The European Legacy, Vol. 16, No. 1, pp.

53–69, 2011

Hobbes, Liberalism, and Political Technique

RYAN WALTER

ABSTRACT Hobbes is commonly treated as a foundational figure for liberalism. This familiar view relies on
emphasizing his account of the relationship between rights bearing individuals and state power. By contrast, this
essay centers the practical question of how to govern, and develops this perspective to both question Hobbes’s
supposed liberalism and to demonstrate the utility of construing liberalism as more than a set of philosophical
arguments regarding subject-state relations. In particular, understanding liberalism in terms of political technique
offers a new perspective on the relationship between liberalism and republicanism.

There is a powerful tradition of reading Hobbes as a foundational figure for liberalism.

Leo Strauss’s claim illustrates this practice well: ‘‘If we may call liberalism that political
doctrine which regards as the fundamental political fact the rights, as distinguished from
the duties, of man and which identifies the function of the state with the protection or
the safeguarding of those rights, we must say that the founder of liberalism was Hobbes.’’1
An equivalent characterisation comes from Pierre Manent: ‘‘The intensity of moral
approval that the ancients gave to the good, the moderns, following Hobbes, gave to the
right, the right of the individual. This is the language and ‘value’ of liberalism.’’2
Both authors identify Hobbes as a liberal by emphasizing his account of the
relationship between the individual and state power. This normative question is taken to
provide liberalism with its central problem and mode of argument. In this sense a good
deal of contemporary political theory is also liberal and thereby enjoys a familial relation
with Hobbes.
Identifying intellectual lineages in this way supports the less strident but more
common formulation of Hobbes’s relationship to liberalism—that Hobbes is not a
liberal thinker even though aspects of his thought are liberal in nature. Vickie Sullivan
recently used this tactic when she claimed that ‘‘elements of his thought point in a liberal
direction,’’ especially Hobbes’s version of the social contract that sees ‘‘decrees of the
sovereign as ultimately emanating from the people.’’3 Many similar equivocations have
been offered in this vein. J. P. Sommerville argued that seeing Hobbes as an advocate
of liberalism ‘‘is only partially correct,’’4 while Norberto Bobbio said he was ‘‘neither
a liberal writer, nor a precursor’’ yet there are ‘‘some features typical of liberalism in

Centre for the History of European Discourses, University of Queensland, St Lucia, Brisbane, Queensland 4072, Australia.
Email: r.walter1@uq.edu.au

ISSN 1084-8770 print/ISSN 1470-1316 online/11/010053–17 ß 2011 International Society for the Study of European Ideas
DOI: 10.1080/10848770.2011.543374
54 RYAN WALTER

Hobbes’s thought.’’5 Lucien Jaume was undoubtedly right to claim that making
assessments of this type ‘‘requires one to take a philosophical stand on the nature of
liberalism,’’6 which involves specifying the subject-state relations that liberalism will bear
and those it will not. It is precisely the philosophical character of these procedures that
makes them historically questionable.
Here we can note that ‘Cambridge-school’ historians have complicated the art
of tracing liberalism’s lineage by detecting its competitors. J. G. A. Pocock has claimed
that there ‘‘is a conventional wisdom, now taught to students, to the effect that political
theory became ‘liberal’ . . . about the time of Hobbes and Locke . . . I find this a serious
distortion of history.’’ The distortion relates to the fact that liberalism and its commitment
to rights did not enjoy an easy march from the seventeenth century to its triumph in the
nineteenth. Rather, it was part of ‘‘a bitter, conscious, and ambivalent dialogue.’’7 Pocock
urged the recovery of the voice of civic humanism in this dialogue, a task towards which
he made the definitive contribution.8 Skinner has similarly unearthed a neo-roman
conception of ‘‘liberty before liberalism’’ that liberalism, and Hobbes, were forced to
contend with.9
A more powerful challenge to treating Hobbes as an early liberal comes from Conal
Condren. The problem is that liberalism and its attendant categories, such as the
autonomous individual’s freedom and the private-public boundary that determines it, are
simply read back into the seventeenth-century. Condren’s powerful study of the language
of office in early modern England suggests that liberty was thought to come from
enacting the persona one assumes in office; without (public) office one is unburdened by
liberty. It is only with the eighteenth century that we can begin to discern contemporary
liberal categories.10
It has been possible to construe Hobbes as a liberal by relying on questions
concerning the subject-state nexus to guide both the practice and historiography of
political theory. In tandem, it has become possible to question Hobbes’s supposed
liberalism as modes of historical inquiry that are not wedded to this approach have
become available. Key here is the shift to treating argumentative contexts and political
languages as the historian’s quarry, instead of old answers to contemporary normative
questions.11 Equally valuable in this regard is Foucault’s perspective on liberalism, partially
developed in his lectures on government at the Collège de France.12
Like Condren, Foucault read texts from the liberal canon with contemporary liberal
categories suspended, and his redescription of these texts is similarly disruptive: eighteenth-
century ‘liberal’ texts can be profitably read as sharing a principle of government.
Liberalism’s principle is one of critique—that government is always in danger of being
excessive, and therefore harmful. The harm that can arise from excessive government does
not relate to individual rights and freedoms in the first instance, as we would normally
expect, but to the processes that are being governed, such as the allocation of resources by
markets.
Foucault argued that this new style of thinking about government emerged in the
eighteenth century, and largely as a response to modes of rule based on the comprehensive
regulation of social life. This form of government sought strength through order, and order
through regulation. The clearest example is the Polizeiwissenschaft, or police science, of the
seventeenth-century German princely states, but an English variation has also been
detected.13
 Hobbes, Liberalism, and Political Technique 55

Approaching liberalism in this way—in terms of the means that it proposes for
successful government, not how it legitimates power—promises to offer new and
important perspectives on the history of political thought. For this essay only two are
claimed. One is to reveal how Hobbes’s status as a liberal thinker can be supported by a
focus on the subject-state relation but undermined by an analysis of political technique.
The second is to make it possible to recast the relationship between contemporary
liberalism and republicanism; from the perspective of political technique, these programs
appear less as rival articulations of the relationship between state and subject and more
as variations on a liberal theme.
In what follows Foucault’s account of liberalism as a critique of the view
of government that calls for the comprehensive regulation of everyday life is set out.
This portrayal of liberalism is then used to inquire into Hobbes’s liberal credentials. It is
argued that, regarding the technique of government, Hobbes has no point of contact with
contemporary versions of liberalism. The view from technique is then used to examine
the relationship between liberalism and republicanism.

