The climax of Leviathan:
[T]he Multitude so united in one Person, is called a Cᴏᴍᴍᴏɴ-ᴡᴇᴀʟᴛʜ, in latine Cɪᴠɪᴛᴀs. This is the Generation of that great Lᴇᴠɪᴀᴛʜᴀɴ, or rather (to speake more reverently) of that Mortall God, to which wee owe under the Immortal God, our peace and defence. For by this Authoritie, given him by every particular man in the Common-Wealth, he hath the use of so much Power and Strength conferred on him, that by terror thereof, he is inabled to conforme the wills of them all, to Peace at home, and mutuall ayd against their enemies abroad. [Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 17:13, emphasis in original.]
This is a genuinely terrifying and awesome image of the state (in the original senses of those adjectives). But it is also, for exactly that reason, one that may seem implausible to someone coming across it for the first time. Thinking of the state as a god is weird, likely counterintuitive, and apt to be accompanied by accusations of fetishisation and slavish defence of despotism.
Hobbes knew this, and so he didn’t open with this vision; he built up to it, slowly. Chapter 17 is marked as the climax by the recapitulation of many of the elements of the introduction. But there is one crucial difference between these two texts. Consider:
Nᴀᴛᴜʀᴇ (the Art whereby God hath made and governes the World) is by the Art of man, as in many other things, so in this also imitated, that it can make an Artificial Animal… For by Art is created that great Lᴇᴠɪᴀᴛʜᴀɴ called a Cᴏᴍᴍᴏɴ-ᴡᴇᴀʟᴛʜ, or Sᴛᴀᴛᴇ, (in latine Cɪᴠɪᴛᴀs) which is but an Artificiall Man; though of greater stature and strength than the Naturall … and in which, the Soveraignty is an Artificiall Soul, as giving life and motion to the whole body… [Introduction 1, emphasis in original.]
In this earlier passage, the commonwealth is just a man—a particularly strong and long-lived man, to be sure, but a man—and indeed it is we people who play the role of God in creating it.1 This metaphor is more intuitive and immediately useful; indeed, the idea of the personhood of the state embedded in it is one of Hobbes’ great legacies to European thought.
But over the course of the first part of Leviathan, Hobbes slowly builds up an infamous and also-terrifying vision of the human condition. Pathetic automata that yet delude themselves vainly into squabbling over ‘Honour and Dignity’, we are inevitably drawn into pointless ‘Envy and Hatred, and finally Warre’. The effect of Hobbes’ nominalist and barren pessimism is, paradoxically, to build up in the reader a readiness for the fantastic and the awesome. A mere man, even a particularly strong and long-lived one, could never dream to tame human vainglory and produce a ‘real Unitie’ among men. A person that could manage that would have to be almost divine.
And so, when Hobbes gets to his argument’s climax, the reader is ready for a different metaphor. Many of the elements of the introduction reoccur in chapter 17: the small caps, the mention of the sea monster of Hobbes’ title. But one aspect is abandoned, indeed completely reversed. No longer is the state a man, created by other men. No: the state is a god, and we must fear it.
There are lots of implications of this for interpreting Hobbes’ political theory, which I may write about another time. But right now I want to talk about the (I believe independent) emergence of a similar set of ideas in different circumstances, in the hope the comparison is illuminating.
The Americans, during and immediately after their first revolution, had little truck with the developing European state theory that took from and built on Hobbes. The name of the country itself is a matter of how little they cared about the niceties: we are (absurdly) asked to believe that it is not itself a state, merely a union of states. The revolutionaries and ‘framers’ of the constitution drew on many other aspects of European political thought, but never thought particularly hard about the nature of the state. This has had effects down to this day: Americans generally lack the useful distinction we Europeans have between the long-lived state and the government that temporarily holds its levers—not least because of the constant restaffing of their executive bureaucracy. So we get talk of ‘the federal government’ that really means ‘the American state’, and indeed talk of ‘state governments’ in a way that sounds weird and almost oxymoronic to European ears.
