Pascal and Hobbes

• In Event: Pascal's Politics

Abstract

While the bulk of Pascal’s Pensées is focused on philosophy and theology, it nonetheless contains important commentary on political life. Pascal is careful to subordinate politics to religion, arguing that only the latter can lead to the truly good life, but he nonetheless sees value in politics as a means of preventing great evil. He considers civil war to be “the greatest of all evils” (Pensées fr. 128), and this is an evil that politics rightly understood seeks to prevent. This places Pascal’s political thought firmly in line with that of Thomas Hobbes, though they come to their conclusions by very different means: the former through an overriding concern with the next life and the latter through the concrete world of the political.
This paper seeks to understand and explain Pascal’s political pragmatism in light of his concern with the wretchedness of the human condition, and in relation to the writings of Hobbes. As with the rest of the Pensées, Pascal’s politics is an attempt to meet people where they are. It is fundamentally pragmatic and realistic without losing sight of the greater goods which must be attained by nonpolitical means. Politics for him is a necessary but insufficient response to the problem of human wretchedness, the goal of which is to give justice to force and prevent large scale suffering. This human justice, distinct from the perfect justice of the divine, is malleable and flawed, but indispensable to society.

Author

• Samuel Little, Boston College