Views of Machiavelli, Hobbes and Grotius about Society - Essay Example

How do the views of Machiavelli, Hobbes and Grotius differ and what aspect of society influenced these theories Machiavelli, Hobbes and Grotius were all thinkers who engaged with different notions of the law and, beyond that, the state which oversaw and administered the law. However, these three thinkers approach the problems of the law - on what basis does the law stand, how should the law be administered, what is the nature of the state when it comes into contact with the law - in widely different ways. For Machiavelli the law was a means to an end. The law was purely that which enabled the principality to be held together and the prince to hold on to power. Hobbes, in a different way, also saw the rule of law as a thing which was necessarily imposed from above. To his mind the law was a necessary and rational perversion of nature, part of the civil contract that governed all societies - a compromise in order for men to live peacefully. Grotius, on the other hand, would not accept the separation of nature and the law - the true law arose out of human nature and, more pertinently to him, the nature of God. As such, the law is not merely a series of arbitrary rules with which those in a social group (say, the state) are forced to comply. It is a base for all interaction, including interaction between states. As such Grotius points to a law than can be transnational, one that binds all cultures and societies. Machiavelli portrayed a system of government that, unlike the systems of government that had been propounded before, was based entirely on pragmatic concerns. In his writings there is a large gap between the concept of things that are morally correct, and those things which are politic and advisable. As he says when regarding the way a leader chooses to rule his people, "it is a sound maxim that reprehensible actions may be justified by their effects" (Brown et al. 266). This, then, completely changes the landscape of how one is to understand the law, which before Machiavelli had been considered the inscription of rules barring those practices which are immoral or against the common good. In other words, people had seen the law as something which was used to protect society from those members of it who wished to harm the rest. The only way the law is a consideration in Machiavelli's philosophy is if the prince needs to pacify the populace and, by doing so, retain control of a kingdom. The rule of law, then, is merely used by the leader as an appeasement to the collective might of the masses. However - Machiavelli is quite clear - the law can be suspended at any time the prince sees fit, and it should offer no protection from the violence he might wish to inflict - "It should be observed here that men should either be caressed or crushed" (Brown et al. 260). An example that Machiavelli uses is the annexation of Milan by Louis XII and its subsequent loss to Ludovico. When Louis had taken the principality, the people expected certain favours from him but, in actuality, he ruled as a tyrant. This made it nearly impossible for him to hold the Milan when a new attack came from without. "For when the people who had opened the gate to Louis found that they did not receive the benefits they expected, they could not endure the oppressive rule of the new master" (Brown et al. 258). Notice that Machiavelli does not treat the law (and other benefits, such as governmental structures, a wealthy privileged class, etc.) as a result of the organic growth of society. Rather, it is a tactical means of a prince retaining power. Machiavelli does not identify the rule of just law as a prerequisite of the state, quite the opposite, it is one weapon in the arsenal that a ruler might use in order to perpetuate his rule. As we will soon find, Hobbes sees the law as a treaty between a group of people - a little like a social contract - which grows of necessity when enough people congregate. For Machiavelli, however, the rule of law is applied from above, by the prince or emperor. The rule of law is intrinsic to the power of the ruler, it is guaranteed by his presence and it is weighted so as to either benefit him, or to keep the social conditions in balance (and thus avoid the dangerous unrest that is caused by a populace that declines to be ruled). This is why it is best if the new ruler of a principality is present in the country he has invaded - "One of the best and most effective solutions is for the conqueror to go and live there" (Brown et al. 258). It is his presence which guarantees the following of the laws he decrees; it is power - and not natural inclination or mutual treaty - which holds together a fragile state. How then should a state be run to best perpetuate the ascendency of its ruling class The three examples that Machiavelli provides are Rome, Sparta and Venice. In the case of the latter two, the empires were able to perpetuate themselves with very little disturbance between the ruling class and the general populace. The reason for this was, on the whole, numerical. In the case of Venice the ruling population ("the gentlefolk" (Brown et al. 264)) was always either larger than or equal to the classes that were ruled by them. Therefore lawlessness was controlled by the superior force that the ruling class could call