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HOBBES AND TERRORISMDavid Lay Williams aa Department of Political Science ,University of Wisconsin , Stevens Point, WI54481Published online: 06 Apr 2009.
To cite this article: David Lay Williams (2009) HOBBES AND TERRORISM,Critical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society, 21:1, 91-108, DOI:10.1080/08913810902812164
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Critical Review
21
(
1
):
91–108
ISSN
0891-3811
print,
1933-8007
online©
2009
Critical Review Foundation DOI:
10.1080/08913810902812164
David Lay Williams
HOBBES AND TERRORISM
Taylor and FrancisRCRI_A_381386.sgm10.1080/08913810902812164Critical Review0891-3811 (print)/1933-8007 (online)Original Article2009Critical Review [email protected]
ABSTRACT
:
Terrorism is perhaps the greatest challenge of the contemporaryage. Of all the canonical figures in political theory, Thomas Hobbes is the mostlikely candidate to offer genuine insight into this problem. Yet although hisanalysis of the state of nature is immediately relevant to the diagnosis of thisproblem, his metaphysics cannot sustain his politics. His aspiration to “immuta-ble” natural laws grounded in the universal motivation of the fear of deathcrumble when this fear is no longer universal. When terrorists are inspired by areligious ideology that makes them willing to die for their beliefs—and whenthey benefit from other asymmetries with the civilian populations against whichthey are arrayed—Hobbes the theorist of war and international relations becomesless relevant than Hobbes the prescriber of “rational” (fearfully pacific) humannature.
“Men are not equally attached to life.”
—Montesquieu,
Persian Letters,
Letter
89
With the emergence of terrorism as a dominant specter in the contem-porary world, many eyes have turned back to Thomas Hobbes (e.g.,Magnell
2003
; Wells
2004
,
227
–
41
; Meisels
2005
; Abosch
2007
).Indeed, the ability of terrorists to strike either by “secret machination or
David Lay Williams, Department of Political Science, University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point,WI
54481
, [email protected], a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Research in theHumanities at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and the author of
Rousseau’s PlatonicEnlightenment
(Penn State,
2007
), thanks Jeffrey Friedman, David Chan, Dona Warren, Karin Fry,James Sage, Chris Diehm, and Samuel Stanton for their helpful comments on earlier drafts.
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, No.
1
by confederacy with others” (
Leviathan
,
13
.
1
)
1
may be the ultimatemanifestation of Hobbesian equality. We appear, in this sense, to betruly in the state of nature he described.
If Hobbes appears to be right in his diagnosis, one might very welllook to him for the prescription. American efforts to thwart the terroristsmight be described as an attempt to establish a Leviathan who can “over-awe them all” (
Leviathan
,
13
.
5
), thus bringing us out of a state of nature.Would this be Hobbes’s strategy?
Hobbes’s prescription appeals to the idea of a contract. What,however, would motivate opposing groups to obey a contract? Hobbes,bereft of immaterial Platonic ideas or a classical notion of immaterialnatural laws, turned instead to a material enforcer of the eternal laws ofnature. Specifically, he turned to the tangible motive of fear: “The originof large and lasting societies lay not in mutual human love but in men’smutual fear” (
Citizen
,
1
.
2
). Fear is not only material; it is universal. Itinvariably nudges all toward justice. This engine drives the machine ofthe social contract, the Hobbesian laws of nature, and ultimately theefficacy of the Leviathan itself.
The Hobbesian model for understanding conflict and treating itsproblems has been treated as decisive for much of Western history. Thiswas most evident in the Cold War and the scholarship of that era.Headley Bull (
1977
,
46
–
51
) thought that the condition of internationalanarchy was accurately portrayed in Hobbes’s
Leviathan
. HansMorgenthau (
1961
,
508
) found in the
Leviathan
inspiration for a worldhegemon—a power that could overawe others and enforce peace.Raymond Aron ([
1966
]
2003
) similarly relied upon Hobbesian assump-tions in developing and defending his balance-of-powers thesis. RobertGilpin (
1984
,
290
) found inspiration in the Hobbesian cliché that “it’s ajungle out there.” Indeed, he went even further, embracing theHobbesian doctrine that “men are motivated by honor, greed, and,above all, fear.”
