I'm going to try to argue that Hobbesian anarchism is a coherent thesis and I'm also going to
argue that Hobbesian minarchism is an incoherent thesis.
First question I think should come to mind is why this paper?
Very few, if any anarchists, certainly anarcho-capitalists are Hobbesians.
So what does it matter?
I think one of the important things is that most other people, most political theorists
are either Hobbesian explicitly or certainly very influenced by Hobbes' state of nature theory, this sort of stuff.
And so it's important to be able to speak about them and to them more on their own terms, rather than sort of always fighting on sort of the meta level, you know, foundational disputes or something like that.
The second part is there's, I think, a philosophical strength to arguing within an argument, granting
someone his or her premises and then working from within those as opposed to, again, sort
of trying to clash head on from foundational assumptions.
And finally, I think it's just best not to whine.
I'm projecting on people here, but I tend to get really annoyed when people don't see
something that I see as obvious, and so I start sort of, you know, dragging my feet
and wondering how they manage to tie their shoes in the morning.
I plan on going about it by isolating three from among possibly many necessary conditions
for any political theory to be called Hobbesian, which is to say that any political theory
to be called Hobbesian must obtain all three of these conditions.
This is not an exhausted list, just three I isolated from the text in Hobbes that are
I'm also going to show that minarchists, in this case an article by Michael Levin, fail
to satisfy at least one of the three, thereby being not a true Hobbesian position.
And finally, I'm going to show that anarchism can show all three, you can't really see in
the box, but anarchism can satisfy all three.
So I'll start with Hobbes' framework. Can you help me out there?
This is obviously incredibly brief. I appear about the first 24 chapters of Book One in
a paragraph. But I left nothing out, trust me.
Human beings naturally find themselves in a state of nature, a war of all against all.
Rationally desiring peace, they elect a sovereign whose rule and guidance staves off the scenario.
So there are three necessary conditions found within that paragraph.
I think, one, that people in the state of nature are rational, two, sovereign is established
so that the war of all against all might end, and three, the sovereign must be a man or
a group of men.
By the people in the state of nature being rational, what I mean by that is they have
an ability to recognize ends, they have an ability to recognize various means that will
Achieve those ends, they have the ability to adjudicate among those means to best reach
those ends. In other words, they desire their happiness and have at least some way of maximizing
that happiness, reaching towards that end in the best possible way. I think that's important
because in the state of nature, rationality, so far as I can tell, implies that people
won't just choose any random sovereign, the first sovereign that maybe comes to somebody's
But they will actually be able to adjudicate among several possibilities for sovereignty,
and Hobbes actually allows for that.
He thinks, he envisions something like an election to elect the sovereign.
Sovereignty is being established to end the war against, of all against all.
I think that's, other than the fact that it's pretty bloody obvious that that's in Hobbes.
What that really means is that when the sovereign is elected, he doesn't, the state of nature,
The state of humanity doesn't fundamentally change.
The state of nature in the war of all against all is a rational response to the goings on
of the world at that time.
Simply because a sovereign comes about and makes the war costly or even impossible doesn't
mean that human beings have somehow changed in their nature.
When the sovereign is established to end the war, he's ending a war fought among human
beings and is governing human beings.
Nothing fundamentally changes in their nature after his election.
And the third one, the sovereign must be a man or a group of men. Again, that sounds
fairly obvious, but Hobbes himself was dealing with some people at the time who were sort
of some form of millennialists or something who thought that God could be, primarily God
could be a sovereign and Hobbes, for very good reasons I think, recognizes that no, for men
to be let out of the state of nature, they must be let out by a man or a group of men.
So here's Michael Levin's attempt to defend Hobbesian Menarchism in his article A Hobbesian
Minimal State. He says, quote, There is in spite of all of this a clear sense in which
the Hobbesian state is minimal. It is first minimal in intent. The sovereign's fundamental
right is to secure us all against attack, primarily each other's attacks, and we give
him our swords for this security. So we see then the purpose of sovereignty is to avoid
violent death and the threat thereof. It is not concerned with education or access to
The Sovereign's Election ensures that the utility of violence is reduced.
That is to say, the absence of swords, which is the gift of the Sovereign, renders their
utility obsolete.
The absence of the plow does not.
What Michael Levin is saying is that, look, what do you use swords for?
They're not very useful for anything other than hacking off limbs and fighting battles.
When the sovereign comes in and takes everyone's sword away, they have no reason to fight any
longer.
He's got all the swords now, you're not brandishing your sword, I'm not brandishing my sword,
and we tend to sort of back off one another.
Now Levin points out that the sovereign can't do that with a plow.
If he starts to sort of co-opt and socialize food, say, and food production, well, we're
all still going to be hungry at the end of the day, right?
