Thoughts on Thomas Hobbes

By Eugene Sheely

It could be said that Hobbes believed Anarchy to be evil since humans attack each other without quarter. Man exists in a state of perpetual self-interest at the expense of everyone else. Therefore, in order to achieve peace you will give up your rights to a sovereign (social contract), and this sovereigns rule and his laws are what is moral, since it maintenance peace and the state of nature at bay. The only check on the sovereign is prudence, for if he pushes them too far he’ll drive them back into a state of nature with rebellion, but other than that his will is law.

I’m fascinated with the conception of Thomas Hobbes of the state of nature. Much like The Lord of the Flies, it’s war of all against all. This is in contrast to the caricatures some Americans portray the native Americans, as having lived in a paradise robbed to them by the Europeans. I remember sitting in a class in San Diego and listening to these students claim that the Spaniards brought rape and slavery and all these awful things to a paradise that was a complete fiction. I asked these guys if they’ve read a single history book on this time period, which they had not. Nothing but barbarians with a smartphone incapable of reading a history book that think the fluffy feelings in their tummy means their fictions are facts. But the question arises: can we track where Hobbes got his opinion of the past, centuries before modern archeology and anthropology?

Doing a search on Hobbes I discovered that the man had translated The Peloponnesian War by Thucydides in 1629, the Leviathan was published in 1651. This is fascinating, since Thucydides does give his belief on how prehistoric migratory peoples lived in Greece in a way very similar to his state of nature in the first paragraphs of Book 1. People lived in small bands fighting for resources, they didn’t accumulate much since someone else would simply come and take it away. The people living in specific regions changed over time since they were conquered by a new group of immigrants. It wasn’t until several of these small groups got together and formed a state (particularly in Attica) that civilization could flourish with laws, walls and the accumulation of wealth protecting these laws.

Thucydides later goes over the breakdown of society and blames the fall of Athens to direct Democracy. The civil war of Corcyra is another anecdote that shows the horrors of what happens when the state breaks down. Citizen against citizen, only to be ruled under tyranny after a period of hideous chaos and self-inflicted suffering. So we have from Thucydides the horrors of a state of nature in prehistory, the state as the cause that alleviate humanity from the state of nature, and the horrors that ensue when the state collapses.

The second inference for this is did the treaty of Westphalia came before or after Hobbes. While sitting in class I thought it might have come shortly after the Leviathan was published, but instead I find that it was being negotiated and officially accepted a fear years before the Leviathan. This is interesting because this means Hobbes is an observer rationalizing the treaty of Westphalia, and justifying it, rather than being it’s originator. Hobbes is therefore a product of his time, not an originator per say (Machiavelli was in contrast a true founder).

For the sake of Brevity I’ll list some of the fallacies I see in him:

Modern biologists like Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene and David Sloan Wilson in Darwin’s Cathedral give explain that altruism is a form of selfishness if we see the preservation of the gene as the goal of evolution, and not that of the individual as Hobbes suggests.
Morality does exist in the animal kingdom and is not a product of pure reason or established laws. It evolved in social groups to create cohesion and beneficial behaviors for the group. His social contract naturally exists in many social species. One example is game theory (as in behavioral economics) that has come up with the tit-for-tat concept. There is a species of bats where the mothers collectively feed all of the young who are grouped without difference, but if a mother decides to hoard her food and feed mainly her child (they can still recognize their offspring) the other mothers will stop feeding that child, who will surely die since the mother can’t feed it on her own.
Before Hobbes the role of government was limited and the focus was of having men of merit rule, Hobbes endorses unlimited government that is ever growing and possibly ruled by a moron or ill willed individual. Even Machiavelli asked for men of merit and saw the medieval and Platonic version of merit as false and offered his own version. The natural conclusion of Hobbes is a totalitarian government of bureaucrats. Aristotle said it best in his Politics: “To the size of the state there is a limit, as there is to plants, animals and implements, for none of these retain their facility when they are too large.” and “But if the citizens of a state are to judge and to distribute offices according to merit, then they must know each other’s characters;”

Pros:

Hobbes seems to attempt to rationalize the treaty of Westphalia, which as far as I know originated out of practicality and concession (the reasons given by Machievelli for the liberty of the Roman Republic, the internal struggles of plebs and patricians). If Hobbes didn’t create the treaty of Westphalia, he most likely helped maintain it by providing a theory for it.
Hobbes is clever into not assigning the basis of government on divine religion or rationality, but on a sense of needed security. Considering Hobbes reading on Thucydides and his living through the end of the Thirty Years War, one may excuse him for pushing a state that could lead to totalitarianism But Benjamin Franklin once said: “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” I can’t remember which founding father one made a comment about Latin America, in which he said Americans will get the best government possible, while Latin Americans the best they can manage. The context of this statement was that liberty was only to be established with a certain group of people, but not all. Hobbes may have been right in the right context. Having lived in Mexico I have seen that what seems good and nice people will be quick to hire a hitman and have someone murdered over a family conflict (such as a grandmother wanting custody of her only granddaughter and thus murdering her daughter-in-law after she initiated divorce with her son). If we are talking about Mexico, I would say his thoughts would apply to that country. Somewhere like Utah a government as was foreseen by the founding father, that is to say limited and operating with self-government. So in Hobbes context (Europe having experienced the Thirty Years War), he was probably right.

Considering that technology and financial capacities were quite limited at his time, it’s hard to say if he was an actual totalitarian in our modern sense when he demanded a strong government. After all, Alexander Hamilton did ask for a strong government but Hobbes seems to have taken the concept too far, which the founding fathers like Franklin rejected. : “Unless your government is respectable, foreigners will invade your rights; and to maintain tranquillity you must be respectable; even to observe neutrality you must have a strong government.” While warning against chaos that seems much like Hobbes state of nature: “It has been observed that a pure democracy if it were practicable would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved that no position is more false than this. The ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity.”