Terrorism, however, adds a wrinkle that threatens both the Hobbesianunderstanding of the international system and its proposed solution to theproblem of international anarchy. While Hobbes’s appeal to the univer-sality of fear was effective in previous eras, it is less relevant in the age ofterrorism. That terrorists do not fear death and, in fact, sometimes inviteit, problematizes Hobbes’s characterizations of the international condi-tion by undercutting his most important “material” supposition: that fearis universal and is symmetrically distributed.
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Williams
•
Hobbes and Terrorism
93
Equality and War, Fear and Materialism
Though one might assume that the natural condition of humankind ispeace, Hobbes assumes that war is natural, from which peace is an artifi-cial—and frequently, unstable—respite. Conflict is built into our verynature. It is for this reason that he defines war prior to defining peace(which comes almost as an afterthought).
In Hobbes’s account, several factors conspire to create a state of war.These include psychological egoism, scarcity of goods, equality, compe-tition, diffidence, and glory.
Egoism
(
Leviathan
,
14
.
8
) naturally leads tohuman conflict, especially when combined with
scarcity
. Selfish partieswill
compete
with one another over scarce goods, and according toHobbes, this is one of the great causes of war. Widespread competitionfor scarce resources leads to
diffidence
or mistrust. Further, some will take“pleasure in contemplating their own power in the acts of conquest,which they pursue farther than their security requires” (
Leviathan
,
13
.
4
),and this motive,
glory,
can likewise lead to conflict.But the most significant cause of war, for present purposes, is Hobbes’s
notion of equality.In the abstract, equality hardly sounds like a source of conflict. But
Hobbes thinks of equality not as an abstract ideal, but as a fact about thehuman condition:
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 orof quicker mind than another, yet when all is reckoned together the differ-ence between man and man is not so considerable as that one man canthereupon claim to himself any benefit to which another may not pretendas well as he. For as to the strength of body, the weakest has strength enoughto kill the strongest, either by secret machination or by confederacy withothers that are in the same danger with himself. (
Leviathan
,
13
.
1
)
Equality means, for Hobbes, the brute fact that no one is so strong as tobe immune from murder, and no one is so weak so as to be incapable ofit. We are all vulnerable predators.
This conception of equality fits into the grander scheme of Hobbes’stheory of conflict. Egoism drives individuals to pursue their interestsabove those of all others. Equality in the sense of the ability to kill oneanother fuels competition for the resources entailed by people’s (material)interests. Competition over these goods leads to mistrust. And the pursuit
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of glory leads people to fight for their reputations. Without the artificialconstraints of a state, then, we will necessarily be reduced to this state ofwar, and thus the intolerable condition of “continual fear, and danger ofviolent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, andshort” (
Leviathan
,
13.9).That Hobbes viewed human nature as selfish and potentially vicious is
not highly unusual in the history of political thought. That he furthersought a solution to the problems of human nature in a rule-promulgatinggovernment also was not unique. Plato argued that “mankind must eithergive themselves a law and regulate their lives by it, or live not better thanthe wildest of wild beasts” (Laws, 875a).
What is unique about Hobbes is the method by which he arrives at hisconclusions. In this respect, his metaphysics becomes increasingly impor-tant to his argument, and ultimately produces the flaws in his solution tothe problem of war that are exposed by terrorism.
Hobbes’s method in solving the problem of war is distinctivelymodern. There had never been anything like it before, and it would leaveits imprint on nearly all subsequent attempts to solve the problem of warand the foundation of the state. Ancient and medieval philosophy appealedto metaphysical concepts in addressing these topics. Plato, for example,took recourse to the Forms for establishing political order and assuringpeace. Such approaches, however, were unacceptable to Hobbes becausethey assumed the existence of immaterial substance. This seemed to beinconsistent with the burgeoning scientific discoveries of the age. Consis-tent with what Hobbes admired in these discoveries, he proclaimed: “Thatwhich is not body is no part of the universe” (Leviathan, 46.15). This isthe central tenet of a materialist metaphysics, and is ultimately the mostimportant underlying assumption of Hobbesian politics.2
It is easy enough to understand how materialism would be importantto Hobbes’s philosophy and natural science. It is also easy to perceive itsvirtues. In abandoning idealism, Hobbes was able to do away with theleast plausible elements of the old natural sciences, such as Aristotle’s tele-ological causation. But Hobbes was not satisfied to limit his explanationsto nature. He pushed his materialism further, to explain human nature andthus both morality and politics.
