Conspiracy : James Martel

Even when God is actually king, Hobbes tells us that divine authority is necessarily mediated by human beings, first by Moses and then by a series of high priests, judges, and prophets. In practice, this means that there is always a risk of idolatry, a danger of creating “separated essences” in the place of God’s divine commandments. Accordingly, there was a lot of tension in the kingdom of God, The Levite priests in particular threatened to corrupt God’s truth with their own agendas. In De Cive, Hobbes offers that the rule of the priests was constantly being disrupted and interrupted by the prophets:

[T]he supreme civil power was therefore rightly due by God’s own institution to the high-priest; but actually that power was in the prophets to whom (being raised by God in an extraordinary manner) the Israelites, a people greedy of prophets, submitted themselves to be protected and judged, by reason of the great esteem they had of prophecies.³⁷

While this may seem to be merely an instance of who gets to speak for God, priests or prophets, it is critical to note that for Hobbes, prophecy represents a chance for people to decide for themselves what they think over and above other forms of interpretation:

others did judge of the prophets, whether they were to be held for true or not. For to what end did God give signs and tokens to all the people, whereby the true prophets might be discerned from the false; namely the, the event of predictions, and the conformity with the religion established by Moses; if they might not use those marks?³⁸

In other words, when a prophet claimed to speak for God, it was up to the people to decide if they believed this representation or not. Ultimately, then, the true authority in the kingdom of God lay not with any human sovereign, nor with the priestly caste, but with the community’s own power of decision. They had the ultimate interpretive authority; if they decided to believe in a prophet (and they didn’t always), the priestly power was swept aside. Instead of being trumped, the popular readers of divine power become the trumpers.

Ah, the reader might be saying at this point, but that authority is itself trumped by God’s own sovereignty, a sovereignty that is absolutely true and irresistible. But here is where a really conspiratorial reading of Hobbes becomes clearest: God’s sovereignty is effectively an aporia. In a way, you could say that God’s sovereignty does nothing but disallow for any other kind of sovereignty. When God is king, there is no room for any earthly kings even as God says and does nothing directly (possibly even at all). This opens up a radical aporia in the political structure. Here, the people have not only the right to decide (as Hobbes always suggests) but furthermore the possibility to actually do so without any interference. God’s sovereignty evacuates the center of earthly political authority and, in so doing, offers the promise of what a truly decentralized form of authority might look like. In this case, popular conspiracy is not incidental to, but at the very center of, the political process.

To add some credibility to this claim, Hobbes then goes on to consider what happens when the Kingdom of God is ended by Saul’s election as a human king over Israel. Still in De Cive, Hobbes writes that even after the Hebrew Kings came to power, the power of prophecy continued as a check on their ability to speak for God. Thus

[T]he civil power therefore, and the power of discerning God’s word from the words of men, and of interpreting God’s word even in the days of the kings, was wholly belonging to [prophets, among others].³⁹

Here we come full circle. Whereas Hobbes often insists that the sovereign have the last word (and furthermore offers a genealogy wherein the power of Kings descends directly from the power of Moses) we see that human sovereignty is a very poor substitute for God’s own. Whereas God (via the prophets) offers human beings a check on their own tendency to misrepresent and to dabble in idolatry, human kings offer no such respite; they are the veritable fox guarding the henhouse.

Whereas one could read these “esoteric” readings in Hobbes as signals that only an elite might understand, it is critical to note that for Hobbes, the upshot of his methodology, as well as this alternative genealogy of political authority that we find in the second half of Leviathan and elsewhere, is to decentralize and radicalize reading and, along with it, political and ecclesiastical authority. Whatever Hobbes may have meant for his texts to convey, the collection of his works and his methods of reading offers the possibility of reading him as both depicting and fomenting a conspiracy of readers in the very texts that otherwise seem to do the opposite.

^{37. Hobbes, De Cive in Man and Citizen (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1991), 323.↩}

^{38. Hobbes, De Cive in Man and Citizen, 325.↩}

^{39. Hobbes, De Cive in Man and Citizen, 326.↩}