Individual Life, Community Life, and the Challenges of Liberal Government

 

By Tanya Hoke, Swarthmore College

 

 

At least as fundamental to political philosophy as the question of whether humanity is naturally good or bad is the question of whether we are by nature individual or community-oriented. Plato and Aristotle took as a given the idea that humanity was by nature a community-being, a “political animal.” Somewhere between Aristotle and Hobbes, however, this idea was lost, and most modern philosophers have spent their time trying to reconcile the idea of a naturally individualistic, egoistic humanity with the perceived necessity of life in society. Hobbes took the individual life of humanity to an extreme, postulating an inevitable state of perpetual conflict between men. Locke, in contrast, did not claim that men were naturally in conflict, but took humanity’s individual life, his life apart from the community, his life without interference from the community, to be even more important than did Hobbes. The two have different perspectives on how the individualistic nature of humanity is to be accommodated in society, but both take as a given that the independent existence of humanity is a defining element of his nature. In a return to the Ancients and in rebellion against the tradition of political thought which had developed under the influence of Locke and Hobbes, in the 19^th century Marx reintroduced the idea that human nature was a community-oriented one, what he called human species-life.

In this paper, instead of evaluating Hobbes, Locke, and Marx on the basis of the systems they devise to accommodate human nature, we will look at their most basic premises about human nature. In particular, we will address the question of whether humanity is by nature oriented toward an individual life or toward a community life. The answer to this question matters, because if human nature is not defined by independent life, as Hobbes and Locke maintain, then we may need to reconsider the very foundation of the modern political debate about the relationship between a citizen and his government.

Understanding what makes persons different from an animals is fundamental to an understanding of what is important about human nature. Hobbes believes that the great difference between humans and other living creatures is our curiosity and reason, which make us pursue knowledge with a “delight” which exceeds that of the other pleasures of life.1 All very well and good, but the pursuit of knowledge does not seem to be something which leads us toward a peaceful life. Instead, Hobbes believes that the nature of humanity contains the three causes of conflict—competition, diffidence, and glory—which, as a consequence, make the natural life of humanity “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”2 According to Hobbes, life for humans in the absence of government is a lonely, violent struggle to survive.

Locke claimed that Hobbes, and those who believed as he did, had made the mistake of attributing to human nature characteristics which actually only arise in the presence of government. He did not believe that humans would naturally tend toward a state of war with others. Indeed, for Locke the state of war was arrived at through a “sedate settled design,” rather than passion or instinct.3 He maintained that the natural state of humanity was actually one of “perfect freedom,” in which humans could “order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and persons, as they think fit…without asking leave, or depending upon the will of any other man.”4 While Locke did not agree with Hobbes’ conclusion that humans were naturally in conflict with one another, he did not attack the premise which led Hobbes to that conclusion—the assertion that a human is an individual, solitary being by nature. In fact, Locke’s description of the state of nature is one in which humanity is defined by his freedom from interference by others, by his possession of things, and by his independence from others. Though Hobbes and Locke disagree on the natural conditions of human interaction, they fundamentally agree on human nature—we are by nature individuals.

Hobbes and Locke’s shared belief about humanity’s individual nature has a serious impact on how they understand why society comes into being. For one thing, they both conclude that society is not a natural outgrowth of human nature, but instead must be consciously willed. It also must speak to humanity’s selfish interests: Hobbes says, “Of the voluntary acts of every man, the object is some good to himself.”5 For his part, Locke writes that “the great and chief end…of men’s uniting into commonwealths, and putting themselves under government, is the preservation of their property.”6 Hobbes and Locke agree that the purpose of entering into society is the preservation of a private and individual good. The implication of their shared view is clear—humanity does not have a natural instinct toward communal life. Humans, according to both Hobbes and Locke, enter society to avoid the state of war in which it is impossible for a person alone to protect his or her private interests in a satisfactory way. Humanity enters society and creates government in order to enable persons to better live out their individual lives. Society is a necessity, but it does not speak to the natural instincts of humanity.

The political systems which descend from such an understanding of the purpose of society are defined by the tension between humanity’s instinct to protect individual interests and the necessity of giving up power to the system in order to better protect those interests. Much of modern political discourse has centered on the question of how to balance the power of the system against individual interests. Achieving a logical balance may be one of the great irreconcilables of political philosophy, and the whole issue arises from the premise that the system only comes into existence in order to protect personal interests.