Hobbes had good reasons for making this leap (Harrison 2003). Thepractice of justifying states by appealing to metaphysical theology had hita genuine impasse in early modernity. The Reformation had set off achain of events that made universal foundations in theology practically
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Williams • Hobbes and Terrorism 95
implausible. As Ross Harrison (2003, 11) has remarked, “For needingstarting points, needing authority from which to write, it was no longersufficient simply to reach for the obvious truths of religion.” Hobbes thussought a material solution to a material problem.
The State of Nature vs. the State
The exit from the state of nature, and hence the end of war, is the mostimportant moment in Hobbes’s political philosophy, and its manner is inmost respects perfectly consistent with the logic and assumptions madebeforehand. In short, given both the intolerability and inevitability of thestate of war, individuals are forced to seek an option more suited to theirself-interest: peace. Hence Hobbes’s first law of (human moral) nature:“Every man ought to endeavor peace, as far as he has hope of obtaining it; andwhen he cannot obtain it, that he may seek and use all helps and advantages ofwar” (Leviathan, 14.4, emph. original).
In order to achieve this peace, Hobbes derives a second law of nature,the surrender of the right of nature—the right that all individuals have,in the state of nature to do as they please (Leviathan, 14.5). In pursuit ofthe second law of nature, everyone transfers their right of nature to asovereign through contract.3 This sovereign is the government and, inturn, has the power to do whatever is necessary in order to maintain thefirst law of nature: peace.
This broad outline requires some explication. In particular, what isneeded is a greater understanding of the motivation of the participantsin this contract. Hobbes assumes that there is nothing worse thanliving in constant fear of one’s own violent death. This fear leaves notime for agriculture, mechanical engineering, navigation of the sea,literature, or art: It would be foolish for any rational individual topursue anything other than military self-preservation, so long as thisfear dominates. To pursue civilization under such conditions is toinvite violent death. “The passions that incline men to peace are fearof death, desire of such things as are necessary to commodious living,and a hope by their industry to obtain them” (Leviathan, 13.14). It isthis continual fear of death that pushes us inexorably into accepting thesocial contract. All natural laws, according to Hobbes, follow from thisfearful dedication to peace. And these laws establish and maintain civilsociety.
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Government is established by transferring the right of nature of all tothe Leviathan, who in turn uses fear to maintain the order necessary touphold the laws of nature. This is what makes civil laws efficacious: “Ofall the passions, that which inclineth men least to break the laws is fear”(Leviathan, 29.19).4 This is one reason Hobbes describes the Leviathan asa “mortal god” (Leviathan, 17.13): the state is to be as powerful and as fear-inducing in this world as the “immortal God” is to be in the next.
While fear may not be the most attractive basis for a theory of the state,it is for Hobbes the most solid, for two reasons.
First, fear is a genuinely material phenomenon. Hobbes defines it asthe belief that one will be “hurt [by] the object” of aversion (Leviathan,6.16). This makes fear completely natural, rational, explicable, and evendeterministic. Aversion is a desire to keep away from the unpleasant.Thus the perception of some displeasing physical object automaticallytriggers aversion. If this displeasing object seems unavoidable, aversionbecomes fear.
