facing leviathan

Facing Leviathan:

Political Theory through the Pequod

Kyle Cregge

Citation Format: MLA

9 May 2013 Cregge 1 HE504 Professor Shaffer “Facing Leviathan”

“He’s a grand, ungodly, god-like man, Captain Ahab; doesn’t speak much; but, when he does speak, then you may well listen.” – Captain Peleg, Chapter 16, “The Ship”

I. Introduction

“Sic semper tyrannis!” goes the old Latin phrase. First ascribed to Brutus during the

killing of Julius Caesar and popularized during Shakespeare’s play about the same Roman

general, its more modern usage was by John Wilkes Booth after shooting President Lincoln in

Ford’s Theatre in 1865. Translated in English to “thus always to tyrants,” it is meant to show that

all tyrants will eventually fall (the latter two through assassination), for one man is not meant to

hold the power of the polis in perpetuity. The enigmatic and enraged central figure, Captain

Ahab, of Herman Melville’s magnum opus truly falls both literally and metaphorically. Dragged

to the depths by Moby Dick, he is stripped of his life and the power he held as captain of the

Pequod. Ahab has always been a character of intrigue; he is one ripe for psychoanalysis, and the

way he holds his crew in rapt awe is yet another opportunity for literary theory. Nevertheless, for

all the practical judgments each reader makes during the reading of Moby-Dick, Ahab’s

leadership style has not often been scrutinized through a political lens. Through a combined

approach of literary and political theory to examine Ahab and the role of the modern tyrant, the

reader can gain a greater understanding of Ahab in the text but more importantly of leaders in

their day – for those who study literature in liberal democratic societies should hope that they too

will never suffer the fate of a leader who would say and attempt to “strike the sun if it insulted

[him]” (Melville 140).

This paper will not address Ahab’s tyranny only through textual analysis of Melville.

Rather, it will turn theoretically through the ideas of Plato, the Hebrew Bible, Hobbes, and Locke


in response to the evidence presented in Moby-Dick and further critical texts. These examinations

into the Ship of State, the power of the sovereign, the mastery of nature, and the consequences of

unjust rule will show Ahab to be a modern tyrant who meets his end after the irrational and

monomaniacal chase of Moby Dick. For a more timely analogy, consider this research to be the

hypothetical examination of evidence before the United Nations Security Council, to answer the

question of whether [King] Ahab acted unjustly and outside the ethical and legal bounds for the

rule of his state. Was he right to make his citizens pursue the White Whale? Or did he fail in his

responsibility to protect the human rights and dignity of his citizens while degrading the

environment around him? To make this modern metaphor effective however, we must return to

an ancient text.

II. Captains of Philosophy: Melville, Plato, and the Ship of State

Melville had an intimate knowledge of Plato, as he references throughout Moby-Dick.

Seven times the old Greek philosopher is brought up, first in “The Mast-Head”. Ishmael is

musing about watch-standing and whale-watching, and warns all further Nantucket ship captains

that he is exactly the wrong sort of person to handle this role as he describes wistfully: “Beware

of such an one, I say; your whales must be seen before they can be killed; and this sunken-eyed

young Platonist will tow you ten wakes round the world, and never make you one pint of sperm

the richer” (Melville 135). Ishmael says again in the same chapter how poorly any captain would

react to this negligent watcher:

Very often do the captains of such ships take those absent-minded young

philosophers to task, upbraiding them with not feeling sufficient "interest" in the

voyage; half-hinting that they are so hopelessly lost to all honourable ambition, as


that in their secret souls they would rather not see whales than otherwise. But all

in vain; those young Platonists have a notion that their vision is imperfect; they

are short-sighted; what use, then, to strain the visual nerve? (Melville 136)

Of course Ishmael considers himself one of the Platonists he describes, but Melville’s

description of vision in this way shows his understanding of one of the central issues that runs

through all of Platonic philosophy: the imperceptibility of reality. Famously in the Allegory of

the Cave, Plato describes the life most people see as but the shadows on the wall that trick those

prisoners chained there into believing the world as they perceive of it (Plato 514A-520A). While

not explicitly mentioning Plato, Ahab too pushes back against this very idea when he yells a

mere chapter later, “If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach

outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to

me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ‘tis enough” (Melville 140). Further evidence

for Melville’s relationship with Plato continues through the text. Among other references at the

end of chapters 75, 78, 85, and 101 (Melville 267, 273, 293, 343) there is one allusion to Plato

that connects Melville, Hobbes, and Job to the writer of The Republic.

Ishmael again muses about the nature of things in Chapter 55 on “Of the Monstrous

Pictures of Whales,” this time wondering why it is so difficult for the full majesty of a whale to

be captured:

But these manifold mistakes in depicting the whale are not so very surprising after

all. Consider! Most of the scientific drawings have been taken from the stranded

fish; and these are about as correct as a drawing of a wrecked ship, with broken

back, would correctly represent the noble animal itself in all its undashed pride of


hull and spars. Though elephants have stood for their full-lengths, the living

Leviathan has never yet fairly floated himself for his portrait. The living whale, in

his full majesty and significance, is only to be seen at sea in unfathomable waters;

and afloat the vast bulk of him is out of sight, like a launched line-of-battle ship;

and out of that element it is a thing eternally impossible for mortal man to hoist

him bodily into the air, so as to preserve all his mighty swells and undulations.

