July 28, 2018 Dear Reader

Chapter 14:

Smith was No Reductionist, Economistic or Otherwise
But the alternative and novel systems of prudence-only, or of love-only, or of anything-only, as Smith noted, did not work very well. Specializing a theory of ethics down to merely one of the seven virtues—the economist specializing in prudence only, for example, the theologian in love only—does not do the ethical job. Smith declares himself on the issue early, indeed in the first clause of his book. “How selfish soever man may be supposed”—then proceeds to show in the next 330 pages that a specialized selfish account, like the one nowadays so popular with modern economists and evolutionary psychologists, does not suffice. On the fifth page he attacks prudence-only again: “Those who are fond of deducing all our sentiments from certain refinements of self-love think themselves at no loss to account” for sympathy. The supposed egoist rejoices in expressions of approval of his projects, and is downcast by expressions of disapproval, “But both the pleasure and the pain are always felt so instantaneously, and often upon such frivolous occasions [for example in a theatre for the characters portrayed, as he later notes; or in an account from a remote history], that it seems evident that neither of them can be derived from any such self-interested consideration” (TMS, pp. 13-14). And so repeatedly throughout.

Smith is sometimes viewed as a Stoic in the mold of Epictetus.²⁵⁹ But such a view can specialize him down to temperance-only. As Raphael and Mackie themselves put it, “Smith’s ethical doctrines are . . . a combination of Stoic and Christian virtues—or, in philosophical terms, a combination of Stoicism and Hutcheson. . . who resolved all virtue into . . . a philosophical version of the Christian ethic of love.”²⁶⁰ Smith certainly admired the “manly” character of Stoicism, and he remarked in a letter that the atheist Hume faced death “with more real resignation. . . than any whining Christian ever died with pretended resignation to the will of God.”²⁶¹ And I have said that Smith spent a third of his life’s creative effort on the master virtue of TMS, that self-command or temperance-plus-courage so characteristic of a successful Stoic. In the Part VII of TMS dating from his lectures in the 1750s and included in the first edition, in which he surveys the ancient and a very few of the modern systems of ethics, he spends a mere 4 ½ pages on Plato and Aristotle together, 5 on Hutcheson recommending benevolence only, 5 ½ on Epicurus (really on Hume) and 8 on Mandeville recommending prudence only, but fully 21 pages on Stoicism according to Zeno, Epictetus, Cicero, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius , 9 ½ of which are a disquisition on the Stoic attitude towards suicide added to the 6^th edition, apparently in reply to a notorious essay by Hume.

What Smith mainly took from his readings in Stoicism, however, was the system of the virtues. That is, Smith was a virtue ethicist who learned his trade in a Stoic school.²⁶² His admiring pages on Stoicism are gathered in the 6^th edition into the chapter of section VII entitled “Of those Systems which make Virtue consist in Propriety,” that is, those attending like his own system to a set of virtues instead of merely to one. In the section VI added in 1790 he argues against the specialized excesses of Stoic insensibility, or what we would now call Buddhist disengagement from the world, and recommends instead an active virtue, “that keen and earnest attention to the propriety of our own conduct, which constitutes the real essence of virtue” (p. 244).

A man following propriety shows in a temperate way all the principal virtues. That is to say, he shows a balance of all them, or selects the sub-set appropriate to the occasion. The virtues are not cloistered, but take place in the practice of the vita activa. Sunday mornings in church the virtuous person exercises chiefly the virtue of spiritual love, Saturday nights on the dance floor the virtue of self-asserting courage, Mondays through Fridays at her job in the bank the virtue of careful prudence.

Such was the ethically plural theme of Smith’s very last published writing. His very first, to the memory of a merchant of Glasgow, remember, praised Stoicism in a virtue-ethical key, admiring frugality, probity, plainness of manners, love of learning, generosity of heart, great-heartedness, enduring courage, cheerfulness, candor, penetration, circumspection, and sincerity: admiring in short the bourgeois virtues, all of them, together in a system, as virtue ethicists bourgeois or aristocratic recommend.

