Hobbesian

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?            

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