State of Nature as an Exemplum
Dean Pagliaro Professor Pasquino Introduction to Political Theory 8 November 2003 The State of Nature as an Exemplum In the Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes’s theory of the state of nature serves as an exemplum; an account that legitimizes the authority of the state, by providing the logic behind sovereignty. The theory illustrates the point that without government, man is in hell (an awful and evil state of nature), where peace, order and liberty are impossible. The purpose in writing the Leviathan and in describing man’s state of nature, should be seen as having an anti-anarchical aim; that is, his task is to make people accept and obey the political authority of the sovereign, in order to solve the problem of recurring disorder within society and make the state “permanently stable –internally indestructible” (Lloyd 27). ... Hobbes, in the Leviathan, asserts that life in the state of nature would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short” (Pasquino 2). This state is characterized as a state of war, of man against man. ... The state of nature is an individualistic, self-governing existence where everyone is an enemy, and man’s is primarily focused on self-preservation. In The Elements of Law, Hobbes tries to comprehend the state of man in nature. ... He concludes that man in the state of nature is equal, because people are all equally dangerous and capable of killing one another. ... Since people cannot distinguish between friend and foe, they will live in a constant state of terror and fear (of destruction), which will lead to random killings, anticipatory preemptive attacks against other people, and “a war of all against all” (Lloyd 25). Hobbes proclaims that the state of nature is a state of war, where men “through vanity, or comparison, or appetite, provoke the rest” to violence (Hobbes 78). ... People in the state of nature will compete for resources; they will distrust everyone, and they will seek glory because of their perceived self-importance or pride.