Is man a wolf to man?
Listen and subscribe your favorite audio platform
You’ve probably experienced this scene when you’re eyeing the last free seat on public transport as someone rushes and crushes you to get it.
Or when you enter a line and someone elbows their way in ahead of you, exuding from that ridiculous moment a sense of satisfaction matched only by their vanity.
In short, our like-minded people compete in the imagination to find reasons to confront each other.
It’s hard not to tell yourself, even in the most basic domestic scenes, that man is a wolf to man…
In 1651 England was in the midst of a civil war, Thomas Hobbes then addressed his countrymen directly in his famous work; Leviathan. Faced with the urgency of the situation, he seeks to define political power dependent on individuals, embodied in the figure of the sovereign.
At first, he carries out a pure thought experiment where he imagines a state of nature.
The state of nature is the absence of rules. Men are plunged into a state of pre-war, where everyone is constantly in danger.
Through this anthropological assessment, Hobbes shows that the desire of men is directed towards the same object and precisely because they desire the same things, they become enemies.
The other, the one who is not you, the stranger, who, for example, occupies the last free seat on the bus, is then perceived as an opponent, a competitor who must be destroyed in order to get what we want without fear.
In this case, here are the rest of our butts…
Homo homini is lupus – man is a wolf to man. Well… actually this famous quote is not taken Leviathanbut of a citizen The text written by Hobbes in Paris in 1641. in November. That’s 10 years ago.
So how to overcome this constant competition? A contract is necessary, says Hobbs.
The treaty establishes here the convention that men renounce their right to everything and give their power to the representative of the City. It can be a monarch or a political assembly that has the function of caring for the people and working for the common good.
This is how the transition from the state of nature to the political order represented by the state takes place.
While in nature man obeyed the law of the strongest, now he obeys laws in the state of law.
On the contrary, the philosopher affirms that people remain protected by laws that make any abuse of power by the state impossible.
Well, unfortunately for us, Thomas Hobbes didn’t solve the problem of rush hour on public transport…
Source: Le Figaro
