The question of freedom is an important one. Freedom is a cardinal value in America, and much of our civic debate centers on what should be regarded as inviolable freedoms and what can or should be subject to limitations. The question has an important bearing on our conception of civilization itself, its standards and its bounds. Must we give up any freedom in order to live in society? And if so, how and where should we set the limits?
The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes began thinking and writing about these ideas in the seventeenth century. His great treatise Leviathan (1651) hearkens back to a time before organized society when humans had perfect freedom. Imagine a nomadic Stone Age type of existence before either law or government. Without institutional restrictions on behavior there was perfect freedom. Hobbes refers to this life as the "state of nature." Yet at some point people decided to abandon this perfect freedom and live under the rules and restrictions of society. Why?
That is because though there was perfect freedom there was no security. In the state of nature the prevailing mode of human intercourse was "the war of all against all," resulting in a life that was typically "nasty, brutish and short." If I enjoyed perfect freedom to kill you and take your food I stood under similar threat from you to do the same to me. At some point, Hobbes surmised, people decided to put an end to this dog-eat-dog existence by setting up a leader with the authority to enforce order.
Thus was born what Hobbes called "civil society" under what is now termed the "social contract." The Leviathan would protect the persons and properties of the citizenry and punish evildoers. In return the people would obey his laws. People would not be as absolutely free as before, but they would be more secure. They would enjoy general liberty to conduct their own affairs so long as they refrained from preying on others or disturbing societal order. It was an arrangement freely entered into, Hobbes felt, and unbreakable once formed.
Thus was established the intellectual foundation of constitutional monarchy and liberty under law. It wasn't perfect but it was a start. I'll discuss how the concept was extended in my next post.
2 comments:
One can't fault Hobbes for not considering the anthropological evidence because there were no anthropologists in his time. But from what I know of the subject, there never was a time of perfect freedom in a "state of nature." Homo sapiens seem to have always lived and prospered under conditions of reciprocity in hunting, provisioning of food, child-rearing, and so on. Chimpanzees, our closest living relative species, do the same thing, so this part of our humanity probably goes back at least 6 million years. Contemporary studies of primitive hunter-gatherer peoples (such as Papua New Guinea) do show a higher rate of aggression than modern states, but much of that is group-on-group violence. The idea of a single human being free to pursue only his own personal goals and freedom isn't supported much by anthropological evidence. Some contemporary ideologues promote this as an ideal way to live (Ayn Rand and followers) but only because they've never had to live under those actual conditions.
Good insight, Don. Humans, like other primates, are social animals. The reference to ideologues is prescient.
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