Political Hypocrisy

The Mask of Power, from Hobbes to Orwell and Beyond, Revised Edition - Second Edition

David Runciman

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781400889662
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

What kind of hypocrite should voters choose as their next leader? The question seems utterly cynical. But, as David Runciman suggests, it is actually much more cynical to pretend that politics can ever be completely sincere. Political Hypocrisy is a timely, and timeless, book on the problems of sincerity and truth in politics, and how we can deal with them without slipping into hypocrisy ourselves. Runciman draws on the work of some of the great truth-tellers in modern political thought--Hobbes, Mandeville, Jefferson, Bentham, Sidgwick, and Orwell--and applies his ideas to different kinds of hypocritical politicians from Oliver Cromwell to Hillary Clinton. He argues that we should accept hypocrisy as a fact of politics--the most dangerous form of political hypocrisy is to claim to have a politics without hypocrisy. Featuring a new foreword that takes the story up to Donald Trump, this book examines why, instead of vainly searching for authentic politicians, we should try to distinguish between harmless and harmful hypocrisies and worry only about the most damaging varieties.

1

HOBBES AND THE MASK OF POWER

HYPOCRISY AND SOVEREIGNTY

Throughout his long writing career, Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) displayed a striking consistency on his central political concerns: the scope and content of the laws of nature (which boil down to “the Fundamentall Law of Nature, which is to seek Peace, and follow it”); the unfettered power of the sovereign to decide on questions of “security” (including what was to count as a question of security); the threat posed to any lasting peace that comes from allowing individuals to exercise their private judgment on such questions; and the horrors of the civil war that might result.¹ But he also shifted his attitude in relation to a number of important issues: the role of rhetoric in political discourse, and its possible uses in the dissemination of “civil science”; the Erastian implications of the sovereign’s supreme authority over all questions of religious doctrine; the function of the concept of representation in building up the idea of the state. All of these areas of his thought have been the subject of considerable scholarly interest in recent years, and I will come back to them.² But another matter on which Hobbes appears to have altered his position, and one which has attracted far less attention than these others, concerns the dangers of hypocrisy in political life. The apparent shift can be illustrated by looking at the scope Hobbes gives to the problem of hypocrisy in three of his major works on politics: De Cive (1642), Leviathan (1651), and Behemoth (completed in 1668, but only published posthumously in 1682).³ In De Cive, though Hobbes has things of importance to say about the need for sincerity on the part of the sovereign, he has nothing at all to say about hypocrisy; he does not seem to have considered it a problem. In Behemoth, by contrast, Hobbes is obsessed with hypocrisy: it is everywhere in that book, not least in its opening lines, which blame hypocrisy (something Hobbes characterises as “double iniquity”) along with self-conceit (“double folly”) for the catastrophe of the English civil war.⁴ Between these two books comes Leviathan, where Hobbes is neither as sanguine about hypocrisy as he is in De Cive, nor as troubled by it as he is in Behemoth. Rather, it is here that he provides his clearest indications of where he thinks the limits of acceptable hypocrisy in political life might lie.

Before exploring what Leviathan has to say about the necessary hypocrisies of a civil existence, I want to discuss the wide gap between his treatment of the subject in the other two works. Part of the explanation for the different approaches taken in these two books lies in the kinds of books they are: De Cive is a work of philosophy (or “science” as Hobbes would call it); Behemoth is a history, designed to tell the story of, but more importantly to apportion the blame for, the civil war. It is much easier to be untroubled by hypocrisy when considering it philosophically, in the abstract or in the round; much harder, when thinking about an actual sequence of political events in which hypocrisy is on conspicuous display. Hobbes is by no means alone in this. David Hume (1711–1776), who was Hobbes’s intellectual successor in so many ways, also has a split attitude to hypocrisy in his different modes of writing: calmly and clinically dismissive of its apparent wickedness in his philosophical oeuvre, and even more so in some of his private letters,⁵ he is nevertheless deeply exercised by the hypocritical behaviour of some of the leading protagonists in his History of England, particularly in the chapters that deal with the period 1640–1660. Above all, Hume was unable to resist harping on what he saw as the brazen hypocrisy of Oliver Cromwell, a subject to which we shall return.⁶ This serves as an important reminder when thinking about the problem of hypocrisy: however much one might recognise its essential triviality as a vice, it is impossible to avoid its potential significance as a motor of political conflict, given its capacity to provoke people beyond measure. Hobbes and Hume also show how hard it is, even for the most clear-headed political thinkers, to keep their cool when it comes to the hypocrisy of people they thoroughly dislike or distrust (as Hume both disliked and distrusted what he knew of Cromwell’s personality, even as he acknowledged the hold it gave him over his followers). Behemoth is perhaps Hobbes’s angriest piece of political writing, and while it is true that the hypocrisy he sees at work among those who took their part against the king helps to fuel his anger, it is equally true that his anger serves to fuel his obsession with their hypocrisy. Hobbes would have us believe that the reason he cannot stand the Presbyterians (the primary focus of his fury in Behemoth) is because they are hypocrites; but it is just as likely that the reason he thinks they are hypocrites is because he simply cannot stand them.

