t fully account for the attractions of the war slavery encounter nor for the ingenuity of Hobbes’s adaptation of Grotius. As has been mentioned, according to Roman jurisprudence, international law (jus gentium) sanctions the victorious military party’s enslaving of its captives. Although war slavery is often represented in early modern literature as an accepted contemporary practice, when promulgated in elite theoretical discourses its authorities are Greek or Roman, which helps to ensure its esteemed status as jus gentium. Following this practice in Rights of War and Peace, Grotius pioneers Hobbes’s appropriation of the war slavery doctrine by presenting slavery as an advantageous, humane alternative to murder: “Now this large Power is granted by the Law of Nations for no other Reason, than that the Captors being tempted by so many Advantages might be inclined to forbear that Rigour allowed them by the Law, of killing their Prisoners.” Grotius goes on to cite as authoritative the more than questionable etymological derivation of servire (to serve) from servare (to save): “The Name of Slaves, Servi, (Pomponius tells us) arose from this, that Generals sold their Prisoners, thereby preserving them from Death.”30 In support of this view, Grotius suggests that forbearance is fundamentally civilized as well as economically beneficial; given the option of enslaving captives, putting them to death is 12 R E P R E S E N TAT I O N S “barbarous.” Though Grotius’s language maintains a studied distance from contemporaneous social and economic realities, there can be little or no doubt that Rights provides a covert apology for Atlantic slavery. At the same time, though, Grotius is very aware of the implications of analogies between slave masters and rulers, implications he is most eager to spell out when it comes to the unlawfulness of resistance. Flight is permitted the slave by Grotius, but not more active resistance.31 On the basis of international law, then, Grotius assigns the slave master (or “lord”) the power of life and death over his slave. Hobbes goes on to make this juridical right the basis of his theorization of sovereignty, every mode of which centrally involves the power of life and death. How dependent Hobbes’s conception of sovereign power is upon this juridical right as a feature of war enslavement hasn’t been appreciated. Nor, as a result, has the novelty of the theoretical prominence Hobbes gives to what the war slavery doctrine ordinarily only implies: when capture results in the preservation of life rather than death, the slaveholder’s disciplinary power is somehow an extension of the lawful murder that is withheld. As was seen in the passage I first cited from Elements, where sovereignty is not directly being considered, Hobbes revises Grotius’s comments on the unlimited nature of the victor or slave master’s “right” so as to make the preemptive, disciplinary use of force a forethoughtful extension of the principle of self-preservation. Even without detailed comparative analysis, it can be seen that where Grotius emphasizes how the material incentives offered by institutionalized servitude should move the victor to forbear disposing of a potential slave’s life, Hobbes draws attention to how a decision to preserve a captive’s life gives the captor’s power disciplinary scope. Incorporation of self-preservation doesn’t, though, alter Hobbes’s identification of “irresistible might” with “right.” Grotius’s belief that this right is from one perspective a kind of injustice and its exercise equivalent to complete license informs Hobbes’s emphasis on the amorality of the natural “right of the sword” or the “right of war.”32 Like Grotius, Hobbes is thus able to conceptualize the victor’s power of life and death independently of the subject’s consent to such power. Hobbes’s most radical innovation, however, is to theorize consent as constitutive of sovereignty itself. Though such consent, as will be seen, is relevant to institutional slavery, its primary significance lies in Hobbes’s accommodation of contractualism to absolutism. Against resistance theorists (later to include Locke) who assert the impossibility for freeborn men of self-enslavement, Hobbes theorizes submission to absolute sovereign power as an act of voluntary self-servitude that is simultaneously an act of self-preservation. In effect, Hobbes transplants war slavery, an institution sanctioned by jus gentium, to the state of nature from which it provides an exit. As sovereignty’s necessary condition, war slavery enables Hobbes, Slavery, and Despotical Rule 13 Hobbes to synthesize absolutism, civil society, contractual servitude, and selfpreservation. Yet this is possible, it should be observed, because Hobbes adopts Grotius’s view that the captor’s enslavement of his captives involves forbearance. Hobbes, too, civilly forbears imagining a scenario in which the right to extinguish life is actually exercised. Instead, he correlates the powerholder’s threatening right to extinguish life with the subject’s fear, which, in the act of covenanting, is both allayed and, as it were, focalized by means of the sovereign representative. More positively, he correlates the sovereign representative’s capacity to preserve life with the subject’s commitment to self-preservation. Neatly foregrounding both the sovereignty-holder’s power and the subject’s self-preservation, despotic power is prototypical in large part because it is completely, consistently natural. In all three texts, Hobbes distinguishes three modes of sovereignty, one of them artificial (a collective creation resulting in the commonwealth by design) and two of them natural; the first of the natural, despotic—though not, problematically, always so designated—being a product of warfare, the second of the natural, parental, of biological reproduction.33 The special naturalness of despotic power appears in a number of passages. It is evident when maternal power is explicitly derived from the (slave) master’s syllogistically, or as if a theorem from a postulate: And so we must return to the natural state, in which because of the equality of nature, all adults are to be taken as equal to each other. There by right of nature the victor is Master of the conquered; therefore by right of nature Dominion over an infant belongs first to the one who first has him in their power [potestas]. But it is obvious that a new-born child is in the power of his mother before anyone else, so that she can raise him or expose him at her own discretion and by her own right.34 Its special status is equally evident in the ur-despotism that appears in the first-cited passage from Elements, as well as when later in that text Hobbes rebuts those who deny that a master and servant form a little body politic.35 Whether it is held in precivil or civil society, despotic power remains true to its origins in “Naturall force,” and can therefore reveal the essence of absolute dominion. As Hobbes puts it in Elements (agreeing with Grotius, who uses “law of nations” rather than “law of nature”), “the restriction of absolute power in masters proceedeth not from the law of nature, but from the political law of him that is their master supreme or sovereign” or, similarly in De Cive, “whenever the Master’s power over their slaves [servi] in a commonwealth is absolute, it is thought to derive from a right of nature, not established by the civil law but prior to it.”36 As Hobbes constructs it, despotic power has significant advantages as a prototype for other modes of dominion. First, the starkly opposed choices it 14 R E P R E S E N TAT I O N S offers the vulnerable party—death or submission to the irresistibly mighty— correspond to the fear and self-preservation to which Hobbes gives pride of place. Second, it dramatically reveals sovereignty’s formal dependence on covenant. In Elements, Hobbes argues that the “covenant from him that is overcome, not to resist him that overcometh” gives the victor “a right of absolute dominion over the conquered.” Hobbes more clearly specifies the contractual origins of this little body politic in De Cive when arguing that despotic