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Hobbes and the Dilemma of the Modern State
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16318 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1989 |
6,561 Words |
| Author
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John Gray
John Gray is a professor at Jesus College, Oxford, and the
author of Liberalisms (Rutledge, 1989). |
Thomas Hobbes lived in, and wrote for, an age of civil and religious wars. For this reason, it may seem that we have little to learn from him that we do not already know. To be sure, anyone who reflects upon the intractable religious conflicts in Northern Ireland or the Middle East will see that wars of religion are as much an evil of our age as they were of Hobbes', and civil peace as precious a good. Beyond these commonplace reflections, it would appear that Hobbes has indeed little to teach us. His entire system of thought, conceived and developed at a time when the scientific revolution was barely under way, may seem to be an anachronism, an intellectual construct whose terms and postulates are so far removed from our own that we are hard put to make sense of them. With this conventional view, at least we may read Hobbes' writings as literature (for he is one of the greatest prose stylists in English) or as history, but we should not turn to them for instruction or enlightenment.
Conventional Views Of Hobbes
Although much might be said in support of this conventional opinion, it is misguided. It is true that Hobbes' system of ideas encompasses extravagances that we find hard to credit and that his entire mode of thought has an archaic character, recalling medieval ways of reasoning more than the methods of modern science that he supposed governed his theorizing. Yet there is an arresting contemporaneity about many of Hobbes' insights that we can well profit from. This relevance to our age should not be a surprise--Hobbes wrote at the start of the modern age (he was born in 1588 and died in 1679), and few have seen further to the bottom of the dilemma of modernity than he. In contrast with Hobbes, John Locke was a remote thinker, Kant hollow, and Burke not much more than a nostalgist. With all of its limitations and its excesses, Hobbes' thought goes far to account for the maladies of the modern state, and does so in ways that are as surprising and paradoxical as they are instructive.
The lesson of Hobbesian theory is that the modern state is weak because it aims too high and is too large. Worse, the modern state has failed to deliver us from a state of universal predation of all against all into the peace of civil society. Modern democratic states have themselves become weapons in the war of all against all, as rival interest groups compete with each other to capture government, using it to seize and redistribute resources among themselves. In its weakness, the modern state has recreated in a political form that very state of nature from which it is meant to deliver us. Modern democratic states are riven by a
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