Table Of ContentThe Ideology of Order
The Ideology of Order
A Comparative Analysis of
Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes
by
PRESTON KING
Professor of Government, University of Nairobi
First published in 1974
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© George Allen & Unwin Ltd 1974
Published in the USA 1974 by
HARPER & ROW PUBLISHERS, INC.
BARNES & NOBLE IMPORT DIVISION
ISBN 06 493710 O
Printed in Great Britain
To my Fisk elders and age-mates
and particularly to nine among them:
Ama Bontemps, T. S. Currier, Robert Hayden, August Meier,
Bernard Spivack, David Lewis, Norman Hodges, Richard Thomell,
Eugene White
But most especially in memory
of my late brother
SLATER
whose charm, sympathy and intelligence
made him so tolerant a friend
and whose death proved so great a loss
244650
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am indebted to several friends and colleagues who kindly
allowed me to address their senior seminars with a view to testing
explicitly the main line of argument which is both assumed and
stated in the text.
I am especially grateful to Maurice Cranston of the lse, to Dr
Parekh of Hull, to A. H. Birch, M. M. Goldsmith and Bob
Dowse of Exeter, to Geraint Parry and Michael Evans of Man¬
chester, to Jack Greenleaf, Jim McNamara and Graham Evans
(a wonderfully acute and tenacious man whom I had not pre¬
viously met), all of Swansea, to a measured D. D. Raphael and a
vibrant Peter Campbell, both of Reading, and finally to Dr Berki
and Professor Dodd, also of Hull.
In the text I have drawn attention to the notorious inconsistency
of Bodin. This inconsistency is evident on any internal analysis of
his Six limes de la Republique and can reasonably be assumed to
obtain as between this work and the earlier Methodus ad facilem
historiarum cognitionem. It is for this reason that my analysis of
Bodin is basically restricted to the Republique. All the same, some
scholars have made a point of arguing for a dramatic break between
the Methodus and the Republique which I find it difficult to accept.
The case is only rarely supported by tough, textual evidence,
so that those who advance this argument are compelled to resort
to historical evidence which is mostly circumstantial. A recent
book of this type is J. H. Franklin’s Jean Bodin and the Rise
of Absolutist Theory (Cambridge, 1973). It provides the most
careful of the conventional arguments so far marshalled in
support of the Methodus/Republique hiatus theory (as discussed
in Appendix 4 of this book). I think the argument of Appendix 4
stands, but the detail of that argument would naturally have been
somewhat modified if the Franklin book had not been published
too late to permit some formal account to be taken of his
evidence. My basic view then remains that the more important
hiatus obtains between Bodin and previous writers, not between
an earlier and a later Bodin.
‘The ground of the people to endure even the almost unendurable
measure of sovereign power is . . . that its resistance to the supreme
legislative power . . . must be thought of as destroying the whole
legal constitution.’
Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals.
‘The notion that the state . . . would be no state if its will were tied
by a higher norm, determining and limiting its range of action, poses
a serious problem. To tell the whole truth, I do not think it has a
solution. Despite the attempts which have been made, despite the
prodigious subtlety which has been displayed, no satisfactory
solution has been or ever will be provided. The most ingenious
systems have merely concealed, but never resolved, the difficulty.
For they have either ended up by affirming an all-powerful state or
by entirely negating the state as such. They have oscillated between
the absolutism of writers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Kant and
Hegel, and the anarchism of writers like Stirner, Bakunin and
Proudhon.’
Leon Duguit, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Kant et Hegel (Paris, 1918), p. 4.
‘Unlimited power, if it exists at all, must belong to a monarch, and
least of all to a democracy, where the whole or a great part of the
people wield authority collectively.’
Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus.
‘The defects of every government and constitution, both as to
principle and form, must on a parity of reasoning, be as open to
discussion as the defects of a law, and it is a duty which every man
owes to society to point them out.’
Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man.
