War: What is it good for? Read Online Free Page A

war of all against all. “In such condition,” he famously mused, “there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
    As Hobbes saw it, murder, poverty, and ignorance would always be the order of the day unless there was strong government—government as awesome, he suggested, as Leviathan, the Godzilla-like monster that so alarmed Job in the Bible. (“On earth there is nothing like him,” said Job. “He beholds every high thing; he is king over all the children of pride.”) Such a government might be a king ruling alone or an assembly of decision makers, but either way Leviathan must intimidate its subjects so thoroughly that they would choose submission to its laws over killing and robbing each other.
    How, though, had unruly humans managed to create Leviathan and escape from violent anarchy? In the 1640s there was little anthropology and less archaeology to inform discussion, but that did not stop Hobbes from holding strong views. “Savage people in many places in America” illustrated his thesis, Hobbes claimed, but he was always more interested in abstract speculation than in evidence. “The attaining to this sovereign power is by two ways,” he reasoned. “One [is] by natural force: as when a man maketh his children, to submit themselves, and their children to his government, as being able to destroy them if they refuse; or by war subdueth his enemies to his will, giving them their lives on that condition. The other, is when men agree amongst themselves, to submit to some man, or assembly of men, voluntarily.” The violent path to Leviathan, Hobbes called “commonwealth by acquisition”; the peaceful, “commonwealth by institution .” But either way, Hobbes concluded, what makes us safe and rich is government.
    This really set the cat among the pigeons. Leviathan was so unpopular among the Parisians who had given Hobbes shelter that he had to flee back to England. Once there, he faced a storm of criticism. By the 1660s, to call an idea “Hobbist” was to imply that any decent person should dismiss it; in1666, only the intervention of the recently restored king saved Hobbes from prosecution for heresy.
    Not content with getting rid of Hobbes, Parisian intellectuals soon set about disproving his depressing claims. From the 1690s onward, one French thinker after another announced that the Englishman had had things completely back to front, and seventy-five years after Hobbes was safely dead, the Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau pulled the critiques together. Government could not be the answer, Rousseau concluded, because in the state of nature man was “an equal stranger to war and every social connection, without standing in any shape in need of his fellows, as well as without any desire of hurting them.” Leviathan had not tamed our warlike spirits; rather, it had corrupted our simplicity.
    Rousseau, however, proved even less popular than Hobbes. He had to flee French Switzerland for the German part, only for a mob to stone his house when he got there. He next fled to England, which he did not like, before sneaking back into Paris, even though he had been officially exiled from France. But despite this stormy reception, Rousseau gave Hobbes a run for his money. In the later eighteenth century, Rousseau’s optimism about mankind’s innate goodness made many readers consider Hobbes reactionary. In the later nineteenth century Hobbes bounced back as Darwin’s