Thomas Hobbes invented the modern ego – the ego that thinks it exists quite on its own.
He did this by declaring, in his Leviathan, that the natural state of human life was one of ceaseless "war of all against all". Human beings, he said, were naturally pure, relentless egoists who could only be brought to live in harmony by their fear of the threatening power of government. Without that threat, their life would be just a zero-sum game - "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short".
This was not mere rhetoric. Hobbes was responding to an ongoing series of civil wars which were nominally wars of religion. He couldn't stand people being conned by pious nonsense into fighting battles that didn't concern them, and ending up dead. He therefore proposed a new principle of political obligation, designed to stop them killing each other for trivial reasons. The state's authority does not, said Hobbes, rest on the Divine Right of Kings. The state exists only as a means of self-preservation for its citizens. What justifies its authority is (he said) simply the social contract, a tacit agreement by all members to obey government in return for the protection of their own lives. They are therefore only required to obey it in so far as it gives them that protection. Where it fails to do so – as in the case of an unjustified war - they cease to owe it any duty.
This may well sound pretty convincing. But Hobbes insisted that, to make the contract work, each individual citizen must be considered as wholly independent, a unit entirely devoted to its own interests. Any outside obligation, whether to God or to other people, would weaken the self-preservative motive on which the contract depends. God therefore vanished entirely and Hobbes went to drastic lengths to shoot down all possible human social claims, reducing them to enlightened self-interest. All our passions, he said, may be "reduced to the desire for Power" – essentially, the power to protect ourselves. Thus all morality - not just its political aspect but the whole of it – is valid only so far as it serves this ruling purpose. If, for instance, you ask about virtue, he tells you "Force and Fraud are in War the two cardinal Virtues" – "Honour consisteth only in Opinion of Power", and "The Value or Worth of a man is, as of all other things, his Price, namely as much as would be given for the Use of his Power". The man's Value therefore depends entirely on how much we need him at the time. He might become worthless to-morrow. And any apparently outgoing feelings such as compassion, which might seem to give other people a hold over us, cannot really do so because they too are really just forms of our self-interest. "Grief for the Calamity of another is Pity, and ariseth from the Imagination that the like Calamity may befall himself".
Like other theorists who have reduced human psychology to a single dominant motive – Epicurus, Nietzsche, Freud – Hobbes aimed above all to make people more realistic. He attacked their euphemisms in order to make them admit certain nasty truths about themselves so that they could stop their foolish, wasteful activities. This is good, but true realism demands a bit more than this. It asks for more attention to the complexity of the facts. It does not actually mix well with propaganda.
Like those other theorists, Hobbes did indeed make people aware of some important psychological facts. Since his time, the thought that each individual's interest must be considered because, for each of us, our own safety is so terribly important, has been built into the political vision of the Enlightenment. It lies at the root of modern individualism. But – also like those others – he did it at the cost of bringing in his own distortions. The picture that he finally displays is not straight fact. It is one more romantic reforming vision – a dream of strange, isolated, clear-headed beings who are both far more self-absorbed and enormously better at rational planning than any actual members of our species.
Right from the start, his critics have therefore asked, "Do you mean that we actually are like this – that we are beings with no natural sociable feelings (which doesn't seem very plausible) – or that we ought to be so, which is even less convincing?" This question is awkward because Hobbes probably wanted to say part of both these things, but he put them both in such extreme forms that it gets very hard to combine them.
In a way, his central point was probably the moral one – that we ought not to risk our own and other people's lives and interests in the outrageously thoughtless ways that we often do. Like Barack Obama, Hobbes was strongly opposed to dumb wars and rash wars. And he thought that the only way to avoid these wars was to be rational in the very odd sense which economists have since developed – that is, to become economic men, wholly devoted to our own interests.
Why, however, ought we to do this if we don't happen to want to? Of course Hobbes wasn't going give the accepted answer by talking about God, so he said that actually this is what we really want already, and we would know that if we were a bit more clear-headed. Here he is making a factual psychological claim – one that is convincing up to a point, but rather hard to reconcile with many of the ways in which quite clear-headed people often do behave, such as riding motor-bikes and climbing mountains, let alone committing suicide or devoting much of their lives to others.
Can we somehow sort out this dilemma? That would surely be the right way to ride the Leviathan – to profit by Hobbes's strange but penetrating political message without being landed with an unrealistic psychology which is liable to complicate our lives.
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