Second, relying on fear is promising because of its apparent universal-ity. Nothing is less desirable than death—or more universal. This makesit a more ambitious, yet a more plausible, foundation than such ancientimmaterial notions as the Forms, the virtues, or the gods (many or one).While Hobbes’s political theory has no summum bonum, as Michael Oake-shott (1991, 253) has argued, fear of death constitutes its very real summummalum.5 It is on this basis that Hobbes produces “scientific” rather thanspeculative laws of nature. “The laws of nature are immutable andeternal, for . . . it can never be that war shall preserve life, and peacedestroy it” (Leviathan, 15.38).6
For material laws of nature to have the force of the ancient equivalents,their commands must be universal—and so must be their material foun-dations. The fact that everyone can be expected to fear death—especiallya violent death, if one is in the state of nature—is sufficient ground forHobbes to generate his positive political program. Without this univer-sality, his laws quickly crumble from being universal prescriptions tocontingent prudential recommendations.7
A Hegemon in the War on Terror
There can be little doubt that Hobbes’s account of the state of natureoffers a practical heuristic for thinking about international relations.
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Indeed, he was the very first to observe this application: “In all timeskings and persons of sovereign authority, because of their independency,are in continual jealousies, and in the state and posture of gladiators,having their weapons pointing and their eyes fixed on one another, thatis, their forts, garrisons, and guns upon the frontiers of their kingdoms,and continual spies upon their neighbours, which is a posture of war”(Leviathan, 13.12). For Hobbes, the normal condition of internationalrelations is a state of war. Most fundamentally, this is because there is nosovereign to settle disputes between nations, and so no authority towhich a nation can appeal as an alternative to war. Thus, each state retainsits right of nature and can act in whatever manner it sees fit to promoteits own survival.
Some have argued that there is one way to introduce stability to thisotherwise anarchic condition: establish a hegemon. If one state is consid-erably stronger than the others, it can become a de facto Hobbesiansovereign, ushering in an age of peace and stability. Arguably, this wasthe role played jointly by the United States and the Soviet Union formany years, and is now a position occupied exclusively by the UnitedStates. To the extent that there is an effective hegemon, one mightexpect that the international community will be spared a state of war.They rather can expect the hegemon to impose rules and, just as impor-tantly, to enforce them.
In the most obvious sense, the threat of international suicide terrorismcreates a Hobbesian state of war. This has certainly been the interpreta-tion both of the jihadists and of the United States government. Osamabin Laden (1996) claimed that the “crimes and sins committed by theAmericans are a clear declaration of war on God, his messenger, andMuslims.” As a consequence, he, in turn issued a fatwa against America.Likewise, on the very evening of September 11, 2001, President Bush(2001a) noted that America was engaged in a “war against terrorism.”The president reiterated his view on August 3, 2005: “Make no mistakeabout it, we are at war.”
There are good Hobbesian reasons for both Bush and the terrorists tohave considered the conflict a “war.” First, “it is manifest that during thetime men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, theyare in that condition which is called war” (Leviathan, 13.8). There is nosovereign power that stands above and overawes the terrorists. However,the United States has been as much a failed hegemon on this score as hasevery other country and the United Nations. For Hobbes, the sign of a
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true Leviathan is the obedience it commands. The absence of a trueLeviathan can only mean that we are in the state of nature.
In the absence of a Leviathan, according to Hobbes, every party retainsits right of nature—the right to do whatever is necessary to preserve itself.In this respect, bin Laden has been a model Hobbesian, remarking in1996, “Terrorizing you [the Americans] . . . is a legitimate and morallydemanded duty. It is a legitimate right well known to all humans andother creatures.” In a condition where he does not recognize the UnitedStates or any other earthly authority as sovereign, he does what he thinksis necessary to promote his community’s survival.
Another feature of Hobbes’s state of war is that it need not be charac-terized by persistent actual combat:
War consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fighting, but in a tract oftime, wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known: andtherefore the notion of time is to be considered in the nature of war, as itis in the nature of weather. For as the nature of foul weather lieth not in ashower or two of rain, but in an inclination thereto of many days together,so the nature of war consisteth not in actual fighting, but in the knowndisposition thereto during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary.(Leviathan, 13.8)
This passage was often cited to describe the Cold War, and with goodreason (see Martinich 1997, 30). The Cold War—by definition—waslargely absent of active conflict. It was nevertheless an extended period offear and distrust. The same can be said of the current predicament. Therehave been moments of conflict, to be sure. But for most Americans, atleast, it has been more an extended period of anticipation of attacks.
