The New Leviathan or Man, Society, Civilization & Barbarism by R.G. Collingwood, rev. ed. David Boucher

The last work by Collingwood published before his death

The New Leviathan is the last book Collingwood published before his death at age 53 in early 1943.  Collingwood had suffered a series of increasingly debilitating strokes secondary to uncontrolled high blood pressure (for which doctors at the time could only prescribe "the rest cure"). In a race against death, Collingwood attempted to make sense of the political world in which he was then living, marred as it was by fascism and war. He did so by taking the architectonic work of modern political thought, The Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes, as his model. Let me introduce my brief consideration of this work with Collingwood's reflection on his project of building an understanding of politics from the ground up. I find it quite pertinent today.

12. 9. Our favourite nightmare in the twentieth century is about our powerlessness in the giant grip of economic and social and political structures; the nightmare which Professor Arnold Toynbee calls ‘The Intractableness of Institutions’.  

12. 91. The founders of modern political science made it clear once for all that these Leviathans are ‘Artificial Animals’, creatures formed by the art of man, ‘for whose protection and defence’ they were intended. 

12. 92. This is the ground of the nightmare. Oppression and exploitation, persecution and war, the torturing to death of human beings in vast helpless masses, are not new things on the face of the earth, and nobody thinks they are; nor are they done in the world on a greater scale or with more refinement of cruelty than they have been done in the past; nor have we grown more sensitive, to shrink, as men once did not, from blood.  

12. 93. But Hobbes (and others, but especially Hobbes) has for the first time in history held up a hope that there would be ‘protection and defence’ against these things; and by now the hope has sunk into our common consciousness; so that when we find it to be precisely the agents of this longed-for safety that are the chief authors of the evils for whose ending we have made them, hope turns to despair and we are ridden by another Frankenstein-nightmare, like Samuel Butler’s nightmare of humanity enslaved to its own machines, only worse.  

12. 94. But the despair, once more, is parasitic upon the hope.  

12. 95. If the hope went, the despair would go too. If we believed Marx’s monstrous lie that all States have always been organs for the oppression of one class by another, there would be nothing to make all this fuss about.  

12. 96. To strengthen the hope until it overcomes the nightmare, what must be done is to carry on the work, sadly neglected since Hobbes and a handful of successors began it, of constructing a science of politics appropriate for the modern world.  

12. 97. Towards such a science this book is offered as a contribution.

Collingwood, R. G.. The New Leviathan. Read Books Ltd. Kindle Edition. (All quotes to numbered paragraphs are in the Revised Edition edited by David Boucher published in 1992.)

Collingwood is known to most readers--if he's known at all--for his work in the philosophy of history. But his most comprehensive publication work in that field, The Idea of History, wasn't published until 1945, and it was in some measure incomplete because of the editorial choices of Collingwood's literary executor, T.M. Knox. Collingwood had also published in the fields of metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics (and archeology). In short, in some ways--but not in others--he was a traditional academic philosopher, educated and then later employed at Oxford University, finishing his career as the Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at Magdalen College, Oxford. But in the late 1930s, his attention turned to the political world around him, which was marked by the rise of fascism and increasing violence. He shocked and disturbed some of his more staid colleagues by growing a beard and declaring in his Autobiography (1939), his intention to dive into contemporary political issues. He closed his Autobiography with these words: 

I am writing a description of the way in which those events [the rise and response to Fascism] impinged upon myself and broke up my pose of a detached professional thinker. I know now that the minute philosophers of my youth, for all their profession of a purely scientific detachment from practical affairs, were the propagandists of a coming Fascism. I know that Fascism means the end of clear thinking and the triumph of irrationalism. I know that all my life I have been engaged unawares in a political struggle, fighting against these things in the dark. Henceforth I shall fight in the daylight. 

Collingwood, R. G. An Autobiography. Read Books Ltd.. Kindle Edition. 

Having laid down his gauntlet, and in the face of his declining health, Collingwood embarked on his final work, which became The New Leviathan.  

In approaching this work, I have to admit I was a bit puzzled at the choice of Hobbes's great work as a model. My admittedly incomplete reading and knowledge of Hobbes pegged his work as solitary, nasty, brutish, but not short. And absolutist to boot. But Collingwood has earned my respect, and he addresses the issues concerning his role-model up-front. In his Preface, Collingwood writes: 

A READER may take the title of this book in whichever way he pleases. If he is one of those who think of Hobbes’s Leviathan as the classical exposition of a classical type of despotism, namely seventeenth-century absolutism, the portrait and anatomy of ‘that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMON-WEALTH, or STATE (in latine CIVITAS) which is but an Artificial Man; though of greater stature and strength than the Naturall’, he may take it to mean that I have set out in this ‘New Leviathan’ to portray and anatomize the new absolutism of the twentieth century, based (like that which Hobbes described) on the will of a people who in thus setting up a popular tyrant gave into his hands every right any one of them has hitherto possessed. For the immediate aim of this book is to study the new absolutism and inquire into its nature, causes, and prospects of success or failure; success, I mean, in either destroying all competitors and becoming the political form of the future, or at least contributing to the political life of the future some positive heritage of ideas and institutions which men will not forget.

