Hospitality and World Politics

Gideon Baker

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137289995
• eBook ISBN: 9781137290007
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Civil Rights in Law
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A long neglected concept in the field of international relations and political theory, hospitality provides a new framework for analysing many of the challenges in world politics today, from the search for peaceable relations between states to asylum and refugee crises.

Part I

On the Origins of Modern Hospitality

1

Leviathan’s Children: On the Origins of Modern Hospitality

Haig Patapan

Introduction

Thomas Hobbes starts his most famous political work, Leviathan, with a dedication to his friend, Francis Godolphin, in honour and gratitude to the memory of Francis Godolphin’s brother, Sidney Godolphin. Hobbes admires Sidney Godolphin as an exemplary citizen:

For there is not any vertue that disposeth a man, either to the service of God, or the service of his Country, to Civill Society, or private Friendship, that did not manifestly appear in his conversation, not as acquired by necessity, or affected by occasion, but inhaerent, and shining in a generous constitution of his nature.¹

Having introduced Leviathan with Sidney Godolphin, Hobbes returns to him at the very end, in his A Review, and Conclusion.² There he takes up the claim by some that ‘Civill Amity’ is not possible where there is ‘perpetuall contention for Honor, Riches, and Authority’.³ His response is that though these ‘are indeed great difficulties, but not Impossibilities: For by Education, and Discipline, they may bee, and are sometimes reconciled’.⁴ To demonstrate that there is ‘no such Inconsistence of Humane Nature, with Civill Duties, as some think’, he cites once more the example of Sidney Godolphin:

I have known cleernesse of Judgment, and largenesse of Fancy; strength of Reason, and graceful Elocution; a Courage for the Warre, and a Fear for the Laws, and all eminently in one man; and that was my most noble and honored friend Mr. Sidney Godolphin; who hating no man, nor hated of any, was unfortunately slain the beginning of the Civill warre, in the Publique quarrell, by an undiscerned, and an undiscerning hand.⁵

Sidney Godolphin, it seems, is proof that Hobbes’ teaching in Leviathan is true. Moreover, his intention in creating the great Leviathan, an ‘Artificiall Man’, is to protect citizens such as Godolphin from the ‘undiscerning’ to ensure that such good citizens are not needlessly sacrificed.⁶ Hence Hobbes’ account of his writing as a form of public service, in the spirit of Godolphin, ‘occassioned by the disorders of the present time’, and ‘without partiality, without application, and without other designe’ than ‘to advance the Civill Power’.⁷

This view of Hobbes as a patriotic citizen who will sacrifice himself to defend civil authority, needs to be reconciled, however, with his claim that what he is proposing in the Leviathan is novel, and in its novelty, offensive.⁸ Hobbes seems to be both a conservative and a radical. In this chapter, I want to argue that an important source of Hobbes’ novelty, and therefore radicalism, lies in his creation of Leviathan’s children, a new ‘subject’ or citizen of the Leviathan state that displays a new civility that will also be the occasion for a new hospitality. Though such a new citizen will in all important respects approximate or match Sidney Godolphin’s virtues, he is in one important aspect superior: the apparently rare virtues of Godolphin will be made more reliable and therefore commonplace due to the new Hobbesian civility and hospitality made possible by education and discipline. This radical plan, as we will see, will require an extensive campaign of re-education, starting with the most influential sources, the universities and, subsequently, the majority of humanity that will absorb the new catechism of the Leviathan. Hobbes’ overall intention is to reconfigure and redefine humanity, to found a new commonwealth that is safe, peaceful, prosperous and potentially everlasting.

To see the true novelty of Hobbes’ project, the first part of this chapter will explore his new teaching regarding human nature. Hobbes’ conception of power, I contend, seeks to destroy the classical idea of friendship and Christian belief in charity (the bases of hospitality in antiquity and Christendom, respectively) in order to inaugurate a new way of thinking about each other. Such an approach brings out the dangerousness of human beings and, ironically, our potential tractability. Seeing ourselves in terms of power forces us to see how much we are driven by fear, in hospitality as elsewhere. Once we realise this fact, we are well placed to moderate our actions and attempt to accommodate each other on reasonable terms. Having examined the personal aspects of this new hospitality, we will examine its political implications understood as a new form of civility. The political consequences of seeing ourselves as power seekers is the institution of a new political association, the contractual artificial state, that will in turn create the ‘sovereign’ and the ‘subject’. These new entities will be animated by a new hospitality, founded upon equality, rights and reason. Hobbes’ education will therefore favour citizens, and by extension hosts, who are fearful, competitive and philosophic at the expense of the glory seekers and the pious. In the final part of this chapter, we will attempt to discern the international implications of this new hospitality. Here we will see that a morally neutral state and a rights-based universalism will only condone defensive wars, rejecting moral crusades and imperialism. This form of international hospitality, in rejecting the natural law of scholasticism, will thereby secure the foundations of the state and the new civility upon which it, in turn, is founded.

