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Hobbes and the Ants
Thomas Hobbes, also known as The Monster of Malmesbury for being an atheist and making God so mad that he caused the great fire of London 1666, also had a bleak, some may say realistic, view of human nature. In his view, humans have impulses, freedom, and self-preservation. This means humans just want to do whatever they want to do unimpeded and they also want to survive. This is a problem because freedom, when left unchecked, leads to issues with self-preservation. The only way to reign people in is via the Social Contract and in order to enforce the Social Contract he thought we need an extremely strong sovereign, be it a King, or a Dictator, or a strong-armed democracy, only a strong sovereign will do.
One possible objection to Hobbes though includes an appeal to the behavior of ants. There is a section of the Leviathan named: “Why Certain Creatures Without Reason, Or Speech, Do Nevertheless Live In Society, Without Any Coercive Power.” By “certain creatures” he means “ants and bees,” for the sake of simplicity, we can say he is talking about ants. The question being asked is, it seems like animals like “ants” work together for the collective good apparently without being coerced. Why can’t humans do that?
Hobbes writes: “It is true, that certain living creatures, as Bees, and Ants, live sociably one with another, (which are therefore by Aristotle numbered amongst Political…
