LEVELS OF READING FOR THE ETHICO-POLITICAL SYSTEM

Hobbes's ethical and political philosophy can be the target of a reading at different levels. This situation essentially stems from this: that Hobbes did not always keep, in the elaboration of his doctrine, to the principles that he however articulates as being before those of science, namely, the use of a language the nominal definitions of which must assure the univocity of significations. So that I am better understood: I am not at all saying that Hobbes does not put science's procedures to work in the ethical and political domain. On the contrary, the power [puissance] of his doctrine stems precisely from his broad overall consistency. I am only saying is that this consistency is studded with analogies that are sometimes presented as schemes of intelligibility. We are thinking, for example, of the analogy present in chapter 10 of Leviathan where man's tendency to increase his power [puissance] is compared with ‘the motion of heavy bodies, which the further they go, make still the more haste’. These are the analogies that have given rise to readings of the whole of the doctrine in terms of mechanistic physics. Certainly, physics very much constitutes the basis starting from which ethics and politics are deployed, but these cannot be reduced to that. The theory of the passions, the relational dynamics that lead to the state of war, the institution and the juridical function of the state cannot be explained in terms of movement and of composition of movements. Thus, the effects of a man's power [puissance] or of political power [pouvoir] are defined according to a notion that can have no place in physics, that of the sign. The ethics of a man's power [puissance] as much as the theory of political power [pouvoir] involve at different levels a specific modality of a semiological relationship between a signifier and a signified. This relationship, which it is possible to locate from The Elements of Law up to De Homine, takes on a frankly systematic character in Leviathan.