Chapter 2
‘No respecter of persons’: Individual Merit in Milton’s Heaven
In the last chapter it was suggested that any satisfactory account of Milton's political modernity would have to avoid dismissing liberal ideals as the merely ideological derivations of market society I and recognize that, as Jay Bernstein puts it, their 'original force ...owes as much to the politically functioning public sphere in which public ~ opinion was formed through unrestricted discussion as it does to the market economy'.(1) The blanket scepticism regarding such ideals often displayed by Foucault is a similar disincentive to attentive analysis. To the extent that appeal to 'the people' implied, (and still implies) operations of definition, and therefore the exclusion of some individuals as the counterpart to the inclusion of others, the analyses, by Foucault and many others, of these practices and their effects in a whole range of ; social institutions 'are salutary. Discourses of liberty and the formation; of people as individuals are bound up with the exercise of power: The “Enlightenment," which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines.(2) But, notwithstanding his disclaimers, caveats, and methodological declarations, there is a consistent tendency in Foucault's texts; to interpret those social practices which contribute to individualization: as reflexes of the state:
…although in a formal way, the representative regime makes it possible, directly or indirectly, with or without relays, for the will of all to form the fundamental authority of sovereignty, the disciplines provide, at the base, a guarantee of the submission of forces and bodies. The real, corporal disciplines constituted the foundation of the formal, juridical liberties. The contract may have been regarded as the ideal foundation of law and political power; panopticism, [a series of techniques for instilling self-discipline by fostering a
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permanent sense of visibility] constituted the technique, universally widespread, of coercion. It continued to work in depth on the juridical structures of society, in order to make the effective mechanisms of power function in opposition to the formal framework that it had acquired.(3)
The reality of freedom is not that it is limited, or partial, or depends in certain respects on self-restraint, or that it is wrongly extended to some and not to others, or is in need of enlargement, conceptually or practically, but that 'the effective mechanisms of power function in opposition to the formal framework' and all its fine talk. The reality of freedom is domination.(4) Despite Foucault's announcement that 'we must eschew the model of Leviathan in the study of power' (meaning that we should give up the post-Hobbesian story of the constitution of the ,state by its subjects and instead attend to the construction of subjects by the state), his account of political modernity is, in essence, Hobbesian: 'The Liberty of a Subject, lyeth therefore only in those things, which in regulating their actions, the Soveraign hath praetermitted.'(5) Where Hobbes disallows the concept of tyranny because to allow thinking along such lines! inevitably produces more misery for all in the form of civil war, Foucault, refusing to espouse any particular political principle, lacks any' grounds for distinguishing liberal democracies from totalitarian states.(6) Where Hobbes, as Otto Gierke put it with reference to the intimate relation between the utter lawlessness of Hobbes's state of nature and the absolute lawfulness of his state 'made the individual omnipotent, with the object of forcing him to destroy himself instantly in virtue of his own omnipotence', Foucault simply inverts the humanist belief' in the individual as free origin of his own actions.(7) Socialization is synonymous with subjugation.(8)
It is necessary to get beyond Foucault's principled hostility to socialization if the different assumptions about human nature and society held by Hobbes, Milton and Locke are to be given their due weight. This chapter will begin by suggesting a fully developed account is beyond the scope of the present work -that these different assumptions have their roots in different social milieux. While Milton and Locke are recognizably partisans of those who were known in the seventeenth' century as 'the middle sort of people', Hobbes, regardless of his social origins, is best understood as an absolutist thinker not merely philosophically or politically, but in social and cultural terms as well. The distinction between these milieux and the types of individuality they
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produce and promote is essential to understanding the 'politics of Paradise Lost.
