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227 227 Hobbes The Sovereignty Race Well, the law is costly, and I am for an accommodation: that M. Thomas Hobbes should have the sole privilege of setting up his form of government in America, as being calculated and fitted for that Meridian. . . . And if it prosper there, then have the liberty to transplant it hither; who knoweth (if there could but be some means devised to make them understand his language) whether the Americans might not choose him for their Sovereign ? But the fear is that if he should put his principles into practice as magesterially as he doth dictate them, his supposed subjects might chance to tear their Mortal God to pieces with their teeth and entomb his sovereignty in their bowels. —John Bramhall, Catching of the Leviathan (1658). B ishop Bramhall suspected that a sordid story of murder lay upon the threshold of the Hobbesian contract. Whether this was rhetoric or intuition, Hobbes is certainly the social contract thinker closest to Girard. He is one of the rare philosophers who does not underestimate the role of violence in human affairs. He made society spring from a state of nature that is a state of war of all against all, and that state of war, insofar as 228 On Violence and Politics it is revealing of certain features of human nature, determines the kind, form, and extent of political government. In Hobbes, there is no civil society prior to political government. Violence is first, and the institution of sovereignty, which is supposed to solve the problem of violence, is the founder of civil association. Moreover, Hobbes knows that people find peace only in the shadow of their own violence made sacred; the Sovereign, he says, is a mortal god. We are protected from the most extreme violence by a power that is “as great as possibly men can be imagined to make it.”1 This said, Hobbes is not imagining people drunk on death and fury finding reconciliation around a common victim. The contract does not take place in an atmosphere of collective hallucination. On the contrary, it results from the calm solitary reasoning of rational agents, individuals wishing to promote their own self-interest, which in this case is limited to their security. Hobbes wants people to consent to the Sovereign and the state of society in their own best interest, voluntarily, with full awareness of why. In his work, no original misapprehension is thus necessary for reconciliation, or at least there should not be any. People choose peace. As soon as they become aware of the causes of the state of war, it becomes possible for them to escape it; they no longer experience the state of nature as an unavoidable destiny. As soon as they imagine the artifice of the contract and the Sovereign, they can indeed escape. It becomes rational for each, in terms of self-interest, to opt for the state of society. People are not evil. They are simply ignorant and lack imagination. The rationality of the passage from the state of nature to the state of society is important. The contract is not the sudden discovery by a horde of bloodthirsty barbarians of the beneficial virtues of rationality. Instead, it flows from thinking about the conditions of possibility and operation of the state of nature. People thus become of the opinion that the state of nature is simply the unintentional result of their rational behavior in a situation in which there is equality but insecurity. The equality and insecurity are the results of their own activity. However, the adjective “unintentional” could cause problems here because so long as no one has imagined the artifice of the contract, it remains rational for each to persevere in behavior characteristic of the state of nature. The result is thus the war of all against all, and it is intentional, even if all hate it. Yet inventing the contract does the trick: it provides a rational way out. The Sovereignty Race 229 Nonetheless, there is still a problem: of all the people who will soon come together in society, which one will be the Sovereign? Who will sit on the throne, hold the power and the glory? Here is finally an attractive position, a worthy prize for which all the envious and proud will happily tear each other apart. This is finally a reason for conflict that is worthwhile. But I am forgetting: they are rational, they are renouncing war for...

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