Thomas Hobbes blamed the coming of the English Civil War (at least in part) on rhetorically skilled parliamentarians “with no arguments at all”. Gruen sees him as both right and wrong: right to seek an answer in fiduciary cognitive societal-scale institutions like science, but overwhelmingly wrong in his fever dream that, starting from geometry, we could maintain certainty in a logical chain of reasoning that would carry us to a science of justice. The real virtues of science are that it “reorders prestige to follow evidence, rather than the reverse” while making reasoning inspectable. Good institutions inject contestability, and grant standing to whoever can competently join the argument.
Thus our worries about the destructive rhetoric of spin and bullshit destroying public reason are not new, 350 years old. Or perhaps 2075 years old: recall how Quintilian reported that Cicero gloried in his having spread darkness over the jurors in Pro Cluentio. Or perhaps 2450 years old: do recall that Hobbes picked up on Thoukydides’s lamenting that during the Peloponnesian War
words had to change their ordinary meaning….. “Reckless audacity” came to be considered “the courage of a loyal ally”; “prudent hesitation”, “specious cowardice”; moderation was held to be a cloak for unmanliness…
<https://nicholasgruen.substack.com/p/hobbes-on-spin-and-bullshit> <https://nicholasgruen.substack.com>
What Hobbes understood about spin and bullshit
Much of what is now said about public discourse — that manipulation and spin prevail over truth and candour, that pleasing abstractions displace description, and that profile confers standing more readily than expertise or disinterest — was said in much the same terms by the great 17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes about rhetoric.[1]
Hobbes’s account of what public speech is for could stand for our own time (even if his ultimate remedy was extreme — showing all the motivated impatience of the intellectual). The office of a counsellor is to make the consequences of a course of action manifest, so the person counselled may be “truly and evidently informed”; speech that works by stirring the passions is “repugnant to the Office of a Counsellour.” [2] Against that standard he listed rhetoric among the causes of a commonwealth’s dissolution,
For Hobbes, this was existential. Over a decade before the English Civil War, he’d translated Thucydides, dwelling on the way in which the tumult of civil war tore civilisation asunder, “the received value of names” being changed at will. Thucydides depicted a society losing its hold on its own vocabulary, and so on reality itself. A prime instrument of the transformation was described in rhetoric as paradiastole — the redescription of a vice under the name of a neighbouring virtue. Henry Peacham’s Garden of Eloquence (1577) gave the example of calling murder “a manly deede”, and Shakespeare illustrates it when Lady Macbeth goads her husband into murdering Duncan in his sleep: “When you durst do it, then you were a man”. We’re inured to this today from our political class. Kidnapping becomes ‘extraordinary rendition’, torture ‘enhanced interrogation’.
Seven such parallels between Hobbes’s concerns then and ours today are set out in the appendix.
However, two things have changed in the centuries since Hobbes wrote, not for the better. First, classical rhetoric was typically adversarial and, in its forensic form, retrospective: opposing advocates contested the appraisal of deeds already done. [5] Its practitioners therefore spoke in the expectation of contradiction: an advocate’s case had to survive another advocate’s attempt to break it. Modern advertising, public relations and corporate values statements typically carry no equivalent constraints. Though they may be deployed to pre-empt criticism, their puffery faces no equivalent adversary; their pleasing abstractions gesture to the future and float free of the inevitable frictions and dilemmas of reality: “Excellence in everything we do”.
The second difference concerns who is listening. Castiglione’s courtier was trained to inform his prince candidly on any matter he needed to understand. [6] The scheme assumed a prince who wanted to know, because he governed and stood to suffer for his own mistakes. He might still prefer flattery, but an honest counsellor would set his interest against his vanity.
By contrast, modern institutional speech is often different in both respects. No corporation hires anyone to argue that it doesn’t actually operate according to the pleasing values hanging in the foyer — that it lacks integrity, responsiveness or respectfulness in specific respects. The Catholic Church did something similar in having candidates for sainthood run the gauntlet of the devil’s advocate. [7] Hence the quiet coerciveness of so much institutional language: it is less an account of what is or was done than the peremptory assertion of a free-floating benignity which only the churlish would dispute. And its audience is diffuse — the honeyed, vapid words radiate outward to ‘stakeholders’ and forward in endless time, but never constrain what senior managers actually do.
Hobbes looked to science for a way out of all this. [8] I think he was right. And wrong.
What impressed him was geometry’s promise of certainty. For Hobbes, geometry starts from principles evident to anyone and arrives at equally secure conclusions. He set out to create a science of just and unjust, demonstrated, as he put it, from principles evident to the meanest capacity. His younger contemporary Descartes pursued a similar ambition: to take nothing for granted and build from indubitable foundations.
Even in natural science, if there are any indubitable foundations, they’re too thin, too emptily formal to take you very far. Hobbes’s task was harder still: not just to understand human motivation but to deduce the ideal institutions under which people should live.
But Hobbes was right to look to science for an answer to a problem that beleaguered his own time as it beleaguers ours: rhetorical tricks unmooring public institutions from reality and its inevitable dilemmas. Science reorders prestige to follow evidence, rather than the reverse. And it makes reasoning inspectable, so claims can be questioned on their merits by someone with no standing whatever.
That does not mean that public policy should be value-free in the way often associated with science, still less that scientists should rule, though scientific consensus should presumptively enjoy high standing. Successful scientific institutions do not abolish rhetoric or hierarchy; they introduce contestability at every step of scientific reasoning and accord standing to whoever can join the contest competently. Yet so much of our own governing code — values statements, for instance — comes down from on high, and it’s not really for challenge.