POLICE AND LIBERALISM

In the sixteenth century reason of state was not used exclusively in the pejorative manner
typical today, as when the cold pursuit of state interests is seen to override ethical
considerations. Instead, it referred to the rationality that informed the good management
of the state as a state, as against understanding the state as a possession of the ruler,14 and
in opposition to Christian renderings of political community. Reason of state thus calls
attention to the nature and purpose of the state, which is to exist among and hold out
against rival states.
Foucault identified two great practical manifestations of reason of state: police
science and the balance of power. The latter consisted of diplomatic and military
components that worked together through treaties and wars to ensure no one European
power could achieve universal monarchy. This manifestation of reason of state was an
external one, primarily relating to what we would call foreign policy. Police science,
by contrast, was directed inwards, working on the state itself. Foucault claimed that, from
the seventeenth century onwards, police ‘‘begins to refer to the set of means by which the
state’s forces can be increased while preserving the state in good order.’’15
The police state was therefore characterized by ‘‘its interest in what men do; it is
interested in their activity.’’16 In tandem, men came to be seen as ‘‘a constitutive element
of the state’s strength.’’ Foucault claimed that this interest in men could be understood
in terms of five concrete concerns. The first was the number of men in a territory.
More men usually implied more strength, but not always; population, resources, and the
size of a territory were interrelated. Thus, Holland could be described as smaller and
stronger than Russia. Second, the necessities of life, such as foodstuffs, which implies a
need for control over agriculture. Third, the health of the people, necessary alongside
their sustenance if they are to work productively. This is the fourth concern—the activity
of the population, in particular, ensuring that they are distributed into the professions in a
way that is useful to the state. Finally, the circulation of men and goods needs to be
managed. This requires that the instruments of circulation are provided, such as roads
56 RYAN WALTER

and bullion, and that circulation is guided into some channels and away from others;
vagrancy is harmful to the state, industry is beneficial.17
As this list suggests, police science implied the comprehensive regulation of
social life:
What police has to govern, its fundamental object, is all the forms of . . . men’s
coexistence with each other. It is the fact that they live together, reproduce, and that
each of them needs a certain amount of food and air to live, to subsist . . . police must
take responsibility for all of this kind of sociality.

All this regulation was not for its own sake. The driving idea was to take the population
beyond ‘‘surviving and not dying’’ and onto ‘‘living and doing a bit better than just
living.’’ In turn, ‘‘doing better than just living, coexisting, and communicating can in fact
be converted into forces of the state.’’ In sum, the concern of police is ‘‘making men’s
happiness the state’s utility.’’18
Police should not, therefore, be understood simply in relation to justice and judicial
power. Instead, it is more akin to a permanent coup d’État, functioning on the basis of its
own rationality and outside the rules of justice: ‘‘the sovereign exercise of royal power
over individuals who are subjects.’’ The primary mechanism of police was, however,
borrowed from the domain of justice, ‘‘the regulation, the ordinance, the interdiction,
the instruction.’’19 Hence, while the police concern with optimizing the contribution
of the population to state strength was historically novel, the regulatory mode it assumed
for achieving this end was not.
Police in this sense is therefore distinct from the meaning and institutionalization it
currently enjoys, namely, as an armed constabulary that prevents and detects crime against
persons and property. This contemporary sense was systematically elaborated in England
around the turn of the nineteenth century, notably by Patrick Colquhoun in his
A Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis, which was concerned with the causes of crime,
the figure of the criminal, the different species and extent of crime, and the need for a
centralized body to answer them. Because of the novelty of this program, Colquhoun
could describe police as a ‘‘new Science,’’ one that does not consist in the ‘‘Judicial
Powers which lead to Punishment, and which belong to Magistrates alone; but in the
PREVENTION and DETECTION OF CRIMES.’’20 Thus, the police that we are
familiar with is highly specialized in its aims and means when compared to its earlier
namesake.21
This is an outline of a general theory of police; its precise contours differed from
state to state, and the outlines of an English version will be suggested shortly. But three
general elements are key: (1) police was connected to reason of state; (2) it was therefore
interested in increasing the internal powers of the state; and (3) it proposed to do this
through a detailed regulation of much of the population’s everyday life. It is this last
element that would be most heavily disputed by those formulating liberal programs of
government.
Foucault offered the physiocratic analysis of grain prices as a classic example of the
type of critique of police style regulation that would become the hallmark of liberalism.
Police regulation sought a plentiful supply of grain at low prices, since grain is a staple
good necessary for life. The analysis of the physiocrats posited the naturalness of a just
 Hobbes, Liberalism, and Political Technique 57

price that emerges from supply and demand, fatally undermining the rationale for
regulation: there is
a certain course of things that cannot be modified, but precisely by trying to modify it
one makes things worse. This is why, the économistes explain, grain is dear when it is
scarce. What will happen if one seeks to prevent the dearness of scarce grain by
regulations that fix its price? Well, people will not want to sell their grain, and the more
one tries to lower the price, the worse the scarcity will become, and prices will tend to
rise, so that not only are things not flexible, but they are as it were recalcitrant and turn
back against those who seek to modify them against their natural course . . . a regulation
based upon and in accordance with the course of things themselves must replace
a regulation by police authority.22