Nevertheless, the difference between De Cive and Behemoth is not simply one of genre or provocation. It is also the case that Hobbes is making different kinds of arguments in the two books, though by no means incompatible ones. One way to capture this difference, and thereby to see the wider continuity in Hobbes’s view of hypocrisy, is to look at what he has to say in De Cive about the role of sincerity and good intentions in political life. In a striking note at the end of chapter III, which follows his lengthy itemisation of the various laws of nature, Hobbes offers this summary: “Briefly, in a state of nature, Just and Unjust should be judged not from actions but from the intention and conscience of the agents.”⁷ In other words, a just action is one that is sincerely intended to be just. One implication of this is Hobbes’s famous contention that the laws of nature, though they bind internally (in foro interno), do not always do so externally (in foro externo)—that is, an action performed with the intention to seek peace is just, even if it does not accord with the outward observance of the laws of nature. So, for example, “to steal from Thieves” is, in Hobbes’s terms, “to act reasonably,” because it is consistent with a desire to seek peace: although natural law says we should behave towards others with consideration—“the fourth precept of nature is that everyone should be considerate of others”—treating thieves in this way would just encourage them.⁸ But more importantly for our purposes here, in chapter III of De Cive Hobbes also draws the countervailing inference: that to act in accordance with the natural law without meaning to do so is injustice. “Laws which bind the conscience,” he writes, “may be violated not only by an action contrary to them but also an action consonant with them, if the agent believes it to be contrary. For although the act itself is in accordance with the laws, his conscience is against them.”⁹ In other words, if you happen to do the right thing, that is not enough; unless you intended it to be the right thing, what you did was still wrong.

Is this emphasis on the inner motives of political actors a veiled warning against the dangers of hypocrisy in politics, of not being on the inside what you appear to be on the outside? I think not, for two reasons. First, the injunction against insincerity in effect only applies to those who remain subject in their actions to the laws of nature; that is, it only applies to sovereigns. On Hobbes’s understanding of politics, sovereigns are the sole agents who persist in a state of nature; everyone else is subject to the civil laws.¹⁰ So the scope of this injunction is in political terms pretty narrow. It is true that Hobbes allows for the possibility that all the members of a state could collectively form the sovereign body, in what he, and we, would call an absolute democracy. In that case, everyone would be part of the sovereign power. But it certainly would not follow that everyone would be living under the laws of nature. Individual citizens would still be subject to the civil law. Sovereignty would reside with the artificial body of the citizens, assembled together to act by majority rule. It is hard to know what it would mean to insist that an artificial body of this kind should be sincere in all it does. Part of the problem is that it is not clear what the inner life of the assembly would consist in—an assembly does not have thoughts of its own beyond those expressed in its collective decisions. But the deeper problem, certainly for Hobbes, is that sincerity is the last thing one would expect of the individual members of such a body, given the kind of politics they were bound to be engaged in. Democracies were places of posturing, rhetorical dissimulation, and grandstanding—“nothing but an aristocracy of orators,” as he witheringly puts it in The Elements of Law (1640).¹¹ This was one of the lessons Hobbes learned from Thucydides, whose translator he had been. The reason monarchies were to be preferred to democracies is precisely because the institutions of popular rule made political sincerity practically impossible. Such sincerity could never therefore be a widespread value in Hobbes’s view of the world.

The second point to make here is that Hobbes’s claim about insincerity does not straightforwardly translate into an argument against hypocrisy. What Hobbes says is that an action which happens to coincide with natural law is unjust if it is nothing more than that: pure chance. For example (and this is my example, not Hobbes’s, but it is probably the sort of thing he had in mind), if a sovereign ruler declares war on a rival power for entirely capricious reasons—boredom, avarice, cruelty—it may be that the result is to cement peaceful relations between the two states; perhaps the threatened state, terrified by the prospect of war against such a capricious opponent, surrenders straight away. Still, in Hobbes’s terms, the act of aggression that produced this outcome is an unjust one, because the aggressor did not care about peace; mindless aggression is wrong whatever its consequences. But aggressive acts that produce peaceful outcomes are not strictly speaking hypocritical, because hypocrisy requires more than the coincidence of an ill-intended act with a desirable result. If I commit a burglary, say, with the result that its victim ends up better off than before thanks to an insurance payout, that does not make me a hypocrite. It might make me a fool, if my intention was to do the victim harm; but fools, like liars, are by no means always hypocrites. Hypocrisy is not about a mismatch between intentions and outcomes. Rather, hypocrisy is an ill-intended act dressed up to look like a well-intended one (or, very occasionally, a well-intended act dressed up to look like an ill-intended one).

