Comment on State of Nature as State of War (Hobbes). (2023, 10 Marks)
In chapter 13 of Leviathan (1651) Thomas Hobbes holds that while men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in such a war, as is of every man, against every man. The claim is not that men always fight but that nothing assures peace. The equation is analytically powerful, founding the anarchy problematique of international relations, but it rests on premises that John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau contest.
Why Nature Means War
- Defined by an absence. A thought experiment: remove the common power and see what follows. Hobbes concedes it may never have existed generally.
- Equality and scarcity. The weakest can kill the strongest, so all hope alike; two men desiring what both cannot enjoy become enemies.
- Diffidence. Distrust makes anticipation, striking first, rational; each person’s prudence makes all less safe (the security dilemma). Glory adds fights over a word or a slight.
- War as disposition. War lies in the known disposition to fight, as foul weather lies in an inclination thereto of many days together, not in one shower. Peace is all other time.
What Follows
- No future. No industry, agriculture, arts, letters or society, only fear of violent death; life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
- No justice, no property. Where no law, no injustice; there is no mine and thine, only what each can get and keep.
- Hobbes’s evidence. He cites the savage people of America (his weakest case), civil war (his strongest) and kings in the state and posture of gladiators.
Critiques
- John Locke (Second Treatise, 1689, §19) separates the two conditions that some men have confounded. The state of nature is governed by natural law, and war is force without right, which can occur inside civil society too.
- Rousseau: natural man is solitary and moved by pity; war, says The Social Contract (1762), is a relation, not between man and man, but between State and State.
- Hedley Bull (The Anarchical Society, 1977) found order among states without a Leviathan; Hobbes himself conceded the international condition is less miserable, since sovereigns protect their subjects’ industry.
Contemporary and Indian Relevance
Kenneth Waltz (Theory of International Politics, 1979) kept Hobbes’s structure, anarchy leading to self-help, while dropping his psychology. Kautilya anticipated the domestic argument: without danda, matsyanyaya prevails and the big fish devour the small.
Conclusion
The equation holds as a claim about insecurity without assurance, not as history. Its value is diagnostic: order is an institutional achievement. His error was to think absolute sovereignty the only cure.