upon. In the case of Sparta, although the ruling senate was proportionally small, the population was kept static and no foreigners were allowed into the kingdom. The static population, with no access to any notion of a different way to live, meant that the status quo remained in place. However, both Venice and Sparta relied on the lack of expansion and the lack of war to provide a restful, unproblematic and lawful population. Although more peaceful, neither could ever achieve the greatness of Rome. In the final analysis Machiavelli prefers the relatively problematic relations between the ruling classes of Rome and its plebians, to the other two systems of government. There was great expansion as the Roman empire grew, and, because of the expansion, there were numerous disturbances. This led to give and take between senate and people, teaching the Roman rulers that - "The best way of maintaining their position was to protect the plebs from injustice" (Brown et al. 263). Therefore, the creation of law that protected the citizenship (and which gave the citizenship some power in their dealings with the ruling classes), actually strengthened the position of the ruling classes because, although there were outbreaks of unrest, the state held firm. "Squabbles between the populace and the senate should, therefore, be looked upon as an inconvenience which it is necessary to put up with in order to arrive at the greatness of Rome" (Brown et al. 265). This is not to suggest that Machiavelli believed that a democratic rule of law was the most pragmatic form for prince's to keep control of their kingdoms. Indeed - as in the case of Romulus and his creation of Rome - Machiavelli suggests that a benign autocracy writing and upholding the law creates the most stable society. His point of view suggests again that the law does not arise from the interactions of people who need rules to live together, rather it is something that is imposed by the strong and which the pliant masses accept - "Though the many are too incompetent to draw up a constitution... when they realise it has been done, they will not agree to abandon it" (Brown et al. 266) This, he says, is historically how the great societies (and the great systems of law that ruled them) arose, citing "Moses, Lycurgus, Solon" (Brown et al. 267) as the strong rulers that instigated the rule of law. The law, for Machiavelli then, is a thing to be used, a means to an end and not an end in itself. It is imposed from above, and the populace below follow it blindly. That the law is respected is important to the cohesion of the state not because, in the final determination, it allows men to interact in safety, but that it gives them enough safety to avoid being troublesome to the ruling class. The purpose of the law is to buttress the leader's power, and a system of law can easily be swept away (be it just or unjust) if it do not fulfil this function. Machiavelli's advice to a prince attempting to cement his position in a new country is to place himself at the centre of the society that he wishes to conquer, to make a new law in his own image, "in short, to leave nothing of that province intact, and nothing in it, neither rank, nor institution, nor form of government, nor wealth, except that it be held by such as recognize it comes from you" (Brown et al. 268). Machiavelli worked in government in Florence during the reign of the infamous tyrant Borgia, and was summarily dismissed when the Medici ascended to the throne. He saw at first hand the workings of the princes of his day, and also the success with which they ruled. The emphasis of his political outlook on pragmatism arises out of both his working connection with governing powers, and the extent of the power that autocrats of his time wielded. His philosophy can also be attributed to his passionate and strongly-held beliefs (one of which, despite the constant connection of his name with authoritarianism was actually republicanism). He believed that the future for Italy was a strong and united country - that, like the Roman centuries before, Italy's future lay in expansion and togetherness. He was, before the term fully came into use, a nationalist, and, as Skinner (1978) has pointed out, was the first to understand the state as it was to become understood by the modern world. His pragmatism not only came from his understanding of the workings of the ruling classes, it was also formulated in an attempt to show the way to a unified (and therefore greater) Italy could be formed. Thomas Hobbes, like Machiavelli, was writing expressly against the notion that the law was somehow outside society's constructs, that is was handed down from on high or was inherent in humannature. However, unlike Machiavelli (who saw the law as an addition to the state, at the whim of the state's ruler to be imposed or rescinded), Hobbes sees the law as the bedrock of society, and tried to peel away all the layers of civilisation in an attempt to see when and how the notion of law began. He begins from a concept of human nature - what is natural to man outside of the context of society. Men are, generally, equal in strength and intelligence - outsides of the trapping of power, social position, class, they have equal needs and desires. Therefore, he goes on, "from this equality of ability, arises equality of hope in the attaining