| Criticism towards Hobbes' idea for a state | Leviathan sucks | (German) |
I originally wrote this in german and later translated it to english, click here if you want to see the original version
Hobbes idea for an optimal state is quite easy to follow, however there are also errors in the entire State model, which make everything basically unusable, since these errors set Hobbes' idea of the State in danger.
The first issue in Hobbes' argumentation is already in his image of humanity. Hobbes sees the Human as a Wolf ("homo homini lupus" - "A human is a wolf to another human"), a beast which acts exclusively out of its own interest and will do anything to get its own interests. This image is somewhat understandable, if you keep in mind during what time Hobbes wrote Leviathan. However, this image is missing a very important part, which changes everything Hobbes bases on this image of humanity.
The human is a wolf, but only if their life is in risk. The killing of other humans is incredibly stressful for humans, Hobbes assumes that everyone is a sociopath who does not feel any emotions and are able to kill everything without remorse. Which is not true. In addition to that comes the fact that humans are social beings, in a State of nature, where everyone has the right to everything, most people would not use murder or other forms of violence to secure their life, since it is much easier to connect with others and help each other, in which the right to everything still persists, but is not fully used by anyone, since it is better to help each other than murder everyone.
Ignoring the issues with Hobbes image of humanity and following him with his idea of a social contract, you will hit the next problem. Giving a single person the power to control everything and giving up the right to defend oneself in case this power only handles out of self-interest does not solve the state of nature. It would even become much worse, since even though an ordered society was formed, where humans live together without slaughtering each other, the entire power was handed to one single person that can dictate anything about the people who gave up their right on everything. Keeping Hobbes' image of humanity in mind, the person in power must be completely egoistic. This means that it is only a matter of time for the person in power to become a tyrant, if he wasn't already one, and abuses his powers for his own good to enrich himself, while the main population who do not have any power has to see it happen with no way to do anything against it, since they gave up their rights and after the human reason which Hobbes described, would rather live "safely" than to defend themselves and return to the state of nature.
To improve Hobbes, one must modify the roots of his theory, the image of humanity. The human is not a wolf, it is a social being, which wants to live happily and peacefully with others. If humans ever live egoistically, then it is to make sure they do not die. As soon as this need is fulfilled, no human will have any trouble sharing with others and helping them.
This small change in the image of humanity can still be used to defend Hobbes' image of humanity and his idea of a state of nature. Which is why another point has to be added, the fact that humans, when they aren't sociopaths, don't like killing others and will live under strong emotional stress if they ever do it. The social aspect of humans leads to them seeing it as easier to help each other and live peacefully, than to kill each other to save their own life.
A state of nature, or also known as anarchism, is not similar to war, it's the complete opposite. The state of nature would be very peaceful, since humans would form groups to help each other and make sure that they all are able to cover their basic needs. Once their basic needs are covered, they have no reason to use their right for everything and the need to kill humans to save their own life. The danger that the state of nature turns into a state of war would eliminate itself.
This peaceful society however still needs some form of management, to ensure that it is at all times possible how big the available resources are. Except this does not require a central person to do it, since even after my image of humanity, humans are still egoistic to some extent, which could lead to this central manager to abuse their power.
This management can function decentralized, by simply involving everyone who is part of society into the management, in an openly visible registrar which can only be updated in regular meetings under supervision of everyone.
The same way can this meeting be used to "punish" people who work against the collective good. Since it is still possible that some people have no issue with murdering others. To combat this, a form of punishment can be sentenced under absolute agreement of everyone in the meeting. However, these punishments should never actively harm people, they should offer some form of rehabilitation to go against anything that drove people to do these crimes, since under the circumstances in this society, crimes would mainly be committed out of "random" reasons that can be talked about to be resolved.
This state model can also function recursively, Hobbes does not mention any way how conflicts between other states should be solved, or if these are solvable in the first place. This can be solved quite easily, by simply assuming that the societies act like humans themselves, through which multiple societies form another society, a form of society of societies, which can happen out of multiple reasons.
Different societies can have different resources. For example, society A has apples, but no pears, while society B has pears, but no apples. A common interest is formed to share these fruits between each other to ensure that they both have apples and pears, further fulfilling the needs of the people living in these societies.
It is additionally possible to ensure the existence of the society, and in turns also the people living in these societies, since societies can help each other in case one society runs out of specific resources or has some other issue.
All in all, one can say that Hobbes model of state is very flawed, and in my own opinion cannot be improved in any constructive way, which is why this mainly fixes up the image of humanity to form a completely different state model.
This text is only a translation of my original German text (as noted in the note at the top), however I have plans to expand on this new state model I explained in the Improvements section, this would either consist of reusing this text and adding more paragraphs, or writing a completely new text from scratch (more likely, as my English is better when writing freely than when translating).
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