the dead level of Whiggish timidity; to strip 'one of the greatest thinkers upon record' of all claim to our wonder and admiration. The theory of Hobbes is a theory of unadulterated despotism, or it is nothing. Freedom to him is not a horse who, with the aid of bit and bridle, can be made extremely useful; it is a wild beast to be chained and barred. The gloss may have all the merits in the world, as an independent theory; as an interpretation of Leviathan it is worth nothing.

Is

Does it

But, if Leviathan is useless as a key to history, it is equally fruitless as a theory of the State. The 'society' called together by the 'covenant' is seen, directly we examine it, to be no society at all. All life is gathered in the one man' at the head of it; the rest of the body is a dead weight, a mere unprofitable mass. this what any man in his senses means by a community? answer in the remotest degree to what even the most timid of reactionaries understands by the State? It is of the essence of every community that life should be more or less evenly diffused among its members; that every one of them should contribute his share, large or small, to the activity of the whole. And if it be objected that, in that case, the number of communities in the whole course of recorded history is comparatively small, the answer is that, on any rigorous interpretation, this is unfortunately too true; but that, while many communities have made some approach, more or less distant, to such an ideal, Leviathan, as conceived by Hobbes, is and is intended to be the very negation of it, the one infallible and perpetual bar to its eventual achievement; seeing that, apart from the one man or one assembly of men,' no single other person is admitted to any share, however paltry, in the life of the community' so established. Indeed, even the modicum of civic life conceded under the narrowest of the feudal monarchies would have been anathema to Hobbes. To find his ideal realised, or nearly so, we must go back to Babylon or Assyria. The assemblage of men supposed by him is, as Rousseau said, 'not a community, but an aggregate': 1 a mob huddled together by sheer terror, not that organised body which alone can be called a State.

That being so, it is manifest that, with two exceptions to be mentioned directly, Hobbes, with all his genius, contributed nothing to the theory of the State. By the mere perversity of his conclusions, he may have turned others-Spinoza, Locke and Rousseau -in the direction of the light; but his own face was set resolutely towards the dark. As an historical document, as a monument of the passions excited by the first stirrings of revolution in Europe,

1 'C'est, si l'on veut, une agrégation, mais non pas une association; il n'y a là ni bien public ni corps politique' (Contrat Social, 1. v.).

Leviathan is of the last importance. As a step in the development of political philosophy, it is worth nothing.

There are, however, the two exceptions. Hobbes was the first writer to grasp the full importance of the idea of Sovereignty; and he was the first writer-this unfortunately is a much more questionable service to attempt a complete severance of politics from morals.

Among the most notable omissions of Greek philosophy is the absence of any clear attempt to define the nature of Sovereignty, to determine its seat, or settle the ultimate sanction on which it rests. Its existence was indeed implied in Plato's and Aristotle's conception of Politics as the architectonic science': of the State as the ultimate authority for controlling and harmonising all the diverse energies of its members. But no effort was made either to fix the place where this power resides, or to define its limits, or to determine precisely what it is that obliges the community to obey it. Hints and fragments of answers to most, or all, of these questions especially the last-are to be found scattered about their writings. But it is plain that the idea of Sovereignty had never presented itself to them as a clear-cut conception; and it follows that no clear-cut answer to such questions is to be looked for at their hands.

It is with the Roman jurists that the idea first takes definite shape, in the doctrine of majestas. But with these writers the idea was inevitably so closely interwoven with that of personal allegiance to an individual—they were, moreover, so completely free from any speculative impulse that we owe to them little more than the coining of a name, the invention of an apt term, round which might be crystallised the conceptions already dimly recognised by the Greek philosophers and eventually to be defined, with ever-increasing clearness, by the course of history and the efforts of subsequent thinkers to interpret it.

So the matter virtually rested until the coming of Hobbes. The idea of Sovereignty which he propounded is, no doubt, utterly inadmissible. When pressed to its logical conclusion, it is, in fact, manifestly self-destructive. For, by reducing the whole herd to slavery, he has left no State for the sovereign to govern. By striking out one term of the relation, he has robbed the other of all intelligible meaning. Yet, in spite of this and other perversions, he must take the credit of being the first to see that the idea of Sovereignty lies at the very root of the whole theory of the State; and the first to realise the necessity of fixing precisely where it His solution of lies, and what are its functions and its limits. the three latter points may have been pernicious and impossible. But the first step towards a satisfactory solution of the problem

was to perceive that it was there, and that an answer to it must be found.

The flaws of the answer which he himself offered have been already pointed out. The Sovereignty of Hobbes is placed solely in the ruler, who thereby becomes avowedly a despot. The sanction on which it rests, in the first and braver intention of the author, is nothing but terror; and if, at a later stage of the proceedings, the idea of obligation is brought in, that is merely to avert the impending ruin of his argument, to cobble up the breach which every moment was yawning wider and wider beneath his feet. The supplementary plea, as we have seen, is manifestly inconsistent with that originally brought forward: the argument from duty utterly irreconcilable with that from self-interest and fear. Finally, the functions of the sovereign are all-embracing, and his power without limits. The life, the property, the freedom of his subjects, alike in matters of thought and in matters of action, are absolutely at his mercy. In short, despotism pure and simple -that is the Sovereignty of Hobbes.

The attempt to divorce politics from morals has been fruitful of ill consequences. But, as the two fields are certainly not identical, it was bound to be made sooner or later; and here again Hobbes was the pioneer.