So the absence of plow doesn't mean, of a plow doesn't mean that the utility of the
of the Plough is just obdurated, right?
We still need them.
So Levin thinks that the sovereign
is a very unique institution
because it only concerns itself with, again,
the avoidance of death or threat thereof.
And that's the job of the sovereign.
So far as I can tell,
there are at least two problems with Levin's proposition.
One is a problem with his reading of Hobbes.
I don't think he's Hobbesian.
And two, it seems logical.
First, it's not Hobbesian because Levin has not met the second condition that I laid out.
Humans are still humans even after the election of the sovereign.
The sword is not made obsolete but more costly to use.
What I mean by that is simply because the sovereign takes away everyone's swords doesn't
mean that I still don't want to punch you in the face, right?
It just means it's going to be a lot harder for me to kill you and then if the sovereign
has all the swords, it makes it a lot easier for him to come down on me in retribution.
So fundamentally, even after we've been lifted out of the state of nature, we're still the
same human beings, the world is still fundamentally the same, the very same thing that made us
hostile towards one another in the state of nature is still making us hostile towards
one another now.
It's just that the sovereign's there to make us think twice, maybe three or four times
before we decide to act in anger or something.
Hobbes is clear about this all over the place, so I don't think Levin has read Hobbes very
well.
A second seems to be logical.
Even if Levin's reading were Hobbesian, the power given to the sovereign could hardly
be called minimal.
Taking one sword and threatening him with it is an expansive power, not to mention taking
the swords of an entire nation.
I don't know how you could call that minimal, to disarm everybody and then threaten them
with their own arms, and then throw it up and be like, whoa, hey man, let's not co-opt
the education system.
That's really expansive.
All I'm doing is wanting to point all my guns at you and tell you how to behave.
It just doesn't seem minimal in any coherent sense of the word.
So the fate of Hobbesian minarchism, it's neither Hobbesian nor minarchist, and you may talk
Anarchy means the absence of a state. The state is, as Murray Rothbard said, the organization
in society which attempts to maintain a monopoly of the use of force and violence in a given
What arises from human interactions and is essentially the rules by which such interactions
are most efficiently and successfully carried out? In short, governance is the organic and
spontaneous rule and order which arises among interacting individuals.
My claim for a Hobbesian anarchist position is that we can have everything Hobbes wants
the sovereign to do without the state and using something like governance and I'll explain
how that works here in a moment.
So first off, why would people want to be anarchists in the state of nature?
Well, it's because they're rational, the first sufficient condition and they want to
maximize their happiness and it's not at all clear to me that the state is better than
the state of nature.
In the state of nature, the constant threat of war is sufficient to be a state of war.
The conditions sufficient for a storm are necessary to call it stormy weather. It doesn't actually have to be lightning and actually be raining for us to consider a storm.
Likewise, if there's a constant and real enough threat of war, we might as well be at war. We're all going to be brandishing our weapons. We're going to be constantly prepared to fight.
Well, in the state, one lives under a constant threat of violence, right? That's how the
state survives, it's how the state gets you to do what it wants. In short, with respect
to the sovereign, people are still in the state of nature. So it's not clear to me at
all that there's a difference between the state of nature and the state, and I think
rational people, at least some, could think about it and could coherently reject the state
and the state of nature. So because people wish to maximize their happiness, there must
I think the sovereign can be guided by governance that arises from human interaction and is
embodied by each member of the commonwealth.
No particular member is herself or himself the sovereign because governance only arises
among individuals and not within a particular individual.
Governance supervenes upon the individuals interacting but is not identical to any or
any part of them.
Thus, the second and third conditions have been satisfied.
What I mean by that is you can't really have governance with yourself, maybe in some really
in metaphorical sense, but governance only arises when there are individuals interacting.
Now that governance can be a guiding force and supervene upon individual members of a
commonwealth such that we are essentially our own sovereign being guided by the governance
which naturally arises from among us.
So that satisfies both the second and the third conditions, the sovereign is embodied
by a man or a multitude of them and has lifted us out of the state of nature of something
Recapping, finally, there are my three sufficient conditions. People in the state of nature are rational, and underneath I say, wishing rationally to maximize their happiness, people in the state of nature could realize both that the state is hardly any different than the state of nature, and that the power allotted to it could be worse yet than any power similarly constituted individuals might wield in the state of nature.
In a group of men, each member of the Commonwealth is himself an embodiment of sovereignty guided by governance in order that the war of all against all will end.
So I actually think it's at least a coherent thesis. Now, I don't want to go in, I don't have the time, nor the Constitution to go into what this might look like, how favorable it is.
I'm not a Hobbesian, but my goal here was just to show that I think one can accept Hobbesian premises, general Hobbesian inclinations, and still arrive coherently at anarchism.