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Though well written and insightful, I am somewhat disappointed by Stephen Holmes' Chapter "Hobbes' Irrational Man" in his Passions and Constraint. On the Theory of Liberals Democracy. The chapter seems almost redundant since Holmes basically repeats his findings laid out in the second chapter "The Secret History of Self-Interest," only narrowing his source to the works of Hobbes, especially the latter's account of the Civil War.
Holmes' essential point is that Hobbes, a pre-liberal as far as his Menschenbild goes, shared with the later full-blown founding liberals a highly differentiated outlook of human psychology. Hobbes and the proto-liberals, argues Holmes, were not guilty of the crude elevation of self-interest often ascribed to them or actually perpetrated by later liberal authors.
According to Hobbes, human beings are ultimately driven by beliefs. And beliefs contain large portions of the irrational. It is therefore inappropriate to reduce human motivation to rationally calculated self-interest.
People are socialised into irrational beliefs that will govern them throughout their lives. They are surrounded and frequently under the sway of specialists of doctrinal cajolery. That is in addition to a natural propensity of man to be urged by innate impulses capable of overriding and counteracting rational self-interest.
Sober assessment of man's own best good is constantly eroded by the force of norms - internalised moral compulsion -, names, - a torrent of associations, rather than facts -, and doctrines - inculcated believes, often uncritically adopted capable of enslaving the individual.
What I find interesting is Hobbes willingness to take a quasi Machiavellian stance in his prescription of the good society. Totally illiberal, of course, he seems to recommend not only absolute authority by the king over his subjects as the guaranteeing condition of a civilised commonwealth, but also endorses a cynical ruse on the part of the powers-that-be so as to ensure absolute obedience in the populace.
Hobbes hopes to confiscate the intangible power of religious fraud from dangerous clergymen and bestow it safely on the King. He therefore asserts that legal positivism [the doctrine that the state is the originator of law, IGTU] should not be the official doctrine of the Crown. Indeed, the sovereign must pretend "that the the civil laws are God's laws". (p. 97)
I am not sure that Sen's distinction between transcendental institutionalism, to which he assigns Thomas Hobbes, and realization-focussed comparison, captures the late writing of theEnglish philosopher.
Hobbes seems more realization-focussed, comparing different (not abstract but historical) governmental arrangements and states of society and espousing an imperfect, compromised improvement on the injustice of these alternatives.
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