dominion is constituted: “If, on being captured or defeated in war or losing hope in one’s own strength, one makes (to avoid death) a promise to the victor or the stronger party, to serve him, i.e. to do all that he shall command. In this contract the good which the defeated or weaker party receives is the sparing of his life, which could have been taken from him, in men’s natural state, by right of war; and the good which he promises is service and obedience.”37 The parallelism of the concluding sentence stresses the mutuality of the “good” contracted, mutuality that arises from the powerholder’s offer to preserve life as the perfect complement of the subject’s interest in self-preservation (though in formally establishing sovereignty, the act of covenanting actually establishes a relation of ongoing, radical inequality). Hobbes’s state-of-nature-as-war is, of course, the ideal setting for despotic dominion’s privileged naturalness. In the commonwealth by institution—to begin with the only form of sovereignty initiated by those who become subject—the holder of sovereign power retains the natural “right of the sword,” a right renounced by those who unite in quitting the state of nature’s destructive liberty. On the basis of the naturalness of the right of the sword, Hobbes represents the sovereign by institution retaining rather than acquiring what becomes a gargantuan—or, more properly, leviathan—privilege. For its creators, Hobbes depicts the act of instituting the commonwealth as an agreement to surrender the “right of killing” or the “right of the private sword,” together with the “right of private judgement” to which it is closely related. In transferring individual sovereignty to the representative of sovereign power, subjects agree to “lay down” such natural rights, the right of individual, physical self-preservation excepted. The language Hobbes uses of this transfer is strongly suggestive of military surrender or pacification. To “lay down” one’s sword or arms is to perform a gesture signifying a voluntary cessation of further military activity. The collective act of instituting the commonwealth involves a more abstract, contractual version of this very gesture, a laying down not of the sword but of the “right of the sword.” Only by transferring their natural rights, Hobbes argues, can people reduce the natural vulnerability to harm from one another that comes with living in the state of nature. The consequence, however, is that they become subject to the power of a single sovereign representative who is virtually indistinguishable from the Greek or Roman slave master, that is, the despot or the private dominus. Hobbes, Slavery, and Despotical Rule 15 In a passage in De Cive where he contrasts life “outside” civil society, where passion rules, with reason’s rule “inside” civil society, Hobbes at one point cheerfully concedes that the sovereign ruler possesses the right to his subjects’ lives and property: “Outside the commonwealth anyone may be killed and robbed by anyone; within a commonwealth by only one person.”38 Given the sheer magnitude of the threat posed by the state-of-war, it is, clearly, eminently reasonable to choose subjection to a holder of absolute power. Before going further, we need to reflect briefly on “despoticall,” a term Hobbes uses sparingly.39 As Hobbes was aware, citing this usage in Elements, Aristotle uses “despotical” [δεσποτιχώς] pejoratively in distinguishing deviant forms of political rule, all of which are modeled on the self-interested rule of the master (despotes) over his slave, from rule oriented toward the good of those who are governed. Understood to refer either to “lordly” rule or to the master’s power over his slaves or servants, “despotical” occasionally appears as a synonym for tyrannical rule in mid-seventeenth-century English political discourse. Nothing if not rigorous in eschewing such usage, Hobbes uses the Greek term exclusively in the neutral sense of the master’s rule over the servant as inaugurated by warfare, thereby furthering his transvaluation of servitude. Though seldom used in Elements, “despotical” refers to the dominion acquired by the victor when the vanquished subject themselves. Paired with “paternal” as a mode of natural dominion, “despotical” can modify “kingdom.” Both paternal and despotical units are conceived as familial modes of dominion that gradually expand into larger political entities. The master, it is imagined, remains one and the same while his servants multiply, in this way being exactly like the father vis-à-vis the patrimonial kingdom.40 In Leviathan, Hobbes first uses the term “despoticall” when inaugurating his discussion of war servitude as a mode of subjection: “Dominion acquired by Conquest, or Victory in war, is that which some Writers call DESPOTICALL, from ∆εσπóτης which signifieth a Lord, or Master, and is the Dominion of the Master over his Servant.”41 “Dominion acquired by Conquest,” the more inclusive meaning in this equivocal statement, draws the reader back to the discussion of the commonwealth by acquisition that opens chapter 20, while the term “despoticall” refers more narrowly to household servitude originating in warfare. In deference to the Greek, Hobbes uses “despoticall” only of the master’s dominion over his servant, thereby correlating paternal and despotical dominion. (Hobbes’s linguistic rigor has not been noted.) Hobbes doesn’t draw attention to this in Leviathan because he wants to establish the identity of dominion acquired by military victory, whether it’s exercised within the household or within the commonwealth. To this end, despotical rule appears exclusively in relation to the battlefield. At the same time, Hobbes scrupulously avoids using “despotic” of dominion over subjects of a commonwealth 16 R E P R E S E N TAT I O N S acquired by force on the grounds, I assume, that it has not grown out of a smaller unit (the only unit to which the Greek term properly applies) the way Elements’ “kingdom despotical” does. In this way, “despoticall” orients itself toward “paternall” dominion. Whether the despot and father are mentioned separately or together, the family thereby instituted (in a passage part of which was cited earlier) is “a little Monarchy; whether that Family consist of a man and his children; or of a man and his servants; or of a man, and his children, and servants together: wherein the Father or Master is the Soveraign.” What’s at stake in the likeness of parental to despotic power? Whether pairing or distinguishing them, Hobbes, I believe, wants to emphasize their common possession of the power of life and death, a power that is of central importance to any absolutist theory of sovereignty. For patriarchal absolutists such as Bodin and Filmer, the power of life and death is held by the father. Indeed, this power (potestas vitae necisque) is perhaps most frequently mentioned in connection with the father’s extensive power over his children. It is also, however, power the slave master holds over the enslaved. Filmer responds to the ideological minefields linked with this potential polarity by absorbing the slave master’s power into the father’s, which is allimportant. Bodin, on the other hand, dissociates the two completely in order decisively to privilege patriarchal power. By contrast, Hobbes implicitly models parental on despotic power while at the same time maintaining their correspondence (paternal much more consistently than parental). On occasion, this results in the positing of an ur-despotism in which both despotic and paternal rule participate. We saw this earlier in Elements, where the infant appears cheek by jowl with the subdued adversary. It also appears in Leviathan when Hobbes explains the role of “Naturall force” with reference to both paternal and despotical dominion, “as when a man maketh his children, to submit themselves, and their children to his government, as being able to destroy them if they refuse; or by Warre subdueth his enemies to his will, giving them their lives on that condition.”42 Notice that paternal precedes despotical dominion here, just as it does in chapter 20 of