Part of this is just down to the sources that the American revolutionaries were drawing on. But it also reflected political reality: the relative weakness and unimportance of unified American sovereignty in the initial years of the revolution; and then the deliberate desire in the new constitution to either (as the federalists would have it) divide and undermine the kind of unified indivisible sovereignty that was assumed by state theorists after Hobbes, or (as many anti-federalists would have it) to obscure the fact that the constitution bestowed the federal government with precisely this kind of sovereignty.
But there could be no obscuring the power of the American state during their second revolution. In short order after Fort Sumter, the power of the American federal government began to be massively (and, as it turned out, permanently) expanded to prepare itself for the largest war in the nation’s history. Meanwhile, an ostensible confederation, officially born out of a repudiation of overbearing central government, quickly refashioned itself into an even more centralised state that openly declared its authoritarianism (and not just towards slaves).
Much of the change in the US was not intended by anyone directly: the Northern Republicans who so expanded the power of the federal government did so out of a sense of desperate necessity, going beyond the settlement in order to defend it—a kind of liberal raison d’état. Nowhere was this clearer than in the Emancipation Proclamation. Not passed through Congress nor checked by the judiciary: at a stroke of the pen of the head of state, the entire machinery of American government was redirected to completely destroying and then fundamentally remaking the economy and society of half of the nation. The taking of such a fundamental war power, even if it was thought to be an exception justified by national emergency, created a new political order in the US. The proclamation of the sovereign president was now powerful enough to ‘conforme the wills of them all’, and it made itself heard across the nation:
We heard the proclamation, master hush it as he will …
It said ‘now coloured brethren, ye shall be forever free,
‘From the first of January, eighteen hundred and sixty-three.’
We heard it in the river going rushing to the sea.2
How did Americans respond to this immense display of sovereign power? Well, in many diverse ways, depending on the kind of American they were: there was little in common between southern slave-owners, Irish copperheads, midwestern Republicans, and USCT freedmen. But if we just stick to anti-slavery Americans, what’s notable is how many of them turned to religious imagery and terminology to make sense of state power.
The most famous instance of this is the ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’, and that’s as good a place to start as any. The salvific and eschatological imagery of Julia Ward Howe’s song was obviously supposed to reflect the realities of the war happening around her, but the exact connections between the religious imagery and the real world—the precise points of analogy—are left implicit. To be sure, there are mentions of military camps and soldiers’ steel, but specifics are kept vague: Howe stays in ‘hymn mode’, as it were, almost the whole way through. This adds to the power of her perfect final line, as the song builds to a single clear imperative that at last directs the listener to take specific real-world action: ‘As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free’.
But it is not often noticed that there is one other line where a ‘point of contact’ between the analogy and the real world becomes relatively explicit:
He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;
He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat;
Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! Be jubilant, my feet!
The trumpet of the last day is here, relatively clearly and unambiguously, identified as a war trumpet—an identification not present in the biblical texts, that shows how Howe is using her imagery. The war trumpets of the Union Army have been sounded forth by capital-H ‘Him’; the army is under divine command. This line, I think, tells us how to interpret the rest of the song: the actions of God in the song mirror the actions of (representatives of) the state in real life.3
In other words, the ‘Battle Hymn’ trades not only on a general analogy between the Christian eschaton and the American Civil War, but also on a very specific analogy between God himself and the righteous American state. The state has absolute judgment over the ‘hearts of men’, the power to ‘crush’ opponents, and the right to demand complete obedience. Howe’s point is precisely that the state is a ‘Mortall God, to which wee owe under the Immortal God, our peace and defence’. What we have in the ‘Battle Hymn’ is the independent re-emergence of a key element of Hobbesian political theology.
