Hobbesian Slavery
| Published date | 01 October 2018 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0090591717731070 |
| Author | Daniel Luban |
| Date | 01 October 2018 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
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Article
Political Theory
2018, Vol. 46(5) 726 –748
Hobbesian Slavery
© The Author(s) 2017
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https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591717731070
DOI: 10.1177/0090591717731070
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Daniel Luban1
Abstract
Although Thomas Hobbes’s critics have often accused him of espousing a
form of extreme subjection that differs only in name from outright slavery,
Hobbes’s own striking views about slavery have attracted little notice. For
Hobbes repeatedly insists that slaves, uniquely among the populace, maintain
an unlimited right of resistance by force. But how seriously should we take
this doctrine, particularly in the context of the rapidly expanding Atlantic
slave trade of Hobbes’s time? While there are several reasons to doubt
whether Hobbes’s arguments here should be taken at face value, the most
serious stems from the highly restricted definition that he gives to the term
“slave,” one that would seem to make his acceptance of slave resistance
entirely hollow in practice. Yet a closer examination of Hobbes’s theory
indicates that his understanding of slavery is less narrow than it might initially
appear—and thus that his argument carries a genuine political bite.
Keywords
Hobbes, slavery, resistance, natural rights, seventeenth century
1
“This man deserves to be a perpetual slave,” the clergyman George Lawson
wrote of his contemporary Thomas Hobbes: “his intention is to make men
believe that the kings of England were absolute monarchs, their subjects
slaves, without propriety of goods or liberty of person, the parliaments of
England merely nothing but shadows.”1 If Lawson’s words were notably
vehement, the underlying sentiment was not uncommon, either in his day or
1Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA
Corresponding Author:
Daniel Luban, Whitney Humanities Center, 53 Wall Street, New Haven, CT 06511, USA.
Email: daniel.luban@yale.edu
Luban
727
ours. Hobbes is remembered as the most notorious authoritarian in the history
of political thought, his commonwealth built around a form of extreme politi-
cal subjection that differs only in name from outright bondage. No doubt
many readers have closed Leviathan with a verdict similar to Lawson’s: “the
great monstrous animal hath been examined and viewed: and is found to
consist of an absolute power, and absolute slavery.”2 Hobbes aims to recon-
cile subjects to this kind of slavery, however much he might shy away from
saying the word outright.
But Hobbes does, in fact, refer to slavery repeatedly in his writings, and
his treatment of the subject is not what this picture might lead us to expect.
For Hobbes always maintains that genuine slaves—and the question of who
counts as a “genuine” slave is one to which we will return—are free of all
political obligation, whether to the sovereign or to their masters. Accordingly,
and in stark contrast to the rest of the populace, slaves maintain a full and
unfettered right to resist their predicament, whether by flight or by outright
violence. This basic doctrine is maintained with striking consistency through-
out Hobbes’s major political works. In the Elements of Law, he writes that the
slave retains “a right of delivering himself, if he can, by what means soever.”3
In De Cive, he argues that “if they run away, or kill their master, they are not
acting against the natural laws.”4 And Leviathan states outright that slaves
“have no obligation at all, but may break their bonds or the prison, and kill or
carry away captive their master, justly.”5
We might seem, therefore, to have an explicit argument for the slave’s
right of rebellion, proposed—at a moment of rapid expansion in the Atlantic
slave trade—by (of all people) the most famously authoritarian of political
theorists. (It is appropriate to speak not merely of individual resistance but of
collective rebellion, for Hobbes maintains that any individuals who sepa-
rately have the right to resist also have the right to band together to improve
their chances of success.6) But could this possibly be right? We will see that
some of Hobbes’s earliest critics attacked him for his arguments on this score,
which suggests (if nothing else) that it is not anachronistic to take seriously
this part of his theory. Yet the disconnect between our familiar image of
Hobbes and the apparent political implication of his argument is great enough
that we might reasonably suspect that the latter is not what it seems. This may
help explain the fact that for all the scholarly attention devoted to Hobbes as
a theorist of liberty,7 his account of slavery has attracted only sparse and gen-
erally hostile treatment.8
In fact, there are three broad sets of concerns that might lead us to doubt
whether Hobbes’s claims should be taken at face value. The first would stress
the political limitations of Hobbes’s argument: his insistence on the slave’s
right of resistance is by no means a call for the abolition of slavery as an
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Political Theory 46(5)
institution; it is not even, strictly speaking, a claim that the institution is
unjust. The second would stress the historical limitations of Hobbes’s argu-
ment: whatever it might seem to imply for the burgeoning Atlantic slave
trade, these political implications were surely not what he had in mind in
writing it.