Vivienne Brown, who supports the notion that Smith in TMS thinks in terms of the virtues, argues that by contrast WN cannot be seen as ethical at all, and declares especially that it “cannot be read as an endorsement of ‘liberal capitalism.’”²⁶³ She argues that the highly “dialogic” character of TMS makes it an ethical work.²⁶⁴ The two texts are seen as emphasizing two different sets of so-called virtues, in a hierarchy denying in fact the lower set ethical any true ethical standing. “The truly moral virtues of beneficence and self-command in TMS,” she writes, “are those that define the moral agent as engaged in a dialogic encounter with the self, a moral process of internal debate that is represented by the metaphor of the impartial spectator.” In her reading “the other virtues of justice and prudence”—the main subjects of WN as against TMS—“are therefore denominated as second-order, . . . [eliciting] a certain esteem, . . . [but not] truly moral virtues.”²⁶⁵

It is Brown, not Smith, I would say, who thus “denominates” prudence and justice as second-order, in aid of downplaying Smith’s evident approval of the economic parts of “the liberal plan of equality, liberty, and justice” (WN, p. 664). Brown’s ingenious application of Bakhtin’s notion of dialogic as against monologic discourse certainly does illuminate the rhetoric of the two books. But speaking of rhetoric, WN was written to influence policy under the control of men who fancied themselves as prudent above all. To be effective rhetorically the book had to follow Smith’s own advice about anger and indignation in TMS—“before resentment . . . can become graceful and agreeable it must be. . . brought down below that pitch to which it would naturally rise than almost every other passion” (TMS, p. 34). Nonetheless, Smith’s indignation regularly broke out in WN, as Brown admits (Brown 1994, p. 190). WN, as Griswold (p. 260-261) and Fleischacker (throughout) argue, is an ethical book. One can agree with Brown that ethics depends on “a moral process of internal debate.” But justice and prudence in Smith are not treated so non-dialogically as Brown argues. In both books Smith gives hundreds of instances of the Impartial Spectator staging an internal debate about even these “second-order” virtues.

I noted the revival of virtue ethics after Elizabeth Anscombe’s essay in 1958 “Modern Moral Philosophy” (the revival, by the way, has been led notably by women; ethics is the only part of academic philosophy with a substantially feminine voice, heard since the 1950s). The revival directed attention to the desirability of talking about a set of virtues directly, rather than talking in Enlightenment style only of allegedly universal principles. “It would be a great improvement,” wrote Anscombe, “if, instead of ‘morally wrong,’ one always named a genus such as ‘untruthful,’ ‘unchaste,’ ‘unjust’” (Anscombe 1958 [1997), p. 34).

But where does one stop in listing the virtues of, say, truthfulness, chastity, justice, and the like? A list of 170 virtues would be so broad as to be useless. The point is worth stressing here because Smith’s definite five virtues, and his emphasis on the joint cultivation of the five by the Impartial Spectator, puts him solidly in the older tradition of virtue ethics. Some virtue ethicists after 1958 have no definite list in mind, or a very long one, a fault which the classical virtue ethics of Smith avoided.

Modern ethical philosophy has indeed two opposite faults of quantity. The one is to let virtues proliferate, leaving us to struggle with the 170 words for “virtues” in the main headings of "Class Eight: Affections” of Roget’s Thesaurus (edition of 1962). That would be like the 613 commandments of orthodox Judaism, Hillel’s count. The study of Kant and Bentham (or indeed of the Torah) imposes a healthy discipline on such proliferation.

But the study of Kant or Bentham leads, alas, to the other fault of quantity, acknowledging too few virtues to fit the stories of our lives—for example, one virtue only, The Good, the categorical imperative, the greatest happiness. Or else it chooses one of the seven, such as prudence or love or justice, to stand for all. Smith’s better plan is to stop as Epictetus or Aquinas did with a definite yet pretty-well comprehensive list of a moderate number of the principal virtues. That way you know better what you are talking about. Five or seven is a mean, if not a particularly golden one, between N= 1 and N = 170 or 613.

The clerisy nowadays views Aquinas as Catholic dogma, and therefore as something unnecessary for us Protestant or anti-clerical intellectuals to read. And so the Divine Doctor’s seven do not get much of a hearing in secular discussions. Philippa Foot on the contrary argued in 1978 that "Summa Theologica is one of the best sources we have for moral philosophy, and moreover . . . St. Thomas' ethical writings are as useful to the atheist as to the . . . Christian believer."²⁶⁶ But she and Alasdair MacIntyre are among the handful of ethical philosophers to realize it, and to take Aquinas’ numbering seriously. Foot for instance wrote that “nobody can get on well if he lacks courage, and does not have some measure of temperance and wisdom [her word for what Smith and I call prudence], while communities where justice and charity [her word—referring to the King James Bible—for what I call secular love and Smith calls benevolence] are lacking are apt to be wretched places to live, as Russia was under the Stalinist terror, or Sicily under the Mafia” (1978, pp. 2-3). That is five out of the seven virtues, counting from the bottom of the diagram, just the five that Smith selected.