Leviathan, “Of Dominion Paternall, and Despoticall.” This composite chapter represents a significant departure from both Elements and De Cive, in each of which Hobbes devotes one chapter to the master’s dominion over the servus, which precedes a separate chapter on parental dominion. Where in the two earlier texts the slave master’s dominion is clearly the prototype on which paternal dominion is modeled, Leviathan obscures this innovative precedence, thereby giving the relation between dominus and servus a more conventionally patriarchal character. In the passage from Leviathan just cited, both paternal and despotic dominion get defined by the exercise of the power of life and death, as if functions of an ur-despotism. Their fusion is a reminder that originally or Hobbes, Slavery, and Despotical Rule 17 potentially they may be held by one and the same individual (in the patriarchal family, the father is also the “lord”). Hobbes equitably distributes the power of life and death, assigning one to the father, the other to the despot. It is precisely these starkly opposed options that are, according to war slavery doctrine, conventionally offered by the military victor, who is able either to take or to spare the lives of (a euphemism for enslave) those he has vanquished. Emphasizing the irrelevance of biological reproduction to his conception of paternal power, Hobbes associates the father not with the generation of new life but with “being able to destroy” the lives of his children. Paradoxically, the victor’s “giving” of life involves the gratuitous prolonging of an already existent life, a life that is threatened with imminent death as a consequence of military defeat. Hobbes’s Female-Free Family With regard to sovereignty’s origins, Hobbes’s absolutism is patriarchalist only in this circuitous manner. Doesn’t this emphasis on the father’s power of life and death contradict Hobbes’s claim that dominion over children is originally held by the mother? Hobbes’s inconsistencies on this matter are in my view motivated by the pressures of different rhetorical needs. In the statement just quoted, for example, paternal and despotic power are identified as products of “Naturall force” so as to contrast them both with the uniquely voluntary character of the commonwealth by design. In Leviathan’s systematic discussion of “Dominion Paternall, and Despoticall,” on the other hand, Hobbes hands “Naturall force” over to the mother. As was argued earlier, in making the mother rather than the father the holder of dominion, Hobbes safeguards the consent required for his contractualism. If the “Naturall force” to which children submit is originally held by the mother, paternal power becomes artificial, just as is the sovereign’s power in the commonwealth by design. At the same time, however, Hobbes’s assumption that civil society is patriarchal permits him to provide paternal power with a displaced point of origin in nature. Hobbes makes it clear that in the transition to civil society, maternal power gets transferred to the paterfamilias, who thereby holds what is in origin a natural power. By giving paternal dominion both natural and artificial origins, Hobbes designs a curiously hybrid absolutism, one that plays the maternal force of barbarous, precivil nature off against the disciplined dominion of patriarchal civil society. With the aid of familiar colonialist tropes, Hobbes maintains the artificial contractualist character of his absolutism and associates its official civil identity with a well-dressed, Europeanized patriarchal order. At the same time, in retaining, indirectly, the father’s association with “Naturall force,” Hobbes makes paternal correlative with despotic dominion. 18 R E P R E S E N TAT I O N S In discussing maternal dominion, Hobbes ingeniously transposes the setting, replacing the battlefield with, as it were, a naked hearth or mountainside. Hobbes also, of course, creates a complementary scene of submission on the part of the child whose life has graciously been prolonged. In Hobbes’s account as it appears in Leviathan, the mother naturally has the ability either to “nourish” or to “expose” her infant, alternatives that are patterned on the Roman father’s potestas vitae necisque, which specifically legitimates exposure, as well as on the military victor’s power of ending or sparing the defeated enemy’s life. Again, seeing the Infant is first in the power of the Mother, so as she may either nourish, or expose it; if she nourish it, it oweth its life to the Mother; and is therefore obliged to obey her, rather than any other; and by consequence the Dominion over it is hers. But if she expose it, and another find, and nourish it, the Dominion is in him that nourisheth it. For it ought to obey him by whom it is preserved; because preservation of life being the end, for which one man becomes subject to another, every man is supposed to promise obedience, to him, in whose power it is to save, or destroy him.43 Would Hobbes have expected his readers to know that in ancient Greece and Rome such exposure often resulted in the child’s enslavement? If so, this would be another link between parental and despotical rule. In any case, the concluding sentence of this passage, where the moral of the story is driven home, erases differences between paternal and despotic rule, or, more precisely, among children, servants, and the subjects of sovereign power who are Hobbes’s primary concern. For this reason, Hobbes avoids even the sketchiest narrative of infanticide or exposure resulting in death. Death is threatened but averted; the infant who has been exposed (not murdered) is found and nourished. Submitting to the dominion of its protector, the child remains vulnerable, however, not to the risk of repeated exposure but to the general, abstract exercise of sovereign power. In a process that is more fully elaborated when he discusses despotical power, Hobbes transforms a scene of momentary, dramatic vulnerability into a principle of ongoing, lifelong dependency upon the sovereign for “the preservation of life.” This principle, so central to Hobbes’s theorization of sovereignty, bears directly on the question posed earlier, why are women absent from Hobbes’s family? Indeed, this principle dictates the answer, which is that wives and mothers, not being subject to absolute dominion, cannot properly illustrate the structure and significance of sovereign power. Adult women have no place in Hobbes’s theorization of sovereignty, I propose, because they do not submit to anyone’s dominion. In none of Hobbes’s major theoretical works is the mother said to be subject to dominion or absolute sovereignty.44 Exempt from absolute rule, the wife is therefore absent from Hobbes’s construction of the family, which, as has been seen, features the paterfamilias in Hobbes, Slavery, and Despotical Rule 19 combination with either his children or his servi or with both children and servi. Hobbes privileges a restricted conception of the patriarchal family in which the father is significant only insofar as he is the equivalent of, or identical to, the slave master. It is as if he is reclaiming the Latin famulus, origin of the English “family,” in order to emphasize the membership of servi but especially in their likeness to children. Examined from this perspective, Hobbes’s construction of the patriarchal family highlights both the holders and the subjects of absolute sovereign power only insofar as they reveal the obedient disposition required of civil subjects. It might be objected that adult women are absent because they are not citizens. Yet children and actual servants are not citizens either; in their submission to absolute dominion, they are simply analogous to civil subjects. If formulated in terms of Hobbes’s own conceptualization of subjecthood, the real issue is that adult women do not occupy the requisite position of radical dependency on their husbands for the preservation of their lives. Although she may be subject to her husband, the wife does not subject herself to his dominion absolutely. Subjecthood for Hobbes originates in one of two ways, either in force or in