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Hobbes is useful for his part in kickstarting political science and the systematic study of politics. Beyond that I don't know how useful his ideas are today.
by vivekd 8y ago
Hobbes is useful for his part in kickstarting political science and the systematic study of politics. Beyond that I don't know how useful his ideas are today. Hobbes thought that left to our own devices or in the state of nature, people would devolve into a war of all against all because of all the reasons we have for wanting to kill each other. Hobbes gives reasons like wanting what the other has, or even out of mistrust.
It doesn't take much to see that this is obviously wrong. We have enough data today to know that even in the state of nature, and in societies, people tend towards corporation rather than constant self interested fighting. Modern psychology and social science show that generally people tend towards working together rather than picking open conflict with one another. Archeology teaches us that humans evolved into groups and intra-group cooperation for millions of years. Living in cooperative groups is in our genes.
Maybe the history of nations or groups is a history of conflict, but when you get intra-group it's largely cooperative.
Of course writing when he did, Hobbes didn't have the benefit of our research in archeology, social science and psychology. He was working with the knowledge available in this time and can't be blamed for that.
Hobbes is certainly important for his role in the history of political discourse. I don't know how much real world value his ideas hold up today in terms of understanding political theory or the relationship between sovereign and subject.
- wahern 8y ago> Living in cooperative groups is in our genes. It amazes me that people fail to recognize this, and saddens me that people fail to appreciate how fascinating it is. While humans are the most intelligent creatures on the planet by far, our intelligence still sits on a continuous spectrum, and the basic evolutionary processes that drove our intelligence are both straight-forward and evident elsewhere in the animal kingdom, notwithstanding the complexity of the details. But our cooperative nature completely defies genetic evolutionary theory. We're utterly unique in the kingdom of life. All other examples of cooperative behavior are clearly understood and can even be predicted by standard theory. But somewhere along the way humans jumped an evolutionary chasm. As predictably violent and selfish as humans can be, that doesn't diminish in the least our strange underlying nature. It may turn out to be simple and obvious in retrospect (in fact, I'd be surprised if it wasn't), but in the meantime it baffles me that this mystery isn't appreciated more. Answering it could expose and unlock a tremendous number of doors in anthropology, biology, computer science, economics, mathematics, physics, psychology, and other domains. Hobbes fundamental error was thinking that humans are just animals. Which is a completely understandable mistake as the scientific age is premised on the notion that the world functions according to basic, shared laws. But as animalistic as we are, our species is peculiarly alien on Earth. According to all we know about the mechanics of life, we shouldn't exist. The fact that we not only exist, but continue to exist in defiance of the fundamental laws of evolutionary biology as we understand them, should be mind blowing.