Ameritopia_ The Unmaking of America - Mark R. Levin [23]
Submission to the Leviathan (or Commonwealth) meant transferring one’s rights to the Sovereign. That way, Hobbes believed men could live in peace, stability, and contentment. The rights transferred included, among others, control of the judicial system (what is right or wrong), control of Subjects’ free will (what Subjects could or could not do), control of Subjects’ possessions (what goods the Subject could enjoy), distribution of materials such as land, and control over foreign trade. Hobbes described this relationship as a social contract or compact.
Hobbes argued that men are equal in the sense that all individuals strive for survival. Even a strong man can be compromised by a confederation of physically or mentally weaker men. “Nature hath made men so equal in the faculties of body and mind as that, though there be found one man sometimes manifestly stronger in body or of quicker mind than another, yet when all is reckoned together the differences between man and man is not so considerable as that one man can thereupon claim to himself any benefit to which another may not pretend as well as he” (74). The problem is when “any two men [of equal hopes] desire the same thing, which nevertheless they cannot both enjoy, they become enemies; and in the way to their end, which is principally their own conservation, and sometimes their delectation only, endeavour to destroy or subdue one another” (75). Anarchy ensues as men cannot secure themselves from the collective force of other men and men can also seek to exercise power over other men. Thus, men have no pleasure but, instead, grief (75). “So that in the nature of man we find three principal causes of quarrel: first, competition; secondly, diffidence; thirdly, glory. The first maketh men invade for gain; the second, for safety; and the third, for reputation” (76).
In this state of war, where the individual seeks his own preservation, and where “every man [is] against every man, this also is consequent: that nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, have there no place. Where there is no common power, there is no law; where there is no law, no injustice. Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues. Justice and injustice are none of the faculties neither of body, nor mind.… They are qualities that relate to men in society, not in solitude” (78).
Hobbes concluded that the state of man in the state of nature is a state of war. “[T]he condition of man … is a condition of war of everyone against everyone.…” (80) As such, man believes he has a right to everything, even to another man’s body. As long as man believes it is his natural right to everything there can be no security to any other man to live his full life (80).
Hobbes famously declared, “Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of war, where every man is enemy to every man, the same is consequent to the time wherein men live without other security than what their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently, no culture of the earth, no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea, no commodious building, no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force, no knowledge of the face of the earth, no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society, and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” (76).
Yet there are also passions that incline men to peace, especially self-preservation. “The passions that incline men to peace are fear of death, desire of such things as are necessary to commodious living, and a hope by their industry to obtain them. And reason suggesteth convenient articles of peace, upon which men may be drawn to