Early Modern Philosophy

El presente artículo tiene por objeto hacer un examen preliminar de un manuscrito, hasta la fecha desconocido e inédito, del gran humanista y abogado internacional holandés Hugo Grocio. En dicho manuscrito, Grocio se ocupa, esencialmente, de la formación de una sociedad civil basada en un arreglo contractual, y a su vez, examina los derechos y las obligaciones que emanan de ese pacto o contrato voluntario.

""Hobbes's epistemological revolution in scientia civilis entailed the integration of the traditional organic model for the body politic into the new model of the automaton he derived from Descartes’s mechanics. The object of Hobbes’s civil science was the way men’s natural bodies could be assembled in an artificial body politic ‘the matter thereof, and the artificer; both which is man’. After evoking both the mechanical model of the clock and the concept of persona in De Cive, in Leviathan Hobbes attempted to have the two models explicitly coincide. The Leviathan-automaton was meant to recreate for an artificial body the natural unity of natural bodies, but for its functioning a fictive persona, the counterpart of the Cartesian Res cogitans, was needed as it was not possible in the mechanistic framework to conceive a self-regulated machine. This ‘dualistic’ result was perfectly consistent with the foundational aim of Descartes’ mechanism, but this aim was not itself consistent with Hobbes’s professed materialistic epistemology.

In fact, during the 1640s, as his epistemology evolved, a parallel ideological progression took place in Hobbes’s civil science concerning the relation between science and power, which privileged one of the structural components of modern science: the tendency towards foundation, formalisation and the technical application of knowledge - in a word, deduction against experimentation. He began by supposing that science could be the solid base for civil power, but he increasingly conceived this as a circular relation in which politics had primacy, as it provided the material conditions for the possibility of science, while civil science just contributed (with the support of rhetoric) to the psychological conditions of possibility for civil power, i.e. public consent. This led Hobbes to a twofold ideological move: 1) he emptied the concept of ‘right reason’, both postulating the absolute absence of (divine) justice and embodying it in the deliberate fiction of the sovereign as a persona; 2) he made of ‘determinism’ both an ontological postulate (the guarantee of the neutrality and objectivity of science) and a rhetorical means of justification of the effective power of the laws of nature. Both assumptions reduced Hobbesian civil science to an ideological apology for state power.

In my presentation I shall provide the basic theoretical structure of this inaugural ideological move. In effect, Hobbes’s adoption of the Cartesian deductive model of science conferred to political theory not only its method, but also its ideological configuration. Not only did mechanistic determinism mark the birth of the ideology of science as a neutral form of knowledge, but Hobbes’s extension of mechanistic determinism to political theory also marked the birth of the ideology of technocracy as a neutral form of government. Thus, although early-modern deterministic mechanism contributed, thanks to Spinoza, to the destruction of the ancient faith in teleology as a theoretical tool for the justification of the existing state of things. In fact, with Hobbes, a kind of new teleology emerged within the same deterministic framework, in which the functioning of the body politic-automaton depended on an entirely predetermined goal: its continuation at all costs.""