Collingwood continues to defend his choice:

If he thinks of the Leviathan as a book which is unique in dealing with the entire body of political science and approaches its colossal subject from first principles, that is, from an examination of man, his faculties and interests, his virtues and vices; a book dealing first with man as such, then with political life as such, then with a well-ordered political life or a ‘CHRISTIAN COMMON-WEALTH’, and lastly with an ill-ordered political life or ‘KINGDOME OF DARKNESSE’; then he may take my title to mean, not that I have in fact dealt with these vast subjects exhaustively, but that in this book I have set out to deal with the same groups of problems in the same order, calling the four parts of my book ‘Man’, ‘Society’, ‘Civilization’, and ‘Barbarism’. Readers of the second school (though I have no quarrel with the others) will of the two be nearer to my own way of thinking. It is only now, towards the middle of the twentieth century, that men here and there are for the first time becoming able to appreciate Hobbes’s Leviathan at its true worth, as the world’s greatest store of political wisdom. I say that this is only now beginning to happen. From the time of its publication, when it impressed every reader with a force directly proportional to his own intelligence as the greatest work of political science the world had ever seen, but pleased nobody because there was no class of readers whose corns it left untrodden upon or whose withers it left unwrung, it fell more and more deeply into disfavour beneath a rising tide of ethical and political sentimentalism. Hardly a single political writer from the seventeenth century to the present day has been able so to clear his mind of that sentimentalism as to look Hobbes in the face and see behind those repellently grim features what manner of man he was; or to see behind the savage irony of his style how deeply he understood himself and his fellow men.

Collingwood, R. G.. The New Leviathan. Read Books Ltd. Kindle Edition. (Revised ed. ilx-lx)

(I'd apologize for the long quotes, but Collingwood is also a master prose-stylist whose pithy remarks I have a hard time trimming.) 

Collingwood thus proceeds to build his New Leviathan from the ground up, beginning with "Man," his term for individual psychology. In taking this course, Collingwood follows Hobbes's example in delving into the basics of the human animal. Unlike any of his earlier works, Collingwood works in numbered paragraphs (similar, for instance to Wittgenstein's Tractatus but without the austerity of style and expression). (One may see the numbered paragraphs in my quotes from this work, except in the Preface.) It is as if Collingwood wanted to make sure that he completed his foundation before moving on to the next level; he wanted to denote his thoughts as if they were a part of a schematic or engineering diagram. Happily, while this keeps his thoughts somewhat artificially separate and short, it doesn't necessarily reduce the felicity of his prose, metaphors, and analogies, which he deploys with such great effect. But it does serve to remind the reader of what a careful and thorough construction Collingwood is providing his reader. When needed, Collingwood can analyze and talk logic with the best of them. 

Because this is an architectonic work, it isn't easy to summarize. Each of the four parts into which he divides the book, "‘Man’, ‘Society’, ‘Civilization’, and ‘Barbarism’" are set forth at length and sometimes include some intriguing digressions. But for purposes of this review, let me only point to a couple of highlights to give a sense of where Collingwood takes his readers. For instance, he borrows the terms "Yahoos" from Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels to great effect. (I've previously posted a series of quotes on this blog, beginning here.) In another section, he sets forth what he describes as the "Three Laws of Politics," which, when I first read them, struck me as a bit simplistic, but which, upon further reflection, strike me as capturing some essences of political life. Collingwood describes his three laws as follows: 

25. 7. The FIRST LAW OF POLITICS is that a body politic is divided into a ruling class and a ruled class.
25. 8. The SECOND LAW OF POLITICS is that the barrier between the two classes is permeable in an upward sense.
25. 9. This brings us to the THIRD LAW OF POLITICS: namely that there is a correspondence between the ruler and the ruled, whereby the former become adapted to ruling these as distinct from other persons, and the latter to being ruled by these as distinct from other persons. 

Collingwood, R. G.. The New Leviathan. Read Books Ltd.. Kindle Edition. 

