David Sarkies's Reviews > Leviathan

A Monster of a Book
12 Oct 2017

Woah, after three weeks I have finally managed to finish the behemoth of a book (which, ironically, Hobbes also wrote a book with that name) and I can now move onto something much lighter. Anyway, there was a time, when I was younger, when I was dreaming of one day getting married, having children, while becoming a hot shot lawyer (is it possible to actually do those two things) that I wanted to read this to my proposed child while he (or she) was still a baby. Mind you, I suggested this to one of my Christian friends, who proceeded to have a heart attack claiming that it was a humanist text similar to the writings of David Hume. Mind you, this particular person is now a lecturer in English Literature at Harvard University so I am still wondering why she was hugely shocked at this idea. Maybe it had something to do with wanting to read it to a baby.

Anyway, this is apparently the book that laid the foundation for political science as we know it today, though I am sort of scratching my head at this suggestion. First of all people have been writing about politics since people first tossed out their unelected kings and began to argue as to the best way to run a country, Mind you, those particular people, such as Plato, pretty quickly came to the conclusion that letting the mob make the rules on a principle of popularity was a pretty bad idea so decided to go back to the drawing board to work out how they can have a system where smart people actually run the country. Mind you, as my Classics history lecturer once told us, the problem with that idea was that all of the smart people actually had much better things to do than running a country. Okay, maybe Plato, being a smart person, would have been perfect for that position, but he seemed to end up spending more time trying to teach rulers how to be a smart ruler, and failing abysmally. As it turned out, being a smart ruler isn't a particularly easy thing to do, and in the end it is much easier to collect taxes and then use the said taxes to build palaces and to go around beating up all the people you don't like. At least Machiavelli had the right idea.

Hobbs seems to follow Plato's opinion, though he doesn't go as far as Machiavelli in actually telling rulers how to be successful rulers. Rather he spends the time exploring the nature of government, and instead of coming up with unworkable ideas, he basically looks at what is around him, and the traditions of the past, to come to the conclusion that the best form of government is a monarchical government based upon the principles of scripture. His theory is basically that because God is sovereign, and because God is the perfect ruler, then ergo the best form of government is that of a Christian king. However, as I have mentioned, the book is pretty chunky, and half of it deals with a theological exposition as to why the Bible supports monarchy. Well, not quite because he does come back to the point in the book of Samuel where the Israelites demand a king, and the main reason that happens is because the Israelites had decided that living under the constitution that God laid out was just that little too hard, and it seems that all of the nations around them were having a awful lot of fun, so why not just live like them. Well, for those of us who know their Bible know how that turned out.

A little context is probably in order though. Hobbes wrote this book during the English Civil war, which was an incredibly messy affair. Basically you had the Catholic monarch on one side wanting to do things his way, and the protestant parliament on the other side basically telling him to bugger off and mind his own business. Things got messier, and messier, and it resulted in Charles basically having his head lopped off. Well, that didn't particularly solve anything because, much like the French revolution, it left a power vacuum. Well, not quite, because they did have Oliver Cormwell, but it turned out that they didn't have an effective succession plan in place, and in the end, when Cormwell died, his son took over, with the resultant mess that ended up with them asking the king to come back and take over.

Hobbes' ideas probably won't sit well in our so called advanced Democracies these days, but then again look at who landed up as President of the United States – a Reality TV star. Okay, he wasn't the only actor to have been elected President, but at least Reagan was a tried and true union man (if you consider the Screen Actors Guild a union, but serious – it is). Mind you, we in Australia can't comment because we elected Tony Abbott – a misogynist that when asked what he felt about the LGBT community, the reply was 'they make me feel uncomfortable'. Actually, when asked to comment on an Australian soldier that was killed in Afghanistan, he reply was 'shit happens' (I kid you not). Well, at least you can say that that is the typical Australian response.

Mind you, while I'm no big fan of totalitarianism, you have to admit that this whole democratic experiment, at least in the west, is pretty messed up. Well, not quite, because the Germans have seemed to have worked it out quite well, and seem to be chugging along quite happily. Even the British seem to have some reasonably level headed people in power (and whatever you think of Teresa May, at least she is nowhere near as bad as Tony Abbot, or the Trumpet for that matter).

Yet, despite Hobbes not really being as applicable to our times, in a way he is. He was looking at a country that was in a complete mess and his solution was to go back to the tried and true method – a king – it certainly had to be better that people running around shooting each other. Maybe we could solve our problems by asking Angela Merkel to come over here and sort us out. Hey, at least the Norwegians made sure that the mining companies actually paid for all of the minerals they took out of their lands – over here we simply let them take them. If I were to walk into a shop and start helping myself to all of their goodies I'd be arrested. I guess that is what the matra of 'jobs, growth, and opportunity' gets you these days.