In this context, Foucault suggests that the économistes were heretical with regard to police,
and the most basic point of opposition relates to the way the interaction of men is
conceived. That is, and in broad terms, police portrays the orderly interaction of men as
an artefact of state regulation, of good police, while the new view embodied in
physiocratic arguments construed the interactions among men as following natural
processes: ‘‘what happens spontaneously when they cohabit, come together, exchange,
work and produce.’’ The name for the field of these natural interactions is civil society,
and Foucault’s provocative claim is that the essential tool for its successful government
is freedom: ‘‘Henceforth, a condition of governing well is that freedom, or certain forms
of freedom, are really respected. Failing to respect freedom is not only an abuse of rights
with regard to the law, it is above all ignorance of how to govern properly.’’23 Freedom
becomes crucial to good government because it allows the free interactions of men, and
these free interactions give rise to society’s natural processes.24
It is from this perspective that regulation can be characterized as clumsily and
ignorantly distorting natural processes. A grain scarcity, for example, can only be
exacerbated by state attempts to fix the price below what the market will bear. As a
consequence, the new challenge for government is to clear away obstructive regulations
and, where necessary, regulate in the same direction as natural processes.25 In western
European states this liberal vision of government became dominant. This is a point to
which we will return.
Before turning to Hobbes and his relationship to regulation, a little should be said
about the English context. If we stay at the level of the word, then police did not gain
substantial ground in England until the early eighteenth century, and then it was often
‘‘regarded with the utmost suspicion as a portent of the sinister force which held France
in its grip.’’26 It seems to have gained acceptance in the second half of the century, when
William Blackstone was prepared to write in his Commentaries on the Laws of England that
‘‘public police and oeconomy’’ meant ‘‘the due regulation and domestic order of the
kingdom’’ where ‘‘individuals of the state’’ were ‘‘like members of a well-governed
family.’’27 In reform debates of this time police was used to refer to ‘‘the existing
system of civil government whose task was to govern the peace and order of local
communities.’’28 This system’s institutions included quarter and petty sessions of the
peace, the court leet, and the parish; among its agents were magistrates, churchwardens,
parish constables, sheriffs, lord and deputy lieutenants, and justices of the peace, and their
58 RYAN WALTER

collective tasks ran from regulating weights and measures to seeing to general cleanliness.
As Mark Goldie has argued, officeholding by part-time and unsalaried amateurs was
fundamental to the early modern English state, since it lacked a professional bureaucratic
machinery, a distinctive feature of the English regulatory apparatus.29 To get a clearer
sense of this style of regulation, consider just one of these amateur officers—the justice
of the peace.30 The extract below is from William Sheppard’s 1659 A New Survey of Justice
of Peace His Office:
the Power that the Justices of the Peace have, is given to them partly by, and from the
Commission of the Peace, and therein by the Common Law. And partly, by certain
Acts and Ordinances of Parliament. And some of it is conversant about Criminal
matters for the restrain, and punishment of divers offences. Some of it is about other
things necessary to be done in the Common-wealth, and for the better ordering of the
County; as for the making of Offices, settling of Rates, and the like . . . they are
authorized to look to the Peace of the County.31

The justices are therefore instruments of a descending judicial power, and everyday
administrators.
It is therefore not surprising that ‘‘county business’’ had not been separated from
criminal matters, and the two tasks were carried on in the same Court of Quarter Sessions.
Here presentments by the Grand Jury were a practical device of administration, such as
repairs to county facilities through a formal presentment, which justices could use as the
basis for allotting cost and responsibility for repairs. High and Petty Constables often made
presentments for public nuisances, such as ‘‘not hanging out a lantern with light’’ or
‘‘making a dunghill.’’ Thomas Dale, a Constable of Little Gransden, Cambridgeshire,
made a presentment in 1750 that included the statements, ‘‘We have no young persons idle
out of service,’’ ‘‘We have no profane swearers or cursers,’’ ‘‘We have no riots, routs,
or unlawful assemblies.’’ As the Webbs summed it up, ‘‘these judicial presentments
transformed themselves in the course of the proceedings into acts of direct
administration.’’32
Justices were also charged with various tasks ‘‘out of Sessions,’’ the most time
consuming of which appear to have been administering the poor law, bastardy, and road
and bridge repair.33 Additional items included licensing ale houses, regulating wages, and
seeing to grain policy. It is worth pausing over grain policy because it corresponds neatly
with Foucault’s discussion of police. In a year when corn was scarce, Charles I, following
the example of Elizabeth and his father, instructed his justices to assemble the more
substantial farmers and holders of corn and collect information: who has corn stored and
in what quantities; how much is planted; who carries corn; who bakes and brews with it;
who has bought corn to sell again later, and so on. This information was to provide
justices with the basis for determining who has a surplus of corn and could therefore
be compelled to sell it at market under strict conditions.34 The best British example of
criticism of this style of regulation is found in Adam Smith’s jurisprudence lectures.
Police, we are told, signifies ‘‘policy, politicks, or the regulation of a government
in general,’’ and comprehends three general areas: cleanliness, security, and prosperity.
The last can be hindered by ‘‘bad police,’’ as when a ‘‘magistrate or clerk of the market’’
attempts ‘‘to give plenty by appointing a low price of corn’’, and when this is too low
corn is transported to other locations, causing a famine.35
 Hobbes, Liberalism, and Political Technique 59

Regulation can not only undermine prosperity but security, too. Smith claimed
that ‘‘hardly a night passes in Paris without a murther or a robbery in the streets,’’ while
‘‘in London there are not above 3, 4, or 5 murthers in a whole year.’’36 Yet Paris has by
far the more extensive system of police. We are to conclude from these facts that:
it is not so much the regulations of the police which preserves the security of a nation as
the custom of having in it as few servants and dependents as possible. Nothing tends so
much to corrupt and enervate and debase the mind as dependency, and nothing gives
such noble and generous notions of probity as freedom and independency. Commerce
is one great preventive of this custom.37

Smith thus displays some of the argumentative tropes that Foucault underlined in the
économistes. In particular, Smith undermined the ideal of the polity that was well ordered
because it was subjected to detailed regulation by invoking the naturalness of social
phenomena and, in the process, he insisted on the costs of failing to govern through
individual freedom. Such is the liberal challenge to comprehensive government that
Foucault sketched, and with this account in mind attention now turns to Hobbes.