social covenant, neither of which is relevant to the wife’s subordination. Although, like the servus, the wife is represented as an individual who is subject to another, her subordination does not originate in force; it is a matter of contract or convention. Although, like the subject in the commonwealth by design, her subordination originates in consent, she consents only to abide by the terms of her marital contract. Her consent lacks any social, collective aspect or the determination to evade a threat of death, either of which is necessary to the constitution of civil subjecthood. Hobbes precludes a scene of female consent within a collectivity (even that as small as the family) by defining the family as he does as well as in the origins he provides for it. On the one hand, viewed (tautologically) as a feature of civil society, the patriarchal structure of the family is a by-product of the conventionally patriarchal institution of commonwealths. On the other hand, like the commonwealth by design, the family can emerge by means of the union of its members (members who do not include the mother or wife), a union that constitutes the father and/or the despot as a sovereign power. In the first case, the patriarchal family’s civil character is ensured by its appearance within civil society, whereas in the second the patriarchal family is itself a kind of civil society. In both cases women are not actively involved. Even though paternal dominion has only a mediated relation to natural right, Hobbes can still claim that both paternal and despotic dominion originate in “Naturall force.” Within the state of nature, if heterosexual relations producing children are contractual, such contracts will last only so long as the contracting parties feel like agreeing to their terms. Within civil society, 20 R E P R E S E N TAT I O N S by contrast, patriarchal marriage has the productive security that civil society bestows on its institutions. The conclusion to be drawn is that—for the purposes of theoretical rigor—Hobbes’s wives enjoy a privileged position, being spared the threat of patriarchal force, including the sentence of death, to which subjects of absolute power are vulnerable. Contingent on the male head-of-household’s status as a subject within civil society or as a sovereign power within the family, the husband’s rule over his wife lacks access to a point of origin in the state of nature, where the power of determining life and death arises. Qua husband, the head of the patriarchal household is therefore not properly a holder of sovereign power, with the result that his wife cannot be a representative subject of such power. In the larger-than-life drama in which the life-and-death stakes of absolute submission and dominion get played out, wives and patriarchal mothers do not share the stage with subjects, children, or servants. Servants and Slaves In transvaluing servitude—creating sustainable, systematic analogies among children, servants, and civil subjects—to further his innovative absolutism, does Hobbes ignore contemporaneous institutional slavery? This is a difficult question, in part because it has not before been raised. Yet it’s not, I think, unanswerable, though I am acutely aware that the interpretative difficulties involved make what follows controversial. In a way, the most telling evidence that Hobbes offers a defense of Atlantic slavery is provided by Locke, who is indebted to chapter 20 of Leviathan for his own apology in “Of Slavery.” In spite of obvious, hugely important differences, elements of Locke’s theorization of “despotical” rule in The Second Treatise result from his appropriation of Hobbes’s discussion in Leviathan, though the practice of reading Locke’s “despotical” as a synonym for “tyrannical” has obscured this lineage.45 Given the strong opposition to absolutism that animates The Two Treatises of Government, Locke’s willingness to seize upon and adapt central features of Hobbes’s theorization of despotical rule indicates that he thought it had persuasive force and practical utility with regard to Atlantic slavery. The special status Hobbes confers on the war slavery doctrine suggests that slavery had long captivated his imagination. Like other members of England’s elite, Hobbes would have known about a variety of colonizing ventures, including many in the burgeoning Atlantic plantation societies, and of readers interested in supporting the plantocracy. The favorable consideration Grotius gives the doctrine in Rights occurs at a time when Dutch reservations about trafficking are being set aside.46 Its position in Hobbes’s writings similarly coincides with the period of England’s rapidly Hobbes, Slavery, and Despotical Rule 21 accelerating involvement in plantation slavery. Additionally, Noel Malcolm has shown that Hobbes briefly held land in Virginia through Lord Cavendish and was involved in the Virginia Company and, perhaps longer, the Somers Isles Company, which founded Bermuda in 1612.47 If relations between servanthood and chattel slavery are painstakingly managed in Hobbes’s theory, so in English colonies are those between indentured servitude and racialized slavery over the earlier part of the seventeenth century. In Bermuda, for example, though not originally designated “slaves,” diasporic Africans and indigenous Americans were regularly assigned a period of four score and nineteen years of servitude against the six- to ten-year period given Europeans.48 Circumstantial, extratextual evidence is not all, however. Five features of Leviathan’s discussion of slavery also suggest the relevance of Atlantic slavery. First, in Leviathan servanthood is set apart from slavery more emphatically than in earlier treatises. In all three major works, Hobbes creates two forms of servitude, one that includes physical liberty and one that doesn’t. In Elements, when discussing the right of resistance possessed by the bound servant, Hobbes explains his avoidance of the English “slave”: “The Romans had no such distinct name, but comprehended all under the name of servus.”49 An external sign of the performance or nonperformance of covenant, the presence or absence of physical liberty is what distinguishes the unbound from the bound servant. When making this point in De Cive, Hobbes explains how physical liberty is interconnected with covenant, trustworthiness, and true service: “Not every captive in war whose life has been spared is understood to make an agreement with a master, because not everyone is trusted to be left with enough natural liberty to be able to run away or refuse service or cause trouble or loss for his master if he should take it into his head to do so.”50 By differentiating the unbound from the bound servus in this way, Hobbes radically qualifies the rational, contractual principle informing his three modes of dominion. Or to put this another way, regarding no other mode of dominion does Hobbes create two distinct groups, one of which comprises subjects of absolute dominion who have not covenanted subjection and are therefore potentially or naturally resistant to such dominion. In chapter 20 of Leviathan, though, Hobbes sets the unbound servant so far apart from the bound that he threatens to undermine their shared membership in servitude. In the following passage, Hobbes’s most thorough treatment of despotical rule, the bound servant’s place is occupied by the slave.51 Dominion acquired by Conquest, or Victory in war, is that which some Writers call DESPOTICALL, from ∆εσπóτης, which signifieth a Lord, or Master, and is the Dominion of the Master over his Servant. And this Dominion is then acquired to 22 R E P R E S E N TAT I O N S the Victor, when the Vanquished, to avoyd the present stroke of death, covenanteth either in expresse words, or by other sufficient signes of the Will, that so long as his life, and the liberty of his body is allowed him, the Victor shall have the use thereof, at his pleasure. And after such Covenant made, the Vanquished is a SERVANT, and not before: for by the word Servant (whether it be derived from Servire, to serve, or from Servare, to Save, which I leave to Grammarians to