Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan shaped modern politics

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)

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/31/arts/dawn-of-everything-g...

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?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Graeber

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_of_the_Church

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".)

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? ;-)