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I view philosophies as necessary stepping stones for better civilization. Just because we have already progressed beyond a given philosophy doesn't mean it wasn't a critical step on the path to where we are today. And such philosophies are still important in areas that are less advanced or regress.
Hobbes gets a bad rap because it sounds pretty horrible sitting in the peace and comfort of the 21st century. But we have to remember that the general attitude of "I better kill him before he kills me" (a kind of fear) has been the dominant cause of violence for most of human history. And there was an awful lot of that violence (read The Better Angels of our Nature by Pinker).
Even violence that seems gratuitous is often driven by this fear. A gang leader is essentially riding a tiger he can't let go of, and must constantly generate fear to stay alive.
Hobbes identified this trap, and found an ingenious way out of it: redirect the fear to a third party. If I am less afraid of my neighbor than what the government will do to me if I kill my neighbor, then I won't kill my neighbor. And if the government is vastly stronger than individuals, it will fear neither my neighbor nor I, so doesn't need to constantly terrorize everyone going about their daily lives.
Then, violence drops low enough that people can think about things like voting or free speech. But voting and free speech make no sense in a world of violence and fear.
> Hobbes identified this trap, and found an ingenious way out of it: redirect the fear to a third party. If I am less afraid of my neighbor than what the government will do to me if I kill my neighbor, then I won't kill my neighbor. And if the government is vastly stronger than individuals, it will fear neither my neighbor nor I, so doesn't need to constantly terrorize everyone going about their daily lives.
There are certain fundamental freedoms in a democracy, such as individuality, choice and movement. Democracies, of course, are weak to challenge those, as that is the point of a democracy to protect such fundamental freedoms.
However, this pandemic has made it so that some of those fundamental freedoms are now perceived as a serious threat. The virus spreads individually and thus to control the virus individuals must be controlled, by themselves or by the government.
Are we seeing constant terror in our daily lives because governments now fear the individual, their choices and their movements?
Is this why we see a reduction in democratic values? So governments can regain power to control the pandemic and thus inevitably also control individuals?
States of emergency were such temporary mechanisms used and still in use in some cases.
No, we’re seeing a rise of mask-holes who choose to inflict violence on their neighbors by failing to wear masks. And that because of the freedom not to wear masks, they can inflict harm on, even kill their neighbors because they claim we all have a right to freedom of face. The refrigerated containers full of bodies are a sign of a free and healthy democracy. Well, not that kind of healthy.
It’s not that governments are trying to control the people, it’s that half the population broke the fucking social contract because they didn’t want to be inconvenienced. And if half the people can’t manage one silly temporary rule to protect others, how can I ever trust them?
99.4-99.6% survival rate (1), good sir. Anyone at high risk is free to take extra precautions.
No one is “inflicting violence” by living normally.
(1) https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.03.20089854v...
> Hobbes gets a bad rap because it sounds pretty horrible sitting in the peace and comfort of the 21st century
Hobbes was viewed as an enemy of humanity by many of his contemporaries.
> [H]is writings are very bold. He published views that he knew would be strongly disliked by both parties to the English Civil War. He supported the king over Parliament, which earned him the enmity of those supporting Parliament, but he not only denied the divine right of the king, he said that democracy was an equally legitimate form of government, which earned him the enmity of many royalists, though not of the king. He also put forward views concerning God and religion that he knew would cause those who held traditional religious views to regard him as dangerous. The Roman Catholic Church put his books on the Index, and _Oxford University dismissed faculty for being Hobbists. Some people recommended burning not only his books but Hobbes himself_ (From "Hobbes", in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy)
> Unused to having their own ideas taken seriously, philosophers today may be surprised to learn that the Parliament of the time regarded the doctrines of Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) as a probable cause of the Great Fire of 1666. Safely dead, Hobbes is the greatest of British philosophers; alive and kicking, he was dangerous to know, and those in charge of the universities were not distracted by the notion of academic freedom from persecuting anyone who sympathized with his ‘lewd, scandalous and immoral doctrine’. In 1668 Daniel Scargill was deprived of a fellowship at Corpus Christi College and expelled from Cambridge for being ‘an Hobbist and an Atheist’. Scargill was promised in 1669 that he could return if he delivered a public recantation: two drafts of this were rejected; in the third, the unfortunate Scargill confessed to having been an agent of the Devil, but he was never restored to his fellowship and was obliged to live in extreme poverty. // The hostility of more orthodox thinkers was aroused above all by the intellectual ruthlessness with which Hobbes insisted that all divine authority must reflect earthly power. Nothing is more binding than the word of God: this Hobbes would be the first to allow. But, he argued, the word of God, like all words, may be interpreted in rival ways. What counts as an authoritative interpretation must therefore depend on the power of those capable of enforcing it (From "Persecution of Philosophers", in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy)
> But we have to remember that the general attitude of "I better kill him before he kills me" (a kind of fear) has been the dominant cause of violence for most of human history.
