The 17th Century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes is now widely regarded as one of a handful of truly great political philosophers, whose masterwork Leviathan rivals in significance the political writings of Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Voltaire and Rawls. To which I would add the brilliant young political polymath James Madison.
If Hobbes were writing it today, instead of Leviathan, it would be titled Trump. In any event, he wrote his famous book, Leviathan, in the wake of an incredibly bloody civil war in England. Hobbes believed that humans in nature were so motivated by self-preservation that without some dominant authority a perpetual state of war would prevail. Every person would fear violence and death from every other. Life would be, he said famously, “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short”. For him, the only way was for citizens to relinquish their freedom in return for the security provided by a hopefully benevolent sovereign. Except for the hopefully benevolent part, isn’t that where we are today? We have a rogue president subject, in theory, to the constraints of what was regarded as an exceptional constitutional foundation for a remarkably sustainable republic. We thought our Leviathan was chained. But is he?