Remarkably, I don’t think Howe was unusual in this: when you go looking in 1860s American texts, you find not only generic providentialism (which is obviously incredibly common)4 but also this specific analogy between God and the state. For example, and sticking with music, the 1862 song ‘To Canaan’, with the dedication ‘A Song of the Six Hundred Thousand’, declares that US soldiers who march along ‘rebel coasts’ are going to ‘battle for the Lord’. And not in any vague or metaphorical sense: the soldiers’ commanding officer is ‘The Mighty One of Israel: His name is Lord of Hosts’. Henry W. Bellows, head of the impressive USSC, wrote that ‘The State is indeed divine, as being the great incarnation of a nation’s … life’.5 I don’t want to multiply examples too much in a blog post, hopefully you get the point: the theme emerges that acts of the state are a god’s acts, attributes of the state are a god’s attributes, powers of the state are a god’s powers. In short, the state is a god.
Now, obviously this idea was not ever meant literally. These are all texts taking artistic or creative license. But Hobbes didn’t think that the state literally was the Immortal God either; he just thought it was comparable to Him. The desperate necessity that became so vivid in the American Civil War did for many Americans what Hobbes’ description of the desperate necessity of human nature did for his readers: it prepared the way for a conception of the state as ‘Mortall God’.
Another aspect of anti-slavery religiosity orbited around the president, who was increasingly cast as ‘Father Abraham’ after 1862. This was not just a courtesy title: Lincoln was being analogised to the patriarch, with prophetic authority. While Walt Whitman more famously portrayed Lincoln as captain of the ship of state, Horace Traubel reports the poet describing the president in sacral terms:
There was no reason why Lincoln should not have been a prophet rather than a politician; he was in fact a divine prophet-politician; in him for almost the first time prophecy had something to say in politics.6
Likewise, in a song already quoted we can see the linking together of the president’s immense power to his status as ‘Father Abraham’, an interpretation of righteously-wielded executive power as a kind of religious authority:
Father Abraham has spoken and the message has been sent,
The prison doors he opened, and out the pris’ners went.7
Lincoln was thrust into the role of prophet. Again, we hear echoes of Hobbes. The full title of the Hobbesian sovereign, after all, is ‘the Soveraign Prophet’; he is ‘Gods Vicegerent on Earth’. This was crucial to what Hobbes meant by saying that the state was a ‘Mortall God’: the declarations of the state’s representative were to be treated as the literal word of God. ‘For when Christian men, take not their Christian Soveraign, for Gods Prophet’, it leads quickly to ‘destroying all laws, both divine, and humane, [reducing] all Order, Government, and Society, to the first Chaos of Violence, and Civill warre.’8 Anti-slavery Americans facing such ‘Civill warre’ started to incline to the same conclusion, and began to cast their president in an Abrahamic mode.
Of course, these elements were not universal in American thought, not even anti-slavery American thought. The most important, most sophisticated, most brilliant Republican thinker on political providence was of course Abraham Lincoln himself. He resisted being cast in this prophetic mould—indeed, he resisted completely any identification of the United States’ war aims with God’s will, no matter his own belief in the righteousness of those aims. He used the opportunity of his second inauguration to make this clear:
Neither party expected for the war, the magnitude, or the duration, which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other… The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes.9 [Italics in original, bold mine.]
But even as he denied the office of vicegerent, refused the metaphor of federal-government-as-deity, Lincoln concurred with and re-emphasised one crucial Republican premise: the terrible exercise of sovereign power that Americans were witnessing was an exercise of God’s will. Lincoln complicated and qualified the relationship between the ends pursued by his government and those pursued by God, but he did not deny the relationship. The GOP had witnessed terror and awe—their eyes had seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. They perceived God at work. And while Lincoln developed the most sophisticated picture of how God was at work in the second American Revolution, is it any surprise that many of his subjects fell back on the simpler model: that the state’s will was God’s will, to the point that the two entities could almost be equated?
The sovereign executive leader as prophet, vicegerent to the god-like figure of the state: this was the image that Hobbes settled on in the face of the political and religious challenges of the English Revolution, and it was independently redeveloped in the second American Revolution.
