Hobbes

Thomas Hobbes

Thomas Hobbes asked a question that founded modern political thought: what would human life be like with no government at all? Strip away the police, the courts, the laws, every common power able to enforce a rule, and picture people left entirely to themselves. We tend to imagine noble savages or a peaceable anarchy. Hobbes imagined hell. With no one to keep the peace, he argued, human beings would collapse into a "war of every man against every man," a condition of ceaseless fear and danger in which there could be no farming, no trade, no building, no knowledge, no art, because nothing could be safely kept or planned, and in which the life of man would be, in the five most famous words in political philosophy, "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." This was not gloom for its own sake. Hobbes had lived through the chaos of the English Civil War, had watched a kingdom dissolve into blood, and he wanted to understand, with the cold rigor of a geometer, exactly why ordered society is precious and exactly what it takes to hold one together. His answer reshaped how the West thinks about power, law, and the state, and we are still arguing inside the framework he built.

Born twins with fear. There is a story Hobbes liked to tell about himself: that his mother, hearing that the Spanish Armada was bearing down on England, was frightened into giving birth to him early, so that, as he put it, "fear and I were born twins." True or not, it is the perfect emblem of his philosophy, because fear sits at the very center of it. Most thinkers have treated fear as a weakness to be conquered. Hobbes treated it as the single most important and most useful fact about human beings, and above all the fear of violent death: it is, he argued, the one passion strong enough and universal enough to be relied upon, the great motivator that can drag quarrelsome, proud, greedy creatures out of the war they would otherwise stay trapped in. Reason alone does not move people; their vanity and their appetites pull them toward conflict. But the dread of being killed cuts through everything, and it is precisely this dread, properly understood, that makes people willing to lay down their arms and submit to a common power. Hobbes built an entire political order on the one emotion every human being shares and no one can argue away. Where others saw fear as the enemy of civilization, he saw it as its foundation.

Why it all falls apart. The brilliance is in the derivation, because Hobbes does not merely assert that life without government is war; he shows you, step by step, why it must be. Start, he says, from a fact people resist: that human beings are roughly equal. Not identical, but close enough that there is no one so strong that the weakest cannot kill him, by cunning, or by ganging up. From rough equality comes equal hope of getting what we want; and when two people want the same scarce thing, they become enemies. Now add the decisive ingredient: fear. Because anyone might attack me, my safest move is to strike first, to subdue others before they can subdue me; but since everyone reasons exactly the same way, the result is universal preemptive aggression, a world in which even the peaceful must turn predator simply to survive. It is a chillingly modern piece of analysis: not a claim that people are evil, but a demonstration that even rational, self-interested, not-especially-wicked people, dropped into a situation with no enforcer and no trust, are driven into conflict by the sheer logic of the situation. Three centuries later, mathematicians studying exactly this structure would call it a cooperation problem, and Hobbes's war of all against all remains its founding model, taught in every course on game theory and the state.

The mortal god. If the trap is the lack of a common power, the escape is obvious: make one. And here Hobbes makes the move that founded modern political thought and, against his own intention, eventually doomed the very absolutism he was defending. The people, he says, escape the war by a covenant: each agrees with all the others to lay down his right to govern himself and hand it to a single sovereign, a person or an assembly, on the condition that everyone else does the same. The sovereign that results is "a mortal god," to whom, under the immortal God, they owe their peace; and its power must be near-absolute, because a divided or limited sovereign is no real escape from the war at all. So far this sounds like a charter for tyranny, and Hobbes did defend sweeping state power. But look at the foundation he laid it on. For Hobbes the state does not draw its authority from God, or from the divine right of kings, or from ancient custom. It draws its authority from the consent of ordinary, equal individuals, who create it for their own protection. That single idea, that legitimate power flows up from the people rather than down from heaven, is the seed of every modern theory of government, and once it was planted it could not be contained by Hobbes's absolutist conclusion. If the people make the sovereign, then the people can, in principle, ask what the sovereign is for, and unmake one that fails them. Hobbes laid the foundation of democratic legitimacy while trying to build a wall against revolution.

Mind is matter in motion. Beneath the politics runs a metaphysics just as bold, and just as modern. Hobbes was a thoroughgoing materialist: he held that everything that exists is body in motion, and nothing else. There are no spirits, no immaterial souls, no Cartesian thinking-substance floating free of the brain. What we call thought and sensation and feeling are, for Hobbes, simply motions, the physical pressure of outside objects on our sense organs, transmitted inward and continuing as the churn of the brain. A perception is matter in motion; a memory is a fading motion; even the passions, desire and fear and hope, are inner motions, tiny beginnings of approach or retreat. He set this squarely against Descartes, his great contemporary, who insisted that the mind is a separate, non-physical thing, and the two men argued it out, with mounting irritation, on paper. The quarrel between them is still the deepest in the philosophy of mind: is your inner life something over and above the matter of your brain, or is it, as Hobbes insisted, just that matter in motion, all the way down? Every modern debate about consciousness and the brain is a continuation of the argument Hobbes started, and the materialist side of it has never had a more fearless early champion.

The question we cannot escape. The room holds the full Leviathan and much of the rest of Hobbes in their original editions, cited by chapter; the famous frontispiece alone, a giant king whose body is composed of hundreds of tiny citizens, rewards a long look, because it is the theory in a picture: the state as an artificial person, a body made of bodies. Hobbes was the most hated philosopher of his century, denounced for impiety and tyranny alike, and "Hobbism" became a byword for cold, godless calculation. But the framework he built proved inescapable. Locke would take Hobbes's social contract and draw the opposite, liberal conclusion: that since we set up government for our protection, a government that turns against us forfeits its right and may be replaced. Rousseau would carry it toward democracy and the general will. Every later theory of the state, liberal or authoritarian, is written inside the space Hobbes opened, arguing about what the people, in setting up their sovereign, would and would not agree to. He asked the foundational question of all political philosophy, why should anyone obey the state at all, and he answered it with no appeal to God or tradition, from the bare facts of human fear and human need. You can reject his answer, as most of us do, and still owe him the question.