HOBBES AND LIBERALISM

The overarching purpose and structure of Hobbes’s arguments regarding the individual
and sovereignty are well known, hence their exposition will be brief. A key
argumentative device is the notion of natural rights. Outside of civil society, ‘‘by natural
law one is oneself the judge whether the means he is to use and the action he intends to take
are necessary to the preservation of his life.’’ In addition, ‘‘nature has given each man a
right to all things’’ and a ‘‘natural equality of strength and other human faculties.’’38 The
ubiquitous striving for self-preservation, coupled with a natural right to all things in a
condition of near equality, produces a state of war. A state of war is inimical to self-
preservation, and reason therefore seeks an end to it. Peace can replace a state of war
through the creation of a commonwealth: ‘‘one person, whose will, by the agreement
of several men, is to be taken as the will of them all; to make use of their strength
and resources for the common peace and defence.’’ The powers of the civil
person thus created are unlimited because the rights that have been handed over to
it are unlimited. In Hobbes’s phrasing, ‘‘anyone who has subjected his will to the will
of the commonwealth on the terms that it may do with impunity whatever it
chooses . . . has surely given him the greatest power that he could give.’’ Finally, the
powers of the civil person are not to be divided, such as in a mixed monarchy. The
purported advantage to liberty is fallacious and, more importantly, it gives rise to
civil war.39
This is the centerpiece of Hobbes’s political philosophy: the transfer of natural rights
to a sovereign power to achieve social peace. On this basis, it is easy to see why he has
been given a seminal place in the history of liberalism. Leo Strauss was seen earlier to
have done just this by describing liberalism as a political doctrine that centres the rights
of individuals, and which ‘‘identifies the function of the state with the protection or the
safeguarding of those rights.’’40 As suggested, this view of liberalism foregrounds the
relationship between the state and rights bearing individuals, and since it is the dominant
60 RYAN WALTER

view of liberalism, most commentary on Hobbes focuses on his treatment of the nature
of man and the genesis of a commonwealth.
This approach to liberalism and Hobbes has marginalized the issue of how to
govern, or the practical means of ordering and managing a polity. That is, normative
inquiry into subject-state relations addresses one (albeit crucial) element of liberalism, but,
on the basis of the preceding sketches of police and liberalism, we can also inquire into
the kind of governance presupposed by Hobbes.41 The former involves an extensive
regulation of the population; the latter favors governing at a distance and through the
naturalness of social processes.
An inquiry into Hobbes’s view of regulation should begin by resisting the
temptation to emphasize his concept of liberty. Hobbes has been positioned in a current
of political thought that carries the concept of negative liberty from the early modern
period to the present. Isaiah Berlin is the most influential practitioner here; as he put it:
‘‘By being free in this sense I mean not being interfered with by others. The wider the
area of non-interference the wider my freedom.’’ We are then told by Berlin that this is
‘‘what the classical English political philosophers meant when they used this word,’’ and
his supporting footnote points to Hobbes’s definition of a free man as someone who ‘‘is
not hindered to do what he has a will to.’’ To this Berlin added his own comment, that
the law ‘‘is always a fetter.’’42
The trouble with this procedure is that Hobbes is fitted into one of Berlin’s
pre-fabricated types of freedom, which effaces the historical situation of his writing.
Thanks to Skinner’s research, we know that Hobbes took up his pen to eviscerate a
republican conception of liberty that was used to contest the King’s prerogative in
relation to taxes and religious uniformity.43 Hobbes, that is, wanted to undermine claims
such as Berlin’s, that the law is always a restraint on liberty.
Hobbes was most successful in undermining this line of argument in Leviathan.
Effective rule, he conceded, is largely dependent on the fear people experience when
they contemplate the penalties attendant on breaking the law. But this does not encroach
on liberty, which is only curtailed by external impediments, not by internal impediments
such as the outcome of deliberation. Hence, ‘‘Feare, and Liberty are consistent,’’ and
actions performed out of fear of the law are still actions ‘‘which the doers had liberty to
omit.’’ Hobbes was not concerned with maximizing the sphere of individual liberty.
Indeed, he insisted that when we speak of ‘‘free states’’ we speak of all states equally,
because all that this phrase implies is that one state is not held in subjection to another;
it does not refer to the condition of subjects.44
The next step is to examine Hobbes’s view of reason of state. Richard Tuck has
adduced evidence that in the 1620s and 1630s Hobbes read authors such as Botero,
Lipsius, Machiavelli, and Guicciardini, and claims not only that ‘‘this ragion di stato culture
was clearly what the young Hobbes was most at home in’’ but that much of what these
authors had to say ‘‘went straightforwardly into Hobbes’s work.’’45
Chapter 25 of Leviathan, ‘‘Of Counsell,’’ is consistent with Tuck’s claim. Hobbes
argued that counsel was necessary because ‘‘no man is presumed to have experience in all
those things that to the Administration of a great Common-wealth are necessary to be
known.’’ These include the nature of man, the rights of government, equity, law, justice,
honor, strength, the strength of neighbors and enemies.46 Notice how the last two items
of this list correspond directly with the characterization of reason of state given earlier,
 Hobbes, Liberalism, and Political Technique 61