Where Hobbes and Locke finally diverge is in their arguments about how best to balance private interests with the necessity of empowering government. Hobbes writes that the only way to create a common power which will enable men to preserve themselves and get out from under the state of war is for men “to confer all their power and strength upon one man, or upon one assembly of men, that may reduce all their wills, by plurality of voices, unto one will.”7 The key here is that this contract between ruled and ruler confers absolute power on the ruler. The sovereign will have unlimited power as long as he is able to reasonably guarantee the individual interests of his subjects to avoid violent death.

The life that Hobbes proposes for humans in society is a miserable one, but he maintains that it is much better than the alternative—almost certain violent death in the state of war. Locke is not willing to live in the kind of misery Hobbes suggests. He is less concerned with individual survival than he is with individual property, and he takes serious issue with Hobbes’ argument that power should reside in a single individual, writing that such a system is incapable of remedying the evils of men.8 He would prefer the state of nature, “wherein men are not bound to submit to the unjust will of another,” to Hobbes’ commonwealth.9 Locke is concerned enough with the quality of individual survival, a quality which cannot be preserved under absolute power, that he would rather risk the state of war than exist under the system that Hobbes has put forward.

Though it may seem distasteful to modern liberal thought, Hobbes’ proposal makes more logical sense than Locke’s: the sovereign is given the unlimited power he needs to protect the lives of his subjects. The contract is dissolved only when the sovereign is shown to be unable to protect their individual interests in avoiding violent death. It turns out that logically, at least, Locke’s position is more difficult to defend than Hobbes’. In order to protect the private property which he considers vital to individual freedom and happiness, Locke proposes a system of limited power for the sovereign, but it is hard to see how Locke’s individual rights are to coexist with majority rule, as he suggests they should.10 And yet, the system that exists in the United States today owes more to Locke than it does to Hobbes. We have agreed to live together according to a fundamental ambiguity which is structured into the very premises of our system of government. Why do we accept it? Because of the liberty which Locke tells us is to be found in such a society.

What is interesting about freedom in Hobbes’ society is that, while he believes that men enter society out of purely egoistic impulses, he is not at all concerned with individual liberty. Under Hobbes’ Leviathan, the subject has very little liberty. His freedom consists solely in his right to do things which cannot be transferred through the contractual agreement with the sovereign, specifically, his right to protect his life to any extent necessary. Of course, this in no way means that the sovereign does not have the right to take a subject’s life; it only means that the subject has the right to resist and, if able, escape. For Hobbes, individual freedom is a much lesser priority than avoiding the state of war.

For Locke, in contrast, preserving freedom is the major priority of the state.11 There can be no part of the society which is exempted from the laws of that society because “where there is no law, there is no freedom.”12 Furthermore, a society where one member is exempted from the laws under which all others live, such as Hobbes’ Leviathan, is not a civil society at all. The great liberty for humans in society, according to Locke, is to be under no law but that of the commonwealth, and most importantly, not to be subject to the “inconstant, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary will of another man."13 In Locke’s society, persons have the freedom to pursue their own will in all matters which are not prescribed by law, and the law itself is dedicated to the ultimate purpose of the state—the preservation of private property.14 Locke’s liberty is freedom from the interference of either government or others into the private sphere of the individual, which includes the individual’s life, health, liberty, and, most particularly, possessions.

It is at this point that Hobbes and Locke, and modern American society, reach an impasse. We still argue about just how much power we are willing to give to government in order to guarantee what we believe matters most to us—our individual interests, and especially our right to define those interests for ourselves. This argument appears in such forms as the debate surrounding the Patriot Act—how much power should the government have in order to protect us from terrorist threats? Or in debates over taxes—how much of a limit should there be on the accumulation of private property? These are issues because, for the most part, we have accepted Hobbes’ and Locke’s premise that what naturally matters most to us is our individual interests and that government exists to protect those interests. Any debate tends to center on the extent of those interests, a reflection of the fundamental divergence between Locke and Hobbes: is survival our most important interest, as Hobbes maintains, or does it go beyond that to freedom and private property, as Locke argues? We are nowhere near reconciling the power of government with our private interests. Perhaps the problem is the premise we have taken for granted—are humans really by nature individual beings?