Further, there is a growing equality between the two parties in the waron terror, in that equality means that “the weakest has strength enoughto kill the strongest, either by secret machination or by confederacy withothers that are in the same danger with himself” (Leviathan, 13.1). Whilethe United States and its allies obviously possess far more resources thanAl Qaeda, they do not possess so much that they are invulnerable toterrorist acts. Largely through “secret machinations” and “confederacywith others,” the terrorists have managed to inflict substantial wounds.As the terrorists gain access to weapons of mass destruction, this equalitybecomes more and more real.
However, Spinoza ([1677] 1965, III.11) pointed out that states are notas vulnerable, hence not necessarily as equal, as individuals. He noted that a
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Williams • Hobbes and Terrorism 99
commonwealth can guard itself against being subjugated by another, as aman in the state of nature cannot do. For, of course, a man is overcomeby sleep every day, is often afflicted by disease of body or mind, and isfinally prostrated by old age; in addition, he is subject to other troublesagainst which a commonwealth can make itself secure.
Similarly, while the United States is capable of being wounded, it is notcapable of being killed the same way that human beings can be killed. Itis one thing to kill an individual; it is entirely something else to kill anation of over 300,000,000 people.
However, on a very practical level, if terrorists could acquire weap-ons of mass destruction, many millions could be killed. And even inthe absence of such weapons, the carefully targeted use of less imposingweapons could have the effect of ruining the economy and causinggeneral chaos. It is possible that such strikes might bring millions ofpeople close to a literal state of nature. It doesn’t matter, in a Hobbesiansense, whether or not the terrorists can literally kill off a whole coun-try. What matters is that they can arouse the fear of death among itsinhabitants.
This leads to a final sense in which we might say that we are in aHobbesian state of war: the prevalence of the fear of violent death.According to Hobbes, the state of nature is characterized by the “contin-ual fear, and danger of violent death” (Leviathan, 13.10). Jeremy Waldron(2004, 8n7) has recently made the connection to terrorism explicit, citingthe Oxford English Dictionary definition of “terror”: “The state of beingterrified or greatly frightened; intense fear, fright, or dread.” There is littledoubt that this was the state of many Americans, particularly those in closeproximity in time and location to the actual attacks. On September 20,2001, George W. Bush (2001b) noted that
these terrorists kill not merely to end lives, but to disrupt and end a way oflife. With every atrocity, they hope that America grows fearful. . . . I knowmany citizens have fears tonight. . . . Freedom and fear are at war.
Thus it seems that Hobbes’s account of the state of war accuratelydescribes the existing conflict with the terrorists. To this extent, thosewho refer to it as a “war on terror” appear vindicated, at least from theHobbesian perspective. Almost everything about this conflict appears tofit Hobbes’s own understanding of the nature of war. The exception isthat while the potential victims of terrorism may harbor ongoing and
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deep-seated fears of attack, it is less clear that the terrorists experiencethe same. I will call this the asymmetry of fear; it threatens not only aHobbesian solution to the problem of terrorism, but also Hobbesiannatural law itself.
What Terrorists Have to Say to Hobbes
If Hobbes is useful in understanding the existing state of affairs as a war,it is reasonable to ask if he can help us escape this state—since few (leastof all Hobbes) want to persist in a state of war very long. At least onephilosopher, Thomas Magnell (2003, 8), has explicitly appealed toHobbes in his proposal for solving the problem of terrorism: “The condi-tions, which parallel the conditions of anarchy for individuals thatHobbes depicts to a considerable extent, call for some central authorityto control weapons of mass destruction.” Specifically, Magnell argues forthe establishment of a global hegemon that would assume the role of aninternational Leviathan. By exercising its might, it could employsanctions and incentives to gain control over the tools of terrorism andhence subdue it.
Magnell prescribes this role for the United States. He admits that thissolution has a practical flaw: the free-rider problem. All nations wouldgain the benefit of the hegemon’s investment in global security, whilepaying none of its costs.8 This, however, is a small problem compared tothe larger flaw it reveals in the Hobbesian solution to the state of war, asrevealed in the practice of terrorism.
