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

evolutionary ideas made his dog-eat-dog vision seem more in accordance with nature, but in the twentieth he lost ground once again. For reasons we will return to in Chapter 1 , the idealism of Edwin Starr’s “War” swept the field. By the 1980s, Hobbes’s stern vision of strong government as a force for good was in full retreat.
    Hobbes’s critics spanned the ideological spectrum. “Government,” Ronald Reagan assured Americans in his first inaugural address, “is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” But Reagan’s great fear—that bloated government would stifle individual freedom—also shows just how far the modern debate over the merits of big and small government has taken us from the kinds of horrors that worried Hobbes. To people in any age before our own, our current arguments would have made no sense; for them, the only argument that mattered was between extremely small government and no government at all. Extremely small government meant that there was at least some law and order; no government at all, that there was not.
    Reagan once joked that “the ten most terrifying words in the English language are ‘Hi, I’m from the government, and I’m here to help,’” but in reality the ten scariest words are “There is no government, and I’m here tokill you.” And I suspect that Reagan might have agreed; on another occasion he said, “One legislator accused me of having a nineteenth-century attitude on law and order. That is a totally false charge. I have an eighteenth-century attitude … [T]he Founding Fathers made it clear that the safety of law-abiding citizens should be one of the government’s primary concerns.”
    In 1975, just a few years before Reagan’s first inaugural address, the sociologist Charles Tilly had suggested that out of all the muddle of dates and details that clog up European history, we could draw out a single big story, that “war made the state, and the state made war.” Fighting, he observed, drove the rise of strong governments, and governments then used their strength to fight even more. I am a great fan of Tilly’s work, but here, I think, he missed the real headline. The plain fact, as Hobbes had understood, is that over the past ten thousand years war made the state, and the state made peace.
    In the thirty-odd years since Reagan’s speech, scholarly opinion has moved back toward Hobbes, in a sense going beyond Reagan to embrace a seventeenth-century attitude on law and order. Most of the recent books identifying a decline in violence cite Hobbes approvingly. “Hobbes was closer to the truth,” says Gat in his War in Human Civilization, than the “Rousseauite Garden of Eden.”
    However, Hobbes’s new champions rarely seem entirely at ease with his bleak thesis that the power of government is what makes us safe and prosperous. Keeley, the anthropologist, clearly prefers Hobbes to Rousseau but feels that “if Rousseau’s primitive golden age is imaginary, Hobbes’s perpetual donnybrook is impossible.” Stone Age peoples do not really wage a war of all against all, Keeley concluded, and the rise of government has brought as much pain as peace.
    Elias, the sociologist, took a different tack. He never actually mentioned Hobbes in The Civilizing Process, although he shared the phitosopher’s hunch that government was crucial in curbing violence. But where Hobbes made Leviathan the active party, overawing its subjects, Elias put the subjects in the driver’s seat, suggesting that they lost their taste for violence because they adopted gentler manners to fit in better at elegant royal courts. And in contrast to Hobbes’s guess that the great pacification took place in the distant past, Elias dated it to the years since 1500.
    Pinker, the psychologist, put things bluntly in his 2002 book, The Blank Slate .