CROSSPOST: NICHOLAS GRUEN: Hobbes on Spin & Bullshit
Now modern advertising, public relations and corporate values statements typically carry no equivalent constraints. Contrast 1858’s Lincoln and Douglas, “divid[ing] time and address[ing] the same audiences” in seven three-hour debates, with modern corporate values statement radiating outward to “stakeholders” forever, and you can measure what we’ve lost:
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…
CROSSPOST: NICHOLAS GRUEN: Hobbes on Spin & Bullshit
<https://nicholasgruen.substack.com/p/hobbes-on-spin-and-bullshit> <https://nicholasgruen.substack.com>
The more things change, the more spin and bullshit pile up!
Nicholas Gruen
Sep 19, 2026
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,[3] and in Behemoth proposed that the Civil War was largely talked into being — by dissenting Presbyterian ministers, and by parliamentarians with great rhetorical skill and no arguments at all.[4]
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.
Conclusion
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.
Appendix: Seven rhetorical discontents, then and now
1. Speech engineered to move rather than to inform
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 the unconscious — a man may buy a car not to travel in but because it stands for something he would be embarrassed to name.
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.[10]
2. Indifference to truth, as distinct from lying
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]
3. Pleasing words displacing accurate ones
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”.
4. The frame as a non sequitur
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 Novum Organum carries the same analysis in its charge that leaders of science order existing customs and what is already known rather than devising methods of invention.[14]
5. Standing conferred by fluency rather than by being right
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.”
6. The dissenter renamed rather than answered
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 need not be taken seriously. Hobbes, then Cavendish’s tutor, later revived one of these examples in Leviathan.[15]
7. The right consideration loses for want of a sponsor
The complaint today: Mike Bracken, writing on his Whitehall experience trying to embed digital capabilities into government, describes endless policy cycles of carefully controlled documents circulating between private offices and departments, in which — his own gloss — “Rarely, if ever, does user need get a look-in.” With users unrepresented by anyone with standing in the system, their needs have no practical way of counting.
Hobbes’s complaint: Hobbes’s own 1660s account of why his science of justice made no difference: it had been demonstrated from principles evident to the meanest capacity and was nevertheless “cover’d and kept under here by a cloud of adversaries,” since most people learn their politics from the pulpit. He concedes that the democratical gentlemen who beat him had no arguments at all, only enormous rhetorical skill — and concludes that reason has little chance of being heard against interest, and that the most pernicious doctrine will beat the clearest proof if pressed with sufficient force.[16]
[1] This essay grew out of my reading of Quentin Skinner’s account of Hobbes’s fascination with and horror of rhetoric in 17th-century England. Skinner argues that Hobbes, after an early humanist phase, turned against rhetoric but then decided that, if he couldn’t beat the rhetoricians, he should join them, and made his masterwork, Leviathan, rhetorical with a vengeance.
I was struck by the similarity between Hobbes’s concerns about the befuddlement of public thought by rhetoric and my own about the saturation of contemporary discussion of public life by spin and bullshit. The essay began with my asking Claude to document the first version of the appendix to this essay, from which I drafted the essay.
The Hobbes material throughout is drawn principally from Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge University Press, 1996), with page references given in the notes.
[2] Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge University Press, 1991), ch. 25, pp. 179–80, quoted and discussed in Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 345–46.
[3] Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, pp. 284–85, on Hobbes’s stigmatising of the art of rhetoric as a cause of the dissolution of commonwealths, in The Elements of Law, part II, ch. 8 and De Cive XII.
[4] Hobbes, Behemoth, or the Long Parliament, quoted from the St John’s College Oxford manuscript in Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, pp. 432–34.
[5] See Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, pp. 41–42, on judicial rhetoric’s concern with past actions.
[6] Castiglione, Il Cortegiano, in Hoby’s translation of 1561, on the courtier’s duty to inform his prince frankly of the truth of any matter he needs to understand; see Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, pp. 66–87, on the ideal and its English reception.
[7] Indeed, perhaps it’s a sign of the times that the Catholic adversarial office was wound back in 1983, and canonisations grew a great deal more frequent: John Paul II canonised close to five hundred people, whereas all his twentieth-century predecessors together had canonised ninety-eight.
