Hobbes and the Irrationality of Politics

Abstract

IT IS COMMONLY UNDERSTOOD that concern with civil war dominates Hobbes's political theory. A few years before the Restoration, he said: all such calamities as may be avoided by human industry, arise from war, but from civil war.' His work is held together by the effort to understand the causes of civil war and to offer proposals for its long-term prevention. In Leviathani, his one political work written in the midst of civil war, Hobbes also hints at the most expeditious way of ending it; namely, to accept the conqueror as the new ruler and to do so without scrupulous legitimist worries over the dispossessed (and executed) ruler or his heir. Naturally, no political theorist is indifferent to civil war (or to the intense turbulence that may precede and augur it). Indeed, no rational person can be indifferent to it. But Hobbes is surely unsurpassed, perhaps unequalled, in his concern with it. Even people in Hobbes's situation, or in comparable ones, seem less agitated by it as a brute fact, less affronted by its mere occurrence. For Hobbes, civil war is always senseless. If he thinks that much of political, as distinct from administrative, activity is irrational, he finds in civil war the perfection of such irrationality: political passions, themselves intrinsically verging toward madness, going over the line and into wasteful darkness. The question is why his concern with civil war is as all-absorbing as it is. We must immediately add, however, that he confronts the prospect of perpetual tension and war among nations with an almost perfect equanimity.2 I do not think that the emphasis in the above quotation is on the greater chance of avoiding civil war in comparison to international war, but simply on the greater horror of civil war. If his immediate experience teaches him that it is chiefly civil war rather than international war that causes avoidable calam-