Writing in the 19^th century, Marx took issue with the very conceptual foundation of human political life as it had developed under the influence of Hobbes and Locke. Where Hobbes and Locke defined humanity according to individual interests and activities, Marx sought to differentiate humans from animals on the basis of “conscious life activity.15 While at first this may not seem so different from Hobbes’ emphasis on curiosity, Marx believed that humans are only conscious beings because we are a “species-being,” and species existence depends on a connection with others.16

Marx draws a bold line between what he calls the “political community” and “civil society,” the latter being characterized by the kind of systems which Hobbes and Locke suggested. In a political community, Marx writes, the person “regards himself as a communal being.” In civil society, however, “he is active as a private individual.17 The consequences of these different self-perceptions could not be more serious. By regarding himself or herself as a private individual in civil society, each person “treats other men as means, reduces himself to a means, and becomes the plaything of alien powers."18 According to Marx, the direct result of assuming humanity’s private, individual nature is that it becomes reality, alienating each of us from ourselves and others to such a degree that we are able to treat other human beings as objects to be used in the pursuit of our own private interests.

Marx also takes issue with the difference Locke maintains between human rights and the rights of the citizen. Marx asks, “Who is this man distinguished from the citizen?"19 And really, we might wonder—does something fundamentally change about human beings when they enter society so that our rights as citizens are not the same as our human rights? Marx says no, that the fundamental problem in distinguishing human rights from the rights of the citizen is that, “None of the so-called rights of man goes beyond the egoistic man, the man withdrawn into himself, his private interest and his private choice, and separated from the community as a member of civil society."20 The rights that Locke in particular considers most important to maintain in society are ones which are fundamentally opposed to society. As far as Marx is concerned, humanity, the real species-being, cannot find real freedom within such a civil society.

In fact, Marx maintains that those who seek to liberate humanity through politics actually “reduce citizenship…to a mere means for preserving these so-called rights of man."21 In this context, what Marx claims is humanity’s natural impulse towards a species-life is twisted into a means of serving the egoistic part of human nature. As a consequence, “the sphere in which man acts as a member of the community is degraded below that in which he acts as a fractional being."22 If we accept Marx’s premise that humanity is only truly itself, only truly free, when persons live as a species-being, then it is clear that the civil societies created under the influence of Hobbes and Locke are fundamental impediments to the realization of true human nature and, as a consequence, human freedom. Humanity is not meant to be ruthlessly individualistic.

What does this mean for us today? If we take Marx seriously, we must acknowledge that the system of government we have in place in the United States today suffers from fundamental philosophical flaws which have very real consequences. Under the influence of Hobbes and Locke, we have created a civil society which is designed to protect individual interests at almost any cost and which demands nothing from its citizens in return. Plato and Aristotle would be appalled by the extent to which we have pushed free speech. The religious right is certainly appalled by the extent to which we have pushed the individual’s “right” to choose his own moral values, regardless of their impact on the community as a whole. Our ruthless pursuit of individuality through civil society, in Marx’s eyes, has led us to deny our own human nature. Our lack of unifying values, in Aristotle’s eyes, makes us nothing more than an alliance of individuals—this is no great society.

As Michael J. Sandel points out in Democracy’s Discontent, “The public philosophy by which we live cannot secure the liberty it promises, because it cannot inspire the sense of community and civic engagement that liberty requires.”23 Without a sense of ourselves as members of a community, and all the consequences for individual interests that membership in a community entails, we cannot achieve the liberty that Locke has promised us.

It is difficult for someone who has grown up within this system to even consider what an alternative would look like. What seems fairly clear, however, is that the system as it currently exists has very real failings. Marx points out to us the awful consequences of believing humanity to be a purely individual being, while Sandel makes it clear that a system of government based on such a belief cannot support itself for long. Marx’s philosophy, however, has been disqualified in its application over the course of the last century. The alternative, a type of republic which would, as Sandel says, “cultivate in citizens the qualities of character self-government requires,” would demand that certain values be accepted and imposed on citizens, a concept which would be difficult for many Americans to stomach.

More and more, it seems to be the case that government simply was not meant to exist on the scale which it has reached in modern times. When Plato and Aristotle imagined the city-state, it was a small fraction of the size of the United States today. Even Hobbes and Locke probably could not have conceived of the scale with which we are dealing. Part of the reason we have accepted liberal concepts of freedom is because we cannot at present imagine a way to unite a population of nearly 300 million people under a common set of values. Perhaps we were never meant to. Maybe it is time to accept that good government, a government which speaks to humanity’s true nature, can only exist on a much smaller scale. In order to achieve Athens, we may have to match its size, and this is a matter worthy of further consideration.◦ 

©Tanya Hoke, 2006

 

 

 

 

 

Notes