Collingwood's use of the term "ruling class" may jar some ears, but if you chose, you can substitute "elites," but the point remains. To Collingwood the (classical) liberal and democrat, the key fact isn't the existence of a ruling class, but that it is "permeable in an upward sense." But it is the Third Law that strikes me as most important today: the existence of a "correspondence between the ruler and the ruled." Collingwood elucidates his Third Law in the following: 

25. 91. Working directly, or from the ruling class downwards, the ruler sets the fashion, and the ruled fall in with his lead.  

25. 92. But the Third Law also works inversely, from the ruled class upwards, and determines that whoever is to rule a certain people must rule them in the way in which they will let themselves be ruled.  

25. 93. Both setting the fashion and following it may be done either consciously or unconsciously; but the process is most likely to take the inverse form when it originates unconsciously in the mere, blind, unpolitical stupidity of the ruled, imposing limits on what their rulers can do with them.  

25. 94. An example of this law occurs when vigorous rulers teach the ruled to co-operate with them and to develop, under their tuition, a vigorous political life, a similarity in political enterprise and resource, like their own. In this way that portion of the ruled class which is more closely in contact with the ruling class receive a training for political action which enables them to succeed, in time, their rulers. Here the freedom whereby the rulers rule percolates, owing simply to the process of ruling, without any intention that it shall do so, downwards through the strata of the body politic.  

25. 95. But this only happens when the rulers are vigorous. Let the rulers be of a slavish sort, and what will percolate is slavishness.  

25. 96. When that happens in a body politic, it is hard to say whether the percolation is downward or upward; and the inquiry has little importance.  

25. 97. What is important is to know whether the process to which the body politic is subject is increasing or diminishing. Here is a ruling class, of one or more: to what does its rule tend? To the advancement of freedom, and therefore the ability to cope with political problems, or to its diminution? It is no use raising the question whether freedom is a good thing or not: freedom in the ruling class is nothing else than the fact that the ruling class rules, and the cry against freedom which accompanies the rise of Fascism and Nazism is a confused propaganda for the abolition of one thing (freedom for the ruled) where the distinction between that and another thing (freedom for the ruler) is overlooked. Of course no Fascist or Nazi protests against freedom for the ruler!  

25. 98. In Plato’s Republic the ‘tyrant’ is not a skilful and determined politician who seizes power for himself, but a piece of flotsam floating on the political waves he pretends to control, shoved passively into power by the sheer lowness of its own specific gravity. This is quite possible by the inverse working of the Third Law of Politics. Hitler, referring to Plato’s sense of the word ‘democracy’, claims to be a democratic ruler. He claims that he has been, so to speak, ejected by the automatic working of a mob, which elevates to a position of supremacy over itself whatever is most devoid of free will, whatever can be entirely trusted to do what is dictated by the desires which the mob feels. 

Collingwood, R. G.. The New Leviathan. Read Books Ltd.. Kindle Edition. 

I can't read the words above without thinking about the current state of affairs in the U.S. without thinking about how our current "ruling class" (or the visible part of it), the Trump administration, has infected our entire body politic. When I first completed a reading of The New Leviathan in January 2016, I didn't know that the U.S. would elect a populist demagogue who would promote authoritarian values from the White House. I didn't appreciate the worldwide tide of authoritarianism abroad throughout the world. With this most recent reading, this book came alive to me in a new way. The words above (and others that I've quoted in earlier blog posts) speak to the world in which we live. Look again at Para. 25.98 (above) and tell me that you don't think of Trump! 

I intend to offer further reflect further upon Collingwood's The New Leviathan in a series of blog posts, but I want to address one other point before I close. As an undergraduate, I developed what I came to refer to as an "intellectual crush" on the work of Hannah Arendt. And with the election of Trump, I immediately turned to her work as a benchmark for attempting to come to grips with our predicament. Of late, this turn back to Arendt has been enhanced by joining a Virtual Reading Group sponsored by the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College. As to Collingwood, I didn't "discover" his work until around 2015, although I'd had a brief exposure as an undergraduate to his work in a Philosophy of History course. The exposure didn't take. (Dumb kid.) Now, as I've delved deeply into Collingwood's work, I perceive a number of similarities with Arendt's project. Both were what we might term "pure philosophers" during the early portions of their careers, but the events of the 1930s and 40s compelled both of them to turn their thoughts toward politics. Both were deeply schooled in the traditions of Greek and Latin antiquity, as well as modern philosophy. But most importantly, both emphasize the importance of speech, thought, and action in political affairs. I intend to explore the similarities between these two thinkers in the future. (N.B. I don't think that there are any direct connections between the two, but perhaps Arendt had some familiarity with Collingwood's work.) Both Arendt and Collingwood provide me with insights and models of politics that I find crucial in our dark times. 

sng 9 June 2020