where the state’s purpose is to hold out against rival states. This is where the importance
of police lies, since it represents the knowledge and practice required for augmenting the
state’s strength through the good management of its population.
In chapter 13 of On the Citizen, ‘‘On the Duties of Those Who Exercise Sovereign
Power,’’ Hobbes claimed that ‘‘the safety of the people is the supreme law,’’ but safety does
not mean ‘‘mere survival in any condition’’ but ‘‘a happy life so far as that is possible.’’
Thus, those who exercise sovereign power would be acting contrary to natural law if they
failed to enact laws that provided citizens ‘‘with all the good things necessary not just for
life but for the enjoyment of life.’’ In fact, they would also be acting against their own
interests if they failed to provide their citizens with ‘‘what they need to be strong,’’
because ‘‘the power of the citizens is the power of the commonwealth.’’ Who are these
agents that exercise the sovereign power over the people for their good and that of the
commonwealth? We are told that ‘‘When right and exercise are separated, the government
of the commonwealth is like the ordinary government of the world, in which God the
first mover of all things, produces natural effects through the order of secondary causes.’’47
More simply, the sovereign cannot be expected to have a direct hand in all the activities
that the administration of a commonwealth requires. In Leviathan, public ministers are
defined as those who are ‘‘employed in any affaires, with Authority to represent in that
employment, the Person of the Common-wealth.’’ These public ministers are of various
kinds, including judges, instructors of the people, and those charged with the general
administration of a part of the commonwealth. These local level public minsters, such as
‘‘Governour, Lieutenant, Praefact or Vice-Roy,’’ are said to ‘‘resembleth the Nerves,
and Tendons that move the severall limbs of a body naturall.’’48 In 1631 Charles I issued
a Book of Orders for justices of the peace that, with more than a note of irritation,
underlined just this subservient relationship to the sovereign power.49
One of the specific objects this sovereign power is to be directed towards is the
industry of the people. In On the Citizen prosperity is said to come from three causes: the
products of earth and water, hard work, and thrift. For the first, the sovereign should pass
laws that ‘‘promote the skills which improve returns from the products of earth
and water.’’ In relation to the second source of prosperity, idleness is to be prohibited.50
This theme is given further treatment in Leviathan, comparable to Sheppard’s account
of the duties of a justice: the idle are to be ‘‘forced to work’’ or transplanted to ‘‘Countries
not sufficiently inhabited.’’51 As regards thrift, the sovereign should pass ‘‘laws which
forbid extravagant expenditure on food and clothes.’’52
Trade is presented by Hobbes as needing a particularly fine-grained style of
regulation, for traded commodities represented the ‘‘NUTRITION of a Common-
wealth.’’ Hence, the right distribution of traded goods was a key task for the sovereign
power: ‘‘to assigne in what places, and for what commodities, the Subject shall traffique
abroad, belongeth to the Soveraign.’’ If men were to trade according to their own
judgement ‘‘some of them would bee drawn for gaine, both to furnish the enemy with
means to hurt the Common-wealth, and hurt it themselves, by importing such things,
as pleasing mens appetites, be neverthelesse noxious.’’53
Compare this treatment of trade with Smith’s in Wealth of Nations. For Smith, it was
‘‘folly and presumption’’ on the part of the sovereign power to think that trade could be
ordered in a manner superior to what the uninhibited operation of self-love would
normally produce. This pernicious ethos of regulation resulted in cumbersome mercantile
62 RYAN WALTER

laws that distorted the trade of Britain and its growth. Far better, according to Smith,
to remove these laws and govern through the natural processes that the actions of
autonomous individuals would produce.54
Hobbes’s mode of government contrasts starkly with Smith’s. Laws ‘‘were invented
not to extinguish human actions but to direct them; just as nature ordained banks not to
stop the flow of the river but to direct it.’’ Crucially, the ‘‘extent of this liberty is to be
measured by the good of the citizens and of the commonwealth.’’55 A similar image
is offered in Leviathan; laws are to ‘‘direct and keep them [the people] in such a motion,
as not to hurt themselves by their own impetuous desires, rashnesse, or indiscretion;
as Hedges are set, not to stop Travellers, but to keep them in the way.’’56 One might
therefore say that for Smith’s technique of government the good is achieved through
liberty, while for Hobbes the good provides the test for how far liberty should be
permitted.
In terms of governmental technique, then, Smith and Hobbes diverge sharply.
More is at stake here than the need to prefix Hobbes’s brand of liberalism, as in
authoritarian-liberalism. As James Tully has shown, seventeenth-century political thought
was marked by the widespread use of the law to reform and improve the people in the
interests of the strength of the mercantile-military state.57 As Tully underlined, this
tendency is clearly displayed in Locke—another favorite candidate for the Father of
liberalism. Locke suggested that politics consists of two different parts: ‘‘the one
containing the original of societies and the rise and extent of political power, the other,
the art of governing men in society.’’58 This pairing was alive to Locke but, substituting
the subject-state analytic for one side of it, our historiography and theory of political
thought have largely forgotten the other.

LIBERALISM AND REPUBLICANISM

One often finds partial narratives of the rise of liberalism accompanying attempts to
recover republican or civic humanist arguments. Pocock, for example, claimed that the
passing of civic humanism was intimately tied to the rise of commerce, which unleashed
forces that were perceived as assailing the public citizen of civic humanism. One element
in this process is the rise of the commercial class. The landholder is made independent
by his land; as a result, he can engage in politics and defend his country when needed.
The commercial man, by contrast, is busy with his business and bookkeeping.
Consequently, ‘‘a commercial and manufacturing society like Holland is likely to be
defended by mercenaries and governed by oligarchs.’’ Another element is specialization,
a process that ‘‘may be incompatible with the unity of the moral personality.’’59 Chief
here is the professional soldier and standing armies, which obviate the need for the citizen
to bear arms. Luxury is the root evil—‘‘it leads to choice and consequently to
specialization.’’60 But it is the very stuff of citizenship and virtue that is being outsourced.
The professional soldier ‘‘drained off the military capacity of his fellow citizens’’ and in so
doing diminished the fundamental ‘‘political capacity’’ of the republican polity.61
In response to these attacks, the tradition of natural jurisprudence was mobilized by
defenders of commerce because it allowed them to portray precommercial societies not
as virtuous but as barbarous. Commerce could be lauded for taming barbarity through
 Hobbes, Liberalism, and Political Technique 63