of our ends" (Brown et al. 336). The natural course for a man to take, he believes, is to attempt to fulfil those ends no matter what is done to other men - even if others are beaten, killed or enslaved, man will do so without compunction. This action is just in the sense that, outside a system of laws, there can be no notion of justice, just of success (Cf. Palaver 1995, 57-59). Hobbes says, therefore, that "such augmentation of dominion over men, being necessary to man's conservation, it ought to be allowed him" (Brown et al. 336). There is nothing a priori and in nature that suggests man should hold to any of the laws that are laid down by society. When dealing with a state of nature Hobbes identifies both the right of nature and the law of nature - the only two dictates that man must follow because of his nature as a living being. The right of nature is that a man is able to continue his existence; in nature he is given both strength and intelligence so as to perpetuate his own life. The law of nature, extending from the right of nature, is the general rule that man is forbidden to do anything, or - perhaps more importantly - engage in any relationship, that would endanger his own life. Liberty, particularly the notion of liberty that was being advocated at the time that Hobbes was writing, is being free from all impediments in the pursuit of one's own wants and desires. Where the right and law of nature come up against a problem is in the interaction of human beings; liberty in a social setting becomes extremely problematic. It leads to a constant battle between individuals in an attempt to secure their own existence and desires, and would mean that each social interaction would involve an act of physical violence to reach a resolution. Hobbes understands that such a system - in which all were considered free - would equally require a never-ending and perpetual "state of war" (Brown et al. 337). In this way he is opposed to Machiavelli (and can be seen as even more extreme in his support for authoritarianism and the rule of a single all-powerful monarch). For Machiavelli the relationship between a ruler and his subjects was one of necessary negotiation and tactical positioning. The ruler held on to his kingdom and its people by a thread, the populace made a difference to whether he retained or was removed from power, and sometimes the ruler could accept a certain amount of lawlessness if it meant he held on to his crown. Hobbes, on the other hand, sees the relationship between the people and the state as necessary for any forward process of humanity. Without the state, chaos rules. This, for Hobbes, is demonstrated by lawlessness within society which, in a small way, gives an indication of what might occur if the state was not imposed. He speaks of rich men who go out well armed, constantly looking back in case of thieves or murderers - "Does he not there as much accuse mankind by his actions, as I do by my words" (Brown et al. 337). The central theme of Hobbes's discourse, then, is that in a state of nature there can be notion of right or wrong, just or unjust - "Where there is no common Power, there is no law; where no laws, no injustice" (Brown et al. 338). The central premise of the creation of a state is an attempt to step outside of the constant violence that the state of war creates. Men, if they are to make any kind of advancement in any other art than that of war, require the protection of law, as Hobbes says, "reason suggests convenient articles of peace, upon which men may be drawn to agreement" (Brown et al. 338). These laws are not, it must be stressed, in any way universal, or even stand for the moral right. Rather, they are improvised measures to allow, at least for a while, peace to reign. And, in order to have a power that might police and administrate the peace, to make sure that the articles of peace are adhered to, there must be a strong central authority. This leader is the Leviathan and, in Hobbes opinion, the populace should submit themselves to this strong central will than risk the alternative - a constant state of war. The time in which Thomas Hobbes was living contributed no small part to this particular world-view. Hobbes lived through the English civil war, a time in which a country that had been ruled by the divine right of kings for centuries was making its first, tentative experiments with democracy. Living in the time he did, it might be understandable if Hobbes considered the experiments not tentative enough. There was great violence at the time of the civil war, and the ascension of Charles Cromwell to head of state did nothing to provide greater liberty for the general populace. What the civil war taught Hobbes was the danger of living without order and the destruction that can be wreaked when there is a challenge to authority. He says in Leviathan, "It may peradventure be thought that there was never such a time, nor condition of war as this," but then goes on to imagine the utter catastrophe of a society that had no order at all. It is perhaps no wonder, therefore, that Hobbes held the necessity of order in higher esteem than anything else, even individual freedom. In Hobbes's writing, then, we once more we see a similarity, but also a difference, with the thought of Machiavelli. Like Hobbes, the Italian did not believe that law was a