And, not to speak of the highly presumable difference of contour between a young

sucking whale and a full-grown Platonian Leviathan; yet, even in the case of one

of those young sucking whales hoisted to a ship's deck, such is then the

outlandish, eel-like, limbered, varying shape of him, that his precise expression

the devil himself could not catch. (Melville 217)

In the selected paragraph Ishmael draws on the historical tradition of Job to mention

“hoisting whales to a ship’s deck,” as it is at the end of Job where God addresses the long

suffering man saying, “Can you draw out Leviathan with a fishhook?” (NASB Job 41: 1). God

asks these rhetorical questions so that Job would recognize his place next to Him, for just as Job

cannot catch Leviathan (as God can), neither can “the devil himself… catch” (Melville 217).

Indeed with Melville’s various references to the “Leviathan,” he too is addressing Hobbes, as

will be made clearer through further examination. But it is in the idea of a “Platonian Leviathan”

that gets to the root of Melville’s well understood philosophical background in Platonism.

Melville in the above line asserts that the full-grown whale will be like a “Platonian Leviathan,”

which is in reference to the perfectibility of Forms. Moby Dick is truly unique as an old and

powerful creature, but what makes it Platonian are the sublime feelings that come from seeing

the whale grow into the monster that is a perfection of the idea.


To explain further, in Book X of Plato’s Republic, Socrates describes the nature of

imitation through the explanation of different forms of couches in his dialectic structure: “Don’t

there turn out to be three varieties of couch, one being in nature, which I imagine we’d claim a

god fashioned – who else?” (Plato 597B). Now to be “in nature” is not merely to exist in the

physical environment like Moby-Dick or the Pequod. The Greek root that Socrates uses for

generating and bringing into being, phusis, in the way it is translated to “fashioned [by a god],”

has the same root as the word for nature, whereas verbs for making and producing have the same

root as the word for poetry, poiệsis (Plato pg. 297). Thus the differentiation is slight between that

which is by nature and that which is created in nature, the first being the higher form and the

latter, poetry, being created by man. In regards to Moby-Dick, this explanation of nature and

form illustrates what Ishmael really means when describing the fully formed adult whale as a

Platonian Leviathan – for God made the Moby Dick, and that is a whale’s highest form.

Clearly there is a rich understanding throughout Moby-Dick for Plato and Melville to sail

together on their own intellectual traditions. Therefore let us draw back to an earlier book in the

Republic. In Book VI, Socrates continues his discussion with Adeimantus and Glaucon about the

finer intricacies of their city in speech they have been constructing. Socrates introduces a

hypothetical metaphor for consideration of their leadership model:

As for the true helmsman, they don’t even understand that it’s necessary for him

to pay attention to times and seasons, to the sky and stars and winds and

everything pertaining to the art, if he’s going to be a skilled ruler of a ship in his

very being. They imagine that it’s not possible to acquire the skill and practice of

how one gets the helm whether anybody wants him to or not, and to acquire

helmsmanship too at the same time. So with the things like that going on around


the ship, don’t you think the one who’s a skilled helmsman in the true sense, in

his very being, would be called a stargazer and a windbag and useless to them by

seafarers on ships that are operated in that way? (Plato 488D-E). [sic]

To that question Adeimantus agrees, and Socrates is beginning to make the intellectual

case for the philosopher-king as the head of the city, as opposed to someone of the aristocracy or

guardian classes. Yet the introduction of the “ship of state” metaphor is a valuable one for the

purposes of examining the relationship of Melville to political theory. In the above selection

Socrates himself writes: “if he’s going to be a skilled ruler of a ship,” and what is Captain Ahab

if not the ruler of the Pequod? Indeed in a Westphalian construct, he determines the political

decisions of the ship; adjudicates and enforces rules and regulations upon his territory; and

actively remains non-interventionist when it comes to other ships (beyond seeking word of

Moby-Dick). These specific references will be examined in greater detail, but this is all brought

up to ground Melville within an inversion of the traditional “ship of state” metaphor. Rather than

consider the Roman Empire like a ship to be effectively guided by Caesar, imagine Ahab like the

sovereign of nomadic nation upon the sea; in the words of Ishmael, “For a Khan of the plank,

and a king of the sea, and a great lord of Leviathans was Ahab” (Melville 113). As Socrates says

himself at the end of Book IV: “If we were to claim that we’ve discovered the just man and the

just city, and exactly what justice is in them, I imagine we wouldn’t seem to be telling a total lie”

(Plato 444A). Thus in this retelling of the Pequod Nation, we shall strive to be honest in the

examination of Ahab as King and whether there is justice to be found in his nation and person.

III. King Ahab’s Ivory House


The case for Ahab as King of the Pequod seems somewhat obvious, in the barest fact that

his name is the same as an Old Testament king. As unique as the name is, the allusion is clear

and mentioned throughout the text, especially when Ishmael reports aboard and is speaking with

Captain Peleg who attempts to convince Queequeg and his bosom friend their future

commanding officer is a good man:

‘He's Ahab, boy; and Ahab of old, thou knowest, was a crowned king!’

