Thucydides, Hobbes, and the Interpretation of Realism

Laurie M. Johnson

• Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501747816
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Realism in Philosophy

This original book has been consistently cited by scholars of international relations who explore the roots of realism in Thucydides's history and the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes. While acknowledging that neither thinker fits perfectly within the confines of international relations realism, Laurie M. Johnson proposes Hobbes's philosophy is more closely aligned with it than Thucydides's.

CHAPTER ONE

Human Nature

It is often said that Thucydides’ and Hobbes’s ideas of human nature are very similar.¹ International relations theorists are just as much prone to this mistake as others, referring to Thucydides, as they do to Hobbes, as a “realist.”² In this chapter I will argue that Hobbes’s view is close to the view of the famous “Athenian thesis” repeated throughout Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. That thesis is similar in many ways to the realist thesis, claiming that human beings are universally selfish and always motivated by fear, honor, and interest. Since they are compelled by their passions, they are not to be blamed for their actions, and, as Thucydides’ character Diodotus points out, they can be controlled only through superior power and brute force. But I will argue that, in contradiction to the Athenian thesis, Thucydides’ overall treatment of human nature proves that it is not so uniform and that passions do not force people to act. Individuals are responsible for their actions, capable of reason, and therefore guilty when they allow their passions to overcome their good sense. The latter type of analysis certainly does not coincide with the theories of realists.

In Thucydides’ view, political problems cannot be permanently solved, because there are elements in human nature that cannot be manipulated. Temporary solutions can be obtained only through human intangibles: character, intelligence combined with eloquence, prudence, and ethics. In contrast, Hobbes sees the problem of pride, for instance, as a mere delusion of self-importance that can be banished through science. Hobbes makes human nature so uniform that he engages in grand reductionism when he considers such attributes as altruism, patriotism, virtue, and intelligence. Because of their disagreement about the uniformity of human nature, Hobbes views as normal those human qualities that Thucydides sees as products of decline. While Thucydides depicts the bloodthirsty violence of civil war as well as genocidal international warfare as products of the extreme pressures of war, Hobbes sees them as events that take place whenever there is no power strong enough to prevent them. Whereas Thucydides attributes the overturning of established values to the specific case of the inflamed passions of civil war, Hobbes takes value relativism as a fact at all times—a situation that makes enforced values a prerequisite for peace. For Thucydides, a decline in good political rhetoric is a sign of immoderation and immorality. For Hobbes, there is no such thing as good deliberative rhetoric (political rhetoric that genuinely contributes to the final, not predetermined decision), since all values are relative to the speakers and all speakers are always self-interested. These differences will be worked out below. Does Thucydides supply us with a model of international realism as we understand it today, or does Hobbes more closely approximate the modern realists’ view?

HOBBES

Hobbes’s assumptions about human nature condition his entire theory. I will start where Hobbes started, by looking at the basic unit upon which his system is built: the individual. Hobbes’s mechanism made it possible for him to depict men as uniformly egocentric individuals naturally at odds with one another. This depiction, along with the assumption of rough equality among people, made a war of all against all the necessary result of the absence of government, necessitated a social contract as the basis of government, and made fear the prime motivator for individuals to enter into any such contract. It would seem from this depiction that Hobbesian men are naturally asocial. But as we shall see, Hobbes’s depiction of men in the state of nature includes an element of human nature that is social: pride. Indeed, Hobbes emphasizes pride as the main impediment to rational fear and therefore the main impediment to lasting peace. In order to explain this incongruity I will suggest that the state of nature is, for Hobbes, the state of socialized men who find themselves suddenly without any power to keep them in awe, and that it corresponds closely to the dynamics of civil war.

Next, I will turn to what Hobbes held out as man’s hope for a permanent escape from the possibility of endless sedition and civil war. For Hobbes, man’s hope rests in the possibility of raising his faculty of reason, through precise speech, to the level of science. If this can be done, that is, if men can be convinced of the necessities of absolute sovereignty and obedience, then governments will no longer be plagued continually by civil strife. Man’s downfall, however, can also come via reason and speech if these two faculties are exploited by ambitious and prideful orators or preachers. Hobbes tries to prove that rational fear of the state of nature should make men act as if they had accepted the social contract, which involves the suppression of the harmful aspects of human pride and ambition through (it is hoped) recognition of the laws of nature and (necessarily) the exercise of absolute sovereignty.

