An interesting post from Dr. Little at Understanding Society on Hobbes' Leviathan. I agree with his argument, and it almost makes me want to read the damn thing. But I've got a couple quibbles:
Little argues that Hobbes was taking a line of argument right out of the institutionalist playbook, starting from postulates about the micro-foundations of individual behavior and placing them in an institutional framework. He pulls a piece of text that includes Hobbes' most well-known dictum that life without the state is both short and unpleasant. Hobbes says that it is the Leviathan, an overwhelming centralized power that keeps people honest and makes society possible. Basically, if you think some creep is going to come along and steel your wife, burn your house and smash those nice ornamental urns you were planning on making, you're just not going to be willing or able to trust others or invest energy in producing, trading or hoarding. Incidentally: It brings to my mind the similar line from the Pirke Avot in the Jewish tradition, quite a few years before Mr. Hobbes:
Rabbi Chanina, an assistant of the high priest said: Pray for the Welfare of the government, since but for fear of it men would swallow each other alive.
Ancient wisdom notwithstanding, Hobbes may have been wrong on this point. (NB: I am now quite literally telling tales out of school, as it's been a little while since I've really read deeply into this kind of stuff, but...) it is worth looking into the extent to which cooperation is possible without the mediation of formal institutions, ie structures of power. Says Little:
in fact, a number of contemporary political scientists argue that it is possible for men and women to create non-political institutions within the context of what Hobbes calls the state of nature. Coordination and cooperation are indeed possible within a "state of nature"; it is possible to achieve coordination within anarchy. From a sociological point of view, this is really a friendly amendment; it simply adds a further premise about the feasibility of certain kinds of cooperation. So the "cooperation within anarchy" criticism of Hobbes is advanced as a substantive argument about the feasibility of durable social institutions that do not depend upon a central coercive authority.
He goes on to talk about forms of social order that do not rely on contracts and the rule of law to make equitable decisions about rights and responsibilities in certain small communities. I wouldn't dispute this. But if you look at it from an evolutionary point of view, this makes sense.
Little says that Hobbes most likely wouldn't be convinced by arguments about the possibility of effective collective action in the absence of strong central authority, but most likely Hobbes wasn't thinking about tiny hamlets engaging in small-scale agricultural cooperation. My entirely uneducated guess is that Hobbes was thinking about princely states and trans-national empires which require a good deal of force to get the job of collective action done. And this matter of scale is not a trifle.
I too would tend to believe that men (and women) do not cooperate solely because they fear the wrath of a despot, but there are distinct limits.
For example: Anthropologist Robin Dunbar argues that there is a limit to the size of an individual's social network, somewhere in the neighborhood of 150. The theory is pretty interesting in itself, in part based on an analogy with primate grooming behavior, related to the development of language and the size of the human brain as it evolved. Essentially, language - gossip, small-talk, etc - is the human equivalent of picking nits from your neighbor's pelt; it foments social bonds, but there are cognitive limits to how many folks you can keep up with. The underlying idea is that our neolithic ancestors could no longer cohere as an extended family unit beyond groupings of that size.
I'm reluctant to take Dunbar's findings on faith, but for the purpose of conjecture, let's assume he's right. I find it to be a very compelling story: While various technological innovations - food production, weapons, writing systems, transportation, and various forms political administration - have allowed larger human societies to develop, the mental hardware has been left largely in-tact. Likewise, our instinct to create cohesive groups within which we are able to cooperate quite well is strongly related to our instinct to oppose those we perceive to belong to other 'tribes.' This, of course, is not news. But my conjecture is that, beyond a certain threshold of size (whatever that magic number might be), the abstract idea of group membership (the 'imagined community' to put it in more familiar terms) is harder to manage without the proximity of actual interpersonal interaction with group members.
Let's put it another way, I may feel very strongly about my identity as a member of a nation, but my feelings do not necessarily jibe with the feelings of my neighbor. While I perceive him to be a member of my group, he does not necessarily agree with me. His loyalties might be to others than myself, even if he sees himself to be the member of the same nominal group. This sense of group-ness has to be managed and reinforced through communal socialization and ritual. Without that, the content and boundaries associated with group-ness would be open to individual interpretation, not quite so predictable or homogeneous.
So, returning to our state of nature, the gloss we could put on Hobbes is that life may still be relatively nasty, but a significant part of this is because of conflict between cohesive groups. Within themselves, groups can develop customary , informal ways of dealing with their membership in order to preserve order, but they don't necessarily play well with others. It is only with the influence of somewhat centralized authority and rule of law that this instinct can be overcome by our better angels.
photo: flickr/samuelhteer
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