Representation and Punishment in the Political Theory of Thomas Hobbes

• In Event: Economies of Violence in Modern Statecraft

Abstract

The question of how to justify the state’s right to punish citizens is both difficult and crucial for those political theorists who employ a version of the social contract. This paper will explore this problem in relation to the work of Thomas Hobbes, and in doing so will demonstrate that the question of how a representative, authorised sovereign can commit rightful acts of violence against members of the community is one with which theorists were engaged from the very inception of modern social contract theory. The paper will argue that it is precisely the representative function of such sovereigns, when combined with citizens’ inalienable right to self-defence, which means that the right to punish is unique among the rights held by the Hobbesian sovereign in not being authorised by subjects.

In making this argument, the paper will suggest that the conflict between punishing state and resisting criminal is not one between the sovereign and an individual who has placed themselves outside of the state by breaking the social contract. Nor is it a clash of opposing rights held by state and citizen. Rather, what we see is a case of contradictory representations, in which the resisting subject utilises their right to represent themselves, and in doing so denies this function to their sovereign. By pointing out that throughout this process the citizen retains their civic status, the paper demonstrates that even in a political system built on the principle of political authorisation and representation, punishment is nonetheless a key civic function grounded in a very different set of justifications.

The alternative story Hobbes tells about the origin of the right to punish—that acts of punishment are not ‘owned’ by subjects, and are instead acts attributed solely to the sovereign representative—would seem to undermine any rights held by the punished subject. Indeed this is precisely the response by numerous readers of Hobbes, including Richard Tuck, S.A. Lloyd and Deborah Baumgold, who argue that the relationship between punisher and punished is, in practical terms, nothing but the relationship between two individuals in the state of nature. However, by arguing for a truly political model of punishment, in which in some spheres the state is denied its representative function while fulfilling it in all other areas, this paper will suggest that the punished citizen retains certain protective rights while undergoing punishment precisely because they have not authorised their own punishment. It is therefore not representation but precisely its absence which, in certain crucial areas of governance, provides Hobbesian theory with the ‘proto-liberal’ elements which have been celebrated by figures such as Alan Ryan and Alice Ristroph.

The paper thus aims to shed new light on a notoriously challenging element of Hobbes’s thought. But it also hopes to highlight the ways in which the source and nature of the right to punish was seen, in the early modern period, to come under strain with the introduction of voluntaristic theories of state legitimacy, and associated concepts such as political representation. This in turn suggests that the status of a right or status as political, in which the relationship between citizen and sovereign was paramount, could not, in these early modern discourses, be reduced to a representative or rights-based relationship, perhaps forcing a reconsideration of the history of the concept of ‘political’ itself, and of its opposition to the extra-political or natural sphere.

Author

• Signy Thora Gutnick Allen, London School of Economics