Covenants through Courtship: Satisfying Glory with Equality in Hobbes’s Leviathan

• In Event: Modern Political Theory

Abstract

Although widely denied in the secondary literature, the Hobbesian passion of glory—i.e., the joy of contemplating one’s own power—does not necessarily require positional relations of power but is in fact capable of being meaningfully satisfied through equality. This is because the status of an equal (laid out in the laws of nature) is a substantial augmentation of one’s power, which significantly increases one’s present means to obtain future goods. As Hobbes makes clear, acknowledgment of each other’s equality “must be admitted” as a prerequisite for admission to civil life, and it entails a wide array of other-regarding forms of behavior, from striving to be accommodating to showing grace. Indeed, in comparing the laws of nature (concerned with acknowledging another’s equality) with the laws of honour (concerned with acknowledging another’s power), we see that there is significant overlap between the two, which further suggests that acknowledging equality entails acknowledging power—it is a form of mutual honouring. Compared to the mayhem and misery of the state of nature, where one did not have a right to even one’s body, suffice it to say that civil equality increases one’s power, and for that reason will satisfy one’s glory. This provocative revisionist interpretation of the productive role played by Hobbesian glory gives continued support to the twin ideas that: i) relations of equal recognition are fundamental to stable, satisfying polities, on par with the ends of physical security and material gain ; and ii) that to the extent that Hobbes’s system reveals this truth, he deserves to be recognized as the earliest thinker to put the pulse of recognition at the very heart of his politics.

Author

• Kieran Mabey, Yale University