universal or natural concept. It required a strong central hand to both write and enforce the law, and both writers expect the general populace to follow the law as it is laid down. However, there is a quite important difference. For Machiavelli the law was a means, the end being the retention and the strengthening of the state. The law was given the populace to appease them, so that they would not attempt to challenge their rulers. For Hobbes the situation is reversed. The law comes first, it is the first tenet of society and the bridge over which man crosses from savage, war-like nature to the modern state. Law is necessary in Hobbes's philosophy, it is its bedrock. Grotius, like Hobbes, believed that law was the first component of man's interaction and the first step towards building a state. However, unlike both Hobbes and Machiavelli, Grotius believes in the natural rectitude of the law, and that certain laws are applicable in all circumstances. As such, Grotius moves out of the confines of the state and introduces a concept of an international law, or a law of nations. The first thing that Grotius intends to examine (and dismiss) is the kind of conception of law that was arrived at by both Machiavelli and Hobbes, i.e. that it was a constructed system that had no grounding in nature. The first thing, therefore, that he needed to dismiss was the notion that man in his natural state only acts upon those things that will lead to his own advantage; in other words that man, like animals, is centrally concerned only with his own welfare. Grotius, therefore, takes greater care than the other two writers to separate rational humanity from beasts, who have no knowledge of themselves and no ability to reason. This argument implicitly contains the Christian component of Grotius's thought that will become explicit in other parts of his writing; for, as Christians understand it, man was made in the image of God. Grotius also points to children as providing an empirical proof that even before man has entered into a civilised state he is not necessarily predisposed to selfishness: "even before the training has begun, some disposition to do good to others appears" (Brown et al. 326). In fact, Grotius believes, there are certain laws that arise out of the natural state of man - and these laws, on the whole, are the central tenets on which the legal system of Grotius's day had been built. They include such maxims as: the need to abstain from that which is others, the restoration of another's goods if we take them, the obligation to fulfil promises, making good losses that were our fault, and fitting a punishment to a crime. Whereas Machiavelli saw law as initiating certain rights - for example the right to property and the necessity to make good an obligation - Grotius sees these rights as already present in nature; the laws that are written to protect property and contract arise out of a natural right. Men, of their nature, are made in such a way that they enter into mutually beneficial relationships, and it is from these relationships that the law grows. As Grotius points out, "the mother of municipal law is that obligation which arises from mutual consent" (Brown et al. 328). Law is, in this way, universal to all men. This impression of Grotius's is strengthened all the more by his Christian faith, which teaches that the law comes by the will of God. Although he himself admits that the universality of the law would still apply even if one didn't believe in a divine being, it is certainly clear in large parts of his writing that he summons God as a guardian and guarantor of the possibility that the law might be applied to all men. Assuming, therefore, that laws are universal and not simply cast to fit a particularly set of circumstances - as Machiavelli would have it, to help the ruling class of a particular kingdom to govern - then it follows that the law should be universally applied to all. If law is not limited to the particular circumstances of a group of individuals - i.e. the state as it was envisioned by both Hobbes and Machiavelli - then it can also be applied across state borders and, importantly for Grotius, to the actions taken on behalf of the states themselves. The true law arose out of the mutual consent of peoples in order that they could live in close proximity of one another. Therefore, in just the same way, "national laws have in view the advantage of that state, so by mutual consent it has become possible that certain laws should originate between all states" (Brown et al. 329). Not only is it correct before the eyes of law and nature for states to follow a mutually agreed law, it is also in the advantage of the individual states. In the world as Machiavelli described it, the process of wars depended on the victory of strength and the destruction of the weak. There was no rule of law between states, only within them, and it remained within the purview of the ruler whether to attack or defend. In the world Grotius envisions, these decisions would be designated to a higher power - and the world would therefore protect itself to the mutual advantage of all. Just as the populace keep a state's laws because to break them would annul the protection that the law affords them, so a state would keep the law of nations because it would be in its own self-interest, "the state which