What, actually, is the moral of all this social atomism – this isolation of human beings from one another which I've been suggesting is Thomas Hobbes's central theme in Leviathan? How does it tell us to live?
That question has been answered in a lot of different of ways, some of which would have surprised Hobbes very much Among these answers, perhaps the most politically influential one today is, depressingly enough, that given by Ayn Rand, the American prophetess who, in the mid-twentieth century, preached extreme individualism as the gospel of laissez-faire capitalism. Her message is "the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life". Rand's books strike many people as crazy, yet they have unquestionably had great influence, no doubt because she simply carried ideas already active in the US to their logical conclusion. Apparently Alan Greenspan was her ardent disciple, so was Ronald Reagan, and a survey in 1991 declared her book Atlas Shrugged "the most influential book on American lives after the Bible". And the recession has again shot her books to the top of the best-selling list.
Her theme is the rugged excellence of "men of the mind" - certain grand individuals such as tycoons and inventors - and the need to prevent the state from ever interfering with them by regulation. Clearly identifying herself, and her readers, with these people, she writes that they should never to be expected to consider the rest of the populace, who are "parasites" and "mindless hordes".. She denounces all altruism as evil. "The man who speaks to you of sacrifice is speaking of slaves and masters, and intends to be the master.'
Thus she shares Hobbes's belief in a war of all against all which is essentially about power, but she reacts to it in exactly the opposite way. Hobbes, who had some experience of actual literal warfare, was chiefly struck by the thought that wars can kill you. So he stressed above all the need to keep alive by supporting the social contract. He thought firm government so necessary that he advised people to accept their sovereign's imperfections rather than make things worse by revolt.. Thus (as several commentators on this series have pointed out) he really has no useful advice for how to deal with an intolerable government.
Rand, by contrast, reacts to the idea of a universal war by saying "OK then, let's win it". She counters Hobbes's over-confidence in despotic government – which belonged to the age of the Sun King - by an even greater overconfidence in the modern American myth of the heroic individual. This may have something to do with her having been originally an immigrant from the USSR, but it also clearly feeds on the kind of paranoiac anti-government resentment by which unlucky people often relieve their feelings, rather than trying to find effective ways of political action. Noam Chomsky has called her deeply evil. This may seem like taking her too seriously, but we surely do need to take seriously the ideas that she stands for.
Here, then, are two individualistic prophets recommending quite opposite paths. Politically, they represent the two ends of the spectrum of Enlightenment social thought, the totalitarian end and the anarchistic one. Rand, however, adds to the anarchistic end something peculiarly American – an apparently infinite faith in the market's power to produce good out of disorder. Today, of course, this is beginning to expose the craziness of the doctrine as market mechanisms explode all around us. Nobody knows whether Rand's many readers today have noticed this or whether they still simply take her books to show that the government is always wrong.
What chiefly emerges here is surely how important it is, when we are confronted with these extreme and simple doctrines, to understand the guiding visions behind them and in particular, just what danger they aim to protect us against. Rand's guiding vision is clearly what used to be called infantile omnipotence – the childish hope of total control – and her doctrines have great influence because that hope is still always strong in the depths of our hearts. The fear that haunts her is the fear of having to obey someone else. This fear, intelligently disciplined, does indeed lie at the root of our emphasis on liberty, but there is nothing to be said for erecting it on its own into a "heroic" stance of self-admiration.
Hobbes too touches a deep and legitimate chord in invoking our fear of death and destruction. Both these themes have a real and serious place in our lives. But neither of them can possibly rule us altogether, as these prophets want it to. And the notion of a war of all against all which underlies both of them is really quite unrealistic. Yet it still seems to be quite influential – a point which we will have to discuss further later.
For Mary's previous blogs on Thomas Hobbes, visit the How to believe series page