‘And a very vile one. When that wicked king was slain, the dogs, did they not lick

his blood?’ [asked Ishmael].

[Peleg, in response] ‘…Captain Ahab did not name himself. …I know Captain

Ahab well; I've sailed with him as mate years ago; I know what he is—a good

man—not a pious, good man, like Bildad, but a swearing good man… once for

all, let me tell thee and assure thee, young man, it's better to sail with a moody

good captain than a laughing bad one. So good-bye to thee—and wrong not

Captain Ahab, because he happens to have a wicked name’ (Melville 78-79).

Peleg swears that Ahab is not tied to the fate of his Biblical namesake, and asks both

Ishmael and by extension the reader to appreciate his proficiency as a captain. However whether

he is a good or bad king and captain is not yet relevant. He is named a king by Captain Peleg,

and there are various other arguments through the text than enforce the idea of Ahab as the

metaphorical King of the Pequod.

Kings of old were known for their castles and dominions, and even though so many of

the ancient empires and peoples have not survived into the modern era, grand cities and castles

dot the European landscape. It is only reasonable to assume then that the Ahab the King should


have a castle and dominion that would last and be noteworthy. This castle is the Pequod, which

has its own identifiable features both in its own existence and tied to antiquity. From Chapter 16,

“The Ship,” Ishmael describes the foundation for the city that he finds aboard, declaring with

excitement, “She was a ship of the old school…. her old hull's complexion was darkened like a

French grenadier's, who has alike fought in Egypt and Siberia. …Her masts… stood stiffly up

like the spines of the three old kings of Cologne. Her ancient decks were worn and wrinkled, like

the pilgrim-worshipped flag-stone in Canterbury Cathedral where Becket bled” (Melville 69).

Each aspect of the ship is described with a metaphorically multi-cultural and multi-functional

flair, which affirms the idea of a castle which would enclose a diverse city behind it. As well,

Ahab has been upon this ship for years, rebuilding it with his own victories, as Ishmael describes

more famously, “She was a thing of trophies. A cannibal of a craft, tricking herself forth in the

chased bones of her enemies. All round, her unpanelled, open bulwarks were garnished like one

continuous jaw, with the long sharp teeth of the sperm whale, inserted there for pins, to fasten

her old hempen thews and tendons to” (Melville 70). Ishmael goes even further describing the

other areas of the ship where wood has been substituted for ivory as its building material, and is

meant to inspire fear in whales in much the same way as the native warrior wearing human bones

would do for the average Westerner in colonial times.

But this description of the castle also alludes to the King Ahab of 1 Kings again. When

war breaks out between Judah and Israel, King Ahab eventually dies in battle, as prophesied, the

dogs lick his blood, and the writer of 1 Kings asks rhetorically, “Now the rest of the acts of Ahab

and all that he did and the ivory house which he built and all the cities which he built, are they

not written in the Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Israel?” (NASB 1 Kings 22:39). Now

until that point in 1 Kings, there is no reference to a physical house of ivory built by King Ahab,


yet it is not unreasonable to assume that Melville would have subsumed the text and relevant

allusions in the entire King Ahab narrative prior to conceiving of each aspect of the Captain

Ahab narrative. But from this verse, the connection is clear: just as King Ahab built himself a

house of ivory that he will eventually die in, Captain Ahab rebuilt the Pequod with ivory

wherever possible. And like the writer of the Book of [Chronicles of] Kings, Ishmael chronicles

all of Captain Ahab’s victories and follies, through the end of the vile King’s life.

IV. Ahab: King or Democrat?

While the intellectual foundation for Captain Ahab the King is clear, in order to argue whether

Ahab is an effective and just king, it is not merely enough to describe his name, labels, and house

of ivory. The most important determinations will come from how he treats his subordinates and

enforces order upon the ship and within that metaphorical state. Leon Harold Craig describes the

governmental structure in his book, The Platonic Leviathan, expressly, “Ostensibly, the regime

of the Pequod is that of an Absolute Monarchy…. Ahab himself, in a moment of high passion,

invokes the ultimate analogy to proclaim most emphatically his own absolute authority: ‘There is

one God that is Lord over the earth, and one Captain that is lord over the Pequod’ (Melville

362)” (Craig 503). Melville’s Ahab holds such a power over his crew that it is near divine in its

totality.

Craig’s Platonic Leviathan truly is a landmark text connecting Hobbesian monarchy to

Plato and Moby-Dick, but it should be noted that there is a significant amount of scholarship

describing the Pequod’s governing structures as radically democratic, rather than monarchical,

which Craig concedes as well, “But despite the Pequodian commonwealth’s government being

monarchical, it nonetheless rests upon the radical egalitarianism implicit in the requirement that


every individual, whatever his status and station, personally consent to the regime in signing on”

(503). Furthering a democratic thesis are various authors who lay bare the inherent connections

in the democratic nature of the Pequod and Melville’s characterizations of the crew, to include:

Jennifer Grelman’s “Circles upon Circles: Tautology, Form, and the Shape of Democracy in

Tocqueville and Melville,” who argues for “the roundness” and all-encompassing nature of

democracy as portrayed in both writers; to Susan McWilliams, who in “Ahab, American,”

explains how the Captain is “a representative American man,” who helps readers “understand

Melville’s true anxieties about the prospects for democratic flourishing in the United States;” or

there is Elizabeth Schultz’s “Common Continent of Men,” wherein she sees in Melville, “our

author’s passionate vision of a democratic society of diverse and equal individuals.” Other critics

reinforce the idea of Melville preaching for the vanguard lower classes in other texts beyond

Moby-Dick, as “every one of his ocean texts includes a voice from before the mast,” excluding

“Benito Cereno,” meaning that Melville gives credibility to the modern equivalent of the enlisted

man’s perspective in each text (Lee).