In initiating a new politics and morality, Hobbes claims to be the political scientist who saw clearly for the first time what was necessary to solve the political problem of war, and therefore became the great benefactor of humanity. An essential and influential aspect of his teaching was the new hospitality he inaugurated. In examining the character of Leviathan’s children, the nature and feasibility of his new teaching on hospitality and especially the new obligations subjects will have to each other and to the state, we not only undertake an assessment of the validity of Hobbes’ novel and ambitious claims but also initiate the basis for evaluating those other children of the Leviathan, the thinkers that Hobbes persuaded and who subsequently adopted his insights into politics, philosophy and morality.

Education for the new world

Hobbes is aware of the importance of education for creating new citizens. But what is the character of this education? ‘I recover some hope’, he states, ‘that one time, or other, this writing of mine, may fall into the hands of a Sovereign, who will consider it himselfe (for it is short, and I think clear), without help of any interested, or envious interpreter; and by the exercise of entire Sovereignty, in protecting the Publique teaching of it, convert this Truth of Speculation, into the Utility of Practice’.⁹ As this statement reveals, Hobbes is aware of the difficulties confronting his proposed education. He states that a sovereign would take up his teaching because it is to his benefit and security.¹⁰ Yet he is concerned that the novelty of his teaching, requiring a depth of ‘Morall Philosophy’ to be understood properly, may make his labour ‘as uselesse, as the Common-wealth of Plato’ which required sovereigns to be philosophers.¹¹ His response is that unlike Plato he does not require his sovereign to possess the ‘Sciences Mathematicall’. He is the first to have outlined and proved ‘Theoremes of Morall doctrine’ that ‘men my learn thereby, both how to govern, and how to obey’. In any case, as noted above, it is a short work, and all that is required is for the sovereign to protect its public teaching. Though Hobbes may hope that the sovereign will follow his advice in the Leviathan, to see his ‘Doctrine’ as a clear expression of ‘Nosce teipsum, Read thy self ’, a looking into himself to discern his thoughts and passions and thereby those of ‘Man-kind’, he is realistic enough to know that the best he may hope from the sovereign is the public teaching of the Leviathan.¹²

But will this public teaching be understood by most people? Hobbes hopes that his writing can be ‘profitably printed, and more profitably taught in the Universities’.¹³ The importance of Universities is clear for Hobbes – they are the ‘Fountains of Civill, and Morall Doctrine, from whence the Preachers, and the Gentry, drawing such water as they find, use to sprinkle the same (both from the Pulpit, and in their Conversation), upon the People’.¹⁴ Thus Hobbes does not have high hopes that the ‘vulgar’ or the ‘Common people’ will understand his doctrine. Though he claims that his teaching is so ‘consonant to Reason’ that no unprejudiced person would have difficulty understanding it, he also states that most people are like ‘clean paper’, ready to receive whatever the Public Authority impresses on them.¹⁵ Consequently Hobbes appears to endorse the view that education for most people, especially those ‘diligently taught’ (both the few and the many) means accepting his teaching on trust (and perhaps interest).¹⁶

Such a view of education suggests that it is predominantly a kind of indoctrination. This insight reveals the political aspect of all attempts at educational reform (or what came to be called the enlightenment).¹⁷ All education, including Hobbesian education, is in fact a struggle, an attempt to oust ‘interested, or envious interpreters’, those who presently dominate teaching and thereby control both the preachers and the gentry. The main threat and obstacle to Hobbes’ political science and the reshaping of modern citizenship therefore lies in the Universities.¹⁸

Friendship, charity, power

Hobbes will use Universities to reshape our notions of hospitality. But what dominant conceptions of hospitality does he seek to replace in the universities? He dedicates a large part of the Leviathan, especially the fourth part, ‘Of the Kingdome of Darknesse’, in detailing and countering these other contending doctrines. His argument is that this ‘Darknesse’ is due to two main sources, an interpretation of scripture that in emphasising eternal punishments after death gives extraordinary powers to ministers, ¹⁹and ‘vain philosophy and fabulous traditions’ of pagan philosophers, whose ‘naturall Philosophy’ or science is ‘rather a Dream than Science’ and whose Moral philosophy ‘is but a description of their passions’ leading to a subversion of the commonwealth.²⁰ Though Hobbes is especially critical of Aristotle, his real concern is in fact scholasticism or Thomism – that is, the Christian appropriation of classical political philosophy.²¹

St. Thomas Aquinas, Doctor of the Church, sought to address the challenge posed by classical political philosophy to Christian piety, especially the recently discovered writings of Aristotle. In his magisterial work, Summa Theologica, Aquinas attempted to harmonise the two wisdoms, philosophical and divine. Yet the primacy of the divine for Aquinas meant that the two wisdoms emphasised and favoured different understandings of hospitality. In classic political philosophy, the regime has as it aim not only the useful but the good li...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: On the Origins of Modern Hospitality
• Part II: The Ethics of Global Hospitality
• Part III: Understanding Hospitality in World Politics: Social-Theoretical Approaches
• Index