Hobbes on Respect for Persons and Self-Respect
Elena Irrera, 2017
Can people respect each other where there are no laws and no judges, and everyone fears everyone else? In a chapter from the collection “The Roots of Respect”, Elena Irrera finds several kinds of respect in Thomas Hobbes, even in the war of all against all. This retelling of the chapter shows how honour becomes a price, how self-respect differs from vainglory, and why equality in Hobbes begins with fear.
Who it is for
For anyone who wants to understand where respect between people comes from, why the struggle for status turns so easily into hostility, and what real self-respect rests on. And for everyone curious about Hobbes without a textbook.
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 judgment of another.
A war in which nobody fires a shot
Picture a village with no police, no court and no common rules. The neighbours aren't fighting yet. But everyone locks their door with three locks and has no idea what the person on the other side of the fence is planning. This is how the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes described the state of nature: human life without a state, before one appears or after it has collapsed.
Hobbes has a famous name for this kind of life: the war of all against all. War, for him, is not necessarily a battle. What matters in it is distrust and fear. Where they rule, Hobbes writes, there is no place for industry, the arts or society, and worst of all is the continual fear of violent death.
It seems respect has nowhere to come from here. In her chapter, Elena Irrera shows the opposite. Even in such a war, people respect others and themselves, only in different ways: for glory, for superiority, for the ability to do harm, and finally for the fact that the other person has the same legitimate needs. At the root of every kind of respect in Hobbes lies the same thing: acknowledging power, your own or someone else's.
Ahead are seven steps: from the race for first place to respect for yourself, and on to an equality that grows out of fear. Let's start with what people fight over.
A race with only one prize: coming first
Hobbes finds three principal causes of quarrel in human nature. The first, competition, drives people to attack for gain. The second, distrust, drives them to attack for safety. The third, the thirst for glory, drives them to attack for reputation.
In an early work, Hobbes compares life to a race that has “no other goal, nor other garland, but being foremost”. Glory, reputation and honour can't be shared out equally among everyone: if one person has them, another is deprived of them. Game theory has a name for this kind of rivalry: a zero-sum game.
Irrera notes that the problem isn't the lack of a common good: different goals would more likely send people their separate ways. For Hobbes, the trouble is the desire to be and to appear superior to others. It grows from an even deeper drive, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, which ceases only in death.
Picture two colleagues going for the same promotion. Doing good work isn't enough for either of them: each needs to be noticed before the other. Competition for riches, honour and power, Hobbes writes, leads to enmity, because the way of one competitor to his goal is to subdue, supplant or repel the other.
The lesson for our own time is simple: as long as respect is handed out as a prize for first place, there will never be enough of it to go round.
About the author
Elena Irrera writes on the history of philosophy. This is a retelling of one of her chapters from the collective volume “The Roots of Respect: A Historic-Philosophical Itinerary”, published by De Gruyter in 2017.
All books by this author: Elena Irrera
Terms from the book
- Hobbes
- Aristotle
- Hudson
- state of nature: Hobbes's concept: human life without a common power, laws or judges. It is also called the natural condition of mankind. For Hobbes it is a thought model and, at the same time, a condition that a weakened state threatens to slide back into.
- war of all against all: Hobbes's famous phrase, in Latin bellum omnium contra omnes. It is his name for the state of nature, where what matters is not the fighting, but constant distrust and fear.
- zero-sum game: A concept from game theory: a situation where one player's gain is exactly equal to the others' loss.
- evaluative respect: A high opinion of someone for some excellence of theirs: skill, intelligence, reliability. Irrera takes this concept from the scholar Hudson.
- reverence: In Hobbes, the opinion of another person that he has the power to do us both good and harm, but not the will to do us harm.
- Rawls: John Rawls, an American philosopher, the author of “A Theory of Justice” (1971), where self-respect is called one of the most important human goods.
- magnanimity: In Hobbes, glory grounded in certain experience: the confidence that your power is enough to reach your goal in the open.
- false glory: In Hobbes, a wrong opinion of oneself, fed by fame and the trust of others rather than by one's own experience.
- vainglory: In Hobbes, attributing to yourself abilities that you know you don't have. Vainglory leads to no action, but, according to Hobbes, it inflames conflict.
- right of nature: In Hobbes, the right of every person in the state of nature to all things: to do anything and to use anything for the sake of self-preservation.
- respect as obstacle: Hudson's concept: respect for whatever can wreck our plans. Irrera sees in it the seed of equal respect in Hobbes.
- law of nature: In Hobbes, a general rule found by reason. The first such law tells us to seek peace, the second to give up the right to all things on equal terms with others.
All terms
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