In response to the hyper-democratic fawning of those writers, there are those that view

the Pequod’s government as highly anti-democratic. Among other descriptions, John Bryant

reads Ahab as an “individualist [and] demagogue who coopts the culture's expansionist idiom to

manipulate the masses and undermine the democracy's fragile community of factions.” Robert

Levine disagrees with Edward Said’s recent interpretation of Ahab when cast as a

neoconservative spreading democracy, but is less convinced by F.O. Matthiessen’s

characterization of the chapters, “Knights and Squires,” as part of a democratic celebration of the

struggle against evil. Levine’s tempered criticism is fair given American Renaissance’s writing

in 1941, which fell in the 20th century’s most sanguinary conflict with democratic ideals in stark


contrast to the autocratic regimes in Germany, Italy, and Japan. Further complicating Levine’s

thought process about Melville as democratic champion is his review of Redburn, which as he

says is, “a novel that evokes the darker side of Jacksonian democracy.” Continuing to soften the

democratic thesis is the understanding of the historical timeframe from which most modern

Moby-Dick scholarship arose. Sanford Marovitz brilliantly traces “The Melville Revival” from

the end of the 19th century to the present day. For all-inclusive studies of Melville though,

Manford declares that, “Before the publication of Clare Spark’s recent study, Hunting Ahab:

Psychological Warfare and the Melville Revival (2001), the only substantial studies of the

revival were two dissertations now forty-five and fifty years old” (528). Thus those two

dissertations creation fall right at the beginning of the Cold War, and further, Spark herself says

in Hunting Captain Ahab, “The Melville Revival, then, is only tangentially about the author of

Moby-Dick. It is but one telling episode in a long-standing global effort to maintain authoritarian

social relations in an age of democratic aspirations…” (11). To be historically explicit - as the

world teetered on the brink of nuclear war between the bipolar hegemons of the US and USSR,

whose systems of government aspired to the highest ideals of liberal democratic freedom and

state-run authoritarianism respectively, it just so happened that the Melville Revival began to

bloom around the central issue with which we now examine in Moby-Dick: is Melville (and by

extension, Captain Ahab) representative of a democrat speaking for the crew upon his ship or a

king and autocrat who seized the reins of power?

It is helpful to be reminded of the finely delineated nature of democracy and tyranny

which we now seek to determine. Plato in the Republic speaks of the Five Regimes and

degeneration from the aristocratic society with which Socrates’ city and speech will eventually

reach (545A-D). Beginning with the aristocracy, over each following generation Socrates argues


the polis will shift to first a timocracy, a government focused on a status and ambition while

retaining some virtue, then to oligarchy, which is exclusively rule by groups of rich and

powerful. Then from oligarchy the demos rises to claim their democracy with freedom as its

highest aim, but one generation later due to the chaos of a disordered society a tyrant rises to

bring order but enslaves the society, thus as the interlocutors say to Socrates, “So in all

likelihood tyranny doesn’t get established out of any other polity than democracy, the supreme

and most savage type of slavery from what I imagine is the pinnacle of freedom” (Plato 564A).

While the whole of the theory might not work in practical application, one can certainly

see the later historical significance that came from the Roman Republic degenerating to the

Roman Empire. The line between rule by all and rule by one is slight, and even sometimes one of

semantics, as Caesar Augustus and many following emperors insisted on being called “First

Citizen” ("Princeps."). Yet for the purposes of Moby-Dick, we have asked essentially this

question: is the polity on the Pequod a democracy or a monarchy? The answer is that while the

culture of ship is democratic in nature through the recognition that each member of the ship must

work, the ultimate structure of authority is monarchical. Ishmael understands this distinction

when he declares the unity in separation of being an Isolato in Chapter 27 stating: “They were

nearly all Islanders in the Pequod, Isolatoes too, I call such, not acknowledging the common

continent of men, but each Isolato living on a separate continent of his own. Yet now, federated

along one keel, what a set these Isolatoes were!” (Melville 107). This federation of individuals is

principally the distinction that has to be made in understanding the monarchy that exists on the

Pequod; while all recognize Ahab is Captain, each man is a free and independent actor who gives

up that freedom for the contractarian wish for the wealth that will come from killing whales.

With the Ship of State metaphor inverted it has been established that Captain Ahab is King of the


Pequod, and while his nation is egalitarian and democratic, he still holds the power in the

monarchy. Therefore before determining whether Ahab is a tyrant, the definition of right

kingship should be sought, and the man who clearly defined the power of the sovereign

published his own foundational text exactly 200 years before Melville published Moby-Dick.

V. Leviathan, Leviathan, and The Whale

In 1651 Thomas Hobbes publish his seminal work on absolute monarchy, Leviathan.