This is what Hobbes and Pinker would have you believe, but the "state of nature" take is largely unsupported by historical and anthropological evidence and is also hard to reconcile with findings from modern psychology and behavioral economics.
The heart of the issue is that humans are not mere opportunistic cooperators like hyenas---we get joy from cooperating and working toward common goals and we exhibit spontaneous altruistic behavior, empathy, and self-sacrifice. Cooperation has played heavily in our evolution, seen in our bodies being poorly adapted to solitary scavenging, hunting, and weathering but highly adapted toward leveraging social networks through language and social learning. The idea that society begins as a prisoner's dilemma of mutually-suspicious individuals emerging out of the woods into contact contradicts findings that the earliest societies were extended kin groups whose individuals benefited from the reproductive success of the entire group at a time when resources were abundant and harvesting them benefited from scale.
If there is a trap of violence it doesn't seem to begin until after solitary city life and farming. Before this point power was largely immaterial and based on social standing. The transition from itinerary to sedentary meant 1) people were living in larger societies among strangers and non-kin, so opportunistic violence had more upside, and 2) grain and weapons could be accumulated, so those with access had a new source of material power. These factors combined in the emergence of palace economies of lawgivers who managed the population through retributive justice. But peace existed before the central management of peace. The mistake of Hobbes and Pinker is to think that history began with the latter, but it is no more than the last 3% of human history.
A good majority of people do derive satisfaction from cooperating and pursuing goals together. Yet, we must always consider the fact that the human population contains a not insignificant number of psychopaths capable of severe damage. For these reasons it is important that society be organized to be both robust and flexible.
>Hobbes gets a bad rap because it sounds pretty horrible sitting in the peace and comfort of the 21st century. But we have to remember that the general attitude of "I better kill him before he kills me" (a kind of fear) has been the dominant cause of violence for most of human history.
Only naive Europeans, mostly western and the Anglophone countries, still believe this. The rest of the world laugh at us and our political leaders who don't have a backbone. Just look at the situation in the Ukrainian border.
And your notion that the use of Violence is related to fear and not power speaks volumes.
A quote from someone who understands this really well:
“To the meaningless French idealisms: Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, we propose the three German realities: Infantry, Cavalry, and Artillery.”
— Prince Bernhard von Bülow
That did Prussia a whole lot of good in 1918.
As if their opponents didn't practice exactly what I said too
Note that many states in the U.S. are actively reverting this solution, legalizing and supporting "I better kill him before he kills me" through stand-your-ground laws.
I’d think Hobbes is better known for his ideas on sovereignty, rather than pop culture views on barbarism and civilization.
"Just because we have already progressed beyond a given philosophy doesn't mean it wasn't a critical step on the path to where we are today. And such philosophies are still important in areas that are less advanced or regress."
This is a vitally important point that is so often missed by many and it's crucial to almost evey field of endeavor that we encounter.
Let me give you what is probably the quintessential example by way of an analogy. To understand the science of mechanics to the extent that we do nowadays, we first had to absorb and then digest Newton's Mechanics through its various iterative refinements, Lagrangian and Hamiltonian Mechanics etc., and it took us several hundred years before we had a sufficient understanding of its implications that it became possible for us to make the next great leap forward in our thinking. When we arrived there we very quickly developed both Quantum Mechanics (1900) and Special Relatively (1905) and from whence we further progressed through to General Relativity (1915) and beyond.
However, this was by no means a simple matter, for along the way we had to make new physical observations such as the Michelson-Morley experiment and to develop new and quite different mathematics, for without both such progress would have been impossible. The mathematics alone took a torturously winding path involving completely new ideas and concepts. Diverse developments such as William Rowan Hamilton's Hamiltonian and quaternions, Ricci-Curbastro's curvature, Hilbert's 'Space', Minkowski space and others were absolute prerequisites for the new physics of the early 20th Century, it couldn't have progressed without them.
Sure, that's a long-winded analogy to reach my point but it illustrates how complicated and convoluted it can be to make progress in any endeavor - and that includes both philosophy and political science.