PREFACE
The history of politics appears very often to consist in a swing from
demands for change to demands for order - and vice versa. In perhaps a
more elevated style, political philosophy helps both to record and to
provoke these swings, from ‘liberty’ to ‘authority’ and vice versa.
Every state, society or system, taken as an order, necessarily evinces
a mixture of rights and wrongs. Every order in some degree establishes
authority and protects liberties. Some liberty is restricted in every
order; authority is absolute in none. To establish an authority or to
protect a liberty may be just or unjust. Order per se is neither one nor
the other. Every order will, in part, prove both just and unjust. Any order,
therefore, will deserve in part both to be attacked and to be defended.
It is often held that order precedes justice. It is basically around such
a formula as this that the ideology of order congeals. By the ‘ideology of
order’ I have in mind a variety of arguments which are disposed to
defend the consolidation of authority in an a priori way - whether that
authority is fixed or expanding, stable or in process. The notion that
order precedes justice most generally means that ‘order’ should be
promoted or defended no matter what harm is done along the way. Such
promotion or defence as this implies not that order is unjust, but that
the supreme form of justice is order. This view is an ancient one, as old
as Plato. But it should be established, and as plainly as possible, that
justice no more equals order (or authority) than justice equals liberty
(or anarchy).
If ‘order precedes justice’ means that order should take precedence
over justice, the conclusion is to be rejected. Where we recognise an
order, in some particular, to be unconditionally evil, we cannot intend
that the evil should be preserved, since it cannot be right to preserve
what is wrong. Of course no order is perfect; but imperfection still
cannot claim any right to be preserved.
If ‘order precedes justice’ means that one grievance must queue up
behind another for attention, then the test of the reasonableness of such
patience is whether that other problem is genuinely more pressing;
whether one cannot attend simultaneously both to the grievance in
THE IDEOLOGY OF ORDER
hand and to its rival; and whether in any event the one, as compared to
the other, has or has not already been made to wait long enough.
Certainly everything cannot be done, or reformed, at once; there are
priorities; and while one priority takes its turn, some other must be
required to wait. But one grievance can only be asked to wait upon the
alleviation of another if it is clear that the other is of greater importance
and that it is in fact being attended to: waiting one’s turn cannot in
fairness be made an endless occupation.
If ‘order precedes justice’ means - whether forever or only as far as
we can see - that some particular evil is irremediable within a given
system, then those who suffer the evil may understandably prefer to
risk overturning the system. If indeed the evil is an evil, and is at the
same time inextricably embedded within the system, then those who
act against that system must surely be right to do so. I would argue that
no evil is inextricably embedded in any system, and therefore that
domino-type theories - which spring to the defence of particular evils
on the grounds that they are necessary for the good of the political
whole - are misguided. Revolutions are not inevitable. Nor are they
illegitimate as such. Revolutions may or may not tend to arise, but it is
perfectly legitimate that they should, in any situation where there is an
accepted need for change which is systematically frustrated on the
grounds that the effects of the change will be too sweeping, that all
order will be undermined, and that the unintended consequences of
these changes extend beyond our capacity to predict. No act, whether its
character is evolutionary or revolutionary, can be usefully argued
against on the grounds that it produces unintended consequences. For
all acts are attended by consequences which no one can ever predict.
Every order instances control and lack of control, a degree of authority
and liberty, both justice and injustice. No order is absolutely ordered.
When we perceive the chinks, the discontinuities, in the armoury of
order, we come closer to perceiving an important part of what it is -
which is a perspective. A radical change of perspective may demolish
an order but it would be extravagant to suppose that it can demolish all
order. We cannot swim to shore if there is no sea; nor see the light if
there is no dark; nor change a system and leave nothing the same. A
change of perspective does not mean that all order is lost, and all order
as such is certainly not bad. But ideologies of order are surely absurd:
order cannot be praised, sanctioned or preserved per se. This is the
slender point, in the analysis of Bodin and Hobbes, that we are
ultimately concerned to set on its feet.