As has already been emphasized, Hobbes has intractable concernsabout basing his politics on an immaterial idea of justice. At the sametime, however, he wants to provide eternal and immutable laws of naturefor our conduct. It is for this reason that he appeals to what he perceivesto be a universal material phenomenon. The universal fear of deathmotivates a universal recourse to the first law of nature: peace. Thecontinued fear of death further leads to the establishment of a Leviathan,who promises to protect everyone from this fear. Finally, this same fearof death leads to all of Hobbes’s subsequent laws of nature; “all the otherlaws of nature are supposed to follow from the first” (Martinich 1997, 41).It is fear of death that leads individuals out of the state of nature as wellas making the laws of nature binding—since for Hobbes, no law can bebinding without the expectation that others will obey (Leviathan, 15.36).
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Williams • Hobbes and Terrorism 101
Thus his entire constructive political program rests on the efficacy of thisfear.
Three Exceptions to Hobbes’s Rule of Fear
The problem is that suicide terrorism proves that the fear of death is farfrom universal, especially in the context of war.
This problem can be understood from two perspectives. The firstpertains to an individual acceptance of death in the practice of terrorism.As Eric Hoffer ([1951] 2002, 61) observed, mass ideological movementsfoster a readiness to die. But it is more than a simple willingness to die. Itis, as Lord Chalfont suggested, an eagerness to die that accompanies thecontemporary phenomenon of terrorism:
The whole time that I have been involved in terrorist operations, whichnow goes back 30 years, my enemy has always been a man who is veryworried about his own skin. You can no longer count on that, because theterrorist [today] is not just prepared to get killed, he wants to get killed.Therefore, the whole planning, tactical doctrine, [and] thinking [behindantiterrorism measures] is fundamentally undermined. (Quoted in Merari1998, 193)
This view can even be heard from the horse’s own mouth: the “coura-geous youth of Islam [fear] no danger. If [they are] threatened: Thetyrants will kill you, they reply my death is a victory” (bin Laden 1996).
Suicidal terrorists, by definition, do not fear death. Whatever theirreason—theological, ideological, or because they are misled by theirsuperiors—the bottom line remains that these terrorists do not fear deathin the traditional, rational sense that is Hobbes’s starting point. That is,suicide terrorists do not fear the loss of their individual lives. But they dofear a different kind of death, in comparison to which their individuallives pale in comparison: the death of their movement, and the loss oftheir cause.9 Taking account of this type of fear may revive the relevanceof a Hobbesian solution to the problem of terrorism.
Yet terrorist movements are not without resources for meeting theirdesire for survival. Most obviously, they can hide. Typically acting asnon-state agents, they are not easy targets. Recall Hobbes’s observationthat in the state of nature, equality is maintained by the ability of partiesto kill one another by “secret machination or by confederacy with
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others” (Leviathan, 13.1). This, however, presumes that they can findeach other. If anything has become clear in the War on Terror, it is thatterrorists—even the most prominent among them—are difficult tolocate.
“Where there is no power of coercion, there is no fear” (Elements,20.6), and the power to coerce without the ability to find its targets is nopower at all. Where lesser powers can maintain their stealth, the greaterpowers lose their capacity for coercion.
The same may be the case even when terrorists are in real danger ofbeing found. If one believes, as they do, that the would-be American hege-mon—the Leviathan that the Ayatollah Khomeini used to call the GreatSatan—is contravening the will of God, then it might be not only just,but rational, to defy this worldly authority in favor of the immortal andpotentially angry God. The Koran describes Hell as a “place of eternal firewith crackling and roaring flames, fierce boiling waters, scorching wind,and black smoke” (Esposito 2003, 111). If the Islamist cause is mandatedby God, the fear of breaching this command would far surpass the fear ofdisobeying the demands of mortal powers, even on pain of death: It is thedifference between temporal discomfort and eternal punishment.
The phenomenon of suicide terrorism shows that some prefer thestate of war, with all its inconveniences, to a life of peace under a recog-nized sovereign. For them, the fear of death is an insufficient incentivefor exiting the state of nature. For them, some political arrangementsare worth dying for. If the terrorists do not fear a mortal, individualdeath—whether because they think their ideological movement cansurvive their personal extinction, or because they fear eternal punish-ment more than the earthly variety—then it is unclear what Hobbes canoffer.