Like Newton, Hobbes's world is, in many respects, very different from our world of today. No matter how brilliant a person of that era was, they simply would not have been able evolve ideas past a certain point as the underlying theoretical infrastructure for him or her to do so was not yet in place.
Newton for instance, wouldn't have been able to progress his ideas forward unless he'd had experiamental data from the Michelson-Morley experiment as well as access to the new mathematics. Moreover, even if by come brilliant deduction, Newton had stumbled onto the idea of conducting such a experiment, then there's a good chance that the limited resolution of the technology of his day would not have provided sufficient accuracy for him to come to the correct conclusion. OK, let's say he had succeeded, then in the absence of new mathematics he'd then be forever left pondering the result sans arriving at any definitive conclusion.
This is why we still need to study Plato, Pythagoras as well as other great thinkers from different eras, for without them we don't have sufficient wherewithal to put everything into proper perspective.
Whilst today we can reject some of their ideas as having less relevance, others are still surprisingly modern and they are often the bedrock foundations from which we've progressed forward.
(For instance, in Book I of Plato's Republic where in a forum Socrates raises the question 'what is justice' and then formally debates the proposition with the sophist Thrasymachus, I reckon is damn hard to beat. The way in which Socrates weaves the development and logical progression of his arguments to the point where he not only ultimately renders the sophist's view worthless but also is able to change the sophist's mind to his view is nothing short of wonderful. It's a debate with logical argument that's almost without parallel. Even if one were to disagree with some of the conclusions in Plato's Republic, and given the passage of nearly 2400 years since it was written, that's not unexpected (especially so for some ideas that emerge in the latter books), it nevertheless still holds intrinsic value that makes it well worth reading.)
Thus, some 371 years on since the Leviathan, it is very easy to be critical of some of Hobbes's ideas - and that's absolutely fine - that is, so long as we do not forget that the zeigest in which he was immersed was very different to our own. Not only should we consider this fact rigorously but also we should factor it into our analysis of Hobbes's book.
Even if you disagree with Hobbes's thesis, his book is worth reading for its own sake: the prose is beautiful, and Hobbes's step by step description of how people form a personal, and then a political consciousness, is exquisite.
Yes, I would strongly agree that Hobbes' Leviathan is worth reading for its own sake but also it's an aboulte must if one is interested in or studying Western philosophy as it holds a key place in the canon of philosophical works.
In my view the Leviathan is an accessible work even for those who've never previously studied other philosophical works, and as you say, its prose is beautiful. Also, I find the way Hobbes lays out his thinking quite logical and the order of his chapters reflect that.
As others have mentioned, the Leviathan was written at the height of the English Civil War. The state of unrest no doubt forced Hobbes to examine a broader more expansive view of the world - of law, politics and affairs of state than he may otherwise would have in more peaceful times.
It seems to me that one should be familiar with the Leviathan before moving onto say John Locke and other Enlightenment thinkers.
I am interested in this book, and will probably get it. It seems to come at a time when the Western governments, despite their gargantuan size, seem totally incapable of resolving their innumerable, largely self-inflicted crises. Plagued precisely by the questions of meaning which Hobbes ejected from politics, the West seems to be demonstrating that one can have both the Leviathan, and the State of Nature at once.
I’ve changed my views about a lot of things in the last decade or so, but seeing Hobbes as something of a villain has been constant. As a secular progressive, it seemed an overly pessimistic take on the possibility of political change. Today, as a (Catholic) Christian, and also a big David Graeber fanboi (these are not as radically incompatible as they may seem), I think that the State of Nature postulate, which forms the basis of Hobbesian thought, is not justified by actual human experience.
Graeber has a fresh take on Hobbes in his Dawn of Everything
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/31/arts/dawn-of-everything-g...
Graeber's books reprogrammed my brain. But I'm still struggling to connect the dots:
What does Iroquois style participatory democracy actually look like?
We need movies and soap operas. To tell the stories.
Like West Wing, House of Cards, Mr Smith Goes To Washington, The Wire. Show the human drama and machinations. Events, issues, and people. Conflicts and resolutions.
Participatory democracy is not all puppies and ice cream. The advocates would be well served to show that it's just another decision making strategy. Hopefully superior to what we have today.
Like how Approval Voting is better than Winner Takes All. We'd still run elections. Just more robust with better outcomes, so therefore less drama.
You have to bear in mind that Hobbes wrote Leviathan in the middle of a civil war when existence was precarious and news consisted of terrifying unverifiable rumors about everything. I too think much of his prescription has turned out to be a Bad Idea but he probably meant well as an individual rather than scheming to lock humanity into its current boring dystopia.