Terror lies at the heart of Hobbes’ work, and it is easy to understand why. He wrote Leviathan

from 1647-1650, and it was certainly a tumultuous time for monarchists like Hobbes (Hobbes

liv). During this time, Oliver Cromwell would strike down rebellions in Ireland, and push back

Royalist groups in Scotland and Wales (Hobbes liv). In 1649, King Charles I would be executed;

all of which Hobbes would watch in Paris as he tutored the son and then next in line for the

throne, Charles II (Hobbes liv). To appreciate Leviathan is also to appreciate the times in which

Hobbes lived.

If there were two foremost philosophical aims for the writing of the book, they were

these: to examine and give Hobbes’ thoughts on the subject of nature, and to reestablish the

rational idea of the state under the rule of a sovereign. Hobbes’ introduction begins with his

definition: “Nature (the art whereby God hath made and governs the world) is by the art of man,

as in many other things, so in this also imitated, that it can make an artificial animal” (Hobbes 7).

“For seeing life,” in Hobbes’ mind, “is but a motion of limbs” (Hobbes 7), he radically refuses

the classical ideas on how a soul might move a body (Hobbes 477). In opening with this

explanation of nature, Hobbes continues to give his thoughts on the essence of life. However he

is also recreating the philosophical arguments for the state that was thrown asunder by the


English Civil War. Hobbes wrote a dedicatory letter to Mr. Francis Godolphin, the brother of a

Royalist killed in 1643 who left two hundred pounds to Hobbes in his will. In the letter, Hobbes

speaks of “the endeavor to advance the civil power” and that his possibly uncommon uses of

Holy Scripture would create “outworks of the enemy, from whence they impugn the civil power”

(Hobbes 3). Clearly Hobbes put forward the argument for why the civil power, or Leviathan,

should serve a more important role in the state, which he built upon over the course of the work.

He lays his new foundation of the state in one sentence: “Hereby it is manifest, that during the

time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which

is called war; and such a war, as is of every man, against every man” (Hobbes 84). Men must be

in awe of a central force or implicitly there is no reason to stop them from quarrelling with each

other. The ramifications of this statement are massive and represent the first step of justifying the

unleashing of Leviathan upon the people.

Hobbes clearly implies that man is not nor does he strive to be good. As a result, this state

of nature is so bad that “In such condition, there is no place for industry… and consequently no

culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities… no commodious building; no

instruments of moving… no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no

letters; no society” (Hobbes 84). This primitive society before the state is chaos, and Hobbes

describes the life of man in this state as being “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” (Hobbes

84). It is so injurious to people that a Leviathan force to lead a commonwealth could be justified,

in order to rectify the loss of production that comes from the national disorder.

With this better understanding of Hobbes’ philosophy on the necessity for a secular king,

let us return to Leviathan and Moby-Dick. Included in the Extracts of Melville’s work are many

references to whales throughout history, which include the lines from Job 41:32: “Leviathan


maketh a path to shine after him; One would think the deep to be hoary,” (Melville 8) and from

Hobbes’ introduction: “By art is created that great Leviathan, called a Commonwealth or State –

(in Latin, Civitas) which is but an artificial man” (Melville 10). Leviathan in its original context

was a sea monster, which when described in Job 41 as having fearsome teeth lining its mouth,

taut skin and scales along its back, a jagged and barbed underside, and most notably, a fire that

streams from its nostrils, sounds nothing like Moby Dick. God describes this monster to Job

because he defeated it, and therefore, ‘who is Job to question God regarding the pain the man has

gone through’ (Job 41-42)? Hobbes draws on this as a symbol of the power of the sovereign in

his newly founded commonwealth, and Melville uses the word Leviathan interchangeably with

whale. However it is not simply word variety that link Thomas Hobbes and Herman Melville.

Once again, Leon Harold Craig’s book The Platonian Leviathan, along with linking

Hobbes with his philosophical foundation in Plato, expressly includes two chapters regarding

Melville, as well as Joseph Conrad as, “much more than mere story-tellers; they are among the

very greatest novelists precisely because they were first of all philosophers in the original, literal

sense of the word: lovers, hence hunters and pursuers, of wisdom” (Craig xiv). The evidence of

an intellectual relationship is laid bare for Craig, from the beginning of the Extracts.

Interestingly, the quote from Job 41:32 which is Melville’s second extract, is “the verse that

immediately precedes the two that Hobbes himself quotes, (though Melville has taken the liberty

of replacing the Bible’s ‘He’ with its antecedent, ‘Leviathan’)” (5-6). Craig also sees evidence in

Melville’s titling of his magnum opus, as he says about The Whale:

In fact [The Whale] was the sole title of the book as published first in London,

1851 (exactly 200 years after the London publication of Leviathan), followed later

that year by publication in New York under the title Moby-Dick; or, The Whale.


Thus, a simple formula suggests itself: Moby-Dick = The Whale = Leviathan

(546).

To assume that Melville would be absent-minded in the correlation between Hobbes and

his own work would be foolhardy. Craig also considers Melville’s connection and discussion

regarding American power that was happening as the political problems leading up to the Civil

War simmered in the late 1840’s and early 1850’s:

Seen in the light of [Melville’s] persistent interest in the peculiar problems of the

American regime, however – especially those arising from the anomalous

institution of slavery and the threat it posed to civil peace – it is not so unlikely

that Melville would have Hobbes, philosophical grandfather of this regime, in the

back of his mind throughout the writing of Moby-Dick (7-8).