self-interest and politeness.62 In this context, the four-stages theory of human history
becomes a powerful intellectual weapon: as a theory of the historical determination of the
human personality, it foretells the inevitable passing of the citizen of old virtue.63
The challenging suggestion Pocock offered in this regard is that, while in the course
of these debates we can naturally ‘‘find highly systematic liberal philosophies occurring
from time to time,’’ they are primarily the outcome of attempts to grapple with more
general problems inhabiting the intellectual context, namely, the challenge presented
to virtue by commerce. We might therefore be tempted to think that liberalism was
‘‘perfected less by its proponents than by its opponents.’’64 In sum, the conceptual
challenges faced by republicanism in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
contributed much to the emergence and development of liberalism.
To take another example, Philip Pettit elaborated a republican conception of liberty,
the essence of which is taken to be non-domination. Hobbes is seen to have issued a
powerful challenge to this understanding by instead defining liberty as non-interference.
Pettit claimed that this alternative conception was given a decisive advantage in the
eighteenth century by the expansion of the category ‘‘the people.’’ More plainly, as the
push to include the lay public and women within the political realm gained momentum,
the republican understanding of freedom began to appear unworkable: ‘‘it must have
seemed less and less realistic to stick with the rich old ideal of freedom as non-
domination. Much better to thin out the ideal of freedom and to orientate the state
by the light of the new, modernist ideal.’’ 65 Like Pocock’s narrative, liberalism is seen
to have triumphed in large part because of its suitability to the new conditions brought
in by a changing world.
Skinner’s brief account fits well with both of these presentations. Like Pettit,
he nominated the eighteenth century as the crucial time for the neo-roman theory
of freedom, in part because of the social changes that were taking place. Specifically,
as courtly manners were passed to the bourgeoisie and became codified as the norm, the
model republican citizen, the country gent, began to appear outdated. The ‘‘virtues of the
independent country gentleman began to look irrelevant and even inimical to a polite
and commercial age.’’ A more important factor was the conceptual challenge from
advocates of negative liberty who consistently proclaimed of neo-roman freedom that its
‘‘underlying theory of liberty is simply confused.’’66
What should be noted in all three accounts is that the defeat of the civic humanist
or republican perspective on government and freedom constitutes the triumph of
liberalism. The active citizen, and the comparatively engaging versions of freedom that his
proponents would have him enjoy, came to be seen as too unwieldy and demanding
for the realities of eighteenth-century society. Thus the conceptual and practical
parsimony of liberalism is seen to have aided its victory in a telling way.
This perspective on the emergence of liberalism misses the other great liberal
victory—the displacement of social life’s detailed regulation as a way of understanding
how the everyday work of government should be carried out. There are good reasons
why these authors should focus on the eclipse of republican conceptions of liberty and
moral personality, not least that these are the subjects of their researches. In addition,
unlike republican liberty, there is no contemporary nostalgia for a system of government
premised on a detailed regulation of everyday life, which grates on our intellectual and
practical attachments to liberty.67 Nevertheless, the eclipse of police styles of rule should
64 RYAN WALTER

be kept in view, if for no other reason than the perspective it offers on the relationship
between republicanism and liberalism, and on the character of contemporary government
in the West. To see a local example of this function, consider Hobbes’s comments on
speech, that noble invention ‘‘whereby men register their Thoughts; recall them when
they are past; and also declare them one to another for mutuall utility and conversation
without which, there had been amongst men, neither Common-wealth, nor Society.’’68
Amongst the various offices of the sovereign, Hobbes listed the instruction of the people
in how to be good citizens. Chief among these was to know the true nature of sovereign
power, and hence be forearmed against the many mistaken opinions regarding this
power—that the sovereign power may be divided, that their property is their own, that
their own conscience may be a judge, and so on. There are two ‘‘Means, and Conduits’’
by which these seditious opinions are transmitted to the people: religious leaders, and
conversation between neighbors and friends.69 Given the difficulty of managing opinions
directly, Hobbes suggested that the best remedy was to ensure the universities taught the
right ideas.70
Now consider the role of civil society in Pettit’s contemporary sketch of
republicanism. After considering the laws and institutions that should characterize a
republican polity, Pettit claimed that by themselves these measures were insufficient for
good government, for ‘‘laws must be embedded in a network of norms that reign
effectively, independently of state coercion, in the realm of civil society.’’ A norm is
approved typical behavior, for ‘‘approval makes the behaviour more likely.’’ Thus, norms
lend society its self-regulating aspect through the approval and disapproval that attaches
to adherence and deviation, respectively. Pettit could therefore speak of the ‘‘intangible
hand’’ that operates alongside Adam Smith’s invisible hand in regulating individual action
for the benefit of society.71
Pettit and Hobbes both used the phrase ‘civil society,’ but their conceptions were
starkly opposed. Hobbes used civil society, commonwealth, and state interchangeably,
and portrayed the stubborn autonomy of opinions that circulated through speech as a
threat to sovereign power. For Pettit’s republican program, by contrast, the intangible
hand of civil society is marshalled to aid the traditional elements of sovereign power—the
law and state institutions. Pettit’s program accordingly shares with liberalism the desire
to govern through those processes that appear natural or self-regulating, such as the law
of opinion.72
In terms of the techniques of government, we might wonder if contemporary
articulations of republicanism and liberalism are not birds of a feather. Both typically
decline to govern everyday life closely, with some telling exceptions, and instead seek to
govern through the processes and mechanisms that everyday interactions are seen to give
rise to. On this basis, we should not think of liberalism as defeating republicanism; rather,
we should see both doctrines as variations on a liberal technique that became available
with the passing of comprehensive social regulation as the dominant political technology.
We might therefore suspect that republicanism does not possess a distinctive technology
of government.
In this light, consider Adam Smith. His work exhibits both pro- and anti-republican
moments. For example, he disagreed with those ‘‘of republican principles’’ who ‘‘have
been jealous of a standing army as dangerous to liberty.’’ On the contrary, when a
military force is under command of those who have an interest in supporting civil
 Hobbes, Liberalism, and Political Technique 65