I don’t believe he erred for the sake of erring (I don’t think anyone does, finally), but I do think his errors were transparent at the time. See, for example, the refutation in Suarez’ Against the Errors of the Anglican Sect, Book II.
> I think that the State of Nature postulate, which forms the basis of Hobbesian thought, is not justified by actual human experience.
Hobbes didn't think that humans had ever actually lived in a state of nature. It's a hypothetical, a thought experiment not unlike Rawls' veil of ignorance.
Yes! I reject both of those for exactly the reason I said above.
It does not need to be true to provide a good model. This happens in most concrete sciences so why not in humanistics?
Actually when contrasted with the noble savage of Rousseau, the human as a bestial savage provides a great ground level from human behavior. From that model you can then have a model for the worst case scenarios of behavior and form governance from that. Probably not the optimum or most efficient but probably the model with the broadest applicability. This is what captivated me in Hobbes. Lot's of unanswered needs, but a very stable base for survival and improvements. I think it is also the model most people could understand at a basic level: Do not do that otherwise <the sovereign> will punish you. Even a child understand this with the parents being the sovereign.
>Today, as a (Catholic) Christian, and also a big David Graeber fanboi (these are not as radically incompatible as they may seem)
How is a left wing anarchist with Communist sympathies [0] in any way compatible with what any Pope or Doctor of the Church [1] has ever written?
The issue of poverty as espoused by the Franciscan order was a hotly debated theological issue in the 13th and 14th centuries. Eventually the Pope had to get involved to denounce the idea of "Absolute poverty of Christ" as heresy. The Franciscan revolution may have not gone as far as some people have hoped, but it was an important step in the development of Western liberalism (cf. Larry Siedentop's Inventing the Individual, pp. 288-292). Incidentally, this same debate was also featured as the central plot conflict in Umberto Eco's historical fiction "The Name of the Rose".
Quiz: who said, “all politics is, at bottom, theological?” St. John Henry Newman, or Proudhon? Trick question! Both! This is radically different from the Marxian/Nietzschian maxim, that all theology is, at bottom, politics. I don’t think anarchism is actually a complete, proper atheism; it tends to propose itself to a kind of negative theology (no false gods). Therefore dialogue is possible, unlike the Marxist, Nietzschian case, where atheism is complete and postulatory.
One area of commonality is that we both believe that society is natural. I’ve already mentioned Book II of Suarez’ Against the Errors of the Anglican Sect in this thread. Anarchists who read it will find it, in turns, dazzlingly profound and infuriating, yet astonishingly satisfying as a whole (just as I do with Graeber).
A second area of commonality is that we both believe in a horizon beyond politics. Graeber is especially good about this. For him, anarchism is an interior disposition — a mode of being — prior to any political program. He therefore avoids the infallible symptom of political atheism, the absolutization of politics. His books are about human life, and in particular about how politics can take place within life, rather than life taking place within politics. The intellectually fearless anarchist can read Andrew Willard Jones’ Before Church and State, and see the commonalities.
As for substantive content of dialogue, the anarchist can help the Catholic to see instances where the Church has, in practice, confused the eternal, Divine order for a particular, temporal order (see Pope Benedict XVI’s discourse on the temptations of Christ and the Kingdom of God in Jesus of Nazareth, Volune I for how to approach this with orthodoxy and openness). This will help the Church more authentically pursue its mission.
In turn, the Catholic can help the anarchist to resolve the power-authority distinction, which lies at the heart of the anarchists’ inability to sustain any positive ideal (see various 19th Century failures, Occupy Wall Street, and the more recent corporate co-optation of radical culture). From there, it is not hard to offer the highest authority, the Lord who stands in judgement of all Lords; sin as the universal oppressor, and oneness in the body of Christ as true freedom.
Some other texts I think we would all like:
St Cyprian of Carthage: On Almsgiving
St. Thomas Aquinas on the Universal Destination of Goods (Summa Theologica)
St. Thomas Aquinas on Distributive Justice (Summa Theologica)
Pope Francis’ Laudito Si
Anything by or about Bl. Oscar Romero
St. Augustine’s City of God
Most of Pope Benedict XVI’s scholarly work, Jesus of Nazareth already mentioned as a highlight.
Happy to see that community here mainly considers Hobbes to be "a villain". I'd like to point to the very enjoyable book by Rutger Bregman - Humankind[0]. In it, the writer discusses the differences between two important philosophers - Hobbes on one side and Rousseau on the other. First one has a general idea that "people are bad and need to be contained", while the latter is opposite.