Hobbes has nothing to say about this sort of hypocrisy in De Cive. Indeed, how sovereigns choose to dress up their actions in their relations with each other is not really an issue for Hobbes. They may well see the need to pretend to be abiding by the outward demands of the laws of nature even when they have no intention of doing so—signing a peace treaty they have no intention of keeping, for example. This would be no different than stealing from thieves, and may be the rational thing to do in the treacherous world of international relations, if it is the only way to achieve security. Certainly, Hobbes had no great expectations that sovereigns would be open with each other.¹² But sovereigns who sign a treaty they have no intention of keeping because they have no interest in peace or security are behaving unjustly, whether they try to conceal their real motives or not. Let me illustrate with a more recent example—was Hitler a hypocrite for signing Neville Chamberlain’s little piece of paper at Munich in 1938, pledging himself to a peace he had no real intention of upholding? Not really, because he hardly made any efforts to conceal his underlying contempt for what he was doing. But on this account, that is not the point—what matters is that if Hitler wanted war for war’s sake, then he was an unjust ruler in Hobbes’s terms, whatever the outcome of his actions, and however he dressed them up. Hypocrisy is not the issue for Hobbes. The issue is justice.

But if hypocrisy is not the issue in the world of sovereigns, neither is it the issue in the world of subjects, for entirely opposite reasons. Intentions, which are all important under natural law, cease to count under civil law, because what matters is outward conformity to the will of the sovereign. Conscience, which may be the test of natural justice, is not the test of what Hobbes calls “right,” i.e., justice under the laws of a commonwealth. Indeed, it is a large part of Hobbes’s polemical purpose throughout his political writings to reconfigure how people understand the language of “conscience,” so that they might come to accept that conscientious action simply means acting in accordance with the will of the sovereign.¹³ A subject’s internal beliefs or convictions are irrelevant here. So, Hobbes says in chapter XII of De Cive, “I am not acting unjustly if I go to war at the order of my commonwealth though I believe it is an unjust war; rather, I act unjustly if I refuse to go to war, claiming for myself the knowledge of what is just and unjust that belongs to a commonwealth.”¹⁴ And he goes on: “Those who teach that subjects commit sin in obeying a command of their Prince which seems to them unjust, hold an opinion which is not only false but one of those opinions which are inimical to civil obedience.”¹⁵ Under these conditions, subjects may have to do things that would fall under the broad heading of hypocrisy: they may have to perform actions, or profess beliefs, that are suggestive of an underlying set of convictions that they do not hold. So it is hardly surprising that Hobbes does not choose to categorise this sort of behaviour as hypocrisy, with all the pejorative connotations that the term brought with it (which was at least as true then as it is now). Instead, he wants to emphasise that the concealment of one’s inner motives on the part of subjects may be not merely inevitable, but essential to the survival of the state.

THE HYPOCRISY OF DISOBEDIENCE

In the world of sovereigns and subjects described in De Cive, there is no real space for worrying about hypocrisy. It is more or less irrelevant for sovereigns, and more or less unavoidable for subjects, which is why in neither case does Hobbes label it as such. How then does hypocrisy become Hobbes’s central worry by the time he writes Behemoth? The answer is that Behemoth is about a third category of political actor, beyond sovereigns and subjects: it is about the perpetrators of sedition. Of course, throughout his political writings, Hobbes has plenty of things to say about disobedient subjects, and how they should be dealt with. In De Cive, he categorises “the CRIME OF LÈSE-MAJESTÈ,” which is punishable by death, as “the deed or word” by which citizens reveal that they no longer intend to obey their sovereign. “A citizen reveals such an intention by his action when he inflicts or attempts to inflict violence against those who hold the sovereign power or are carrying out their orders; such are traitors, Regicides, those who bear arms against their country or desert to the enemy in wartime. People reveal the same intention in words when they plainly deny that they or the other citizens are obligated to offer such obedience.”¹⁶ But the seditious individuals Hobbes is concerned with in Behemoth do not simply belong in one or other of these categories. The reason is that they did not reveal their intentions in so “plain” or self-evident a manner, certainly not until the civil war was well under way—indeed, Hobbes writes, some of them “did not challenge the sovereignty in plain terms, and by that name, till they had slain the king.”¹⁷ Instead, they sought to conceal their true intentions behind the mask of their supposed piety. It is this that made them hypocrites. What is more, it was their hypocrisy, Hobbes suspected, that enabled them to get away with it. “Who would think,” he writes, “that such horrible designs as these could so easily and so long remain covered by the cloak of godliness?”¹⁸

This deliberate concealment is what makes hypocrisy “double iniquity” as Hobbes understands it: first there is the sin, then there is the sin of attempting to cover it up. It is also what distinguishes hypocrisy from what Hobbes calls the “double folly” of self-conceit, which constitutes a form of self-deception. For Hobbes, the ways in which human beings were capable of deceivi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Hobbes and the Mask of Power
• 2 Mandeville and the Virtues of Vice
• 3 The American Revolution and the Art of Sincerity
• 4 Bentham and the Utility of Fiction
• 5 Victorian Democracy and Victorian Hypocrisy
• 6 Orwell and the Hypocrisy of Ideology
• Conclusion: Sincerity and Hypocrisy in Democratic Politics
• Afterword
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index