authority because they share in that authority, a standing army can even ‘‘be favourable to
liberty.’’73 Elsewhere Smith lamented that as a consequence of the rise of commerce,
‘‘among the bulk of the people military courage diminishes. By having their minds
constantly employed on the arts of luxury, they grow effeminate and dastardly.’’74
Similarly, Pocock has advised reading Scottish political economy through the lenses of
natural jurisprudence and civic humanism.75 From the perspective of technique sketched
here, however, Smith appears as unambiguously liberal. More generally—and as with
Hobbes and liberalism—this new perspective on the relationship between republicanism
and liberalism can only emerge when subject-state relations do not dominate inquiry.
To bring these points to a head, let me review one of Skinner’s characteristically
persuasive presentations of the value of intellectual history. In the final chapter of Liberty
Before Liberalism, Skinner suggests that we should practice intellectual history because
it is ‘‘a repository of values we no longer endorse, of questions we no longer ask. One
corresponding role for the intellectual historian is that of acting as a kind of archaeologist,
bringing buried intellectual treasure back to the surface, dusting it down and enabling us
to reconsider what we think of it.’’ The treasure recovered in his book, the neo-roman
theory of liberty, may possess particular value in the present because of ‘‘the rise of the
liberal theory to a position of hegemony.’’ Indeed, it seems that ‘‘the liberal analysis
has come to be widely regarded as the only coherent way of thinking about the concept
[of liberty].’’ The point is that, in relation to liberty at least, we seem to have fallen
‘‘under the spell of our own intellectual heritage.’’76
The present argument largely shares this purpose of recovery to service
contemporary perspectives, but here intellectual history is positioned within the remit
of spell-casters. Skinner has been demonstrably successful in contributing to a widespread
renewal of interest in republican conceptions of freedom. Yet this is where the
enchantment begins. The effect of offering republicanism, or neo-roman theory, as a
forgotten rival to liberalism is to set rather narrow limits on the scope of historical
reflection. As has been highlighted using police science as a contrastive example,
contemporary elaborations of republicanism and liberalism share a great deal in common.
In particular, they share a focus on the formal relationship between individuals and the
state, or who holds power and under what conditions. The consequence of this focus
seems to be the relative neglect of questions regarding the technical arts of government
and the presuppositions they entail, such as the apparent value of liberty as a resource for
the work of government. Put programmatically, the benefit to be gained by keeping
in view liberalism’s eclipse of police and similarly-styled approaches to government is an
awareness of the role of non-sovereign mechanisms of rule in regulating free individuals.

NOTES

1. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1971),
181–82.
2. Pierre Manent, An Intellectual History of Liberalism, trans. Rebecca Balinski (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1995), 25–26.
3. Vickie B. Sullivan, Machiavelli, Hobbes, and the Formation of a Liberal Republicanism in England
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 105.
66 RYAN WALTER

4. J. P. Sommerville, Thomas Hobbes: Political Ideas in Historical Context (London: Macmillan,

1992), 103.
5. Norberto Bobbio, Thomas Hobbes and the Natural Law Tradition, trans. Daniela Gobetti
(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 70.
6. Lucien Jaume, ‘‘Hobbes and the Philosophical Sources of Liberalism,’’ in The Cambridge
Companion to Hobbes’s Leviathan, ed. Patricia Springborg (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2007), 200.
7. J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in
the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 47, 71.
8. See J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic
Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975).
9. Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998);
‘‘Machiavelli on Virtù and the Maintenance of Liberty,’’ in Visions of Politics, vol. 2
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); ‘‘The Idea of Negative Liberty:
Machiavellian and Modern Perspectives,’’ in Visions of Politics, vol. 2, op cit; Hobbes and
Republican Liberty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
10. Conal Condren, Argument and Authority in Early Modern England: the Presupposition of Oaths and
Offices (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) 33–34, 73–76, 94.
11. For an overview see Ian Hampsher-Monk ‘‘The History of Political Thought and the Political
History of Thought,’’ in The History of Political Thought in National Context, ed. D. Castiglione
and I. Hampsher-Monk (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 159–74; Skinner’s
collected essays on method are found in Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics, vol. 1
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Pocock’s method essays comprise Political
Thought and History: Essays on Theory and Method (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2009).
12. Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978,
ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007);
The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–1979, ed. Michel Senellart, trans.
Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
13. For the German variety, see Marc Raeff, The Well-Ordered Police State: Social and Institutional
Change Through Law in the Germanies and Russia, 1600–1800 (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1983); Keith Tribe, Strategies of Economic Order: German Economic Discourse,
1750–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), chap. 2. For estimates of British
police, see Francis Dodsworth, ‘‘The Idea of Police in Eighteenth-Century England:
Discipline, Reformation, Superintendence, c. 1780–1800,’’ Journal of the History of Ideas 69.4
(2008): 583–605; Stanley Palmer, Police and Protest in England and Ireland, 1780–1850
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 69–82; Mariana Valverde, ‘‘Police Science,
British Style: Pub Licensing and Knowledges of Urban Disorder,’’ Economy and Society 32.2
(2003): 234–52; Patrick Carroll, Science, Culture, and Modern State Formation (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 2006), 113–42.
14. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 89–93.
15. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 289–306, 313.
16. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 322.
17. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 322–26.
18. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 326–27.
19. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 339–40.
20. Patrick Colquhoun, A Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis, 7th ed. (London, 1806), preface.
21. There is no straightforward relationship between Foucault’s arguments regarding police and
his work on discipline. In Discipline and Punish, discipline is described as a political technology
of the body intended to produce capacities and attributes in the individuals subjected to it,
a technology that comes to be seen as appropriate for various domains of life. Police, by
contrast, is concerned with the population, not individuals. Michel Foucault, Discipline and
Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin, 1991).
22. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 344.
 Hobbes, Liberalism, and Political Technique 67

23. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 349, 353.