FitzGibbons regards Smith as an enemy of Aristotelianism and of fundamentalist religion (which two FitzGibbons tends to merge), and claims with considerable justice, I have noted, that Smith was a “Ciceronian Stoic.” My claim is that Smith, if a Stoic, was willy-nilly therefore the last of a tradition of virtue ethics dating from Aristotle and perfected by Aquinas and practiced by the casuists whom Pascal and other one-virtue theorists began to assault in the 17^th century (Toulmin and Jonsen 1987). The one characterization of Smith emphasizes his Stoicism; the other emphasizes the wider technique of ethical pluralism of which Stoicism is one example and of which St. Thomas Aquinas is another and more sophisticated version. Both characterizations can be true.

This is not to say that Smith was a close student of Aquinas or of other Christian thinkers. He was not. About Jesuit casuistry he was scathing, in a passage added in 1790: “Books of casuistry. . . are generally as useless as they are commonly tiresome,” because they do not change people’s dispositions. “With regard to one who is negligent in his [duty], the style of those writings is not such as is likely to awaken him to more attention” (TMS, p. 339). In the 18^th century St. Thomas had nothing like the prestige he has acquired from the neo-Thomism initiated in the late 19^th century by Pope Leo XIII. In 1759 in a Protestant country even a scholar of Smith’s quality was liable to suppose that little could be learned from the Goths and Vandals of the Middle Ages—thus “gothic” in this sense, which was before the Romantics a term of contempt. He scorns “a scholastic or technical system of artificial definitions, divisions, and sub-divisions; one of the most effective expedients . . . for extinguishing whatever degree of good sense there may be in any moral or metaphysical doctrine” (TMS, p. 291). In the one place where he might have noted, if he had known it, that Aquinas unlike the lesser theorists of “the benevolent system” gives full weight also to the secular and pagan virtues, he does not (TMS, p. 301). He leaps from “many ancient fathers of the Christian church”—which pointedly leaves out Aquinas, who was medieval, born eight centuries after the death of the last of the “ancient fathers,” the last at any rate in Western Christendom, St. Augustine—right to the Reformation, in which the benevolent system “was adopted by several [Protestant] divines of the most eminent piety and learning,” and then by Hutcheson, “the most philosophical, . . the soberest and most judicious.”

Smith appears to have had read mere summaries of “the schoolmen,” as he called them impatiently, using in discussing courage and temperance for example the Aquinian distinction between the “irascible” emotions (that is, hot, angry emotions; TMS, 268) and the “concupiscible” (that is, appetitive; recent English translations of Aquinas’ Latin prefer instead “concupiscent”). Smith never quotes or refers to Aquinas or any other schoolman directly by name, and a doctrinal influence is untraceable. The power of such evidence, admittedly, is low, since Smith does not quote anyone much at all. Even David Hume, whose doctrinal influence is palpable in Smith, is not actually quoted, though often answered. But anyway Smith, in common with some recent writers who at this date should perhaps know better, skips over the Aquinian and later Christian syntheses of Stoic and theological virtues, courage-temperance-justice-prudence plus faith-hope-love, adding up to seven. Nor was Smith even, to speak of the acknowledged root of Aquinas’ tradition, a self-conscious Aristotelian. As Fleischacker observes, Smith’s egalitarianism implies a virtue of humility, for example, that Aristotle would have found very strange indeed.²⁶⁷ In Smith’s summary history of ethics in TMS the Philosopher gets only two pages, and those focused not on Aristotle’s somewhat rambling listing of the virtues but on the doctrine of the Golden Mean, so suitable to an Impartial Spectator.

