Symposium Papers, Comments and an Abstract: Comments On "Hobbes' Social Contract"Author(s): Jean HamptonSource: Noûs, Vol. 22, No. 1, 1988 A.P.A. Central Division Meetings (Mar., 1988), pp. 85-86Published by: WileyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2215555 .

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Comments On "Hobbes's Social Contract" JEAN HAMPTON

UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH

Gauthier wants to preserve a contract in Hobbes's social contract theory. This seems a laudable idea but for the fact that the notion of contract is deeply troubling in the context of a theory which claims "Covenants being but words, and breath, have no force to oblige, contain, constrain, or protect any man, but what is had from the publique Sword. . . . "1 ' As critics from the seventeenth century on- wards have asked, if people cannot keep contracts in the state of nature, how can they possibly keep the social contract?

In my book2, I develop an answer to such critics, which is "Hobbesian" not in the sense of being something explicitly stated by Hobbes, but in the sense of being both consistent with and im- plied by the starting points of his argument in Leviathan. I argue that the Hobbesian social contract is a "Self-Interested" Agreement, purely coordinative in character, in which self-interest is sufficient to motivate compliance by every party. For those accustomed to the standard view of things, such an argument takes some "getting used to", but Gauthier's objections in his paper do not show it to be wrong.

For example, in Section 2 Gauthier's counter-argument is based on a logical error. If we follow him in supposing that people's reasons for keeping the contract creating the sovereign stem not simply from a concern to achieve the object necessary to realize peace, but also "from the power of the sovereign himself" (p. 74), then we are assum- ing what we are required to prove. The social contract, if it is com- pleted, creates the sovereign, and the sovereign is not able to enforce the very agreement that brings him into existence. Gauthier might counter by proposing that the sovereign-designate can always use force to coerce any holdout individuals into keeping their promise

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to authorize his rule. But where would he get such force? He could get it only from other individuals who were willing to carry out his threats on the holdouts. But what reason would anyone have to carry out the sovereign-designate's threats, since there is, as yet, no coercive force persuading them to do so? Gauthier's argument traps people in a vicious circle; he makes the sovereign force they are trying to create necessary for its creation.

So Hobbes has got to find resources other than sovereign sanc- tions, which don't yet exist, to motivate compliance with the agree- ment creating the sovereign. But given his psychological views on human motivation, the only resource on which he can rely is self- interest. Gauthier worries in Section 3 that self-interest could never suffice to motivate people to join enforcement cadres, and he at- tacks an argument I give to the effect that they can. In my com- ments I will defend that argument, but let me note here that he neglects to discuss another argument I give in my book which is more perspicuous, which seems a very natural solution to this sort of problem, and which is nicely reliant on self-interest: the sovereign can generate enforcement cadres by paying the people in them.

Since Gauthier has not shown that there is an unsolvable free rider problem preventing the sovereign's institution by self-interested people, he has not established that it is either necessary or wise to explain the sovereign's creation by reconstructing Hobbes's no- tion of authorization such that it is the Gauthier-like device of con- strained maximization. Self-interest, in my view, propels people more powerfully than many have realized towards peace. While the political solution it makes possible is not as absolutist as Hobbes wanted given what he took to be necessary to realize peace, nonetheless, in part because it isn't absolutist, it is a solution which twentieth century theorists have good reason to take seriously.

REFERENCES

Leviathan, chapter 18, paragraph 4, page 89 of 1651 edition. Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

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