On Hobbes (and Schmitt) on Enemies and friends/confederates.

Early in the Leviathan, in chapter 2 “Of imagination,” Hobbes introduces the idea of an enemy as a kind of angry dreaming: “when we sleep, the over heating of the same parts causeth Anger, and raiseth up in the brain the Imagination of an Enemy.” For Hobbes, dreaming is (as he tells us in chapter 3) characteristic of unguided thought and unguided thought just is “commonly the thoughts of men!”

Yes, sure, you can also read Hobbes in chapter 2 as saying more prosaically that the content of our dreams is in part constituted by the state of our bodies. Overheated bodies induce the passion of anger, and when this occurs when we sleep we dream of enemies. This presupposes that when we are in the physiological state of a particular passion, and passions are directed at what we might call its ordinary or typical triggering cause, we automatically, when sleeping, direct the passion to the triggering cause (without realizing that this is supplied by our own imagination). But if you think about this more prosaic analysis, that just means that physiologically an enemy is, again, constituted by (or etiologically instantiates the functional equivalent of) angry dreaming.

Now you may expect that I jump to chapter 13, and Hobbes account of enemies in the state of nature. You would be right to suspect that it triggered the present digression. Before we get there, however, in chapter 4, Hobbes offers a normative and teleological account of language which is said to have a proper use or end. Among the four abuses of speech is one worth quoting in full:

Fourthly, when they use [words] to grieve one another: for seeing nature hath armed living creatures, some with teeth, some with horns, and some with hands, to grieve an enemy, it is but an abuse of Speech, to grieve him with the tongue, unlesse it be one whom wee are obliged to govern; and then it is not to grieve, but to correct and amend.

Here ‘to grieve’ means, I think, still to ‘injure’ (and not ‘to mourn.’) And so Hobbes is saying that we abuse language when we hurt each other (the only exception allowed involves the art of governing others). For the significance of this one should read Bejan on hate speech and microaggressions in Hobbes.

In the quoted passage, Hobbes seems to be saying that the proper way to hurt an enemy is, thus, not through words, but either through our natural armaments (e.g., our hands and fists) or artificial ones that imitate nature (physical weapons). Hate speech, curses and spells are, de facto, then always an abuse of language.

Now, if you come to this material with a Schmittian sensibility (and remember I have read a lot of Vermeule and Schmitt recently), you may notice that in the Leviathan the enemy is introduced and discussed without mention of friends at all. This is, in fact, illustrated by a somewhat weird passage in chapter 10, where one may well think the friend-enemy distinction is tacitly presupposed, but it actually is not. Here’s the passage I have in mind.

To pray to another, for ayde of any kind, is to HONOUR; because a signe we have an opinion he has power to help; and the more difficult the ayde is, the more is the Honour….

To imitate, is to Honour; for it is vehemently to approve. To imitate ones Enemy, is to Dishonour.

To honour those another honours, is to Honour him; as a signe of approbation of his judgement. To honour his Enemies, is to Dishonour him.

Honor as an activity explicitly comes in degrees. To Honor another is a sign that tracks, in fact, a subjective state of our own mind that we have the need for aid and the opinion that an other can help us and so we (!) approve of him. When expressed in speech it is servile or supplicant in character. And one really important way we express this state is by imitating those that can help us.* (This suggests that the nineteenth century proverb, ‘imitation is the sincerest form of flattery’ has a kind of Hobbesian provenance.)

Hobbes’ account here suggests we naturally think that (powerful) others are more likely to help those who they recognize as agreeing with or imitating them (in manners, speech, etc.) The function of imitation is to get another’s attention and for them to want to help you.

If you are a Schmittian it is natural to treat those who are likely to come to our aid in virtue of some such apparent similarity/agreement as friends. And there is a hint of this earlier in Chapter 10, when Hobbes claims (in one of his earliest uses of ‘friend’ in Leviathan), “To have Friends, is Power: for they are strengths united.” (He immediately goes on to say that one benefit of wealth is that allows one to procure (!) friends.) This is often quoted by those working on the role of friendship in Hobbes’ politics.

But Hobbes is not anticipating the Schmittian distinction/opposition between friend and enemy because while friends united may oppose enemies, enemies may also be conceptually opposed by combines involving people who are not friends but in relationships of dependency and mastery (or, as I will emphasize below, confederacy). This is not merely a remnant of feudal thought in Hobbes. For, when in chapter 13, Hobbes describes the state of nature as the state of war, and the “time of Warre, where every man is Enemy to every man,” enemies are conceptually characterized without introducing friendship at all:

And therefore if any two men desire the same thing, which neverthelesse they cannot both enjoy, they become enemies; and in the way to their End, (which is principally their owne conservation, and sometimes their delectation only,) endeavour to destroy, or subdue one an other.