I am merely arguing that Smith, in sharp contrast to his great contemporaries in ethical theorizing, was a virtues man, a follower of Aristotle and therefore of Aquinas and also of the Stoics in emphasizing a system of multiple virtues—and indeed precisely five of the seven Aquinian virtues. That is to say, until its revival in the 1970s he was indeed the last great virtue ethicist. Smith puts Plato (in parts), Aristotle, the Stoics, and in shadowy form the schoolmen into the tradition of “propriety” as against prudence-for-self or love-of-others. “If virtue. . . does not consist of propriety [which is to say the balance in the soul recommended by Aristotle, the Stoics, Aquinas, and Smith himself], it must consist either in prudence [thus Smith’s friend Hume] or in benevolence [thus Hutcheson]. Besides these three, it is scarce possible to imagine any other account can be given of the nature of virtue” (TMS, p. 267). All ethics in Smith was divided into these three: propriety, prudence, and benevolence/love. In choosing the first, the multiple virtues of propriety, he chose to stand with the tradition of Aristotle and Epictetus and Aquinas against the monism of Plato (reducing justice and prudence and courage and temperance to The Good) or of Hobbes and early Hume (reducing The Good to prudence only) or of Hutcheson in a late and literally sentimental version of Christianity (reducing all the virtues to love alone).

As a virtue ethicist Smith disliked all such reductions. “By running up all the different virtues . . . to this one species of propriety [namely, ‘the most real prudence’], Epicurus indulged a propensity,” Smith noted, “which philosophers. . . are apt to cultivate with a peculiar fondness, as the great means of displaying their ingenuity. . . to account for all appearances from as few principles as possible” (TMS, p. 299). It is Ockham’s Razor, with which so many philosophers have cut themselves shaving. Parsimony, after all, is not the only intellectual virtue. In his very method Smith recommends a balance of the virtues, historical relevance balanced with parsimony, justice in summarizing other philosophers balanced with hope in going beyond them. And therefore in substance he avoided the utilitarian pitfall, into which Hume gazed fondly and into which Bentham enthusiastically leapt, of reducing all other virtues to prudence alone.

Love was one of the Smithian virtues, but balanced with pluralism. In TMS the “amiable” Christianity of Hutcheson came in for criticism chiefly because it tended to suppose that “the mixture of any selfish motive, like that of a baser alloy, . . . took away altogether the merit that would otherwise have belonged to any action” (TMS, p. 302). According to the system of love-only “self-love was a principle which could never be virtuous in any degree or in any direction” (TMS, p. 303). Such a specialized version of Christian love violated the propriety of a balanced set of virtues. And indeed, as Smith would have discovered had he looked into Aquinas, it violated Christian orthodoxy. Hutcheson’s False Lemma, Smith noted, implies that “virtue must consist in pure and disinterested benevolence alone” (TMS, p. 302). The same fault infects Kant, with justice put in the place of love. Smith was a virtue ethicist, not an ethical reductionist.

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Smith’s confining of attention to five virtues avoided the errors of quantity in modern ethical thinking—too many virtues or too few. The other two errors are of quality and of object. Smith’s obsolete virtue-ethical system avoided them as well.

The most prevalent error is that of quality, the reduction of ethics to taste, or rather to “mere” taste, viewed as analogous to a taste for chocolate ice cream. It was articulated philosophically by the logical positivists and their descendents. The theory is called officially “emotivism,” “the doctrine that all evaluative judgments and more specifically all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference” (MacIntyre 1981, p. 11, his italics). Or as Hobbes wrote in 1651, “Good and evil are names that signify our appetites and aversions.”²⁶⁸ Most academics and other intellectuals nowadays, without giving it much thought, adhere to the emotivist, chocolate-ice-cream theory. They view the ethical person as maximizing her utility function with respect to the doing of good deeds, just as she does in the eating of ice cream. No duty, love, faith, or persuasion matters, The sort of amiable, casuistic reasoning together that the virtue-ethical and rhetorical tradition recommends, the trading of “more or less good reasons," as the literary critic Wayne Booth put it, such as the stories of good or bad lives ranging from the Hebrew Bible and Plutarch to the latest movie, is spurned. No persuasion, please: we’re positivists.

We can’t have reasonable ethical lives, the virtue ethicists like Smith claim, if we depend only on a narrow definition of reason. “But though reason is undoubtedly the source of the general rules of morality,” Smith noted, without much optimism that “general rules” are much help, “it is altogether absurd and unintelligible to suppose that the first perceptions of right and wrong can be derived from reason” (TMS, p. 320). But such taste is not “mere” in Smith, to be determined without education or reflection. It is rather the providing of good reasons, yielding “reason, principle, conscience, the inhabitant of the breast, the man within, the great judge and arbiter of our conduct” (TMS, p. 137).

