Iraq and Thomas Hobbes
In recent months it has become common, even fashionable, to describe the situation in Iraq as “Hobbesian.” In his Nov. 29 column in the New York Times, for example, Thomas Friedman wrote that Iraq “is not the Arab Yugoslavia anymore. It’s Hobbes’s jungle.” Or, as Washington Post correspondent Thomas Ricks said on “Meet the Press” on Dec. 10, the Iraqi sectarian conflict is a “Hobbesian war of all against all.” Helena Cobban, in the June 6 Christian Science Monitor, wrote that Iraq “has become a Hobbesian nightmare.” The examples could go on and on.
The point, clearly, is that the situation in Iraq is really, really bad, but never do those invoking Thomas Hobbes’s name bother to examine the deeper issues that such a comparison invites. What does this persistent reversion to a seventeenth-century British political philosopher tell us? How far does it take us in understanding the war in Iraq? How does it work to frame the issue, and what assumptions are built into it?
In his most influential work, Leviathan (1651), Hobbes famously described the state of nature as a “war of all against all” and wrote that human life in a state of nature was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” These are his two big sound-bites, and together they represent the basic conventional wisdom regarding Hobbes’s view of the world. But what Hobbes had to say about human beings and society should be approached very cautiously, for his premises are not ones we should be repeating and reinforcing, even unwittingly.
Against the political backdrop of English revolution and civil war, Hobbes – in De Cive (1642) and Elements of Law, Natural and Politic (1640), as well as Leviathan – developed a systematic, “scientific” theory of government in which natural human depravity required the imposition of an overawing central power. In the absence of such a power – the leviathan – the unbridled pursuit of self-interest will lead, he argued, to a kind of rapacious free-for-all. While stopping short of outright atheism, Hobbes’s political philosophy strips the world of any independent moral framework, reducing questions of good and evil, honor and justice, to matters of perception and relation (“these words of Good, Evill, and Contemptible, are ever used with relation to the person that useth them: There being nothing simply and absolutely so. . .”). Instead he described a world where individual human beings, motivated by elemental appetites or desires for security and felicity, seek to extend the range of their power to satisfy those appetites and wants: “I put for a generall inclination of all mankind, a perpetuall and restlesse desire of Power after power, that ceaseth onely in Death.”
Hobbes did posit a rough equality among all human beings, but only as to the basic features of human life – physical appetites, the desire for longevity, and so forth – rather than a more fundamental moral or spiritual equality. Moreover, the equality of individuals runs up against the overriding need for social order, in the form of contracts, pacts, or covenants enforced by an absolute sovereign, whose authority must be unquestioned – for if it is questionable then the whole system breaks down. Even if the law appears unjust, it must be obeyed, because justice exists not as a transcendent quality but as the creature of contract: What is lawful is just. Finally, an individual’s “value” is determined socially: “The Value, or WORTH of a man, is as of all other things, his Price; that is to say, so much as would be given for the use of his Power: and therefore is not absolute; but a thing dependant on the need and judgement of another.”
The keywords of Hobbesian theory, in short, are pessimism and absolutism: a pessimism regarding the moral order of nature and an absolutist belief in the depravity of man and consequent necessity of total obedience to authority.
And so what? How do these details of Hobbes’s thought contribute to our understanding of the Iraq war? Why should we hesitate before invoking Hobbes’s name in describing the conflict?
Well, first of all, it’s worth pointing out the irony that the closest Iraq has come to a Leviathan is Saddam Hussein himself. If the situation there were truly “Hobbesian,” as the commentators are so fond of suggesting, then the consistent solution would be to return Hussein to power.
More broadly, however, while the violence and chaos in Iraq may look Hobbesian, we don’t want to imply that it is in fact Hobbesian, or that Hobbes’s view of human nature and human society is actually, ontologically true. Since Hobbes was describing not just situations but fundamentals, his philosophy rules out the kind of enlightened, rational, real-world solutions we should be pursuing in the Middle East.
People who understand politics understand the power of words to create reality. We see what we are inclined to see, create what we expect to find, and respond accordingly. Calling the Iraq war Hobbesian is on one level just a rhetorical flourish used to make a point. Yet it reinscribes an understanding of reality and of people that we would do well to avoid.
© Commonweal Institute, Inc., 2006
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