1.The return of Leviathan
… during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war, as is of every man, against every man …
In such a condition, 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.
Leviathan, Chapter 13
Twenty-first-century states are becoming Leviathans, spawn of the biblical sea-monster mentioned in the Book of Job, which the seventeenth-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes used to picture the sovereign power that alone could bring peace to unruly humankind. Only by submitting to unlimited government could they escape the state of nature, a war of all against all in which no one is safe from their fellows. As he portrayed it in his masterpiece Leviathan, a state of nature was not in the distant past before the emergence of society but the breakdown of society into anarchy, which could happen at any time. It did not matter whether the sovereign was a king or a president, a parliament or a tyrant. Only a state whose power was unfettered could secure a condition of ‘commodious living’ in which industry, science and the arts could flourish in peace.
In the centuries that followed, it seemed Hobbes was mistaken. States emerged in which power was limited by law. Democracies developed in which governments could be held to account. In the twentieth century, the defeat of Nazism and communism seemed to show that liberal government was inherently more effective than dictatorship. After the end of the Cold War, many believed liberal democracy was becoming universal.
Today, states have cast off many of the restraints of the liberal era. From being an institution that claimed to extend freedom, the state is becoming one that protects human beings from danger. Instead of a safeguard against tyranny, it offers shelter from chaos.
New dictatorships have emerged in Russia and China, where communism and free markets have both been rejected. Where democracy continues to function, the state intervenes in society to an extent unknown since the Second World War.
These are not Leviathans Hobbes would recognize. The goals of Hobbes’s Leviathan were strictly limited. Beyond securing its subjects against one another and external enemies, it had no remit. The purposes of the new Leviathans are more far-reaching. In a time when the future seems profoundly uncertain, they aim to secure meaning in life for their subjects. Like the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, the new Leviathans are engineers of souls.
The upshot has been the return of the state of nature in artificial forms. Even as they promise safety, the new Leviathans foster insecurity. By deploying food and energy supplies as weapons of war, Russia has projected famine and poverty across the globe. China has established a surveillance regime which through exports of technology threatens freedom in the West. Within Western societies, rival groups seek to capture the power of the state in a new war of all against all between self-defined collective identities. There is an unrelenting struggle for the control of thought and language. Enclaves of freedom persist, but a liberal civilization based on the practice of tolerance has passed into history.
In schools and universities, education inculcates conformity with the ruling progressive ideology. The arts are judged by whether they serve approved political goals. Dissidents from orthodoxies on race, gender and empire find their careers terminated and their public lives erased. This repression is not the work of governments. The ruling catechisms are formulated and enforced by civil society. Libraries, galleries and museums exclude viewpoints that are condemned as reactionary. Powers of censorship are exercised by big hi-tech corporations. Illiberal institutions are policing society and themselves.
A global pandemic, accelerating climate change and war in Europe have hastened these transformations. But they began as many historical reversals do, with the apparent triumph of an opposite trend. Greeted in the West as an augury that liberal values were spreading worldwide, the Soviet collapse was the beginning of the end for liberalism as it had previously been understood.
An epitaph for liberalism
Good, and Evil, are names that signify our appetites, and aversions, which in different tempers, customs, and doctrines of men, are different; and divers men, differ not only in their judgment, on the senses of what is pleasant, and unpleasant to the taste, smell, hearing, touch and sight; but also what is conformable, or disagreeable to reason, in the actions of common life. Nay, the same man, in diverse times, differs from himself; and one time praiseth, that is, calleth good, what another time he dispraiseth, and calleth evil: from whence arise disputes, controversies, and at last war.
Leviathan, Chapter 15
Hobbes was a liberal – the only one, perhaps, still worth reading. His best interpreters – the conservative Michael Oakeshott, the Marxist C. B. Macpherson and the classical scholar Leo Strauss1 – all recognized him as a liberal thinker. Alone among liberals, he can help explain why the liberal experiment came to an end.
In 1986 liberalism could be defined in terms of four ideas:
Common to all variants of the liberal tradition is a definite conception, distinctively modern in character, of man and society … It is individualist, in that it asserts the moral primacy of the individual against the claims of any social collectivity; egalitarian, inasmuch as it confers on all men the same moral status and denies the relevance to legal or political order of differences in moral worth among human beings; universalist, affirming the moral unity of the human species and according a secondary importance to specific historic associations and cultural forms; and meliorist in its affirmation of the corrigibility and improvability of all social institutions and political arrangements. It is this conception of man and society which gives liberalism a definite identity which transcends its vast internal variety and complexity.2
As presented in Leviathan (1651) and other works, such as De Cive (1642) and Behemoth (1681), Hobbes’s political theory features all of these ideas. Society is made up of individuals, who can assert their claim to self-preservation against any demand by the state; if a ruler fails to protect them, they can be disobeyed or overthrown. Human beings are equal in being exposed to death at each other’s hands: the strong can be killed by the weak, and no one has a divine right to rule. Human nature is universal in its needs; divergent cultural identities are superficial and insignificant. With the application of reason, government can be improved. Human beings can overcome their conflicts, and learn to live in peace.
Each of these ideas is a half-truth. Individuals may be the basis of society; but self-preservation is only one of their needs: bare life is not enough. Human beings may be equal in needing protection from each other, but they regularly give up peace and security in order to defend a form of life they believe to be superior to others. The most basic human goods may be universal, but they are often sacrificed in order to fight for values that are specific to particular ways of living. Society and government can be improved, but what is gained can always be lost.
Hobbes’s political theory expressed the faith in reason of the early Enlightenment of which it was a part. His writings contain another strand in which he is not a rationalist philosopher but a theorist of absurdity. In his account of language, he shows how human beings allow themselves to be possessed by words. This other Hobbes can help us understand why liberal civilization has passed away.
A poor worm
He that is to govern a whole Nation, must read in himself, not this, or that particular man; but mankind …
Leviathan, Introduction
Hobbes has been condemned and execrated for his unsparing view of human beings. Leviathan was attacked as a defence of atheism and egoism, with over a hundred books being published against it in England by the end of the century in which it was published. Copies were publicly burnt by Oxford University, and Hobbes destroyed his papers to protect himself against accusations of heresy. Many of these attacks came from churchmen, for whom he was (as he said) ‘a perpetual object of hatred’.
He was avoided, and at times betrayed, by fellow men of letters. The head of Oxford’s Bodleian Library, who had written thanking him for the gift of a book, penned an essay arguing that Hobbes could lawfully be executed for blasphemy. A translator who had worked on rendering Leviathan into Latin denied he had read any of Hobbes’s books and removed them from his shelves.
According to his friend John Aubrey, Hobbes
… had very few books. I never saw above half a dozen about him in his chamber … He had read much, if one considers his long life; but his contemplation was much more than his reading. He was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men, he should have known no more than other men.3
Copyright © 2023 by John Gray
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint “This is how hunger begins…,” from Russian Absurd: Selected Writings by Daniil Kharms, translated by Alex Cigale. Copyright © 2017 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2017. All rights reserved.