Craig sees further relationships between Plato, Socrates, and Ishmael in Moby-Dick

which have been previously mentioned, and as his work is to tie Plato to Hobbes, thus the two

previous authors and Melville are inextricably knotted. Yet there is more than enough direct

evidence linking Melville to Hobbes throughout Moby-Dick, irrespective of Plato. Notably, there

is Ishmael’s musing on the Golden Rule in the midst of his relationship with Queequeg, where he

asserts, “And what is the will of God? – to do to my fellow man what I would have my fellow

man to do to me – that is the will of God” (Melville 57). Contrast this sentiment with Hobbes’

notion of the same point: “And though this may seem too subtle a deduction of the laws of

nature, to be taken notice of by all men; …that is, Do not that to another, which thou wouldest

not have done to thyself [sic]” (Hobbes 104).


Hobbes’ most often known for his (previously referenced) characterization of life in the

state of nature as the “poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” but in the words of Leon Craig, “Could

there be a more obvious Hobbesian echo that Ishmael’s observation, ‘Long exile from

Christendom and civilization inevitably restores a man to that condition in which God placed

him, i.e. [sic] what is called savagery’” (Melville 222, Craig 21)? Finally, there is the extent to

which Melville raises Moby Dick near to the height of divinity in saying, “In the great Sperm

Whale, this high and mighty god-like dignity inherent in the brow is so immensely amplified,

that gazing on it, in that full front view, you feel the Deity and the dread powers more forcibly

than in beholding any other object in living nature” (Melville 274). Hobbes too regards his

Leviathan in much the same way, “This is the Generation of that great LEVIATHAN, or rather

(to speak more reverently) of that Mortal God [sic], to which we owe under the Immortal God,

our peace and defence” (Hobbes 114). It is clear Melville had a full understanding of power and

the philosophies that undergirded it, specifically in relation to Hobbes and Leviathan. Thus the

inversion of the Ship of State of Plato has been shown to be effectively related to Melville, Ahab

has been textually proved to be King of the afloat Pequod nation, and Hobbes and Melville have

been linked through the immense power they give to Leviathan. I will now argue that Ahab is an

effective king under the critiques offered by Hobbes, but usurps his authority and becomes a

tyrant in his modern drive to master nature.

VI. For King, Country, and Corruption

Hobbes ends his introduction to Leviathan with this crucial declaration of his intentions:

But let one man read another by his actions never so perfectly, it serves him only

with his acquaintance, which are but few. He that is to govern a whole nation


must read in himself, not this, or that particular man; but mankind: which though

it be hard to do, harder than to learn any language or science; yet, when I shall

have set down my own reading orderly and perspicuously, the pains left another

will be only to consider if he also find not the same in himself. For this kind of

doctrine admitteth no other demonstration. (Hobbes 8)

In common English, the king of a nation must know himself and hope that there is order

within him. Because the Leviathan leader of the Commonwealth will hold such autonomy, the

idea of justice rests on the hope of that king’s choice about what is good for the nation and thus

aligning, if he must, his interests with the nation’s. How did King Ahab of the Pequod lead his

people? Initially in much the same way Hobbes hopes all future kings to be. Ahab believed that

“the permanent constitutional condition of the manufactured man [was] sordidness,” and thus he

naturally was direct in his orders and spared no time for sympathy, in the way that he calls Stubb

a dog for walking around the ship with his wooden leg (Melville 111). It is not a matter of

inspiration to be the effective sovereign, it is the ability to make others act with order, and

Ishmael describes Ahab early in the text as the crew’s “supreme lord and dictator” (Melville

107). It should be noted that while “dictator” and “tyrant” are now used interchangeably, the two

Greek historians Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Appian of Alexandria characterized a dictator

as a ‘temporary tyranny by consent’ whereas a tyrant was a ‘permanent dictator’ (Kalyvas). It

was not until the 20th century that the two words were totally conflated to be the same

conceptually (Kalyvas). Early on, Ahab is merely a dictator: a qualified sailor to whom the rest

of the crew consents to be their leader.

Furthering a Hobbesian monarchical thesis is in chapter 34, where Ishmael contrasts the

officer and enlisted dinner tables, where the enlisted are rowdy and boisterous, and the officers


are silent and ordered (Melville 128). It is unenjoyable for Stubb and Flask, yet that is the

expected etiquette when one is face to face with Ahab. This is similar to how Hobbes intends for

the sovereign Leviathan to act on a larger scale. He is the one who will “common power to keep

them all in awe” (Hobbes 84), so that there will be order amongst the officers on the ship.

Finally before Ahab’s usurpation he addresses the crew and attempts to inspire them with

coin before he must admit his true intention:

[Ahab, exclaiming] “Whosoever of ye raises me a white-headed whale with a

wrinkled brow and a crooked jaw; whosoever of ye raises me that white-headed

whale, with three holes punctured in his starboard fluke—look ye, whosoever of

ye raises me that same white whale, he shall have this gold ounce, my boys!"