[8] Skinner argues that having completely repudiated rhetoric in The Elements of Law and De Cive, Hobbes changed course in Leviathan, trying to beat the rhetoricians at their own game by incorporating their persuasive arts into his civil science. See Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, pp. 327–425.
[9] Hobbes, De Cive X.xi, quoted and translated in Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, p. 270.
[10] Hobbes, De Cive XII.xii, quoted in Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, p. 270; and The Elements of Law, part II, ch. 8, quoted at pp. 269–70, on amplification and extenuation.
[11] Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, pp. 283–84, summarising Hobbes’s reversal of the rhetoricians’ formula; the underlying text is De Cive XII.xii.
[12] Humfrey Braham, The Institution of a Gentleman (1555), borrowing Sallust’s complaint that we have lost the true names of things; Stefano Guazzo, La civil conversazione (1574), on an age in which courtesy is read as flattery; Ben Jonson, Catiline (1611), chorus to Act IV. Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, pp. 167–68 and 178, notes that both forms of the corruption were taken to be gaining ground; his summary judgement is at p. 179.
[13] Hobbes, The Elements of Law, part II, ch. 8, quoted in Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, pp. 269–70. On loci communes as storehouses of pre-existing argument, and Hobbes’s assault on the doctrine, see Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, pp. 113–17 and 262–63.
[14] Francis Bacon, Novum Organum (1620), preface, discussed in Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, p. 263. On Hobbes’s service to Bacon, Skinner, pp. 225, 236–37.
[15] William Cavendish, A Discourse Against Flatterie (London: Walter Burre, 1611), pp. 41–42, quoted in Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, p. 169. Cavendish deleted the passage when revising for Horae Subsecivae (1620); Hobbes, his tutor and secretary from 1608 and possibly the source of the example, restored it in Leviathan, ch. 4, forty years later (pp. 169–70, 340–41). The catalogue of the Detractor is in Cavendish’s essay “Of detraction” (1620), quoted at p. 170.
[16] Hobbes, Behemoth, quoted in Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, pp. 432–34.
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Brad DeLong here: Nicholas Gruen says that we are worse off than we were in Thomas Hobbes’s day. In many ways, we are. Back then rhetoric was adversarial and often focused on the past as much s the future. Opposing advocates contested the appraisal of deeds already done, so anyone making a case spoke expecting to be contradicted. On July 24, 1858, Abraham Lincoln wrote to Stephen A. Douglas asking:
Abraham Lincoln: <https://papersofabrahamlincoln.org/documents/D201056b>: ‘Will it be agreeable to you to make an arrangement for you and myself to divide time, and address the same audiences the present canvass? Mr. Judd, who will hand you this, is authorized to receive your answer; and, if agreeable to you, to enter into the terms of such arrangement…
And Douglas agreed. Within a week <https://papersofabrahamlincoln.org/documents/D201067> they had set up seven debates between the man who would be chosen as U.S. Senator from Illinois if the Democrats were to emerge from the fall election with the Illinois-Senate majority and the man who would be chosen if the Republicans were to emerge. The opener was to speak for 60 minutes, followed by a 90 minute rebuttal and then a 30 minute surrebuttal. Douglas and Lincoln were to switch openings debate by debate. These bear no resemblance to the modern “debates” that candidates’ handlers setup,. (In large part, I think, because handlers have little confidence in their candidates and think the risk of having something that is not a joint press conference with little or no follow-up is too great.)
Thus we have this: contemporary anxieties about “spin” are 350-year-old news. And we have this: the distinctive modern pathology is unopposed rhetoric: values statements and PR that pre-empt criticism as they are designed to never face an advocate on the other side.
Now do consider modern science’s own prestige hierarchies, replication crises, and capture by funding interests. Those do tell us that “prestige follows evidence” is aspirational. And it is not true that modern institutional speech faces “no adversary”: we have journalism, litigation, regulators, social media pile-ons, whistleblowers, and o on. Evidence and “front-line learning” do not point to determinate answers that merely lack standing. Disagreement is, often, genuinely about values or truly contested facts. It is only a fuzzy middle for which framing certain things as “facts” and devaluing others can move opinion needles.
But I found this very much worth reading this morning.