Comment: “The end of every man is continued success in obtaining those things which he from time to time, desires. (Hqbbes) (1995)
The statement paraphrases Thomas Hobbes‘s definition of felicity in chapter 6 of Leviathan (1651): continual success in obtaining those things which a man from time to time desireth, that is to say, continual prospering. Chapter 11 draws the consequence: there is no final end at which a man can rest. This restless, mechanical idea of the good grounds his whole case for the state. It is persuasive as an account of insecurity and thin as an ethics.
The Argument: Desire Without Destination
- Life is motion. For Hobbes’s materialism, man is a body whose vital motion continues until death. Appetite is motion towards an object, aversion motion away from it, and “good” is the name each man gives to what he desires.
- No summum bonum. Chapter 11 denies the finis ultimus and summum bonum of the old moral philosophers. Felicity is a continual progress of the desire, from one object to another, each attainment only a step to the next.
- From desire to power. Power is a man’s present means to obtain some future apparent good (ch. 10). Hence the perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death. The motive is defensive: a man cannot assure what he has without the acquisition of more.
The Political Consequences
- War of all against all. Equal beings chasing scarce goods fall into competition, diffidence and glory. Each man’s search for security makes every other man less secure.
- The greatest evil replaces the greatest good. Men disagree about what is good but agree in fearing violent death. Chapter 13 names the passions that incline to peace: fear of death, desire for things necessary to commodious living, and hope of obtaining them by industry.
- A negative state. The sovereign secures the conditions of pursuit and does not prescribe its object. Where the law is silent, subjects choose their own trade and diet.
- Beyond the state. Among sovereigns the same logic yields the security dilemma that John H. Herz named in 1950.
Critiques
- Classical. For Aristotle, happiness (eudaimonia) is an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue. Plato’s Republic treats insatiable appetite as the mark of the tyrannical soul, not of human nature.
- Historicist. C. B. Macpherson (The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, 1962) reads Hobbes’s man as the competitive market man projected into nature; Hobbes even defines a man’s worth as his price. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Discourse on Inequality, 1755) likewise held that Hobbes described civilised man, whose amour-propre society itself creates.
- Indian. Mohandas K. Gandhi accepted the diagnosis and reversed the remedy. In Hind Swaraj (1909) the mind is a restless bird; the more it gets the more it wants, so civilisation sets a limit to indulgence. The Buddhist idea of tanha (craving) likewise treats endless desire as the problem, not as happiness.
Conclusion
Hobbes was right that desire has no natural resting-point, and he rightly drew from it a state that protects the pursuit without dictating its ends. His error was to treat a competitive psychology as the whole of human nature. Restraint, recognition and cooperation are also human, and a polity that relies on them needs less of a Leviathan.