Against this claim two objections—the one historical, the other philosophical-might possibly be lodged. Historically, it might be argued that the honour, if such it is to be reckoned, belongs rather to Machiavelli. And philosophically, that what Hobbes did was rather to bring morals down to the level of politics than to mark out the frontiers between them.

The former of these objections rests upon an evident confusion. The question is not, Who was the first to divorce politics from morals in the field of practice? If that were all, no question could be more futile. The innovation is as old as the world. It goes back, doubtless, as far as Nimrod, or Cain, the first recorded builder of a city. It had been followed by every monarch and every republic upon record. And all that Machiavelli did was to reduce the timehonoured practice to system and illustrate it by examples profusely furnished by the Popes and Princes of his time. Of any speculative theory and it is that alone which is here in question—he was entirely innocent. That was an honour thrust upon him, as an afterthought, by distraught professors in search of a reputable sponsor for their unchartered ravings. And if Machiavelli's is the only claim to the contrary, Hobbes may rest placidly upon his laurels. In him we have at least a stubborn attempt to base the whole political life of man, from first to last, upon nothing but self-interest; to admit none but self- regarding motives

into the speculative origins and subsequent maintenance of the State.

It is perfectly true that he applies the same principle to the life of the individual: that, on his theory, the moral, no less than the political, life of man is governed solely by utilitarian—which, on his interpretation, means purely selfish-motives. And that, no doubt, is enough to distinguish him sharply from those later writers who admit disinterested motives—or, at any rate, motives which in long course of time have become disinterested-in matters of personal conduct, but steadfastly deny their legitimacy, and even their very existence, in matters of State: who are idealists, or something like it, in the region of ethics, but pure materialists in that of politics. Still, the main point for our purpose is not whether moral considerations are to be banished from morals as well as from politics, but whether they are to be banished from politics. And on this point Hobbes gives every guarantee that could be desired. What impels men, as he holds, to enter society is not any dim instinct of human kindliness, not any natural hatred of the force and fraud' to which they are driven by the truculence of their neighbours, but sheer terror of the bodily harm with which they are perpetually threatened, sheer disgust at the physical misery of the state of nature.

And the significance of this picture is clearly seen when we compare it with that offered by other chroniclers of the state of nature. All the others admit softer elements side by side with the more brutal qualities of primitive man. All the others, thereforeabove all, Locke and Rousseau-allow for the working of moral, no less than of purely material, motives for the subsequent formation of the civil state. Hobbes alone confines the natural man to the lowest instincts of the brute. He alone, therefore, shuts the door to all but animal motives for his entry into civil society.

And that society, once formed, is inevitably true to its origin; it reproduces, and cannot but reproduce, the character of the rock whence it was hewn. The sole bond of union between the members of Leviathan is a common terror, the fear of relapsing into the state of nature. Or to speak more correctly, between one member and another there is no bond at all. The only cement provided is that which binds each of them, singly and separately, by sheer terror to the tyrant who stands above them all. It is quite true that this purely material bond, a bond of undisguised selfishness, is subsequently reinforced by a tie-that of obligation to fulfil their contract, to perform the covenant made between each of them and their common master-which claims to be a matter of duty; and that this tie is further supplemented by a whole code of 'natural laws' which are intended to carry with them the same

implication. Not only, however, are these newcomers manifest intruders, but it is clear that Hobbes himself was shy of invoking them and more than half sceptical as to their value for his purpose. Even if that were not the case, it would still be true that between the members of the 'mortal god' there is no bond, moral or otherwise; that, after as before their embodiment, they are a mere agglomerate of atoms, held in their place not by mutual attraction, but solely by a compelling force exercised from above. In other words, the exclusion of all moral motive from the internal life of the community, the banishment of all sense of fellowship, is as complete as human ingenuity can make it. Between its members there is no moral relation, if only because, strictly speaking, there is no relation at all.

As for the external relations of the State, it was no part of Hobbes' plan to discuss them. He was so busy forging the chains which were to bind the subject within that he had no thought left for the policy which should be followed towards rivals, and possible enemies, without. Accordingly, the whole matter of foreign politics is dismissed in a single paragraph.

In that one paragraph, however, is contained all that is necessary for our purpose. We learn that the offices of one sovereign to another are all comprehended in what is commonly called the law of nations'; and that the law of nations and the law of nature is the same thing.'1 By the law of nature' we are clearly to understand the code of laws-To seek peace and ensue it,' By all means we can to defend ourselves,' and the rest— which Hobbes had laid out in two earlier chapters, and which he had there applied to individuals in the state of nature. It follows therefore that, whereas each State, as regards its own members, is under the law of Leviathan, they are all, as regards each other, solely under the law of nature. And our first inference would naturally be that the foreigner is to be let off far more lightly than the subject: that, while all the rigours of the system are to be reserved for the latter, all its more merciful elements are to be set in motion for the benefit-and, as it works out in practice, for the sole benefit-of the former.

If this were really the case, we should have to admit that the moral relations, which are, to all intents and purposes, excluded from the internal government of the State, are readmitted in all that belongs to its external dealings; and that, in all matters of foreign policy, Hobbes has conspicuously failed to carry out that divorce between politics and morals with which he has been credited. Such a result would be explicable only on the assumption that he was completely indifferent to foreign politics: so indifferent that

1 Leviathan, chap. xxx. (close).