By contrast, Toyota’s commitment to getting it ‘right first time’ at each step of the production line is enforced from the bottom. If there’s an error on the line that the process worker can’t solve, they pull the andon cord for more assistance, and if the problem can’t be solved as the production line moves, it is stopped. In other words, teams are given a live veto power to protect the agreed-upon standard.
My proposed Evaluator General seeks to build something more elaborate in government on the same principles so that evidence and front-line learning have standing against managerial imperatives. Each turns a professed value into an institutional power.
Such arrangements do not require agreement about ends. They need to be built into institutions rather than left to individuals whose efforts will mostly go unrewarded or be punished.
We have barely begun to take that seriously in public life.
The complaint today: Edward Bernays opens * Propaganda* (1928) by describing his own trade as the “conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses,” carried on by an unseen mechanism he was content to call an invisible government. Drawing on his uncle Sigmund Freud, he argued that the appeal should be made not to the rational part of the mind but to
**Hobbes’s complaint: **Hobbes defines the “gift of eloquence” as the ability to make good and evil, expedient and inexpedient, honourable and dishonourable “appear to be greater or less than they are in fact,” and to make injustice appear as justice, in whatever way suits the speaker’s purpose. [9] He is echoing the rhetoricians’ own vocabulary of amplification and extenuation back at them: their claim was that the powerful speaker knows how to magnify what favours his cause and diminish what tells against it, quelling or inflaming an audience at will.
The complaint today: Harry Frankfurt’s * On Bullshit* isolates a pathology distinct from lying. The liar is still tethered to the truth — in order to conceal it. The bullshitter, in Frankfurt’s phrase, is indifferent to how things really are.
**Hobbes’s complaint: **The rhetoricians had promised that their art would unite *oratio atque ratio; *that is, speech with reason. Yet Hobbes argues that what we get is oratio praeter rationem — speech running alongside reason without touching it.[11]
The complaint today: George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” (1946) argues that political speech consists largely of euphemism and question-begging because it is mostly the defence of the indefensible: villages burnt and inhabitants driven out become pacification. Political language, he concludes, is designed to make lies sound truthful, murder respectable, and give “an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” Today kidnapping is ‘extraordinary rendition’, torture ‘enhanced interrogation’, and to lie is to ‘misspeak’.
**Hobbes’s complaint: **The figure had a name: paradiastole, the redescription of a vice under the name of a neighbouring virtue. Every virtue lies between two vices, so every virtue has a bordering vice it can be slid into. By the end of the sixteenth century, on Skinner’s account, ‘paradiastole’ was widely denounced. [12] In Hobbes’s time, Shakespeare had Lady Macbeth redescribe murder as manliness; Henry Peacham’s rhetoric textbook had already listed murder as “a manly deede”.
**The complaint today: **“Lifting productivity is crucial today with governments keen to reduce budget deficits while satisfying voters’ rising expectations.” Something that should be adopted for its own sake is presented as answering some special strategic priority. I dubbed this ‘strategisation’ and it’s everywhere. Strategisation supplies the appearance of a reason for action but not its substance.
**Hobbes’s complaint: **Rhetorical inventio proceeded by running a matter through the loci communes — pre-set topical headings, described by the theorists themselves as seats or storehouses from which stock maxims could be hunted out and applied. As with strategisation, the link is rhetorical, not substantive. Hobbes argues that accommodating one’s arguments to received opinion cannot in principle yield knowledge. [13] Hobbes’s concerns also surface much earlier, when he served as secretary to Francis Bacon, whose 1620
The complaint today: Jay Rosen calls the working ideology of the political press “savviness”: a claim to authority based on practical, unsentimental realism — knowing how politics “really works” while treating substantive positions as ideological or naïve. The savvy journalist does not claim to have the better analysis but to stand closer to the ‘real action’. Reading a David Speers column at the height of the lockdown debate, I documented the phenomenon line by line. The advice of a Chief Medical Officer whose judgement had already proven faulty was relayed uncritically, though New Zealand’s better-performing officials advised the opposite course. That didn’t register. Meanwhile the concerns of a highly credible public-health expert were described as “armchair” expertise.
Hobbes’s complaint: The classical and Renaissance rhetoricians equated the good orator with the good citizen — Quintilian’s vir civilis, the man fit to govern cities by his counsel. In Tudor England mastery of the studia humanitatis helped legitimise the gentry’s claim on government. Eloquence could therefore qualify a man to be heard on any subject, while mastery of a particular field could disqualify him. The schoolmaster Roger Ascham discouraged mathematics on the ground that men wholly bent on such sciences prove “unfit to live with others, & how unapte to serve in the world.” To paraphrase Michael Gove (admittedly unfairly and out of context), he’d “had enough of experts.”
The complaint today: Irving Janis’s account of groupthink explains how anyone arguing against group consensus meets direct pressure. Rather than being answered, they have their motives or temperament questioned.
**Hobbes’s complaint: **William Cavendish’s 1611 A Discourse Against Flatterie offers a catalogue of ways to dismiss a person by redescribing his virtues as faults. Honesty becomes fastidious eccentricity; gravity, dullness; repentance, superstitious melancholy. The objection is never answered; the objector is simply redescribed as the sort of person whose objection ne…