The other characteristically modern error in thinking about ethics is an error of object. The error is more technical than the chocolate ice cream theory, and is committed especially by analytic philosophers venturing into ethics. It reduces ethics to matters of how you treat other people. That might seem to be no error: surely ethics is about altruism? No, it is not, not only. Look back at the diagram, and note the ethical objects of self, of others, and of the transcendent. The good life will involve all three. Triple.

All right. Smith analyzes good and bad not as a specialized prudence or justice or temperance but as a proper balance among five of the seven Aquinian virtues. We will not grasp his argument if we insist on making it lie down on a Kantian or a utilitarian bed, as analytic philosophers amateur and professional have tried to do.

But something is missing. In choosing his five virtues Smith drops the two transcendent virtues of hope and faith, with the transcendent version of love going beyond love for people, agape as against the philia or eros in the precise Greek. There is no question that Smith realized what he was doing. He knew perfectly well that hope and faith and agape were principle virtues in Christian thought—this would have been clear even in the secondary descriptions of Scholastic thought—though he may have lacked a direct understanding of Aquinas’ role in the construct. But if someone lacks "strengths that forge connections to the larger universe and provide meaning,” in Peterson and Seligman’s words, she does not have a fully human life. Or as the Anglican theologian Richard Hooker put it in 1593, “Man doth seek a triple perfection: first a sensual . . . . then an intellectual. . . . Man doth not seem to rest satisfied . . . . For although the beauties, riches, honors, sciences, virtues [which means ‘power’ here], and perfections of all men living, were in the present possession of one; yet somewhat beyond and above all this there would still be sought and earnestly thirsted for.”²⁶⁹

The reason Smith neglected hope and faith and agape is not obscure. He shared with Enlightenment figures such as Hume and Voltaire an aversion to any alleged “virtue” that could be seen as conventionally religious. Hope and faith looked to advanced thinkers in the 18^th century horribly conventionally religious, and anyway dispensable. Let us build a new world free from religious superstition, free from the wars of sects, free from the meddling of priests and dominies, they cried. Let us dispense with “hope” and “faith,” and establish a new. . . uh . . . faith on the . . . uh. . . hopes for reason and propriety.

The Christianity that Smith opposed was the rigid Calvinism still influential in Scotland at the time, no longer ascendant but able (with some help from the benevolent Francis Hutcheson) to keep atheists like Hume out of the universities; and the Catholicism that could in France still warrant the conviction of a Protestant, Jean Calas, alleged on slender evidence in 1762 to have murdered his suicidal son to prevent the son’s conversion to Catholicism. The religious fanatics with which Scotland had recently had so much experience impute “even to the great Judge of the universe. . . all their own prejudices. . . . Of all of the corrupters of moral sentiments. . . faction and fanaticism have always been by far the greatest” (TMS, p. 156). Smith wanted, as did Hume and Kant and Bentham for that matter, to bring ethics down to earth: “The most sublime speculation of the contemplative philosopher can scarce compensate the neglect of the smallest active duty”(TMS, p. 237). One can hear him including the theologian and other advocates for the transcendent in that phrase "contemplative philosopher." Compare Hume's sneering at "divinity or school metaphysics" and the “monkish virtues.” Thus Hobbes without God, Vico without God, Hume without God, Kant without God. No monkish virtues of hope and faith, please: we’re Enlightened.

Adam Smith’s error was the error and the glory of the Enlightenment, trying to liberate us from transcendence.

But anyway the hope and faith and transcendent love slip back into Smith, as into Kant and the rest, although by the back door unobserved. The Impartial Spectator, or the Kantian or even the Benthamite equivalent, are not merely behavioral observations about how people develop ethically. They are recommendations. Recommendations depend on faith and hope and transcendent love, articulated from the identity of an urbane resident of Edinburgh, for example, hopeful for a rather better society, loving sweetly the imagined result. As Fleischacker notes, “When we ask after the ‘nature’ of human beings we are looking for what human beings ‘really’ want, beneath the surface trappings. . . . Human nature always includes what people aspire to, for Smith; it is never reduced [as in the economist’s version of utilitarianism] to the desires they merely happen to have.”²⁷⁰

And how was this faithful and loving hope, this aspiration to full humanity, to be achieved? Through cultivating the seven virtues—or Smith’s Five, with hope and faith and transcendent love knocking at the back door.

