Cooperating and Contracting: A Reply to I. Haji's "Hampton on Hobbes on State-of-Nature Cooperation"

Abstract

To fashion a successful contractarian argument for the necessity of a certain kind of political institution is no mean feat, and Hobbes purports to have done so. But does his argument work? In my book' I tried to determine whether or not Hobbes can keep the assumptions of his argument and still draw the conclusions he wants. Some of the conclusions I managed to save, but his principle claim that a state must be headed up by a sovereign with absolute power I could not. In his paper, Professor Haji focuses on two of the theses that I claim to have saved: first, that people with the psychology Hobbes attributes to human beings would find the situation in which they were not politically governed a state of extensive conflict; and second, the claim that from this state of war it would be possible for people to generate, via some kind of agreement process, a political remedy. In my book, I point out that it is initially difficult to see how these two theses can fit together into the same argument: if the state of nature really is a state of war, how could its occupants cooperate to end it? And if its occupants are able to cooperate so as to end it, why shouldn't such cooperation be possible in the state of nature, making it a relatively peaceful state? Nonetheless putting these two ideas together is exactly what Hobbes or indeed any contractarian must be able to do if his or her contractarian argument is going to be internally coherent. Haji argues that one cannot keep both theses in a contractarian argument; in this comment I shall review his arguments, and maintain that he is wrong to think that they cannot coexist. Indeed, it is because they can coexist that the contractarian arguments remains a viable form of argument for political conclusions.