The Individual as Torn Garment
The Hobbesian Revolution
One is tempted to say that Hobbes is absolutist in spite of his individualism. But, on the contrary, Hobbes is absolutist because he is so rigorously individualistic. If we find it hard to admit such an idea, it is because we have only a very faint idea of what it means to take the individual seriously, to make the individual, and the individual alone, the foundation of all political legitimacy.
Pierre Manent, An Intellectual History of Liberalism
If two people came to court holding a garment, and this one, the first litigant, says: I found it, and that one, the second litigant, says: I found it; this one says: All of it is mine, and that one says: All of it is mine; how does the court adjudicate this case? This one takes an oath that he does not have ownership of less than half of it, and that one takes an oath that he does not have ownership of less than half of it, and they divide it.
Mishna Bava Metzia 1:1
Individualism—as a legal and moral category—is a recent phenomenon. Sure, a sense of interiority and self-consciousness long precedes the modern foundation of individual rights, yet the notion that the individual is the alpha and omega of political thought begins with Hobbes.
Hobbes established his political theory against a backdrop of an experience of Civil War. If Hobbes is the founder of liberalism, it is out of a need to find a principle of legitimacy that does not derive either from the Church (theology) or from the King (the state). Even as Hobbes ends up justifying monarchy, his path to absolutist monarchy is distinctly modern. The king does not derive his authority from heaven, but from the people. The sovereign is a bottom-up solution to a human problem, not a top-down principle. He emerges as a representative of the universal principle of individuality. He exists as a way of preserving, paradoxically, the individualist impulse in us all.
Locke and Rousseau reject absolute monarchy. Montesquieu and the American Founders understood the practical need for “separation of powers.” Yet the first thinker to enshrine the principle of autonomy and the authority of the individual saw no contradiction between kingship and individualism. This is worth considering.
It is also worth considering that the political creation of individualism was born after centuries of intra-religious conflict. The “truth” of political individualism was by no means self-evident when it came into being. Rather, it was a way of coping with the instability of the Investiture Conflict—a medieval conflict between Church and Crown. Individualism is a compromise between theocratic authoritarianism and secular authoritarianism.
It’s ironic—the term “individual” means unable to be divided, and yet it was discovered of a time when people and communities were precisely divided.
2.
The Talmud presents a case of a “Lost object,” really, a contested object (contestation being a form of loss): two people enter a courtroom holding an object they both claim is theirs. Practically, the law is probabilistic. They split the object. Not literally. Rather, they sell the object and split the proceeds. But some objects cannot be split up—like the famous baby over which Solomon adjudicated. In any case, the law allows monetary compensation to function as a substitute for truth. Instead of fighting over the object, a split solution ensures loss minimization. Each loses half of the value, but that’s better than one person losing all of it (unfairly).
Psychological research on “loss aversion” bears out the practical wisdom of the law. People who make money only to lose some of it are less happy than if they had never made it in the first place.
3.
I propose that the individual is—despite what the term suggests—a split tallis, an object born from the rift between Church and State. Methodologically speaking, Hobbes begins a process that is disinterested in getting to the bottom of the Church’s claims to authority. Instead, it assumes them to be irrelevant. All that matters is what we do to cope with a state of nature. Dislike his solution all you want, but respect the hustle. For Hobbes, sovereignty is born out of a need for keeping the peace. If the result is a cognitive dissonance, or a dissatisfaction with the result, it is helpful to remember the adage, “If you think I look bad, you should see the other guy.”
We didn’t lose when the court told us we only get half. We lost the moment we entered the court, each holding an object, saying, “It’s mine.”
4.
The activist maxim, “No justice, no peace” is entirely correct, but not in the way intended: it is the cry for justice itself—and the violence shed in its name—that substantiates the need for peace. But if the individual is a garment pulled apart by warring parties, peace is what happens when we rebrand the tear as the lesser evil.
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