"Huzza! huzza!" cried the seamen (Melville 138).

Tashtego the harpooner recognizes that this whale must be Moby Dick, and Starbuck, the

first mate asks Ahab if it was Moby Dick that took off his leg (Melville 138-139). The Captain

admits after a pause, written to acknowledge Ahab’s reservation in revealing this part of the

mission, that indeed killing Moby Dick is his sole mission (Melville 139-140). With this

admission, the die has been cast and Ahab has crossed his metaphorical Rubicon. Where the ship

was launched with the regular intention of killing many whales for profit, now Ahab attempts to

commandeer the Pequod for his own purposes.

For as Hobbes says: “The OFFICE of the sovereign, …consisteth in the end, …namely

the procuration of the safety of the people; …but by safety here is not meant a bare preservation,

but also all other contentments of life, which every man by lawful industry, without danger, or

hurt to the commonwealth, shall aquire to himself” (Hobbes 222). Given that the Pequod was to


this point a contractarian commonwealth, whereby Ahab would lead the crew safely into the

promulgation of greater and greater wealth through the killing of whales, Ahab now assumes

authority he cannot hold justly. Revenge against Ahab is a selfish aim that will and does

eventually lead to the crew’s death, and even if they had survived it was not the purpose for

which they set out. Starbuck responds thusly: “I am game for his crooked jaw, and for the jaws

of Death too, Captain Ahab, if it fairly comes in the way of the business we follow; but I came

here to hunt whales, not my commander’s vengeance. How many barrels will thy vengeance

yield thee even if thou gettest it, Captain Ahab? it will not fetch thee much in our Nantucket

market” (Melville 139).

John Locke in his Second Treatise has a chapter exclusively on the nature of tyranny. His

definition is distinctly similar to the actions of Ahab: “AS usurpation is the exercise of power,

which another hath a right to; so tyranny is the exercise of power beyond right, which no body

can have a right to. And this is making use of the power any one has in his hands, not for the

good of those who are under it, but for his own private separate advantage.” Because Ahab

extends his power over the ship for his own private separate advantage which is to achieve

vengeance against Moby Dick, he clearly fits the role of a tyrant. Eventually through blood ritual

the crew turns to Ahab’s side (Melville 139-142), and as Leon Craig articulates, “Once Ahab has

turned the ship’s company, his authority grows with their continuing complicity in his

redefinition of their collective purposes, becoming virtually irresistible, not least because

internalized in everyone subject to him. The consequences, for both him and them, are profound”

(Craig 513). Reading Ahab as a tyrant causes certain implications for the way in which

vengeance will be enacted on the very Leviathan about which the book is named. For as it will


be explained further, the modern project of the tyrant is mastery of nature, and there is no clearer

embodiment of nature than the whale itself.

VII. Master of Nature

Yet while Moby Dick is a mighty whale, it has often been read as the embodiment of God

or nature. Margret Atwood once wrote an op-ed for the New York Times on the hypothetical

situation of Martians arriving on Earth and what literature would need to be given to them to

help them understand America. The aliens begin with Hawthorne but then are recommended to

read Moby-Dick, which they do and respond:

“Moby-Dick is about the oil industry,” they said. “And the Ship of American

State. The owners of the Pequod are rapacious and stingy religious hypocrites.

The ship’s business is to butcher whales and turn them into an industrial energy

product. …Ahab is a megalomaniac who wants to annihilate nature. Nature is

symbolized by a big white whale, which has interfered with Ahab’s personal

freedom by biting off his leg and refusing to be slaughtered and boiled.

Now as with the rest of the New York Times piece, it is slightly amusing and ridiculous,

but that characterization of the whale and nature is not far off from other environmental

criticisms. In “Vengeance on a Dumb Brute, Ahab? – An Environmentalist Reading of Moby-

Dick,” Dean Flower suggests, “that Moby-Dick anticipates a modern view of ecology, even when

—especially when—that view of interdependence is violated.” Further, Flower argues that that

through previous descriptions of Moby Dick in Chapter 41 by Ishmael and its “terrifying

intelligence,” that while Starbuck may mean to call Moby Dick “stupid” or “slow-witted,” that

the textual evidence from Ishmael attests to the whale’s inability to speak rather than think.


How does Ahab, the tyrant, view nature then? In Chapter 41, Ishmael captures the

swirling anger that shapes Ahab the tyrant:

The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those

malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left

living on with half a heart and half a lung... All that most maddens and torments;

all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the

sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil,

to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby

Dick. He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and

hate felt by his whole race from Adam down (Melville 156).

Adam was cursed by God to toil along the Earth as he works as part of the Fall of Man

(NASB Genesis 3:17). Ahab sees the whale as part of nature – a universe cursed to be senseless,

painful, and actively harmful to humans, whether God was a participant or not. And the crew has

no great answer’s either, as Leon Craig articulates, “No one in Melville’s story expressly

articulates a convincing theodicy whereby to rebut Ahab’s indictment of the world” (Craig 520).

Ishmael asks one pertinent question among many when thinking about “The Whiteness of the

Whale:” “Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of

the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the

white depths of the milky way” (Melville 165)?

