Excavations


... nothing is more essential to public interest than the preservation of public liberty.

- David Hume



Sunday, April 21, 2013

On Harper and Hobbes, Trade Secrets with China, and Ancient Canadian Wisdom

This is to let Canadians know that Stephen Harper actually does adhere to a system of thought, albeit a very short-sighted one.  His political philosophy borrows most not from Machiavelli but from Thomas Hobbes, in particular his book Leviathan (1651) written in the wake of England’s Civil War. King Charles was executed in 1649, the House of Lords was abolished shortly thereafter, and the Puritan regime of Cromwell began organizing a new state, known as the Commonwealth. Meanwhile continental Europe terminated the Thirty Years’ War with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648.

While Hobbes can be seen to be in league with Cromwell, he was in fact a Royalist (even when England’s Kings were Catholic). But his political philosophy was indeed considered a “scientific” response to the apparent need for legitimacy of authority while preserving liberty (the latter being a dubious success). Hobbes’s central premise is that man is anti-social, and that man in the state of nature (“where there is no common power”) is approximately equal but always at war (“every man against every man”).[1]  Fear in the state of nature is commonplace, which is why people lock their doors at night, and the life of man is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short” (which perhaps sounds like aspects of  Africa - to which Harper has reduced foreign aid).[2]  Man’s (natural) liberty, the anti-social, or individualistic, assumption of the nature of man is the key reason why Harper is no friend of ‘socialist schemes’ (like the Kyoto Accord) or the United Nations, as well preferring the company of pandas to people.[3]

Hobbes’s solution to man’s disorder in the state of nature is to unite the multitude in awe of one person, otherwise known as a “COMMONWEALTH”, or in Latin “CIVITAS”, better known as the “great LEVIATHAN”.[4]  One of the purposes behind the concept of the great Leviathan was to convert the crowds into an undivided people, and here we see some roots to Harper’s nationalism.[5]  Despite the fact that Hobbes was considered “scientific”, inspired by Euclid and a friend to Galileo (late in his life), and respected for his own mathematical often geometrical mind, which he saw as a means of lifting mankind from the chaos of conflict, Hobbes actually reinvents feudalism on a state scale, arguing for an (in effect, unequal) “relation between Protection and Obedience”.[6]  Similarly he seems to argue with logic, but the sovereign Leviathan is a great source of fear nonetheless, not unlike in Canada today where citizens are afraid to speak out against their great “Protector”.[7]

What Hobbes lacks in his political thinking is precisely what is missing in Harper: the idea of social reciprocity.  In other words Hobbes attempts to rebut Aristotle, in particular his idea that “man is by nature a political animal” (and that we each have a soul), arguing instead that man can be apolitical, or passive, opening up room for deterministic dominance by the Leviathan, Canada’s problem today.[8] Hobbes’s case for “every man against every man” is also a seedbed for Harper’s prevalent use of Game Theory and the classic problem of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, which suggests that it is rational not to cooperate, which in turn is at the root of Negative Political Advertising (because it works, at least in the short run).[9]  Hobbes (unlike Montaigne) also has no appreciation for the game of tennis (and he says so), because in tennis one is expected to “serve” and “return”.[10]  Similarly Harper does not respect Parliament (whose etymological root word is the French parler – “to talk”).  When Harper prorogued Parliament (twice), he turned to Hobbes who answered: “Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues.”[11]

Canada’s Leviathan is again at work, and here perhaps I digress but get to today’s point. The rather unannounced comprehensive trade agreement with China (FIPA), signed in Russia on 9 September 2012 by Harper (note the signatory context of two other countries with their own great Leviathans), granting China “Foreign Investment Protection and Promotion” in Canada is now on the floor of the House of Commons – no thanks to the Prime Minister.  If Harper succeeds, Canada loses – and China gains, true to our resource-based colonial status.  Canada’s current federal Conservative Party (true to its anti-social form) was born in 2003 on a broken contract, a scrap piece of paper gone awry.  Ten years later Canada’s Conservative Leviathan shows unwillingness to make public in Parliament a 31 year written contract with China (with no chance for abrogation until the 15th year) – Harper can do business with the Chinese state but not speak to Canadians.  Why the slyness?

Parliament is no protection, and the great Leviathan is busy protecting himself and China, but is he actually protecting Canadians? Does this “Protector” in all his considerable secrecy really deserve “Obedience” – or is Harper (borrowing from Descartes) a “Great Deceiver”?    Here is a point by Hobbes that Harper clearly has missed: “The obligation of subjects to the sovereign is understood to last … no longer than the power lasts by which he is able to protect them.”[12]  In other words, there really needs to be a “relationship” between the Canadian public and their Leviathan, quite possibly an institutional one too, certainly if there is going to be any “Protection”, a central flaw in both Hobbes’s and Harper’s thinking.[13]

Finally, in pursuit of this sense of “reciprocity” may I suggest sporting lessons for our great Leviathan - not hockey, not Game Theory, not tennis but canoeing lessons.  The canoe has traversed Canada like nothing else over the centuries, from our First Nations, to our French and British explorers, to our Scouts and recreational groups and families today.[14]  So let’s add to this and borrow not from Hobbes but from Hume who makes the well-known case for two men rowing a boat in his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals in 1751, an exact century after Leviathan was first published, for the essence of the metaphor resonates especially well for this country.[15]  In other words canoeing is primarily about equilibrium, balance, stability, agreement, convention and “common measures of exchange” – all vital to Canada’s history and its original state of nature – and to Canadians today.[16]  It sounds like co-operation in Canada is even natural, and this idea would be of benefit to one individual in particular. Are you listening, great Leviathan?





[1] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. A.P. Martinich (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2002),p. 97 (xiii, 13); p. 95 (xiii, 8)
[2] Ibid., p. 96 (xiii,9).
[3] Christian Nadeau, Rogue in Power: Why Stephen Harper is Remaking Canada by Stealth, tr. Bob Chodoas, Eric Hamovitch and Susan Joanis (Toronto: Lorimer, 2011), p. 110.  Nadeau is apparently the first to write on the link between Hobbes and Harper, but I find the work generally uninspired.
[4] Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 129 (xvii,13)
[5] Quentin Skinner “Hobbes on Persons, Authors and Representatives” in Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s Leviathan, ed. Patricia Springborg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 163.
[6] Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 523 (“Review and Conclusion”, 17)
[7] Johan Tralau, “Leviathan, the Beast of Myth: Medusa, Dionysos, and the Riddle of Hobbes’s Sovereign Monster” in Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s Leviathan, p. 77.
[8] See Tom Sorrell “Hobbes’s Moral Philosophy” and Cees Leijenhorst “Sense and Nonsense about Sense: Hobbes and the Aristotelians on Sense Perception and Imagination” in Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s Leviathan. See also Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon, The Basic Works of Aristotle (New York: Modern Library, 2001), p. 1129 [Aristotle, Politics, Book 1, Chapter 2].
[9] For Hobbes and Game Theory see Jean Hampton, Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
[10] For Hobbes on tennis, see Leviathan, p. 156 (xx,19).  It would appear that Hobbes is writing with Montaigne in mind.
[11] Ibid., p. 97 (xiii,13)
[12] Ibid., p. 166 (xxi,21)
[13] Hampton, Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition, p. 203.
[14] See for example Bruce Hodgins, John Jennings, Doreen Small (eds), The Canoe in Canadian Cultures (2001).
[15] David Hume, Hume’s Moral and Political Philosophy, ed. and intro. Henry D. Aiken (New York: Hafner Press/Macmillan, 1948), p. 278.
[16] Ibid.

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