Hobbes: The Philosopher of Our Times

21st Century American Political Factionalism

If you don’t recognize what this is from, nothing I write is for you

If all of Western Philosophy is a footnote to Plato, all political philosophy concerning the State is nothing but scribbling on the margins of The Leviathan.

Hobbes isn’t an author concerned with the good times—he’s primarily fixated on how a political community collapses into strife (and how to prevent that). Strongly influenced by Thucydides¹² and his own experience of the English Civil War, his life’s work could accurately be summarized as looking for ways to prevent factionalism from tearing apart a State.

To modernize his ideas a bit, I tend to think of his concept of the Sovereign (in his terms, an absolute monarch) as the State itself. The contemporary State is—before anything else—a political structure that maintains continuity across time. The State persists despite any one government or individual, and much like Hobbes’ absolute sovereign, the State controls a monopoly on the legitimate use of force (and by extension, the enforcement of law) for the sake of communal security.³

For Hobbes, security was only the first step in forming a political community. It makes up very little of The Leviathan, despite how well-known his quip about the war of all against all is.⁴ His real preoccupation was the problem of factions.

Again, to sort of modernize this concept, in a contemporary sense, I tend to view the Hobbseian faction as incompatible ideological beliefs. In my opinion, a State is an ideological construct, not simply a guarantor of security. The structures and forms of bureaucratic life—how our institutions of State relate to the political community—are explicitly structured around our initial ideological framework.

Bureaucracy is a sort of self-replicating set of procedures on how to carry out tasks. Rules and cultural norms inform how civil servants perform their duties, and those rule and norms are rooted in the framework of just who we think we are.⁵

In the United States that ideology would be liberalism. Despite the rather difficult time we’ve had in living up to our ideals, the fact that all men were created equal was our founding principle. Our State was very self-consciously constructed along those lines.

The problem I think we’re starting to have now is that our contemporary factions—incompatible ideological visions—have emerged in the United States. There is a distinct liberal faction⁶ that still holds to the fundamental ideological framework of 1776.

Opposed to them is a personalist faction⁷ that encompasses a broad coalition of right-wing nationalists who have (in my opinion) very little in common outside of seeing Donald Trump and MAGA as a vehicle towards an ideological restructuring of the United States. They share little in common except their visceral belief that America should not be an ideologically liberal nation.

I think their destruction of institutions like USAID should be seen in this light. It’s not that they take an instrumentalist view of institutions where a rational calculus can be made about whether that institution advances their priorities, it’s that all institutions of the United States are ideological by virtue of their existence in a liberal framework.

Now I really doubt that Donald Trump actually believes that, or has the capacity to see the structures of the State through such a lens; rather, I think that’s an unconscious impulse that’s driving the movement.

Calls for the annexation of Canada, or the threats of military force against Greenland, carry on in a similar vein of an attempt at destroying something (the post-1945 international order⁸) that is, by its nature, an ideologically liberal creation.

It wouldn’t serve a purpose to assist Ukraine in fending off Russia from an unjust assault, because that is something being done with an ethical impulse. It’s a fundamentally liberal notion about how the world functions. Using military force against Greenland, however, would loudly announce a Schmittian⁹ vision where the legal structures of the international order only exist to properly delineate the power of States to exert their will.

Similarly, the whole obsession with tariffs by MAGA can be understood, I think, as an expansion of this worldview. Trade and amicable relations between nations are something that liberal frameworks established, and tariffs return us to a world of predatory nation states competing in a zero-sum world. The very idea that various nations can work together for a positive gain is anathema to a nationalist ideal of the strong vanquishing the weak.

To get back to Hobbes—and what I’m trying to get at here—is that two ideological factions cannot exist in a State together like this. The State, and the machinery of the State, means that there cannot be a split personality over what it is in an ideological sense. A battle over what the State is and the resulting ability to wield power through the violence of the State almost ensures there will be some form of existential struggle between those factions.

The MAGA nationalist coalition will attempt to destroy and replace institutions of the State because any existing burecracy is fundamentally a liberal threat to their vision of the world—likewise liberals once (hopefully) returned to power will almost inevitably attempt to use the State to preclude another attempt by the nationalist right to come to power.

They simply cannot coexist, and one side has to win. If neither side can decisively seize (and use) power to stymie the political future of the other, you’ll likely start to see political violence in the streets. It’s what Hobbes was so preoccupied with. The stakes of being able to use the power of the State means that if you lose, you will almost certainly be doomed.

Extra-legal political violence is the inevitable next step in that process. If you fear losing power—and then having that power used against you—you will turn to violence as a means of suppressing opposition.

It might be a self-destructive impulse that turns the public against you in the long run and seals your fate, but heightened political struggle often results in people turning to short-sighted means to advance their causes. The more intense the struggle, the more people feel the need to use short-term solutions to reverse their cause’s course.

That for Hobbes ends with the collapse of the State and civil war. For us? I hope it just means a contentious mid-term election.

1. He was the first person to translate Thucydides into English, and his translation is still regarded as one of the most accurate. I think it’s stilted, though, and I prefer the Rex Warner translation. Sue me.

2. The Corcyrean Civil War is functionally the ur-case study for Hobbseian thought, and the perils of the breakdown of a State. It’s really good, and if you read anything from Thucydides, you should read that episode. Then you should read the Sicilian Campaign.

3. Yes. I have read Max Weber. How could you tell?

4. Lesser known is his fixation on geometry in the opening section of The Leviathan. I guess he thought that our natural inclination to kill one another was just really rooted in visceral disagreements over Euclid’s axioms.

5. Look seriously. You can just save yourself a lot of time by reading Hobbes and Weber instead of this. I’m just a Walmart brand knockoff.

6. I’m using this in the broad ideological sense that encompasses everyone from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Mitt Romney, not in the sloppy domestic American sense of the word.

7. I’m not rehashing the fascism debate here, you can look at Anton Jäger and John Ganz yell at each other if you want that. I’m Weberposting. I’m in my Iron Cage era. I’m going Leviathanmode.

8. What’s left of it anyways. It’s on life support and unless Macron feels like taking on the mantel of Hegel’s strongest warrior, the prognosis doesn’t look good.

9. Carl Schmitt was also known for things other than his writings on political philosophy.