The Causes of War

Hobbes attributes conflict to three causes inherent in human nature: 1) desire for gain, which causes competition; 2) fear of one’s competitors, which leads to diffidence; and 3) concern for one’s reputation, that is, concern with glory (L, 13, par. 6–7). The first two can be explained by Hobbes’s mechanistic theory of human nature, which depicts man as radically asocial. But the last cause, glory, is derived from further assumptions that bring into question man’s lack of sociability. In effect, Hobbes has two proofs for his political prescriptions, one derived from his mechanism and one from his analysis of society itself. Discerning one proof from the other is made more difficult because Hobbes mingles them together in his description of the “state of nature” or “the natural condition of mankind.” The state of nature is at once the consequence of mechanistic human nature left ungoverned and a depiction of civil war taken to its extreme. Both proofs are needed to support Hobbes’s prescriptions, even though they are somewhat contradictory. With the first, Hobbes proves that all government is founded on the consent of the governed. But only his consideration of man’s pride in society makes absolute sovereignty (preferably monarchy) necessary to ensure order.

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Mechanism and Individualism The extreme uniformity in Hobbes’s depiction of human nature is made possible by his mechanistic psychology. While Hobbes thinks all men share common passions, he says that the objects of those passions vary from person to person. Why do they vary so widely, and why is it so difficult to know them in any given man? The answer lies in the physical origins of all passions and of human nature generally.

According to Hobbes, there is nothing in the world but matter and motion. Man’s senses are activated when they are moved by outward objects, producing different appearances according to the man (L, 1, par. 1, 4). These appearances are called “fancies,” and they are produced in the human body, having no direct relation to external objects. What we see is an apparition that the object produces in the brain and not the actual object (H, 4). Proof of this is that people sometimes “see” things that are not really there, such as light, from pressing on the eyeball (H, 4–5). Color is not actually in the object. Instead, it is an effect in us, caused by the motion of the object. In the same way, sound does not exist outside the human ear (H, 7–8). The consequence of these physiological facts is that man knows not reality but only his impression of it; and because human bodies and experiences differ, each man’s impression is bound to be at least slightly different from every other’s. This effect Hobbes called the great deception of sense: that what we think is in the world is really an illusion. Each person is bound by his particular perspective. He cannot know the outside world, and he cannot know the perspectives of others with any degree of confidence.

Because people have different bodies and experiences, their passions are produced by and vary with these two factors. They are produced when the action of an object, after activating the senses, continues to the heart and there either stimulates or impedes the “vital motion.” The basic passions are therefore appetite (stimulant) and aversion (impediment). Some appetites and aversions are innate, such as hunger. But the rest come from experience of the effects of various objects on individuals. Internal deliberation is nothing but the succession of appetites and aversions, and the will is merely the end of this succession (H, 25–26, 31–32, 68; L, 6–7). Hobbes insists that even though the will is determined by necessary causes, every action is voluntary because it is produced by the will.

Because a man’s body is in constant flux, it is impossible that the same things will always cause the same appetites and aversions in one, much less in all, men. Thus people will not be able to agree on what is desirable and what is not (L, 6, par. 2, 4, 6–7; H, 26). This is the cause of the diversity of passions and ends. Whatever a man does desire, he will call good; whatever he is averse to, he will call evil:

For seeing all names are imposed to signifie our conceptions; and all our affections are but conceptions; when we conceive the same things differently, we can hardly avoyd different naming of them. For though the nature of that we conceive, be the same; yet the diversity of our reception of it, in respect of different constitutions of body, and prejudices of opinion, gives everything a tincture of our different passions. (L, 4, par. 24)

Valuation, then, is radically individual and relative.³ Because of this, a person must be skeptical when hearing others’ words. These words are not only affected by the distortions placed on them by the speaker’s perspective but are also distorted by those who listen, because of their different natures, dispositions, and interests. What one man calls wisdom, another calls fear. What one thinks cruelty, another might praise as justice. Because of this, “such names can never be true grounds of any ratiocination” (L, 4, par. 24). The only passion one can generally attribute to all human beings is the desire for power, since power is the means with which to obtain any end and therefore to satisfy any passion.

All of the above point to human beings who are radically individualistic, who cannot have any meaningful discourse, and who look at each other solely as threats. For Hobbes, government must be established in accordance with this human nature. Hobbes’s theory consequently concentrates on the individual and his particular needs and desires and shows how these can indeed be compatible with society.

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Man’s Natural Equality Having proved man’s radical individualism, Hobbes had only to add one last ingredient to show that without government protracted war would result. That ingredient is the basic equality of men. Hobbes recognized that intelligence and character are unevenly distributed among people. But equality has to do with what men can do to one another, not with other inherent qualities of individuals. All men are to be considered equal because even the weakest can kill the strongest, due to his ability to think and therefore to plot. If it were not for this rough equality, the few who were more effective killers would eventually subdue or eliminate everyone else. The fact that everyone is vulnerable to being killed outweighs all other sources of inequality in the state of nature.