In order to be relevant to the current situation, Hobbes, and hisfollowers in the realist tradition, would have to overcome two signifi-cant difficulties: the asymmetry of fear between states and nonstatemovements; and the asymmetry of fear between citizens devoted totheir lives on earth and terrorists devoted to martyrdom for theircause.
On the first score, recall again Bull’s appropriation of Hobbes to buildhis case for the realist model: “fear . . . [is] the prime motive that affectsnot only some states some of the time but all states all of the time, the causeof preventive wars as well as of defensive ones.” States, it turns out, arean important assumption for Hobbes and his intellectual descendants.
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States are easy to locate and engage. This leads us into the second diffi-culty: the assumption that fear affects all parties all the time. Since not allparties are states and hence cannot be located, fear turns out not to be the“prime motive . . . all of the time” (Bull 1981, 721–22) It recedes into thedistance—and with it, important elements of the Hobbesian model—ifthe terrorist places his eternal prospects over his immediate ones, or placeshis cause above his self.
For Hobbes, too, there is an asymmetry of fear, but it is between thesovereign and the subject. If the subjects were to cease being terrified ofLeviathan, they would disobey it. The existing international state ofnature is, clearly, no Hobbesian state: the terrorists do not submit.
Saving the World from the Martyrs
In Leviathan, Hobbes defines a martyr carefully. He is a “witness of theresurrection of Jesus the Messiah; which none can be but those thatconversed with him on earth, and saw him after he was risen” (Leviathan,42.11). This definition accepts martyrdom as a rational exception to theotherwise supposedly universal and overriding fear of death. However,only actual witnesses to the Resurrection merit the name martyr inHobbes’s lexicon. Those who, later in history, claim to be martyrsonly pretend to this “honorable” title; they are fools or outlaws not trueChristians or citizens.10 There is no room for latter-day martyrs orcertainly non-Christian ones.11
A different kind of martyr is suggested in De Cive, where Hobbesdistinguishes between giving the sovereign the right to command andagreeing to do all that that sovereign does in fact command. “There arecommands that I would rather be killed than perform” (De Cive, 6.13).The most obvious example of this is the sovereign command to commitsuicide, which may always be refused.12 But a son might “prefer to diethan live in infamy and loathing” after having obeyed a command tocommit parricide (ibid.). Hobbes’s definition of martyrdom excludessuch acts from that name, but they do fit a more casual sense of the term:a willingness to die for one’s principles or values. Yet they do not,according to Hobbes, constitute a threat to civil peace, because ifsubjects resist, for example, a sovereign command to kill a parent, thetask will be carried out by another. Such individuals—martyrs in a loosesense—can be addressed by the Leviathan as long as they remain few in
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number and limited in power. In a state of nature, however, those whoprefer death to civil society have the capacity to create and sustain anar-chy for everyone. This is precisely what terrorists do. They often doview themselves as martyrs—and we cannot solve this problem by defin-ing it away. The fact that they are neither witnesses to the Resurrectionnor even Christians does not alter their ability to subordinate fear toideological principle.
There is one conceivable way in which the Hobbesian approachmight be directed at terrorists: wielding the threat of nuclear weaponsagainst them. If the U.S. threatened a nuclear attack on all of the moun-tains bordering Afghanistan and Pakistan, this might induce sufficient fearto bring the terrorists back in “awe” of the Leviathan, as it were, byrendering nugatory—at least temporarily—the advantage they gainthrough hiding. Pursued to its logical limits, such a strategy mightcommit the United States to bombing, or at least threatening to bomb, asignificant portion of the globe. But even if this strategy were feasible, notto mention ethical, it might deter terrorists who now take advantage oftheir asymmetrical invisibility—but not those who are motivated bytheology to subordinate their lives to their cause, or to subordinate theirdeaths to their everlasting reward.
