Winning the "War of All Against All"

In our study of the Leviathan these past two weeks, we’ve examined several factors that go into governing and protecting the ideal state, and how well these factors work on a global scale. The ideal form of government, the nature of man, and therefore states, and the struggle between coercion and reason are all ideas that both Hobbes and we as a class have analyzed and applied to the real world.

However, much of our study left us with more questions than answers. Primarily, the interaction between rational bargaining and raw coercion made us think about whether these ideas can really be reconciled. In our group project, we looked at the International Court of Justice and how they use rational bargaining to solve disputes between states. However, when the dispute is between an extremely powerful state and a weaker state, we found that there are really no controls to enforce rational bargaining and that powerful states can and do use raw coercion to promote their interests at almost any cost. After all, who will stop them? Powerful states with strong militaries are respected and feared, though perhaps not agreed with, in international politics, and even smaller states with strong militaries and nuclear weapons are greatly feared as well, and diplomatic relations with them must be handled delicately.

            Another Hobbesian ideal that left our class in discussion was his promotion of a monarchy. While Hobbes posits the sovereign as an absolute monarch, we disagreed that this was an ideal form of government. Hobbes spends much of the Leviathan describing “the nature of man” and has few positive things to say. It stands that the sovereign is a human, or a group of humans, possessing this nature as well, thus, does it make sense to give them absolute power? It is worth noting that in the time period in which Hobbes wrote the Leviathan, there was an English civil war and a fractured monarchy, and perhaps the only vision of a stable government Hobbes could imagine was a solid monarchy. In order to promote peace, citizens must feel that they have a stable government with their ideas and interests at heart. While Hobbes offers several arguments on why democracy is not ideal, absolute monarchy is far from ideal as well. Hobbes does indicate that the sovereign should be chosen by the people (in a brief mention), however, he offers little guidance on this process.

            It is perhaps worth noting that as a class full of (mostly) Americans, at American University, that deep, deep down, the idea of monarchy feels extremely wrong. We have been raised to believe in a political system that not only encourages, but necessitates, our input and control over who leads us and makes our big decisions. Our system of checks and balances directs our political system in a way as such that what Hobbes describes can never happen. This doesn’t mean we don’t want to be led – far from it. We just want our part in shaping the head of the Leviathan. While our democratic system is not perfect, the contentment that people feel over their say in the political system is far beyond anything in Hobbes’ lifetime, and it would be interesting to see how the Leviathan would be formed today.