Chapter 15:

“Hobbesian” Prudence is Not Sufficient

But it is bourgeois virtues as a system and as a whole that is good. A simplified version of bourgeois virtues takes Prudence as all. The passions, however, played against the virtues, and not merely against the interests; it was not merely a balance of Interests that tamed the passions. Not all is selfishness.

But the rise of prudence and quantification could, and in the event did, undermine the other virtues. The rise of prudence led naturally but unhappily in European theories to a collapsing of all virtues into it. Thus Hobbes, Rousseau, Bentham, Marx, Freud, and the modern economists. Sin is one or two virtues unbalanced. Collapsing all virtues into love and faith results in a theocracy. Collapsing all virtues into hope and courage results in war. Collapsing all virtues into prudence results in the Enlightenment, but also, alas, Thomas Gradgrind and Gordon Gekko and their non-fictional brothers.

The philosophical version of prudence only is often called Hobbesian. The identification of Thomas Hobbes with a modern, prudence-only version of economics and political science is by now conventional, based on such passages as this most famous one, following on his axiom that the state of nature is a “war of all against all”:

where every man is enemy to every man. . . . there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, . . . . no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

Leviathan 1651, I, 13, p. 64f.

It is a fine statement of how prosperity for all depends on private property for some. And in the next chapter another passage that without the “–eths” could come from a 20^th-century economist:

If a covenant be made wherein neither of the parties perform presently, but trust one another, in the condition of mere nature (which is a condition of war of every man against every man) upon any reasonable suspicion, it is void . . . . For he that performeth first has no assurance the other will perform after, because the bonds of words are too weak to bridle men’s ambition, avarice, anger, and other passions, without the fear of some coercive power. . . . And therefore he which performeth first does but betray himself to his enemy.

Lev. I. 14, p. 70f.

The obvious mistake seems to be the axiom (“upon any reasonable suspicion . . . the bonds of words are too weak”) that family, civil society, ethical conviction has no effect, that power is all that “really” motivates people. Hobbes supposes here (though not consistently in all his work) that there is nothing aside from coercive power making people perform—it is part of his strict materialism. The axiom is of course false. And he leaps from a logically valid assertion about the condition of mere nature, under his erroneous axioms about why people behave as they do, to a scientific assertion about the extant world. Two faults in logic. So much for Thomas Hobbes.

But one must take care. Michael Oakeshott, who characterized Leviathan as “the greatest, perhaps the sole, masterpiece of political philosophy written in the English language,” noted “a deplorable overconfidence about the exposure of faults in Hobbes’ philosophy. Few accounts of it do not end with the detection of a score of simple errors.”²⁷¹ Unlike some of his modern rational-choice followers in, say, international relations, Hobbes was in truth quite aware of the power of words, as his very self-contradictions on the matter show. Stephen Holmes uses a reading of the posthumous work (posthumous because his friend Charles II thought it unwise to have it published) Behemoth: The History of the Causes of the Civil Wars of England (finished in 1668) to argue that “Hobbes’ preoccupation with the sources of human irrationality . . . clashes rudely with the ‘rational-actor’ approach that many commentators project onto his works. Despite a few memorable and citable passages, he does not conceive of man as an economic animal.”²⁷² Memorable and citable passages such as the war of all against all/

People in Hobbes---for example the royal and Parliamentary actors in the Civil War he had perilously lived through—are motivated by words, norms, beliefs, rhetoric as much as by coolly calculated interest. Thus Ronald Reagan’s insult to the Russians, “evil empire,” was more than froth. It outraged the Soviet communists because they knew its rough truth, and felt the shame. Calculating machines of the sort imagined in “realist” international relations would not be shaken by mere rhetoric. Though Hobbes was interpreted as a theorist of rationality in his own time---by Christopher Wren, for example, and later by almost everyone---that is not his theory. He is a theorist of the passions, which he was vividly aware could be aroused by mere rhetoric. The word “rhetoric” first begins to acquire its present-day air of disrepute in the 17^th century. No wonder Hobbes's readers have missed the point of his criticism of false speech. He has been misread the same way that Adam Smith has, as a Prudence-Alone theorist who thinks prudence rules without the bonds of words.