dispute) is not meant a Captive, which is kept in prison, or bonds, till the owner of him that took him, or bought him of one that did, shall consider what to do with him: (for such men, (commonly called Slaves,) have no obligation at all; but may break their bonds, or the prison; and kill, or carry way captive their Master, justly): but one, that being taken, hath corporall liberty allowed him; and upon promise not to run away, nor to do violence to his Master, is trusted by him. It is not therefore the Victory, that giveth the right of Dominion over the Vanquished, but his own Covenant. Nor is he obliged because he is Conquered; that is to say, beaten, and taken, or put to flight; but because he commeth in, and Submitteth to the Victor; Nor is the Victor obliged by an enemies rendring himselfe, (without promise of life,) to spare him for this his yeelding to discretion; which obliges not the Victor longer, than in his own discretion hee shall think fit. And that which men do, when they demand (as it is now called) Quarter, (which the Greek called Zwgría, taking alive,) is to evade the present fury of the Victor, by Submission, and to compound for their life, with Ransome, or Service: and therefore he that hath Quarter, hath not his life given, but deferred till farther deliberation; For it is not an yeelding on condition of life, but to discretion. And then onely is his life in security, and his service due, when the Victor hath trusted him with his corporall liberty. For Slaves that work in Prisons, or Fetters, do it not of duty, but to avoyd the Cruelty of their task-masters.52 For the first time, Hobbes does not fold the English slave back into the Latin servus. Slave appears as an etymologically distinct name, even as the use of parenthesis and “commonly called” self-consciously flag its Englishness. Even more importantly, the ideologically charged etymology of servus, which Grotius, following Roman practice, applies to chattel slavery, is here referred to servant alone, exclusive of slave. By means of this ingenious revisioning of received Roman doctrine, Hobbes further underscores slavery’s conceptual separateness. Although slavery is still treated under the category of despotical rule, it is not unambiguously a kind of servitude. Why is Hobbes willing to jeopardize what has up to this point in his political theory been a unified, if internally differentiated, servitude? Or to undermine its corollary, an undifferentiated despotical rule? In the context of Hobbes’s transvaluation of servitude, the effect of this sharper polarization is certainly to enhance the likeness of servanthood and civil subjecthood. Under the fraught, post-regicide circumstances in which he writes, it would be especially important to clarify civil subjecthood’s consensual basis under “conquest,” and to theorize the resistance some royalists continue to offer a regime to which they may choose not to covenant subjection.53 In both the passage just cited and in “A Review, and Conclusion,” Hobbes, Slavery, and Despotical Rule 23 which explicitly addresses the current political situation, Hobbes denies that “Victory” itself constitutes sovereignty: “It is not therefore the Victory, that giveth the right of Dominion over the Vanquished, but his own [i.e., the Vanquished’s] Covenant.”54 This claim unmistakably elevates rational, contractual subjection over physical coercion. Hobbes may have decided that his earlier formulation—that unbound and bound servanthood differ in degree not kind—did not adequately highlight servanthood’s origins in covenant under conditions of “conquest.” By opposing the servant and slave as they respond to a situation of military “Victory,” Hobbes significantly highlights servanthood’s figurative character together with its likeness to civil subjecthood in the commonwealth by design.55 If this had been Hobbes’s primary objective, however, it could have been met by a more nuanced opposition between the unbound and bound servus. Set against the immediately preceding, comparatively straightforward treatment of parental dominion in chapter 20, the section on despotical dominion in Leviathan goes well beyond nuance in its mind-boggling complexity. Where the dramatic encounter between the vulnerable infant and all-powerful mother is disposed of in a single paragraph, Hobbes devotes three, complexly interrelated paragraphs to relations between military victor and vanquished. By reformulating the opposition between unbound and bound servant as one between servant and slave, Hobbes prepares the way for the second, distinctive feature of Leviathan’s treatment of slavery, namely the commodification of the enslaved. (This feature, incidentally, makes it evident that the slave is not a stand-in for the resistant royalist.) While De Cive numbers captives, prisoners and workhouse detainees among its bound servants, the above passage refers only to slaves. Intimately, syntactically related, the “captive” here becomes the “slave,” who in turn awaits the appearance of an “owner.” That this “owner” is distinct from the “victor” recalls Grotius’s casual reference, in a passage cited earlier, to military generals selling their prisoners. The presence of an “owner” involving potential purchase and sale inescapably gestures toward the Atlantic slave trade, besides indicating the precivil state the commodified slave shares with animals. Later in Leviathan, when Hobbes returns to the two orders of servitude, slaves are said to be “bought and sold as Beasts.”56 Commodification is therefore related to the third feature of Hobbes’s discussion in this passage, which is slavery’s association with the state of nature. Hobbes’s argument pivots on the value of covenant as a signifier of civility. The servant distinguishes him- or her-self from the slave by the performance of covenant. Elsewhere in Leviathan, Hobbes has the victor proactively offering prisoners-of-war preservation of life on the condition of covenanted subjection.57 In this section, though, the initiative—and therefore the onus of differentiating servant from slave—lies with the vanquished. Because Hobbes’s 24 R E P R E S E N TAT I O N S servant, not the master, initiates the covenant, the master does not save the servant in an act of chivalrous rescue. Yet the moment at which the master trusts the servant with physical liberty, the servant begins to enjoy life “in security,” which pretty much amounts to being saved. Enjoying life in security means having “his life given,” “giving,” as has been seen, being the verb used earlier of the despotic power of life and death as a function of “Naturall force.” Not having had his life “given” in this sense, the slave, by contrast, remains indefinitely, perpetually fearful that it will be taken. An abject, adrenaline-charged existence bent on nothing more than avoiding death is, of course, just what Hobbes’s state of nature has on offer. Unlike servanthood, slavery remains in the precivil condition of war. As Hobbes structures this passage, discussion of the servant precedes that of the slave, thereby replicating the way the performance of covenant permits the servant to exit the scene of warfare. Once the covenant has been described, its ceremonial, performative effect stressed (“And after such Covenant made, the Vanquished is a SERVANT, and not before”), and the causal relation between trustworthiness and liberty established, the servant virtually exits Hobbes’s discussion (except for the summary in the penultimate sentence). Having reached the decision that the benefits of covenant are worth placing life and liberty at the victor’s service, the servant formally surrenders the right of resistance and is awarded physical liberty. Having, in effect, been saved, the servant need not be discussed further. Against the clarity of the servant’s narrative closure appear the various militarized acts of surrender (“rendring himself,” “yeelding to discretion,” and demanding “Quarter”) that do not result in security of life or liberty. If Hobbes’s discussion of slavery seems opaque, it’s in part owing to the non-progressive return of the battlefront and the scene of surrender