The State and the Problem of Uncertainty

Hobbes, Mutual Intelligibility, and the Risks of Undermining the State Part I

Departure for the Hunt in the Pontine Marshes, Horace Vernet, 1833

I feel as though Hobbes’ opinion of Man in the State of Nature is one of the most chronically misunderstood ideas in political philosophy. It is typically told as a story of how Man in Nature was inherently instinctively ruthless and violent, thereby necessitating a State to prevent what Hobbes terms the War of All Against All.

It is the prevailing view that Hobbes believed that Man is inherently Nasty and Brutish, and that our deeply flawed natures require us to have an absolute Sovereign to reign over us.

However, I tend to see Hobbes are arguing that the psychological terror that we’re subjected to in a State of Nature reduces us to this state, rather than that being what he thinks we truly are.

In my view, Hobbes primarily sees violence emerging in a State of Nature as a product of the mutual unintelligibility of others. It may seem like a truism, but my inner life is as unknowable to you as yours is to mine. The problem Hobbes sees is a problem of uncertainty in our interactions with others.

Your intentions are, at best, a guess to me informed by a set of patterns and assumptions that I can lean on to discern how you would act in any given set of circumstances. In a State of Nature—I have little to nothing from which I can base another person’s intentions on.

Absent a State, once I’m removed from the immediate bonds of friends and family, I’m interacting with people of whom I have no real grasp. Their history is unknown to me, and there are no accepted conditions that I have from which I can interact with them. Every new person that I encounter is essentially just a blind guess. They may be friendly. They may not. I have nothing I can make an informed judgment around.

Hobbes terms the psychological state of Man in this condition as being psychologically gnawed on by feare of death. Specifically, violent death at the hands of another.

It isn’t so much that Man is inherently violent, but any single person may be violent, and I have no reliable roadmap on how to differentiate that single person from any person in general.

It’s entirely reasonable to suspect that almost every person I could come into contact with in the absence of a State would be an ethical person who simply wishes to live their life—but the cost of misinterpreting the intentions of that single person who is violent has existential consequences for me.

If everything is essentially equal and you can kill me, and I can kill you, there is little incentive for me to accept risk and engage in dialogue when doing so gives the other party (the perceived) initiative to strike at me.

It turns into a vicious cycle in which every participant is forced to assume that any person can be violent because every other person also has to assume that anyone could be violent. We’re all trapped in a psychic state of fear and panic over the intentions of others because they’re trapped in the same dilemma with no outside force that can impose order on our relations.

You are left with no option besides being violent yourself to ward off the threat to your security, or as Hobbes puts it: there is no way for any man to secure himself…[except] by force, or wiles.

Putting this another way, there is no way to engage in what contemporary international relations would term as “confidence-building measures” when there is no framework for me to work within. I have no guarantor that can enforce the boundaries in my interactions with another party, which gives me the space to build trust.

In the absence of a neutral¹ arbiter (the State), I have no way to bridge any form of intelligible set of social guidelines with other people.

While Hobbes is, of course, clear that the State must have a monopoly on violence, his reason for doing so isn’t that it’s because we’re all just irredimable violent beasts, but our rational self-preservation calculations will not permit us off-ramps in the absence of an outside body that can mediate between us.

I may not trust you, and you may not trust me, but there is a neutral body that sits above us that provides a framework that allows us to have a shared language of intentions.

Think of it like a contract dispute. Agreeing with an unknown party, you have to accept some form of risk that the counterparty will reneg on their end of the bargain—but you proceed anyway because you have an enforcement mechanism if they breach your contract in the form of the court system.

You are both able to enter into that contract because, despite not knowing one another—and therefore not having a pre-established relationship upon which you can reasonably judge the behavior of the other party—you can speak a similar language of knowing the boundaries of your interaction are being enforced by that outside party.

Similarly, you can think of this as the framework for basic interactions between unknown individuals in a State. The State functions as a translator between us. It provides the medium through which we can eliminate uncertainty in our interactions.

We no longer walk around thinking that every person we encounter will be violent.² We’ve become psychologically accustomed to working within an accepted set of social customs that have arisen over time, which have been facilitated by the State, to the extent that we take it for granted that any other person we meet shares essentially the same basic accepted ground rules.

We may not know each other as we know ourselves, but we can take it with some assurance that we know reasonably well what the other person will and won’t do. It’s in many ways the grand success of the Hobbesian project—building a framework for how we meet each other in public without ever needing to guess what the other person is thinking.

The greatest risk, however, to these gains is when the State is perceived as no longer acting as a neutral arbiter between citizens.³

1. Yes yes. I know. There’s no such thing as anything “truly neutral”, but it would be annoying to continuously write “the closest thing that humans can create to a dispassionate neutral arbiter” every time, so I’m going to say neutral.

2. At least I hope you don’t. If you do you need to chill out a bit.

3. Coming in Part II. Whenever I get around to it.