In the extant world, of course, as Hobbes would have agreed, some words do bind. We are governed by little else: the proverbs learned at Mother’s knee, the ethical system of the playground, a teacher’s rules, a friend’s advice, an enemy’s jibe, a highway code (written and enacted, two different ones), a lover’s complaint; movies, cartoons, jokes; scriptures and sermons; advertising; gossip. There is nothing intrinsically shameful about this. It is human, with good results as well as bad. In a review of Bryan Caplan’s engaging book on the irrationality voting or of acquiring the political sophistication to vote rationally, Louis Menand expressed well the problem with prudence-only guides to life: “people are less modern than the times in which they live.”²⁷³ He means that people are moved by matters of love and faith and justice as much as by prudence, and therefore are moved by rhetoric---though there’s a rhetoric, too, of the science of prudence and even of a life of prudence in a market. ²⁷⁴ The only mistake is to think with Max Weber that “modern” means “rational in a sense that Jeremy Bentham and the modern economists would have approved of.” We have always been modern, or never have been modern.²⁷⁵ They mean the same thing, namely, that the image of modern people guided exclusively by the best science is false. In fact, the best scientists themselves are governed by passions.

Because this is evidently so, and because Europe was engaged in religious wars nominally about words such as "eucharist" and "predestination," Hobbes like many of his contemporaries was suspicious of eloquence. He and Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, Newton, and the others devalued it at every turn, though of course practicing it with great skill. Among numerous self-contradicting assertions in this regard is, from Leviathan: “for metaphors . . . . seeing they openly profess deceit . . . to admit them into counsel, or reasoning, were manifest folly.”²⁷⁶ Yes, dear Thomas, like speaking of a metaphor “professing” deceit, as though it were a man, or of a metaphor “admitted” into a council chamber. Yet one can sympathize with Hobbes, writing in England's time of troubles, or with any of those rhetorically brilliant enemies of rhetoric in the 16^th century trying to bring sense to a continent which had taken leave of it.

The modern cynic (and he is legion) replies that “basically” or “really” or “ultimately” behind all the words is individual passion and the coercion that controls it. Hobbes does appear to believe that passions are usually men’s motives. What he does not believe, Holmes shows, is that the passionless prudence of the rational man dominates human affairs. Hobbes was no cool utilitarian, either in his own person or in his view of how people behaved.
* * * *

He had nonetheless some strange beliefs about behavior, as behaviorists often do. When Hobbes speaks of families, for example, he attributes their cohesion to sexual attraction alone. No words of love bind. Concord in “the government of small families,” he declares offhandedly in the great Chapter 13 of Leviathan, “dependeth on natural lust.”²⁷⁷ He later repeats that he means “where there are supposed no laws of matrimony; no laws for the education of children,” that is, in the state of mere nature.²⁷⁸ But he does not mention love within the family, and was never married himself (though he did father an illegitimate daughter, to whom he behaved honorably). Only the laws bind people, he says, with the cudgel propped in the corner. His brief mentions of human love in Leviathan would satisfy the crudest utilitarian: “That which men desire, the are also said to LOVE. . . . so that desire and love are the same thing.”²⁷⁹ In Elements of Law (23.10; cf. Leviathan II.20) he identified the patriarch as a little king (a very common figure of speech in a patriarchal century), “and therefore I shall no more speak of [family and kingdom], as distinct, but as of monarchy in general.”²⁸⁰ Hannah Arendt’s complaint against Marx, as Allan Megill notes, was just such a reduction of the sphere of intimacy to the socio-economic: the division of labor “was originally nothing but the division of labor in the sexual act.”²⁸¹ Marx and Engels in The German Ideology The very word “love” is not common in Hobbes, used often (one might say metaphorically) in the sense of prideful delight, as a “love” for ones own opinions. Perhaps Hobbes’ life experience overcame his common sense. He was abandoned by his father and raised by an uncle. Still, he was treated lovingly all his life by the Cavendish family.

We are unsurprised to read in the Essays of Hobbes’ employer and model that love, construed merely as lust and irrational infatuation, is “the child of folly”:

They do best who, if they cannot but admit love [that is, banish it entirely], yet make it keep quarter [within its proper limits], and sever it wholly from their serious affairs and actions of life; for if it check [i.e., interfere] once with business, it troubleth men’s fortunes, and maketh men that they can no ways be true to their own ends.