Hobbes is often described as a 'bourgeois' thinker. This characterization has a degree of validity insofar as the society on which Hobbes reflected was increasingly characterized by market relations, but in political terms it is misleading. It appears most plausible when Hobbes is discussing the modes of living and' the rights and privileges of the aristocracy. Of the 'three principal I causes of quarrel' in the 'nature of man' -'First, Competition; Secondly, Diffidence; Thirdly, Glory.' – only the last of these, the desire 'for Reputation' derives not from models suggested by natural philosophy but directly from social observation. In society, this desire is liable to take the form of vainglory, or 'boastfulness, excessive vanity' (OED):
Of the passions that most frequently are the causes of Crime, one, is Vain-glory, or a foolish over-rating of their own worth; as if difference of worth, were an effect of their wit, or riches, or bloud, or some, other naturall quality, not depending on the Will of those that have the Soveraign Authority. From whence proceedeth a Presumption that the punishments ordained by the Lawes, and extended generally to all Subjects, ought not to be inflicted on them, with the same rigour they are inflicted on poore, obscure, and simple men, comprehended under the name of the Vulgar.
(Leviathan, 341/ 154) (9)
It is clear that. vainglory is inegalitarian in inspiration, that a belief in ' the natural or inherent qualities of rank ('bloud') may be a key factor, and that it is not associated with the 'poore, obscure, and simple' or 'Vulgar'. Leo Strauss, took' such analyses as evidence that Hobbes's was a 'bourgeois' worldview which substituted the values of peaceable hedonism for those of social vanity.1O Jean Hampton 'associates the critique! of vainglory and potential rebelliousness with Hobbes's anti-feudal and Anti- Aristotelian worldview, which had no truck with the belief in natural rulers (see particularly Lev. 211 / 77).11 In opposition to such 'feudal' ideas about human worth there is a strong meritocratic streak: in Hobbes. He recommends that counsellors be chosen on grounds of I merit not birth: 'Good Counsell comes not by Lot, nor by Inheritance; and therefore there is no more reason to expect good Advice from the rich, or noble, in matter of State, than in delineating the dimensions of I a fortresse' (Lev. 391-2 / 184). He argues that nobility is contingent and
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social, not inherent and natural: 'Nobility is Power, not in all places, but onely in those Commonwealths, where it has Priviledges: for in such priviledges consisteth their Power' (L~v. 151 / 41). He accepts the suggestion of Selden's research that titles once denoted 'offices of Honour' but have since 'by occasion of trouble, and for reasons' of good and peaceable government', been 'turned into meer Titles' (Lev. ! 159 / 45). Opinions such as these led Clarendon to descibe his rejection of natural hierarchy as a 'levelling fancy' and to chide him in general for 'his extreme malignancy to the Nobility, by whose bread he hath' alwaies bin sustain'd'.(12)
What is more, Hobbes seems to cut through such empty pretences as 'meer Titles' in ruthlessly materialistic terms: 'The Value, or WORTH of a man, is as of all other things, his Price;. that. is to say, so much as ' would be given for the use of his Power: and therefore is not absolute but a thing dependant on the need and judgement of another' (Lev. 151-2 / 42). This assertion is one of the key pieces of evidence in Macpherson's case that Hobbes's theory of human nature, which posits' as 'a generall inclination of all mankind, a perpetuall and restlesse desire of Power after power' (Lev. 161 / 47), is 'a reflection of his insight into the behaviour of men towards one another in a specific kind of society'. By this Macpherson means a possessive market society, the only kind which allows a continual and universal competition for power without a degree of violence incompatible with the existence of society.(13)
Hobbes's reference to the 'price' of a man's power, or the potential value of his services, reflects his assumption 'that power is so generally transferable, that there is a pervasive market in power, which established the value of every man'. Macpherson argues that since power is something on which one can put a price, then Hobbes's claim that the 'Desire of Power, of Riches, of Knowledge, and of Honour. ...may be reduced to the first, that is Desire of Power' (Lev. 139 / 35) represents a reduction' of all human strivings and human value to the logic of market relations. ! His models 'of man and society. ..were bourgeois models'.(14) A ruthless' and calculating streak of commercialization undercuts feudal claims to : natural superiority.