in the second and third paragraphs. This passage’s central, interpretative crux arises in the second paragraph, where it is claimed that the vanquished is not “obliged because he is Conquered; that is to say, beaten, and taken, or put to flight; but because he commeth in, and Submitteth to the Victor.” The contrast between coercive force and voluntary submission is clear. Yet the second clause poses difficulties because though Hobbes elsewhere treats submission as a metonym for covenant, they here appear to be different.58 If distinct, both submission and its various synonyms (“rendring himself,” “yeelding to discretion,” and demanding “Quarter”) would have a sub-covenantal status throughout this passage. Hobbes appears to imagine a situation in which the vanquished has the potential to become either a servant or a slave, though he refers only to the interval of time before the would-be servant opts for covenant’s higher destiny (“And after such Covenant made, the Vanquished is a SERVANT, and not before” [my italics]). Observe, in this connection, that Hobbes consistently Hobbes, Slavery, and Despotical Rule 25 uses “vanquished” when gesturing toward the moment prior to the establishment of status. In this reading, the second paragraph concerns the absence of covenant in the earlier stage of the dramatic, militarized encounter when the vanquished sues for life. Hobbes appears to envision a two-stage process. In the first, the vanquished submits in the sense of formally acknowledging a desire to live (rather than to continue risking life in warfare) and the victor’s superior might. In signalling a voluntary cessation of military activity, the act of surrender signals provisional non-resistance as well as a consensual recognition of the opponent’s victory. Whereas this surrender is the only form of submission the non-covenanting vanquished performs, it temporally precedes the servant’s formal covenant of non-resistance, which is an independent act of submission constitutive of civility. Significantly, in his marginal comment on this passage, Hobbes uses the more inclusive “consent” rather than “covenant”: “Not by the Victory, but by the Consent of the Vanquished.” As becomes more evident in the third paragraph, surrender (first-stage submission) and its synonyms are tantamount to consent but not to constitutive covenant. Hobbes, it would seem, creates continuities between slavery and unbound servitude as well as a radical discontinuity. For this reason, the critical “because he commeth in, and Submitteth to the Victor” applies to both slave and potential servant, who are situated back on the battlefield, a point of origin they must share if despotical power is in some way to apply to both. Does this mean that slaves are in some way “obliged”? On the one hand, Hobbes pointedly contrasts the servant’s covenanted obedience with the slave’s lack of obligation. When differentiating them in the opening paragraph, Hobbes states categorically that slaves “have no obligation at all.” On the other hand, Hobbes implies that the act of surrender is itself a meaningful “Submission,” as a consequence of which the victor temporarily refrains from killing his enemies. In this rudimentary form, submission is the basis of both actual and eventual, metaphorical enslavement. Such consent, however, is, as it were, lower-case; it does not hold over time; it does not bind because it is the sort of contract that befits the state of nature. And it does not constitute actual sovereignty as Hobbes theorizes it. Hobbes signals its sub-covenantal status by referring to the “victor” rather than the “master” in the second and third paragraphs. For those who become servants, this lowerorder consent is prelude to the more rationally strategized covenant, which secures a condition free from the threat of impending death. They voluntarily serve and can therefore be saved. For those who perform only the inferior, ad hoc contract—those who merely render themselves, yield to discretion or compound for life—there is only an impermanent reprieve because the victor is at liberty to exercise the power of life and death he 26 R E P R E S E N TAT I O N S continues unconditionally to hold. Although “obliged” in the way infants are by the mother’s willingness to sustain life, the slaves’ consent cannot deliver them from the war-zone that is Hobbes’s state of nature. Expressed in terms of a rational calculus of ends, the renunciation of resistance is well worth the benefits received when covenanting. Why, then, don’t slaves covenant too? Unsurprisingly, this question isn’t raised, either here or in other discussions of servitude’s two forms. Yet responses may be sought in examples of subcovenantal consent Hobbes provides elsewhere, the most relevant perhaps being the “concord” Hobbes mentions in Leviathan’s evocation of the state of nature, chapter 13: “For the savage people in many places of America, except the government of small Families, the concord whereof dependeth on naturall lust, have no government at all; and live at this day in that brutish manner, as I said before.”59 A refusal to deem indigenous social formations “government” is essential to Hobbes’s state of nature. In this passage, “natural lust” produces the “concord” that even animals are able to achieve, such concord therefore being an inferior version of patriarchal marriage as well as the covenant associated with civil society. Regarding Hobbes’s distinction between unbound and bound servitude, that slaves do not covenant is presumably to be accounted for in terms of other naturalized absences, most notably the lack of orientation toward the future Hobbes frequently associates with the “savage” inhabitants of America.60 It must be stressed that Hobbes diverges radically from Graeco-Roman norms regarding slavery by ceding the vanquished who have not covenanted subjection a natural, inalienable right of resistance. In Leviathan, those who belong to this group could include both resistant royalists as well as slaves. At the same time, Hobbes produces his own peculiar distinction between free citizen and slave. For insofar as such a right of resistance belongs to the state of nature-as-war, it stigmatizes those who are (apparently indefinitely, and on grounds not specified) slaves by making this state seem somehow native to them. To put this another way, Hobbes retains not only the category of the unfree servant but also its demeaning associations with the animalized body, associations that are strengthened by his use of “slave.” In the process whereby Hobbes’s servant secures physical liberty and life (becoming analogous to the citizen), rationality, covenant, and liberty of body are united in radically minimizing the significance of mere force. For the bound servant, or what Leviathan calls the slave, however, bodily fear so predominates that compliance cannot be voluntary. In De Cive, for example, Hobbes safeguards his transvaluation of servitude by claiming that the labor bound servi perform is not actually service (conceived, conservatively, as the voluntary honoring of a master) nor can people of this sort be considered proper servi “because they serve in order to avoid beatings, not on the basis of an agreement.”61 As Hobbes, Slavery, and Despotical Rule 27 is typical of Graeco-Roman representations of slavery, the fear of physical harm to which slaves are subjected is the abject counterpart of noble freedom’s high-mindedness. When discussing covenant, Hobbes refers to “the present stroke of death,” a slightly displaced, civilized representation of the “present fury of the Victor” used to describe the state of nature-as-war. Rhetorically, the victor’s “fury” prepares for the taskmasters’ “cruelty,” introduced in the last sentence with regard to slavery: “For Slaves that work in Prisons, or Fetters, do it not of duty, but to avoid the cruelty of their task-masters.” Again, this vividly evokes the fear-based propitiatory cycle—an ad hoc compounding for life that results in fear of further, even fatal, violence—to which enslavement is bound. Fourth, in this passage Hobbes places as much, if not more, stress on