Yes! This book really messed with my head in a good way.
I don't know if I ever read a book before that taught me I had assumptions, and immediately tossed those assumptions in the trash can by showing solid evidence of the contrary.
Highly recommended read!
(For Dutch people: the Dutch title is "De meeste mensen deugen".)
I mean did his work shape politics or did politics shape his work.
Exactly
His work shaped politics, alongside those of Locke, Montesquieu, Marx and Rousseau
Bellum omnium contra omnes.
Davis Runciman has a very good associated limited podcast series [1] itself spinoff of his excellent recurring podcast [2] co-hosted with Helen Thompston.
[1] https://www.talkingpoliticspodcast.com/history-of-ideas
[2] https://www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-videos/podcasts/talking-p...
IMO the fact that it's impossible to have a state without "doubleness" and professional politicians is not an argument that idealistic approach to politics is wrong per se, but rather the argument that all states are fundamentally broken systems that have to be dismantled in the long term for us to make further meaningful progress in politics.
Hobbes’ state of nature (definitionally, the absence of a state) is definitely a lot worse
Well yes, Hobbes’ hypothetical very bad society would be very bad. The point is questioning whether we have any evidence to suggest this hypothetical society has any grounding in reality or, as Graeber suggests, has just been convenient to liberal ideology for a couple centuries and thus accepted as fact.
Going even further, Graeber also tries to dismantle the "counter-thesis" to Hobbes', Rousseau's primitive egalitarian harmonic societies. He shows lots of archaeological evidence suggesting that "primitive" pre-historic societies were probably not that simplistic in terms of social relationships, and some were most likely not egalitarian, since, for instance they would present different displays of wealth in how different people were buried.
In summary, his new book 'The Dawn of Everything' tries to present evidence in a more scientific way in order to destroy these inaccurate portrayals of primitive societies.
I even tried to start a thread and discuss the book in this HN post, feel free to participate. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30002793
Hobbes' very bad society wasn't a hypothetical. It was the reality during the English civil wars, i.e. the time when he wrote the book. And existed for some time before that in many other areas.
And there was plenty of warfare in North America pre-Columbus. Iroquois had a long reputation as a ferocious warrior culture.
Doubtful. Humanity has lived without states for millennia. A state is not a requirement for preventing mass self-destruction (although that does not mean I would advocate a stateless society as a first choice). Hobbes makes the same mistake Plato does with the only difference being that he puts force in place of philosophy. And in so doing, rather ironically, justified Cromwell's usurpation of/ascendance to the throne as Lord Protector.
Assuming you take his postulate at face value. Given that he lived centuries before anthropology became a science, I'm not inclined to think that it's literally true, and he might not have either.
Given the context when he wrote Leviathan, a civil war, I think that his views less reflect the reality of no state, and more the reality of what happens when control over the state is contested.
Is it, though? It's a lot more dangerous. I'm not sure that's necessarily worse somewhat safe hopelessness.
> The idea that “Man is a wolf to man” sums up many of Hobbes’ theories in a single phrase. However, it should be noted that the sentence so often quoted as summarising Hobbes’ theories continues, “Man is an arrant wolf to man, and man to man is a God.” <
Is there a version of this book that is a modern translation of sorts of the old English the book is written in? It has been on the list of books I wanted to read for a long time but picking it up has always felt more like labor due to having to work through the prose and style.
It is still the coolest book cover in history.
Really though? Because the last five years have seemed more like Dante's Devine Comedy.
Leviathan is the most frequently read book in the ivy league, and this is why the American establishment is a wretched hive of villiany and scum.
Does that translate into 'Hobbes was a very bright bastard, so if you want get the 'good oil' on the matter then read him first' ?
Reckon he's widely read elsewhere too - I'm definitely not one of them - so with others also in the 'know' then they may not have had such an advantage. Perhaps it was something else, something in their drinking water perhaps? ;-)
If reading X meant "being indoctrinated by X", humanity would have vanished early in history under tearing cognitive burden.
Could you expand more on why that is? I have tried to read it but found it dry and stopped. Are there themes in it that you feel have created problems, what are they?
One problem is that Leviathan teaches that coordination problems must be solved by centralized force. Another problem is that it views society as competition for resources. The extremes of its rhetoric are a memetically potent drug, and turn exceptions into rules, which then become axioms in the minds of the susceptible privileged undergraduate population - axioms which then rationalize sociopathic patterns of abusive control perpetuated by the ruling elites. The populist reactions to these abuses are perhaps the most damaging aspect of the whole scenario as it is playing out today.