When Hobbes, the man from whom Melville draws so much of his own political

philosophy, reinstitutes the concept of justice in Leviathan, it comes listed under Chapter 15, “Of

Other Laws of Nature,” no longer the central focus of man’s endeavors or its abiding principle,


like in Plato’s Republic. He defines justice thusly: “But when a covenant is made, then to break it

is unjust: and the definition of injustice, is no other than the not performance of covenant. And

whatsoever is not unjust, is just” [sic] (Hobbes 95). For Hobbes, justice itself lacks a definition,

and is only recognized in the renunciation of its opposite. Since justice is no longer the highest

goal, However it is the role of the sovereign to bring peace to the commonwealth but also to

pursue the growth to secure future well-being, even at the expense of other nations: “And from

hence it is, that kings, whose power is greatest, turn their endeavours to the assuring of it at home

by laws, or abroad by wars: and when that is done, there succeedeth a new desire; in some of

fame from new conquest; in others, of ease and sensual pleasure…” (Hobbes 66).

The only effective way for Ahab to strike back against a chaotic universe where justice is

at best a contractarian goal, is to master the very nature to which he responds. Ishmael surmises,

“To accomplish his object Ahab must use tools; and of all tools used in the shadow of the moon,

men are most apt to get out of order” (Melville 177). Even though Ahab does see a cruel and

unjust world though, the contract unto which he enters with his crew is broken by his wish to go

seek vengeance upon Moby Dick rather than make the money that would come from killing

other whales. Therefore he is an unjust tyrant who took power of the ship and all the people upon

it through his force of will. Moreover, when he eventually leads his crew into the chase on the

third day and all but Ishmael die, he fails in both tasks: the first is the safety of his crew that he

endangered by taking on the mission against Moby Dick; the second is to actually kill Moby

Dick and ascribe justice to nature. Whether one views the crew as complicit in the attack against

Moby Dick or mere plebeian pawns in Ahab’s grand scheme, is undecided. Starbuck certainly

contests Ahab throughout the novel but never can slow a scheme that seems set by Fate. Yet in

the end it still seems senseless, like the rest of Ahab’s moral universe, for his crew to have died


for naught. In modern times, Ahab the King could be compared to those Communist leaders like

Stalin or Mao who in their formative years attempted to ascribe a new order of things through

government initiatives, and often through famine killed millions. Those men who snatched

power in their own revolutions had grand ideas too, and each will live in the cultural

consciousness forever. Melville understood that ultimately these discussion about death, tyranny,

and nature are ingrained in the human struggle; one can hear that voice in Ishmael: “To produce

a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be

written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it” (Melville 349).

VIII. Thus Always to All

“The drama’s done,” begins Ishmael in the Epilogue. Not only have the major events

concluded, but the stage-like spectacle of Ahab battling Fate and Moby Dick are at an end. As

we have examined the various aspects of Moby-Dick, there is some hope to derive meaning and

practical exercise from the literary and political theory that arose from the study. It has been

shown that the Ship of State can be effectively flipped to portray the Pequod as a nation on its

own; that Ahab is the King of that nation; that in his desire for vengeance he becomes a tyrant of

the ship who wishes to master nature; the nature is symbolized in Moby Dick, and Ahab

eventually fails to set right the cruel world, when he dies fighting Moby Dick. It is true that

Moby-Dick is not only about politics; there are issues of epistemology, race, sexuality,

colonialism, psychoanalysis, and near every other field of literary theory that has jumped to

understand the white whale. Yet just because a political theory analysis is but one of many facets

of the diamond that is Melville’s magnum opus, does not mean it lacks for practical rigor.

George Shulman, who did a similar analysis of Moby-Dick as political theory, eventually

came to see The Whale as a “tragedy of democratic dignity,” and if one wishes to apply the


Aristotelian idea of catharsis to this tragedy, then it may well work. Readers can be affected by

the tragedy that is the loss of a nation, the Pequod, at the hands of a monomaniacal man.

However I think political scientist Leon Harold Craig provides a slightly less ethereal idea. He

asks the question, “what might a philosophical Caesar make of a Hobbesian commonwealth”

(524)? By which he notes to a selection from Plato’s Republic which again calls for an erotic

desire for philosophy from the hypothetical king of the polis (499B-500E). This too is a fine and

lofty answer.

Yet let us dive closer to the text and to our human natures. If literary or political theory

should ever progress from academic hypothesis to real-world discipline, we must strike through

the mask. Of the so many things we can draw from Melville and Moby-Dick, we know these

principles: that we are all upon a ship of state, whether it be America or the Earth as a whole; and

that we are afloat across a vast ocean of the universe, struggling in a life that so often seems to

lack any hope for goodness or justice. Therefore as our charismatic leaders gain power in our

various human forms of government so that we can provide goodness and justice for all, we

should constantly be reminded to consider the tyranny Ahab wrought upon the Pequod. For

purely selfish reasons, the crew would certainly reconsider their choice to follow Ahab on his

personal vendetta if they had known it meant certain death upon the chase’s third day, rather than

glory and triumph for the crew. But individually, for those who do have the ability to keep men

in awe and rise to power, they must consider the responsibility of that office, and strive to live up

to the ideas for which we actually ought to consider dying. For unlike Ishmael and Job, none of

us shall escape life to tell others; we only have our lives to live with the rest of our crew.

FINIS


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