Just like sincere belief in a metaphysical god, metaphorical belief in a political god struggles to make sense of the capriciousness of events, the triumph of evil over good and the complexities of real-world motivation. During Reconstruction, the American state’s sovereign unity came undone, and in the ensuing political disputes the nation capitulated to terrorists and traitors. The complexity of reality belies any attempt to explain it in terms of the straightforward or simple working of providence.
But the attraction of believing in the ‘Mortall God’ is the same as the attraction of believing in the immortal one. It is the temptation to assimilate power to omnipotence: sometimes one experiences such a transformative, transcendent moment that it is almost impossible to not explain it in terms of providence. Americans in the 1860s lived through one such moment, and many of them gave into the temptation. But this temptation shaped a moral vision of unsurpassed clarity and beauty; its limitations should not stop us from paying tribute to it.
John Brown was John the Baptist for the Christ we are to see,
Christ who of the bondsman shall the Liberator be;
And soon throughout the sunny South the slaves shall all be free.
For his truth is marching on.10
Overreliance on this people-as-God, commonwealth-as-man aspect of Hobbes’ image of the state—which, I emphasise, Hobbes discards in the course of building up to that image’s recapitulation—has led to the Hobbes-as-democrat readings you get in Richard Tuck and those influenced by him. I follow Kinch Hoekstra and Paul Sagar in thinking this reading is implausible, and indeed does significant violence to the texts.
This is from the ‘Marching Song of the First Arkansas Colored Regiment’, an excellent song that is also the subject of some interesting historical questions. See David Walls, ‘Marching Song of the First Arkansas Colored Regiment: A Contested Attribution’. I have tidied up some of the language and spelling in the lyrics.
Notably, this fits in with Hobbesianism in another way, through representation: just like the Hobbesian state, all of God’s actions in the ‘Battle Hymn’ are performed by others acting on his behalf, usually the US Army.
Nicholas Guyatt’s book is full of good sources on this, though I am in this post going against some of his arguments about and interpretations of anti-slavery opinion.
The State and the Nation—Sacred to Christian Citizens (New Yok, NY: James Miller, 1861), p. 7.
Traubel quotes this line in the introduction to Walt Whitman’s Memories of Lincoln. I have verified that the quote is in the text, but I am struggling to provide a proper citation. Some Googling says the following citation is to a literary anthology that contains the Memories of Lincoln; I can’t verify that, but it’s probably better than nothing. The Bibelot, A Reprint of Poetry and Prose for Book Lovers, chosen in part from scarce editions and sources not generally known, Volume X, Testimonial Edition, ed. Thomas B. Mosher (Thomas B. Mosher, Portland, MN, 1904) pp. 225–228.
See note 2.
Leviathan, 36:20.
A fascinating aside. Lincoln here (probably coincidentally) echoed, of all people, Brigham Young, who early in 1861 said: ‘What will King Abraham do? I do not know, neither do I care. It is no difference what he does, of what any of them do. Why? God will accomplish his own purposes, and they may do or not do, they may take the road that leads to the right, or they may take the road that leads to the left, and which ever road they do take they wish they had taken the other’.
Likewise, another Mormon elder proclaimed: ‘They have the same God to apply to in the North as in the South, the same kind of religion, but their religion does not teach them to have any confidence in the all-protecting army of Jehovah, for their God has no eyes, no ears, no power, he is without body or parts… Both the North and the South are praying to the same God, that they may have the power to destroy their enemies. Who are their enemies? All good Christians. Therefore, if their God should hear and answer them, they would all be utterly annihilated.’
Ignoring the references to Mormon theology about God the Father’s body, this is a rather striking prefiguration. (Both quotes taken from E. B. Long, The Saints and the Union, respectively at p. 19 and p. 30; all emphasis mine.)
From a version of ‘John Brown’s Body’ with lyrics by William Weston Patton, published late 1861.