The 'Aporia of Biopolitics': A problem in Hobbes’ argument and its relevance for liberal democracies

My paper is a case study to the question of what use historic texts can be for contemporary discussions in political theory. I focus on Hobbes’ development and explication of a type of argument, which was very influential for the development of the liberal state and still has a huge impact on ideas of legitimacy in liberal states: The contractualistic argument. In the first part of my paper, I will develop a detailed reconstruction of that kind of argument as it is developed in the English Leviathan through a close reading of the text. In the “sovereignty by institution”-story, the outline and content of the contractualistic argument is surprisingly liberal because it employs the ideas of political voluntarism and of equal political liberties. In my analysis of the argument, I will focus on the role of the body in the argument. My main thesis is that Hobbes’ contractualistic argument encounters weakness in light of a phenomenon that I call ‘Aporia of Biopolitics'. Although life and death play an important role within in the Hobbesian argument, the fear of violent death being the impulse for contractual formation and the limit of the subject’s obedience, it is unclear in this context what precisely is meant by life and death. Furthermore, it is unclear who has the right to define life and death and thus to determine the limit of the subject’s obedience. The textual evidence is ambiguous, certain passages clearly favoring the sovereign and others suggesting, that this definition is established by the contractualistic participants (and later subjects) themselves. But the problem lies not so much in the unclarity of the concepts of life and death, or the said textual ambiguity with respect to who has the right to define such concepts. Rather, I argue, the problem is that in the status civilis any act of defining life and death – of the sovereign as well as of the individual – must be considered as an unjustified modification of the premises of the argument and thus renders the whole argument invalid. Hobbes’ argument contains an aporia which shows itself clearly in the realm of a public bio-policy and could thus be called ‘Aporia of Biopolitics’: It is both a logical necessity and a logically impossibility to define death within the status civilis. In the second part of my paper, I will argue that this result – the theoretical weakness of an argument developed in a historic text – is of importance for contemporary questions of legitimacy in liberal democracies. The contractualistic argument and its main ideas of political voluntarism, equal political liberties and the state’s task to protect the bodies of its citizens still shape current notions of political legitimacy. Hobbesian contractualism was an important step in the development of the liberal state and is still influential. Reading Hobbes, I claim, can shed light on our understanding of political legitimacy, because it shows that a body based contractualism necessarily fails.