If the canon of political theory is to offer relevant prescriptions for ourpredicament, then, it will not be in the more obvious pages of Hobbes.This does not render Hobbes irrelevant, however—far from it. There isa curious and much-noted ambiguity in Hobbes between the prescriptiveand the descriptive. Are his laws of nature merely the dictates ofprudence, as he presents them? In that case they would seem to have nomoral force. Hobbes surely recognized this, but he seems to have beenengaged, in part, in an attempt to persuade his readers to become the ratio-nal calculators of earthly advantage that he described—so that they would“behave themselves” prudently, leave the state of nature, and obey thecommands of the Leviathan.
More likely than not, Hobbes considered the claims of religious ideo-logues to be foolish at best, but certainly dangerous at worst. These arenot rational people, on the Hobbesian model. Yet they did undeniablyexist in his day, and contributed to—indeed, were blamed for—the terri-ble Civil War that shaped his thought. One might argue that his diatribeagainst the decidedly non-secular universities in Part I of Behemoth—thatthey “have been to this nation [England], as the wooden horse was to theTrojans” (Behemoth, 40)—was inspired by a desire to educate people to
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overcome their religious convictions. That is, Hobbes wanted people tobe more “rational” in the sense of having a healthy and properly priori-tized fear of death; and this required, among other things, presenting as“natural” the prudential, obedient, fearful subject—which, in turn,required undoing the religious indoctrination that Hobbes’s best-educated countrymen had received.
Perhaps, then, what we can draw from Hobbes is not the need for amilitary hegemon, but a cultural one.
NOTES
1. All Hobbes references (except Behemoth) are to chapter and paragraph number.2. As Leo Strauss ([1936] 1952, 175) characterized Hobbes, “there is no cosmic
support for his humanity.”3. “The mutual transferring of right is that which men call CONTRACT” (Levia-
than, 14.9).4. Michael C. Williams (1996, 220) has argued that “rational (Hobbesian) citizens
will accept the rule of the sovereign in part out of fear of its authority but prima-rily because they understand the foundations of its authority and the disastrousconsequences of its dissolution [i.e., a return to the state of war].” Thus fearplays a twofold role in establishing and maintaining the authority of the Levia-than.
5. See Leviathan, 11.1. This view is challenged—or at least modified—in Abosch2007. Yishaiya Abosch suggests that fear cannot work alone—that Hobbesrelies equally on hope. He argues that Hobbes sought to balance fear andhope in order to achieve peace and political stability. This is especially evidentin his Behemoth. See especially Abosch 2007, 10–12 and 17–18. Abosch mayvery well be right, but this would not contradict my thesis insofar as he doesnot deny the importance of fear to Hobbes. It is still a central part of thebalancing act.
6. See also Leviathan, 26.24, 26.36, 26.40, 27.3. Hobbes likewise describes the lawsof nature as “unalterable” in the Elements of Law, 18.4.
7. “Hobbes’s solution . . . lies in his rationalism and his belief that a universal foun-dation for action—a foundation for the laws of nature—could be found in thedesire for self-preservation and the fear of a violent and painful death” (Williams1996, 218; see also 230).
8. Thomas Magnell’s solution to this problem is the establishment of a global feder-ation to take on both the responsibilities and costs associated with the duties ofhegemony.
9. Roger D. Masters (2002) has suggested that one can explain self-sacrifice insofaras it benefits kin, as one finds more broadly in the animal kingdom.
10. It appears, however, that he was willing to entertain a broader definition ofmartyrs in De Cive: “Are princes to be resisted when they [the Holy Scriptures]are not obeyed? Of course not! This is contrary to the civil agreement. What then
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must one do? Go to Christ through Martyrdom” (De Cive, 18.13). Nothing inthis work suggests that there cannot be contemporary martyrs. Hobbes’s accountin Leviathan is thus evidently a revision of his ideas—and surely one more consis-tent with his general views.
11. This latter point has been observed in Christov 2007, 33n164.12. Jean Hampton (1986, 247) has observed that “a systematic approach to Hobbes’s
argument reveals a sophisticated attempt at a geometric deduction of absolutesovereignty that ultimately fails. Hobbes’s premises do not lead to his conclu-sions.” See also Martinich 1997, 48 for a similar argument specifically aimed atthe right to self-defense.
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