These objections, I will suggest, are both correct as far as they go. Yet at
the same time they are not decisive. For although Hobbes may not be arguing
for the injustice of slavery as such, this is largely due to his own highly par-
ticular understanding of justice, and his broader account nonetheless destabi-
lizes the most common justifications for the institution. And although he was
almost certainly not writing with New World slavery chiefly in mind, the
relevant question is whether the Hobbesian theory would apply in these cir-
cumstances, not whether the historical Thomas Hobbes did so apply it.
The third set of concerns is conceptual, and internal to Hobbes’s theory: it
suggests that his definition of slavery as literal bondage is so narrow as to
deprive the term of any real referent. On this view, “slave” for Hobbes is
merely a kind of residual category in a theory whose real purpose is to show
that almost no one actually qualifies as one, and Hobbes’s notional justifica-
tion of slave resistance turns out in practice to be entirely hollow. This objec-
tion, I will suggest, poses more serious difficulties. But it is not ultimately
convincing, for Hobbes’s conception of slavery is in fact significantly broader
than it might appear. This is partly because of aspects of Hobbes’s theory that
the objection tends to neglect. But it is also partly, and perhaps more interest-
ingly, because when discussing slavery Hobbes proves uncharacteristically
reluctant to follow his premises to their furthest conclusions. Regardless of
what his other arguments might seem to imply, he envisions slavery as a real,
widespread, and durable institution—and thus his insistence on the slave’s
inalienable right of resistance carries a genuine political bite.
2
The first thing to say about Hobbes’s justification of slave resistance is that it
is not a condemnation of the injustice of slavery, much less a call for its aboli-
tion. And the reasons why it is not go beyond the familiar fact that abolition-
ism is a relatively recent historical phenomenon, more recent than Hobbes
himself.9 For Hobbes’s treatment of slavery reflects some of the peculiarities
of his broader system of thought, and particularly his understanding of rights.
These peculiarities become evident by way of contrast with a more famil-
iar understanding of rights. We are used to thinking of the rights inhering in
one’s person, the sorts of rights that slavery might be understood to violate,
as entailing corresponding obligations upon others. On this view, to postulate
Luban
729
a right is to settle some set of potential moral arguments, to set limits on par-
ties other than the right-holder. And this sort of view underlies the typical
ways in which both slavery’s opponents and its defenders have understood
the moral issues surrounding it, with the result that the legitimacy or illegiti-
macy of slave resistance comes to serve as a proxy for the corresponding
legitimacy or illegitimacy of slavery as an institution. To say that slaves have
a right to resist their masters is to say that the masters had no right to keep
them subjugated in the first place (i.e., had an obligation not to keep them
subjugated). Likewise, if one were to say that the masters did have a right to
subjugate them, this would imply that the slaves had no right to resist (i.e.,
had an obligation not to resist).
But this is not how Hobbes understands rights. Or at least it is not how he
understands natural rights, the rights that exist in the state of nature. For in
the Hobbesian state of nature—and slavery, for him, is essentially the state of
nature carried over into civil life—each party possesses a sweeping set of
rights, but these rights do not entail any corresponding set of obligations on
others. When he remarks that “law and right differ as much as obligation and
liberty,” he is not merely claiming (as he is commonly understood) that rights
alone impose no obligations on the right-holder; he is claiming that rights
alone impose no obligations on anyone.10 The result is a situation in which
...
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