In the state of nature to be an enemy then is the effect of wanting/needing the same scarce good so much that (despite natural equality) they destroy or subdue each other. Hobbes goes on to suggest that even the anticipation that this might happen is sufficient to treat others as would be enemies and, simultaneously, to induce us to become master over those that might help us against such would-be-enemies and we them.

Thus, in his treatment the state of nature, Hobbes often explicitly describes united strengths against enemies not in terms of mutual friendship, but in terms of mastery and dependence. But sometimes he also adopts the language of confederates “where every one expects the same defence by the Confederation.”

In fact, the one passage that may be thought to undermine my argument here supports it on closer inspection. It occurs in chapter 17, when Hobbes explains the benefits (and true end) of a commonwealth. He then describes a hypothetical scenario on behalf of an anarchist-friendly critic that assumes only temporary submission to a sovereign in cases of urgent practical need (that is a battle or a war):

Nor is it enough for the security, which men desire should last all the time of their life, that they be governed, and directed by one judgement, for a limited time; as in one Battell, or one Warre. For though they obtain a Victory by their unanimous endeavour against a forraign enemy; yet afterwards, when either they have no common enemy, or he that by one part is held for an enemy, is by another part held for a friend, they must needs by the difference of their interests dissolve, and fall again into a Warre amongst themselves.

Here, in fact, in victory, when subordination to the army leader is not required anymore, the potential identification of a would-be-friend is itself a cause of the re-introduction of the state of nature/war! So, rather than conceptualizing friends as the opposite of enemies, as confederates (in Hobbes’ terms), friends are explicitly treated as the kind of scarce entities that trigger or cause mutual enmity.

Okay, that’s what I wanted to show today. It’s pretty clear that in addition to scarcity for Hobbes ‘friendship’ involves a kind of mutual attachment that presupposes a kind of fundamental equality. Let me close with three observations (of which the the third is the important one). First, unlike in Aristotle (or later Schmitt) friendship does not play a central analytical role in Hobbes. (This is probably a commonplace in the secondary literature). I return to this below.

Second, we encounter enemies either when we (anticipate) desiring a scarce good or during angry dreaming. Hobbes clearly allows, analytically, that even in the state of nature those who know how to limit their desires, and show this by outward signs, and those who manage to control their bodies (to avoid overheating) can avoid encountering enmity. If (i) all could be stoic sages or wise or if (ii) we could abolish scarcity, we wouldn’t require a power to overawe us all. Hobbes’ realism is constituted by his rejection of (i--ii).

Third, where Schmitt has friends as the opposite of enemies, Hobbes functionally sometimes uses ‘confederates.’ (See also chapter 15.) Interestingly enough, in Leviathan Hobbes does not really define or explain what confederacy involves. This is surprising because the capacity to confederate is rather important in Hobbes. In his version of the state of nature it is (and I have repeatedly suggested this echoes Glaucon’s account of the origin of justice) a mechanism that is a source of our physical natural equality: “For as to the strength of body, the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machination, or by confederacy with others, that are in the same danger with himselfe.” (Chapter 13) Hobbes couldn’t treat us as natural equals (in the subsequent social contract), if he didn’t also explicitly assume that prior to that we naturally have a political skill that would allow us to coordinate on or band together against the physically more powerful.

For Schmitt, in the political sense friendship involves (recall) the “utmost degree of intensity of a union or… association.” This intensity is also characteristic of Schmitt’s analysis of enmity. The significance of the discussion angry dreaming is precisely that for Hobbes, too, enmity has such intensity. His account of enmity does not anticipate treating political life in terms of unfeeling cost-benefit analysis.

But for Hobbes one can be a unity opposed to enemies in a manner that lacks such intensity. The confederates that subdue the strong in the state of nature or that band together against others in the fight over scarce goods can lack such intense mutuality. And this lack of intense mutuality (the presence of which is so characteristic of Schmittian friendship) carries over into the social contract that ends the state of war. While Hobbes is no liberal, he thus anticipates a form of theorizing about political life in which relative mutual indifference among the (mass) citizenry is a feature. In fact, we may conceive of liberalism as also allowing us to be relatively indifferent toward external enemies.

*It is not entirely clear why in this scheme imitating an enemy is an instance of dishonour. (I do think it is clear why imitating an enemy of somebody whose help we need is to dishonour him/her in this scheme.)