Because all human beings are equal in their threat and vulnerability toward others and consider themselves equal in every way, if any one obtains too much power others can be expected to try to topple him. Rough equality of ability produces equal hope of attaining one’s ends, and when any two men desire the same thing, power, they become enemies and try to conquer one another (L, 13, par. 3). People do vary in the strength of their desires, and some could be satisfied if there were not others who were always hungry for more. Thus, natural man’s situation is the classic example of John Herz’s “security dilemma”: all people must continually seek power simply in order to protect themselves (L, 11, par. 2). In other words, competition occurs not because men are all mad with greed or completely power-hungry but because they are placed in a situation in which they must conform to the most base behavior to survive. They do this because, without government, they have no assurance that anyone else will reciprocate the kind of manners and respect they would like. Hence, the quest for dominion “ought” to be allowed them, as necessary to their preservation (L, 13, par. 4).

Because of men’s rough equality in anarchy, a protracted war of all against all develops. No hierarchy will be able to emerge just because some men are better killers than others. With these observations, Hobbes introduces the situation as an important element. Equality of ability makes the situation (anarchy) the paramount problem, one that cannot be solved naturally.

Hobbes defines war not only as actual battle but also as the inclination to fight, that is, living in constant suspicion and hostility and in continual preparation for battle:

In such condition, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short. (L, 13, par. 9)

In man’s natural condition, because of the situation in which he finds himself, there is no propriety. Notions of right and wrong have no place. Nothing can be unjust, justice and injustice being qualities that apply to men in society, not in solitude. Force and fraud are cardinal virtues, because the only modus operandi is survival (L, 13, par. 13). This is not because Hobbes does not believe in a standard of right and wrong but because the penalty for trying to be just in the state of nature would be death.

For Hobbes, the natural condition of mankind manifests itself in varying degrees depending on the situation in which human beings are placed. As we have seen, the pure form of mankind’s natural condition appears in the state of nature described in the above quote. Did the state of nature ever actually exist? Hobbes says that it is an abstraction, an inference made from the passions (L, 13, par. 11; DC, “To the Reader,” pp. 11–12). But he also says that an analogous situation occurs in relations among states, and in places like America there were savages who, even though they had the simple government of families, lived as he describes. Civil war, which is an example of the degeneration of governmental power into something close to the state of nature, provides an even better glimpse of what men are like without an absolute coercive power to keep them in line (L, 13, par. 11–12).

The natural condition of mankind still prevails in situations in which people are not so isolated as in the state of nature. While civil society is still absent, families can come together and contracts can be made within these families. In nature, men and women are basically equal, for the same reason that all human beings are equal. Mothers, by dint of physical evidence, have first rights to rule over their children. But by pact they can transfer that right to the fathers. This type of cooperation Hobbes still places within the state of nature, even though it contains an element of sociability. Also, the natural condition of mankind, whose brutish character forces men to seek peace, can be deduced from events that occur within society.

Hobbes attempted to prove that uncontrolled human nature and its consequences would produce chaos not only through “inference made from the passions” but also by calling on his readers to test their own experiences. Here was ample proof for those who doubted that the state of nature ever existed, that man’s nature was still as Hobbes described. For even though there were laws and policemen to enforce them, who went out on a journey unarmed or unaccompanied? Who did not lock his doors at night, and lock his chests against his children and servants (L, 13, par. 12)?

The Causes of Civil War

So far I have discussed Hobbes’s mechanism and its consequences for human nature and human interaction. Man’s egoism and inability to escape his own unique perspective give rise to competition. We can see that this competition would produce “diffidence,” or fear. But Hobbes’s third cause of quarrel, glory, cannot be explained on the basis of mechanism, because it cannot be attributed to radically asocial beings. “Glorying” involves valuing other people’s opinions. Therefore, if we are to take Hobbes’s three principal causes of quarrel as natural to men, we must reevaluate our initial assumption that Hobbes thinks man is naturally asocial. This will allow us to consider the natural condition of mankind not as a presocial state but as a condition of socialized man either ungoverned or ungovernable. Pride is the one passion that Hobbes considers lethal to civil society, the one that can make man ungovernable. This doctrine of equality and his promotion of absolute sovereignty are attempts to eradicate the sin of pride, from which all sedition in society flows. Therefore I will focus on this passion Hobbes so wanted to counter with its “rational” counterpart: fear.

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