Thomas Hobbes Rolls Over in his Grave

The novels, short stories and essays that I write all have to do with the human condition, with human nature, and attempt to analyze and explicate all that it means to be human. I spent 8 years in the Army, 30 more as a Criminal Justice Administrator, and now 9 years as an adjunct professor of philosophy at various colleges.

The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes was also a student of human nature. He pictured a time in the long ago past of human kind in which every human had a right to anything that could be begged, borrowed, or stolen. He said that to live in such a State of Nature was to live a life that was short, nasty and brutish. Hobbes believed that human beings are by nature selfish and self interested, and that as such they came to realize that it was in their own interest to cooperate with others in order to have peace and security. In short, people decided to contract with one another in order to secure this peace and security; however, Hobbes knew that some would not honor the contract.

The contract would have to be enforced by some form of Sovereign, be it a King, Queen, Aristocracy or Legislative body. So long, Hobbes said, as the Sovereign provided an atmosphere of peace and security the Sovereign must be obeyed. When and if the time came that peace and security were no longer being provided civil disobedience, even rebellion and revolution, was in order.We see much of Hobbes in justification of the American Revolution and ensuing Constitution ( or contract).

I did not sign the social contract under which I have lived all my life, but I did spend many years working for the sovereign to enforce that contract, both in the military and in government. None of us actually signed the social contract, other than by not breaking the rules of the contract.

It seems to me that in this time of economic turmoil, corporate greed and imcompetence, disappearing jobs and pensions, and rampant government regulatory failure, that I am beginning to hear many voices which in reality are calling for a new contract. Has our Sovereign failed? Is there peace and security? How are we now to define what it means to be at peace and secure? It seems to me that we are neither at this point. We are everywhere at war and no one is secure.