Ostracism, again, in Hobbes and Hume (some spinoza and plutarch)

Last week (recall), I noted that in his in Political Discourses, in the context of defending the European balance of power, Hume illustrated and compared its underlying logic to ancient practices of ostracism: “The same principle, call it envy or prudence, which produced the Ostracism of Athens, and Petalism of Syracuse, and expelled every citizen whose fame or power overtopped the rest; the same principle, I say, naturally discovered itself in foreign politics, and soon raised enemies to the leading state, however moderate in the exercise of its authority.” (“Of the Balance of Power” (1752)).

In a follow up post, I noted inter alia, that Spinoza had been a critic of the practice from the perspective of the interest of the republic that practices it. As an aside, it would be interesting to learn if republics only practiced external exile, and empires only internal exile.

Be that as it may, I am re-reading some passages of Hobbes’ Leviathan in order to prepare my first class lecture of the year. Much to my surprise (I had completely forgotten it), I encountered the following passage in an important (and well known) chapter of Leviathan.

In the same manner, the people of Athens, when they banished the most potent of their Common-wealth for ten years, thought they committed no Injustice; and yet they never questioned what crime he had done; but what hurt he would doe: Nay they commanded the banishment of they knew not whom; and every Citizen bringing his Oystershell into the market place, written with the name of him he desired should be banished, without actuall accusing him, sometimes banished an Aristides, for his reputation of Justice; And sometimes a scurrilous Jester, as Hyperbolus, to make a Jest of it. And yet a man cannot say, the Soveraign People of Athens wanted right to banish them; or an Athenian the Libertie to Jest, or to be Just.—Leviathan, Chapter 21.

This material has not gone unnoticed by commentators although not widely or extensively discussed or analyzed. For example, I learned from a paper by Barry Stocker that Hobbes already discusses ostracism in De Cive X 7. In De Cive Hobbes introduces the practice of Athenian ostracism in the context of a comparison between monarchy and democracy (and unfavorable to democracy). Basically he claims that in a democracy (so without a representative assembly) anyone is at risk of petty tyranny, and he offers ostracism as an example.*

Before I discuss the quoted Leviathan passage my interest in the status of ostracism in early modern discussions is to show that Hume’s use of the practice of ostracism and petalism to illustrate the balance of power — by way of analogy — suggests that in key ways Hume is quite illiberal. And while the treatment of ostracism is strictly empirical, Hume does endorse the balance of power as a desirable policy. In addition, Hume does not distance his analysis from the practice of banishment, “meerly because of their powers” and as Hobbes also notes at De Cive X.7 only “without the guilt of any other crime.”

It’s interesting that in De Cive Hobbes thinks of ostracism as involving a response to a crime. Since that is by no means obvious (and actually partially weakens his argument in context of De Cive). Later, in Leviathan he is clear the banished “committed no Injustice.” In fact, crime was irrelevant to the practice “they never questioned what crime he had done; but what hurt he would doe.” What makes ostracism so troubling is that it is a crime/guilt free punishment. In some (perhaps less troubling) cases it involves pre-emptive action in the service of public good. To put the point anachronistically: if republican liberty is freedom from arbitrary power, then (direct) democracies are incapable of such republican liberty.

The troubling features of ostracism are on display in Leviathan; the quoted passage above is meant to illustrate Hobbes’ claim that “nothing the Soveraign Representative can doe to a Subject, on what pretence soever, can properly be called Injustice, or Injury; because every Subject is Author of every act the Soveraign doth.” (emphasis added). This follows naturally from Hobbes’ argument (and clearly much impressed Rousseau who draws more from this chapter in the Social Contract). In the subsequent discussion it is quite clear why Hobbes uses the practice of ostracism in democratic Athens to drive home his point.

In what follows he makes two points (I quote the passage after I make these): first because the account of liberty in European political theory is derived from too limited a practice, primary democratic and republican in character, one may falsely come to believe (on a too narrow induction/data-set) that liberty is incompatible with monarchic or aristocratic/representative government. His alertness to the unnoticed biases inherited from intellectual tradition is one of his (unnoticed) debts to Bacon.

Let’s leave aside to what degree Hobbes equivocates on ‘liberty’ and has changed the subject. (The quoted passage suggests Hobbes does not leave it aside! He thinks republicans have a faulty notion of liberty.) For that is irrelevant to present issue; second, and more important, the practice of ostracism in democratic Athens suggest that Hobbes’ theory of sovereignty is not ad hoc rigged for monarchic government. Okay here’s the passage I just glossed:

In these westerne parts of the world, we are made to receive our opinions concerning the Institution, and Rights of Common-wealths, from Aristotle, Cicero, and other men, Greeks and Romanes, that living under Popular States, derived those Rights, not from the Principles of Nature, but transcribed them into their books, out of the Practice of their own Common-wealths, which were Popular…And because the Athenians were taught, (to keep them from desire of changing their Government,) that they were Freemen, and all that lived under Monarchy were slaves; therefore Aristotle puts it down in his Politiques,(lib.6.cap.2) “In democracy, Liberty is to be supposed: for ’tis commonly held, that no man is Free in any other Government.” And as Aristotle; so Cicero, and other Writers have grounded their Civill doctrine, on the opinions of the Romans, who were taught to hate Monarchy, at first, by them that having deposed their Soveraign, shared amongst them the Soveraignty of Rome; and afterwards by their Successors. And by reading of these Greek, and Latine Authors, men from their childhood have gotten a habit (under a false shew of Liberty,) of favouring tumults, and of licentious controlling the actions of their Soveraigns; and again of controlling those controllers, with the effusion of so much blood; as I think I may truly say, there was never any thing so deerly bought, as these Western parts have bought the learning of the Greek and Latine tongues.

Before I return to Hume. Notice that in the final two sentences, Hobbes criticizes the scholastics and renaissance alike in generating dangerous consequences from the wrong sort of learning/enlightenment. In modern parlance, unlike the Enlightenment critics (including Hume) of the scholastics Hobbes is not charging lack of intelligibility here, but rather rather is offering a consequentialist criticism (a kind of inductive risk argument) of the tradition.

Hobbes may well think it imprudent that Athens exiled Aristides. (Presumably he is drawing on the account of Plutarch.)** But it is key to his argument (and my own) that for Hobbes it is not unjust or illegitimate that Athens did so. Hobbes and later Hume treat ostracism as an apt and prudent pre-emptive mechanism at protecting the common good (just as the theory of international balance of power operates).

Notice, too, there is an attenuated sense in which Hobbes is appropriating (and also recasting) The Laws of Athens’ argument from Plato’s Crito (50-51). There the Laws of Athens had argued (and Socrates agreed), that by benefitting from and staying in Athens Socrates agreed “to abide by the verdicts pronounced by the polity” and “whoever of you stays here….has thereby entered into an agreement with us to do what we command.” To be sure, (a) the structure of Hobbes’ contractualism is different from the one articulated in the Crito—not the least because The Laws of Athens deny natural equality; (b) Hobbes himself implies that Socrates had not forfeited his natural right to avoid death and so, as Crito urges, try to flee. (It is, however, not obvious Hobbes would endorse Crito’s urging so.)

Let’s return to Hume. One does not have to agree with Paul Russell that Hume’s philosophy is deeply enmeshed in Hobbes’ to recognize that Hume was quite familiar with Hobbes’ writing. In particular, and pertinent here, the whole argument about the international balance of power involves recognizing state politics as a kind of state of nature.

To be sure, Hume treats the state of nature as a (silly, even dangerous) fiction in the Treatise. But in an important note to section 3 of the second Enquiry (EPM 3.15), he explicitly recognizes that Plato offers arguments against the state of nature doctrines (oddly, Hume skips Plato’s use of the state of nature in his account of the universal flood) and that Cicero thought that the state of nature was a historical reality prior to the founding of communities in the service of the common good. And in his essays and the History, especially, he would use the phrase as a kind of shorthand for what he termed savage [as distinct from law-governed, ‘civilized’] society, qualifying it as ‘wild.’

Let me wrap up. In the Leviathan, ostracism is treated as a crime-free punishment that is in some respects wholly arbitrary (of the sort that illustrates the risks of living under ancient democracy), but exemplary of the legitimacy of sovereign power. (

The liberal objects to this practice (echoing Spinoza) as imprudent from the perspective the art of government; it treats the practice as violating basic principles of the rule of law (in substantive and procedural senses), and, ultimately, as endangering the legitimacy of sovereignty. So, in so far as the international balance of power and ostracism share salient features that make them an apt analogy for Hume, I treat this as evidence for demurring from Hume’s account of the international balance of power as something worth having (rather than an empirical analysis held at arm’s length from one’s normative commitments). And also as evidence for the claim that qua proto-liberal Hume often is, despite the normative conventionalism that Keith Hankins and John Thrasher have ably diagnosed in him, more realist than liberal.

In fact, and to close on some banal truisms: in our age there is much criticism of liberalism in democratic theory offered from the vantage of the mythical demos. Many of these criticism are fair reminder to liberals not to forsake commitment to equal representation alongside moral and legal equality. But by the same token, it’s practices like ostracism and petalism that shape the sensibility of the liberal critique of a one-sided focus on, and invocation of, the merits of democracy.

*I now think Spinoza is amplifying Hobbes’ treatment in De Cive, rather than responding to Leviathan.

**It’s possible, but not conclusive, that Spinoza is also thinking of Aristides: “What greater evil can be imagined for the Republic than that honest men should be exiled as wicked because they hold different opinions and don’t know how to pretend to be what they’re not?” (TTP 20:34) Hume himself clearly quotes from Plutarch’s account of Demosthenes and his banishment (EPM 5.11).