transgresses the laws of nature and of nations cuts away also the bulwarks which safeguard its own future peace" (Brown et al. 329) Grotius continues with the analogy of the state with the individual citizen when he speaks about the necessity of regulating war. However this never amounts to a pacifistic stance. Quite the opposite, Grotius bemoans the fact that many of the Christian faith are abandoning war as a means of righting injustice because wars are raged without any restraint. Grotius believed that rather than do away with war altogether - violence is, after all, an effective tool - it should be regulated and put to just causes. He was adamant that "least of all should that be admitted which some people imagine, that in war all laws are in abeyance." (Brown et al. 330) . Grotius hopes for the possibility of creating a criteria by which to judge the justness of a war or, in other words, to limit the use of violence as the state limits it to its citizens. Violence can only be used to punish those who are found guilty of a crime, and violence outside of this framework is unjust. Just as Hobbes called the laws of a state "articles of peace", so Grotius wanted to create a meaningful peace between warring states by limited and judging the ways wars could be raged - "[wars] must be carried on with not less scrupulousness than judicial processes are wont to be" (Brown et al. 331) Like Hobbes, Hugo Grotius lived through a turbulent time in his nation's history. He lived to see the Eighty Years War and the Thirty Years War, both of which ravaged Europe in his lifetime. Not only were these violent and, on the whole, pointless wars, they were also wars that were waged largely in the name of religion. As a moderate Calvinist, Grotius did not wish to see the suffering of those who fought over different manifestations of the same God, but he realised the lack of pragmatism within a creed of pacifism. He wished to expand the system of civil governance and law to an international level, for it was precisely at this level that the most violence was being done and where a reasonable system of laws was most required. The power of his writing and his philosophical work comes, in the most part, from the Classical learning that was becoming available in Europe during the 15th and 16th centuries and strong belief in the biblical teachings of Christ. Although some commentators see him very much of a man of his time, encumbered by the baggage that went along with his generation - for example Bull argues that he is "difficult to read, even in English translation, encumbered as they are with the biblical and classical learning with which in Grotius' generation it was thought helpful to buttress theoretical arguments" (Bull 65), Grotius is anything but obscure. Grotius's entire body of thought relies on a return to the idealistic notion of law that began with Plato and that is such a central tenet of Christian philosophy. He relied on the idealist concept of the law in a hope that he could create a state of peace, not only within states, but between them. Machiavelli, Hobbes and Grotius differ widely in their treatment of the state and of the law. Whilst Machiavelli and Hobbes are, on the whole, arguing against the notion of a natural, universal law - Machiavelli relegating it to the status of kingdom-building tactic, Hobbes actually seeing it as a necessary perversion of nature - Grotius sees the law in an idealistic vein, seeing the law as both reasonable and handed down by God. For Machiavelli the state is the end and the law is the means; law must be applied to the populace in order to protect the leader and to appease the masses in case of revolt. Hobbes, rather, saw the law as the end and the state as the means; without law there would be a constant state of war and without a strong nation there would be no way to guarantee the law. Grotius, staking out different territory, saw the law as all-consuming, it orders both the natural world and the civilised world, it imbues the entire structure. The state should not only be the administrator of the law but, because the law is universal, should also be subject to the law. Law should transcend national boundaries and state lines. In these three thinkers we can see a definite progression (despite the fact that Grotius drew much of his thinking from classical authors) towards the modern notion of the state. For, whilst Machiavelli's system is intent to buoy a strong leader and Hobbes's, of necessity, requires an autocrat at its summit, Grotius's theory paves the way to democracy - not only on the national level, but also internationally. This hope of an international community policed by common law, even now, has not reached full fruition. WORKS CITED Brown, Chris; Terry Nardin, Nicholas Rengger (eds.). International Relations in Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Bull, Hedley. "The Importance of Grotius in the Study of International Relations". Hugo Grotius and International Relations. Eds Bull, Hedley, et al. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990. Palaver, Wolfgang. "Hobbes and the Katchon: The Secularization of Sacrificial Christianity." Contagion 2: 1995. 57-74. Skinner, Quentin. The Foundations of Modern Philosophical Thought. Volume 1: The Renaissance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978). Read More