Thomas Hobbes' forever war
Humankind must descend into anarchy unless governed by a tyrant, argued the English philosopher. Has democracy disproved Hobbes' diagnosis?
This is Who made our minds?, my Thursday essay probing the greatest, cruellest and most beautiful minds of the past 5,000 years, inspired by my book, The Soul: A History of the Human Mind (Penguin 2024). Coming up: Akhenaten, Buddha and Cicero.
‘To this war of every man against every man . . . nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, have there no place. Where there is no common power, there is no law; where no law, no injustice. Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues.’
That is the essence of the philosophy of one of the most influential and disturbing thinkers of the seventeenth century and since: the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679). It was little wonder: Hobbes’ life spanned the Thirty Years’ War and the English Civil War, a period of near perpetual ultraviolence.
Hobbes saw no innate ‘good’ in human nature, no self-restraining conscience and no signs of a soul …