Violence : Uday S. Mehta

One of Hobbes’ many achievements was to normalize the expectation of such a death in an unregulated condition and correspondingly to have normalized the fear that was a permanent accompaniment to it. Death in Hobbes, one could say, ceased to be natural. Instead, like its political redress, it became something artificial. For Hobbes, writing in the shadow of the English Civil Wars and the century of sectarian conflicts that had preceded it, the concern with security served as a way of muffling the language of religion by showing that there had to be a prior concern for corporeal life itself before religions could minister to anyone’s soul.

Hobbes’ great success lay in decisively recasting the meaning of the old Roman and Christian formula salus populi suprema lex esto, where salus no longer referred to salvation, but rather to the safety of individuals, and more importantly, to the security of the political society as a whole.¹⁰ But in emphasizing the fear of death as natural and hence ineradicable, Hobbes also laid out the grounds for the permanent importance of the state as the best and only means for assuaging that fear. The state offers some (however qualified) prospect of security, which according to Hobbes, was totally absent from the unregulated state of nature. The fear of death and the concern with corporeal safety was thus the enduring and underlying basis of politics.

There are of course other traditions of modern political thinking in which the formation of political society is not rooted in the deadly bellicosity of a natural condition but where a contractual agreement among individuals serves as the basis for exiting that condition. In Hegel, for example, there is neither a bellicose natural condition, nor an appeal to the social contract as a regulating and constraining ideal for political society. It is the self-conscious realization of freedom, not the enduring motive of fear, that spurs reason’s long tutelage in history. Similarly Mill, in the brief remarks he makes regarding the relevant preconditions for the application of the Principle of Liberty, offers an account in which the struggle against despotic power has finally brought Western civilization and its public culture to the point where it can be “improved by free and equal discussion.”¹¹ But even in Hegel, Mill, or for that matter Rousseau and Kant, once political society is formed, it is wedded to the primacy of individual and collective security. That is to say, it offers a political response to the permanent shadow cast by the fear of death.

Indeed, even in Mill, his capacious conception of individual liberty has its limit at the point where physical security is threatened. Similarly the contemporary emphasis on justice and rights or the currently fashionable Right to Protect recalls a concern with security in the very ubiquity of the language of the “protection of rights.” By way of contrast, it is worth recalling that fear and corporeal security play, at best, a minor role in the motives for forming and sustaining political society in the political thought of Plato and Aristotle, and more generally in the ancient world—and this is the case despite a surrounding context that was marked by the constancy of war. Fear and security acquire their salience as markers of the political only in the modern era.

It is around these concepts that European modernity has articulated its own self-understanding and produced a political culture which by containing, but never eradicating, the fear of death was able to create the conditions of peace, and hence, the conditions for the exercise of freedom along with other lauded values. But as I have suggested earlier, war and violence were always conditionally rational within this perspective. Gandhi, I have been suggesting, far from wanting to muffle the challenge of death under the assurances of politics, or subsidiary notions such as sovereignty, wished to make the challenge of death utterly intimate and unsparingly constant, in all its exacting implications. One might say, by way of a contrast (in which there are also important affinities) that for Kant the elevation of knowledge and reason was the only pure access to the absolute, including crucially, the absolute of the moral imperative. But in Gandhi, the absolute and the moral imperative had to ratify itself by something much more mundane—courage and fearlessness in the face of death. In this orientation there was an altogether different vision of life in which the transcendent was nested within the routines of the everyday.

Gandhi’s passions found their clearest focus in the myriad, often trivial, details that constitute the texture of everyday life. He wanted to infuse that life with the spirit of civility and non-violence, as he understood it. The courage of being willing to die was the essential question of the human, which for Gandhi, was always conditioned by the transcendent and the utterly mundane. This was a rare sensibility that understood that spirit exits in the actuality of the many trivial things that make up life as it is lived. Gandhi would not countenance the rationale of politics—especially a politics whose distinctive feature was its abstractness and the mediation of the state, either usurping spirit or being a complete stand in for it. Implicit in this was an exacting vision of a form of democratic life and ethics—democratic, simply because it was in principle available to everyone, since courage and fearlessness required neither historical nor social credentials. For that reason, Gandhi would never permit democratic politics, or any other kind, a wholly independent priority.

Uday S. Mehta is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Published on September 1, 2012

^{10. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan: With Selected Variants from the Latin Edition of 1668, ed. E. M. Curley (Indianapolis: Hackett Pub. Co, 1994), 3.↩}

^{11. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty and Other Essays, ed. John Gray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 15.↩}