the unconditional nature of the victor’s power as on the constitutive role of covenant. Hobbes repeatedly hastens to correct any impression that the victor has an obligation to spare—rather to continue sparing—the vanquished’s life. He even engages in wordplay on “discretion,” from the Latin discretio: “Nor is the Victor obliged by an enemies rendring himselfe (without promise of life,) to spare him for this his yeelding to discretion; which obliges not the Victor longer, than in his own discretion hee shall think fit” (my emphasis). The phrase “yield to discretion” occurs specifically in military contexts where it signifies an offer of surrender; “at discretion” is used in the same way. The phrase “in his own discretion,” however, evokes privileges associated with unconstrained individual agency, and thus applies to the victor’s privilege of exercising the power he holds over the vanquished’s life whenever and however he sees fit. Though such “discretion” appears in many contexts at the time Hobbes writes, it plays a major part in debates on sovereignty, where anti-absolutists associate it with arbitrary rule, the contrary of the rule of law. Hobbes’s entire project is, of course, designed to protect the sovereign’s discretionary power. In this passage, though, Hobbes defends the extralegal, discretionary power of the “Victor,” who is free of obligation not only at the dramatic moment of surrender but also thereafter. The situation in which Hobbes places the enslaved is roughly that sketched in the passage from Elements with which this essay began. Yet if Hobbes there represents an ur-despotical coercive power, potentially inclusive of both parental and despotical, here he represents protodespotical power, the unruly, violent precursor to despotical power proper, which is ceremonially constituted by the servant’s covenant. Because this protodespotical power originates in the state of nature, the vanquished remains an enemy even after submitting (“Nor is the Victor obliged by an enemies rendring himself”). For Hobbes, this is the status of the royalist who chooses to live secretly under Cromwell; formally an “Enemy of the State,” he can justly 28 R E P R E S E N TAT I O N S be put to death.62 Yet by giving the “Victor” such discretionary power, Hobbes simultaneously elaborates the fiction, which pervades literature on Atlantic slavery, that slave mastery originates in warfare; he makes the slave master’s continuing, disciplinary exercise of the power of life and death an extension of the military victor’s. The absoluteness of the victor’s power of life and death is not in any way qualified, as it would be were the vanquished to covenant his service. Instead, it involves an interminably open-ended extension of the power of life and death—that is, the threat of death—over the vanquished. Such power is not only the very basis of the unregulated private character of the slaveholder’s power in England’s colonies but also a power exercised, for the most part, with impunity. Further indication that the colonial slaver’s interests are at issue in this passage appears, finally, in the emphasis given the two most feared forms of slave resistance, escape and rebellion. Unusually, Hobbes mentions these when discussing the servant’s physical liberty as the desirable, contractual by-product of trust: the servant is “one, that being taken, hath corporall liberty allowed him; and upon promise not to run away, nor to do violence to his Master, is trusted by him.” This stress can readily be connected with Atlantic slavery as practiced in both Bermuda and Virginia, the two colonies immediately relevant to Hobbes. Owing to the relative absence of large plantations, slavery was practiced with less brutality in Bermuda than in either Virginia or the Caribbean colonies. Even so, in 1623 Bermuda passed the first racialized legislation in an English colony, “An Act to restrayne the insolencies of the Negroes.” This act, reenacted for well over a century, was soon imitated in other English colonies. It prohibited liberty of physical movement and assembly without the express permission of the master (passes were later required).63 After an uprising in 1656 (later, of course, than the publication of Leviathan), a proclamation was issued legitimating the murder “then & there without mercye” of Blacks who were out after sunset without a pass—an instance in which the master’s power of life and death was extended to others.64 For Hobbes, a servant who is under the indefinitely extended, absolute dominion of a master and whose bodily liberty is regulated in this way would clearly be a bound servant (or, in the language Leviathan sanctions, a slave). Not having covenanted obedience, she or he remains in the state of nature, where a propensity for violence remains the norm. Accordingly, the right of resistance Hobbes prominently assigns those who are enslaved calls attention to the uninhibited brutality to be found in the state of nature. In the absence of covenant, Hobbes says, slaves may “break their bonds, or the prison; and kill, or carry away captive their Master, justly.” Instead of being allowed “to escape,” the phrase Hobbes uses of chapter 21’s prisoner-of-war, slaves are represented breaking, killing, or abducting. Hobbes, Slavery, and Despotical Rule 29 Note, too, the almost imperceptible escalation of violence in the shift from breaking bonds to breaking prison, and then from forced reclamation of physical liberty to retaliation against “their Master.” In relation to the compliance expected of subordinates within a status-oriented, hierarchical society, such resistance would appear even more alarming than the “dominion” Hobbes gives the natural Amazonian mother. For Atlantic slaveholders, it represents what violent disciplinary methods are meant to preempt. At a radical remove from actual social relations within any contemporaneous western European nation, despotical dominion as Hobbes conceives it—that is, servitude originating in warfare—legitimates the extralegal power held by the slave-master at the same time that it contributes ideologically to the militarization and bureaucratization of sovereignty claimed by the state. Hobbes’s dispassionate language regarding servanthood forges a connection between the formal equality of human beings in the state of nature and the disciplined sameness of children, servants, and civil subjects, who not only obey but also agree to serve. Interestingly, the “cruelty” Hobbes ascribes to the slaves’ “task-masters,” while permitted in the state of nature and especially relevant to the license enjoyed by the slave-master, violates the (for Hobbes nonbinding) laws of nature. “Cruelty” thus conveys slave mastery’s extralegal status yet also Leviathan’s controlled, civil distance from the slaveholder’s intemperance and physicality. Where his contemporaries often oppose the Egyptian “task-master’s” cruel treatment of his slaves to their deity’s rewarding spiritual discipline, Hobbes compares enslavement’s abjection with civil servanthood, whose “Chains,” he notes, are “Artificiall.” Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 30 This essay has benefited immensely from comments made on an earlier version by Johann Sommerville and, later, by the editorial board of Representations, participants in the Law and Literature Workshop at the University of Toronto, Simon Stern, and Jan Purnis. These issues are explored in my “Contemporary Ancestors of De Bry, Hobbes, and Milton,” Milton’s America/America’s Milton, ed. Paul Stevens, special issue of University of Toronto Quarterly 77, no. 3 (2008). Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 2.30, in Leviathan/Thomas Hobbes, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge, 1996), 231. Unless otherwise specified, italics within quoted materials appear in the original. Richard Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace: Political Thought and the International Order from Grotius to Kant (Oxford, 1999), 130. Leo Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and Its Genesis [1936], trans. Elsa M. Sinclair (Chicago, 1963), 17, 18. See John P. McCormick, “Fear, R E P R E S E N TAT I O N S 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. Technology, and the State: Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, and the Revival of Hobbes in Weimar and National Socialist Germany,” Political Theory 22, no. 4 (1994): 619–52. Thomas Hobbes, The Elements of Law, 1.14.13, in The Elements of Law: Natural and Politic, ed. Ferdinand Tonnies, 2nd ed. (New York, 1969), 73, 74. This doctrine misleadingly represents warfare as the sole or primary means of acquiring slaves. For an analysis of the set of apparatuses required for slavery’s economic organization, see Claude Meillassoux, The Anthropology of Slavery, trans. Alide Dasnois (London, 1991), 67–96. In Slavery and Social Death, Orlando Patterson discusses the various alternatives to enslavement that war captives have suffered, and Roman law’s militarized representation of slavery (Cambridge, 1982), 40, 106–15. Hobbes, Elements, 1.15.13, 79–80. J. P. Sommerville situates Hobbes’s political theories in a variety of contemporary contexts and traditions, Thomas Hobbes: Political Ideas in Historical Context (London, 1992). Tuck, War and Peace, 109–39. Jonathan A. Bush relates the underdevelopment of English jurisprudence regarding colonial slavery to a tacit reliance upon the Crown’s (the conqueror’s) discretionary imposition of common law doctrines. Atlantic slave regimes, Bush argues, were able to develop at a remove from English common law, which does not permit slavery, owing both to the legal autonomy of the colonies and to the privatization of the master’s rule, “Free to Enslave: The Foundations of Colonial American Slave Law,” Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 5 (1993): 457–65. Quentin Skinner, “The Context of Hobbes’s Theory of Political Obligation” and “Conquest and Consent: Hobbes and the Engagement Controversy,” in Visions of Politics, vol. 3, Hobbes and Civil Science (Cambridge, 2002), 264–86; 287–307. See Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development (Cambridge, 1979). Thomas Hobbes, De Cive, 2.9.3, in On the Citizen/Thomas Hobbes, ed. Richard Tuck, trans. Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge, 1998), 108. Ibid., 2.9.19, 112. De Cive and Leviathan reflect a change in the direction of greater systemization, since Hobbes does mention “the father or mother, or both” in Elements, 2.4.10, 135. Hobbes, Leviathan, 2.20, 142. Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford, 1988), 48–50. For the tendency to consider patriarchalism independently of despotism, see Gordon J. Schochet’s classic study, “Thomas Hobbes on the Family and the State of Nature,” Political Science Quarterly 82 (1967): 427–45. In his examination of the racial as it underwrites the social contract, Charles Mills, too, neglects this aspect of Hobbes’s state of nature, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, 1997), 45–48, 64–67. Giorgio Agamben continues this tradition, which, I would argue, accounts in part for the conspicuous neglect of slavery in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, 1995). See Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” for a discussion of biopower that includes Atlantic slavery, Public Culture 15, no.1 (2003): 21–23. Hobbes, Leviathan, 2.29, 226. Hobbes, Slavery, and Despotical Rule 31 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 44. 45. 32 Ibid., 2.21, 150. Hobbes, Elements, 2.5.1, 138. Hobbes, De Cive, 2.7.3, 93. Hobbes, Elements, 1.17.1, 88. Ibid., 2.1.15, 114–15. Hobbes, Leviathan, 2.20, 142. Michael Silverthorne, responsible for the translation, comments on servus and dominus in Hobbes, De Cive, xlii, xliii. Ibid., 2.97, 110. Hobbes, Elements, 2.4.9, 134. Hobbes, De Cive, 2.12.7, 136. Ibid., 2.9.9, 111. Hugo Grotius, The Rights of War and Peace, in The Rights of War and Peace/Hugo Grotius, ed. Richard Tuck (Indianapolis, 2005), 3:7.5.1, 1364. Ibid., 3:7.7, 1370–71. Ibid., 3:7.3.1, 1362–63. “But the Effects of this Right are infinite, so that there is nothing that the Lord may not do to his Slave, as Seneca the Father said, no Torment but what may be inflicted on him with Impunity, nothing commanded him but what may be exacted with the utmost rigour and Severity; so that all manner of Cruelty may be exercised by the Lords upon their Slaves; unless this License is somewhat restrained by the civil Law. It is allowed by all Nations to the Lord, to have Power of Life and Death over his Slave, we are told by Gaius (the Lawyer).” This continuity is obscured when Quentin Skinner reads Hobbes’s tripartite classification in Elements 2.3.2, 127–28 as a contrast between voluntary and coerced subjection, “Hobbes on the Proper Signification of Liberty,” in Visions of Politics, vol. 3, Hobbes and Civil Science, 236. Hobbes, De Cive, 2.9.2, 108. Hobbes, Elements, 2.5.1, 138. Ibid., 2.3.6, 129; Hobbes, De Cive, 2.8.8, 105. Hobbes, De Cive, 2.8.1, 102–3. Ibid., 2.10.1, 116. R. Koebner discusses Hobbes’s innovative usage, “Despot and Despotism: Vicissitudes of a Political Term,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 14, no. 3/4 (1951): 288–91. Hobbes, Elements, 2.3.2, 128. Hobbes, Leviathan, 2.20, 141. Ibid., 2.17, 121. 43. Ibid., 2.20, 140. An exception can be found in the nonsystematic A Dialogue Between a Philosopher and a Student, of the Common Laws of England [1666], where Hobbes says, “the Father of the Family by the Law of nature was absolute Lord of his Wife and Children,” Writings on Common Law and Hereditary Right, ed. Alan Cromartie and Quentin Skinner (Oxford, 2005), 135. See my “Slavery, Resistance, and Nation in Milton and Locke,” in Early Modern Nationalism and Milton’s England, ed. David Loewenstein and Paul Stevens (Toronto, 2008), 356–97. These issues are explored further in a larger study of mine tentatively entitled Arbitrary Power: Slavery, Tyranny, and the Power of Life and Death. R E P R E S E N TAT I O N S 46. Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800 (London, 1997), 193. 47. Noel Malcolm, “Hobbes, Sandys, and the Virginia Company,” Historical Journal 24, no. 2 (1981): 297–321. 48. See Virginia Bernhard, Slaves and Slaveholders in Bermuda, 1616–1782 (Columbia, MO, 1999), 49–52. 49. Hobbes, Elements, 2.3.3, 128. 50. Hobbes, De Cive, 2.8.2, 103. 51. I am indebted to R. W. K. Hinton’s brief reading of this passage, “Husbands, Fathers, and Conquerors II,” Political Studies 16, no. 1 (1968): 56, 57, though Hinton uses “despotic” in ways that are misleading here and in “Husbands, Fathers, and Conquerors I,” Political Studies 15, no. 3 (1967): 297. See also David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (New York, 1966), 116–18. 52. Hobbes, Leviathan, 2.20, 141. 53. J. P. Sommerville, e-mail communication July 5, 2007. 54. Hobbes, Leviathan, “Review,” 485. J. P. Sommerville discusses Hobbes’s concern for royalists contending with the Rump in “Hobbes, Behemoth, Church-State Relations, and Political Obligation,” Filozofski vestnik 24, no. 2 (2003): 220–22. 55. By contrast with both Elements and De Cive, Leviathan’s chapter 20 opens with a comparison of the commonwealth by design and by acquisition, differences between which Hobbes minimizes. Throughout this chapter, though, as in these earlier works, the servitude originating in defeat is, implicitly, household servitude, of which the commonwealth by acquisition is simply a larger embodiment even if it does not grow out of it organically. 56. Ibid., 4.5, 447. 57. Ibid., 2.21, 154. 58. Hobbes, Elements, 2.3.2, 127–28; Hobbes, Leviathan, “Review,” 485–86. 59. Hobbes, Leviathan, 1.13, 89. 60. Richard Ashcroft shows how widespread in early modern European literature are associations between indigenous Americans and acivility, “Leviathan Triumphant: Thomas Hobbes and the Politics of Wild Men,” in The Wild Man Within, ed. Edward Dudley and Maximillian Novak (Pittsburgh, 1972), 141–81. For ostensible absorption in the present see Hobbes, Leviathan 2.30, 232 and 4.46, 459. 61. Hobbes, De Cive, 2.8.4, 103. 62. Hobbes, Leviathan, “Review,” 485–86. 63. Bernhard, Slaves and Slaveholders, 30, 92–93. 64. Ibid., 87–88. Hobbes, Slavery, and Despotical Rule 33