However, as Macpherson acknowledges, Hobbes appears much less bourgeois when he is discussing the bourgeoisie. (15) There is his advocacy of sumptuary laws to prevent the flaunting of wealth.(16) There is his condemnation of the acquisition of wealth as an end in itself and his apparent belief that it was usually acquired crookedly rather than by hard work and talent. He criticizes the Presbyterian clergy, who 'did never in their sermons, or but lightly, inveigh against the lucrative vices of men
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of trade or handicraft; such as are feigning, lying, cozening, hypocrisy, or other uncharitableness', an omission he suspects was welcome 'to the generality of citizens and the inhabitants of market-towns'. Perhaps! even more telling is Hobbes's position on property, the holding of which: is, like everything else, dependent on the will of the sovereign., with; predictable consequences in terms of his position on the right of the sovereign to tax without consent:
of the one, issue where property rights in Hobbes's day were seriously disputed, Hobbes abandoned the interests of possessing classes i altogether. It was not surprising that his contemporaries classed' his views on property with those of the Royalist clergy, Sibthorp and Manwaring, who taught that all property was subject to the king. (17)
Furthermore, Hobbes does not advocate the eradication of the emotion of pride but only certain manifestations of it. Indeed he implies that it should be put to use. Hobbes's description of the titles of nobility as 'meer titles' means not that they are empty displays to be shredded by an egalitarian bourgeois rationalism but that they are filled with meaning only insofar as they can be. understood as spoken by the sovereign. In a commonwealth it is not 'the flattery of other men' (Lev. 164 / 49) which determines differences of human worth, but the' sovereign: 'The public worth of a man, which is the value set on him by the commonwealth, is that which men commonly call DIGNITY' and
is often signified 'by Names and Titles, introduced for distinction of such Value' (Lev. 152/42). Thus titles are a sign of the sovereign's esteem, an expression of his will, and the desire for them can be understood as i an' expression of that 'Desire of Praise' which' disposeth to laudable actions' (Lev. 162 / 48). Given that the desire for esteem is potentially asocial and destructive, it must be deprived of independent grounds and! instead organized around the will of the sovereign as a competition for his favour, the element which will underlie all signs of status.
In its assertion of the centrality of the sovereign Hobbes's theory sums up the aspirations of the absolutist project. But Hobbes can be described as an absolutist thinker not just in the sense that he asserts the in compatibility of sovereign power with external restrictions upon it, but in the sense that his theory reflects the social base of absolutism. The' competitive desire for esteem displayed by Hobbesian individuals makes' them antisocial but it also opens the way to an organization of their desire around the sovereign such that society can be conceived as consisting, essentially, of a bunch of atoms or, more precisely, electrons,
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cohering only in as much as they dance around -attend upon, pay obeisance to, a single nucleus. This is clearly a post-feudal ideal. But it is also, arguably, aristocratic. Certainly the belief that 'most men would rather lose their lives ...than suffer slander' is redolent of an aristocratic code of honour.(18) The reason Hobbe's thought has appeared to some as bourgeois and to others as aristocratic is that one finds in it a sense that status (rather than economic gain) is the overriding concern of men, combined with a recognition that in a post- : feudal epoch status can be to some extent attained by wealth, is certainly enhanced by it and, in the form of royal largesse, is often an expression of it.(19) Hobbes's theory derives from an epoch in which, as Perry Anderson says with respect to the absolutist state, 'noble power' took on a 'new form ... determined by the .spread of commodity production and exchange', in which 'The political order remained feudal, , while society became more and more bourgeois.'(20) The court itself was a market. As one writer cited by Lawrence Stone put it: 'All such as aspire and thirst after offices and honours run thither amaine with emulation I and disdaine of others; thither are the revenewes brought that appertain to the state, and there are they disposed out againe.' As Stone notes, 'The most striking feature of the great nation states of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was the enormous expansion of the Court and the central administration.' One significant consequence of this was that in the course of the sixteenth century the importance of the court; had increasingly overridden local loyalties. This concentration of the activity of the noble class on the court did not happen by accident.