24. At times Foucault slides between economy and society; see especially Security, Territory,
Population, 348–50. For a complementary argument regarding the genesis of civil society as
a category see Christine Helliwell and Barry Hindess, ‘‘‘Culture’, ‘Society’ and the Figure of
Man,’’ History of the Human Sciences 12.4 (1999): 1–20.
25. An important twist to Foucault’s story is that, with the advent of liberalism, the intimate
relationship between knowledge and government is reconfigured into a more distant one.
See Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 350–51 and Colin Gordon, ‘‘Governmental
Rationality: An Introduction,’’ in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed
G. Burchell, C. Gordon, and P. Miller (Hertfordshire: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), 14–16.
26. Sir Leon Radzinowicz, A History of English Criminal Law and its Administration from 1750, Vol.
3: Cross-Currents in the Movement for the Reform of the Police (London: Stevens & Sons, 1956), 1.
27. William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, vol. 4 (Oxford, 1769), 162.
28. Francis Dodsworth, ‘‘The Idea of Police in Eighteenth-Century England,’’ 589.
29. Mark Goldie ‘‘The Unacknowledged Republic: Officeholding in Early Modern
England,’’ in The Politics of the Excluded, c. 1500-1800, ed. T. Harris (New York:
Palgrave, 2001), 154.
30. That the justices of the peace were essential cogs in England’s decentralized state-machinery
has been recognized within the state formation literature. See, for example, Eckhart Hellmuth
‘‘The British State,’’ in A Companion to Eighteenth-Century Britain, ed. H. T. Dickinson
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 23–26. It is also an established point in constitutional history:
see The Stuart Constitution 1603–1688: Documents and Commentary, ed. and intro. J. P. Kenyon
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), chap. 15.
31. William Sheppard, A New Survey of the Justice of Peace His Office (London, 1659), 6.
32. Sidney Webb and Beatrice Webb, English Local Government from the Revolution to the Municipal
Corporations Act: The Parish and the County (London: Longmans Green, 1906), 446–56, 465,
471, 478.
33. Thomas G. Barnes, Somerset 1625–1640: A County’s Government During the ‘‘Personal Rule’’
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961), 58.
34. Orders Appointed by his Majestie (King Charles I.) To be Straitly Observed, for the Preventing and
Remedying of the Dearth of Graine and Victuall (London, 1630), 9–16.
35. Adam Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, ed. R. L. Meek, D. D. Raphael, and P. G. Stein
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 331, 362–64.
36. Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, 332.
37. Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, 333.
38. Thomas Hobbes, On the Citizen, ed. Richard Tuck and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998), 27–31.
39. Hobbes, On the Citizen, 73, 82, 93.
40. Strauss, Natural Right and History, 181–82.
41. Peter Steinberger has distinguished between the prudential and the philosophical aspects of
Hobbes. See Peter Steinberger, The Idea of the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2004), chap. 2.
42. Isaiah Berlin, Liberty: Incorporating Four Essays On Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2002), 170.
43. Here the narrative draws on Skinner’s Hobbes and Republican Liberty, chap. 5.
44. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1991), 146, 149.
45. Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 1572–1651 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1993), 282, 308.
46. Hobbes, Leviathan, 180.
47. Hobbes, On the Citizen, 142–44.
48. Hobbes, Leviathan, 166–67.
49. The orders are partially reproduced in Kenyon, Stuart Constitution, 497–501.
50. Hobbes, On the Citizen, 150.
68 RYAN WALTER

51. Hobbes, Leviathan, 239. See A. L. Beier, ‘‘‘Utter Strangers to Industry, Morality and
Religion’: John Locke on the Poor,’’ Eighteenth Century Life 12.3 (1988): 28–41, for Locke’s
similar recommendations as to how the poor should be regulated.
52. Hobbes, On the Citizen, 150.
53. Hobbes, Leviathan, 170, 173.
54. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, vol. 1,
ed. R. H. Campbell, A. S. Skinner, and W. B. Todd (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 456.
Part of the story relates to the new meaning Smith gave to wealth as productive labor, which
uncoupled political economy from reason of state. See Ryan Walter, ‘‘Governmentality
Accounts of the Economy: A Liberal Bias?,’’ Economy and Society 37.1 (2008): 94–114.
55. Hobbes, On the Citizen, 151.
56. Hobbes, Leviathan, 239–40.
57. James Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1993), 179–83.
58. John Locke, The Educational Writings of John Locke: A Critical Edition with Introduction and Notes,
ed. J. L. Axtell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 400.
59. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History, 109–10.
60. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, 430.
61. J. G. A. Pocock, ‘‘The Political Limits to Premodern Economics,’’ in The Economic Limits to
Modern Politics, ed. John Dunn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 136.
62. On this theme, see especially Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political
Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).
63. Pocock Virtue, Commerce, and History, 113–16.
64. Pocock Virtue, Commerce, and History, 71.
65. Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1997), 37–38, 49.
66. Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism, 96–97.
67. For certain groups it is routinely proposed that parts of their everyday lives be managed in a
rigorous way. Consider the unemployed and work, and ethnic minorities and income
management; the latter is currently seen in Australia’s Northern Territory. Note that Hobbes
excluded children and the mad from the remit of the law, since they ‘‘had never power to
make any covenant’’ (Leviathan, 187).
68. Hobbes, Leviathan, 24.
69. A concept of civil society in anything like the contemporary form is absent from Hobbes.
As Tuck discussed in his introduction to On the Citizen (xxxix–xl), Hobbes could equate
civil society [societas civilis] with the state or commonwealth [civitas]. The contemporary
state/society/economy triad should be seen as a recent phenomenon, wholly unavailable to
Hobbes. For a rich discussion of the context for seventeenth-century translation, see Michael
Silverthorne, ‘‘Civil Society and State, Law and Rights: Some Latin Terms and Their
Translation in the Natural Jurisprudence Tradition,’’ in Acta Conventus Neo-Latini
Torontonensis: Proceedings of the Seventh International Congress of Neo-Latin Studies: Toronto, 8
August to 13 August, 1988, ed. A. Dalzell, C. Fantazzi, and R. Schoeck (Binghamton, NY:
Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1991).
70. Hobbes, Leviathan, 233–37. The popish origins of the universities are discussed in Thomas
Hobbes, Behemoth Or The Long Parliament, ed. Ferdinand Tönnies (London: Frank Cass, 1969),
40–41.
71. Pettit, Republicanism, 241, 244, 224–27.
72. Locke gave a prominent place to the law of opinion in regulating individual behaviour;
see Hindess’s treatment of Locke on this issue in Barry Hindess, Discourses of Power: From
Hobbes to Foucault (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 73–80. The more general point is that
government would seem to occur through more agencies than those normally taken to
comprise the government.
73. Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, vol. 2, 706–7.
74. Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, 540.
 Hobbes, Liberalism, and Political Technique 69

75. J. G. A. Pocock, ‘‘Cambridge Paradigms and Scotch Philosophers: a Study of the

Relations Between the Civic Humanist and the Civil Jurisprudential Interpretation of
Eighteenth-Century Social Thought’’ in Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy
in the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1983).
76. Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism, 112, 113, 116.
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