Comment: “How would and my fellow human beings behave if we were to find ourselves in a state of nature, and what does this behavior tells us about our innate predispositions?” (Thomas Hobbes) (2016, 10 Marks)
The question restates the thought experiment of chapter 13 of Thomas Hobbes‘s Leviathan (1651): remove the common power to keep them all in awe and ask how people like us would act. His answer is war, but what it reveals is less innate wickedness than a drive for self-preservation that becomes dangerous under equality and uncertainty.
How We Would Behave
- Rough equality of body and mind. The weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, so all hope for the same ends and none submits.
- Three causes of quarrel. Competition makes men invade for gain, diffidence for safety, glory for reputation; striking first (anticipation) becomes rational.
- War as a disposition. It is the known readiness to fight, not actual fighting, like foul weather. Industry, arts and letters fail, and life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
- A moral vacuum. Without a common power there is no law and no injustice; force and fraud become the cardinal virtues.
- The evidence is ourselves: even under government we travel armed and lock our doors.
What It Tells Us About Our Predispositions
- Mechanism, not sin. Men are matter in motion, driven by appetite and aversion, with a restless desire of power after power because present means cannot be secured without more.
- Self-preservation first, with the fear of violent death as the shared worst evil.
- Neutral passions. The desires and other passions of man are in themselves no sin. The same nature carries passions that incline men to peace: fear of death, desire for commodious living, hope of gaining it by industry. Reason then supplies the articles of peace.
- Bernard Gert denies Hobbes is a psychological egoist; the argument needs only that some men are dangerous and none can tell which.
Critiques
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Discourse on Inequality, 1755): Hobbes painted civil man and called him natural; amour-propre is social, and natural man has pity.
- C. B. Macpherson (1962): the insatiable Hobbesian is the man of market society read back into nature.
- Peter Kropotkin (Mutual Aid, 1902) and Elinor Ostrom (Governing the Commons, 1990) show cooperation without a Leviathan.
- Hobbes’s strongest case is civil war, the same people minus authority. Haiti since President Jovenel Moïse‘s assassination (2021), its capital largely held by gangs, fits it. Kautilya‘s matsyanyaya (big fish eating small) is the Indian parallel.
Conclusion
Hobbes reads behaviour under collapse correctly but overstates what is innate: self-preservation and reason, not malice. The lesson is conditional: without assurance even decent people must arm, an argument for institutions, not a verdict on human nature.