Hobbes was right that avoiding Warre is a critical priority for humans. He was also correct in anticipating that once states formed and began monopolizing the means of violence and enforcing their laws, killings declined. The Leviathan controlled the Warre of “every man, against every man.” Under Western and Northern European states, murder rates today are only 1 per 100,000 or less; public services are effective, efficient, and plentiful; and people have come as close to liberty as at any time in human history.
But there was also much that Hobbes didn’t get right. For one, it turns out that stateless societies are quite capable of controlling violence and putting a lid on conflict, though as we’ll see this doesn’t bring much liberty. For another, he was too optimistic about the liberty that states would bring. Indeed, Hobbes was wrong on one defining issue (and so is the international community, we might add): might does not make right, and it certainly does not make for liberty. Life under the yoke of the state can be nasty, brutish, and short too.
Let us start with this latter point.
Shock and Awe
It wasn’t simply that the Nigerian state didn’t want to prevent the anarchy in Lagos or that the state in the Democratic Republic of Congo decided it would be best not to enforce laws and let rebels kill people. They lacked the capacity to do these things. The capacity of a state is its ability to achieve its objectives. These objectives often include enforcing laws, resolving conflicts, regulating and taxing economic activity, and providing infrastructure or other public services. They may also include waging wars. The capacity of the state depends partly on how its institutions are organized, but even more critically, it depends on its bureaucracy. You need bureaucrats and state employees to be present so that they can implement the state’s plans, and you need these bureaucrats to have the means and motivation to carry out their mission. The first person to spell this vision out was the German sociologist Max Weber, who was inspired by the Prussian bureaucracy, which formed the backbone of the German state in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
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In 1938, the German bureaucracy had a problem. The governing National Socialist German Workers’ (Nazi) Party had decided to expel all Jews from Austria, which had recently been annexed by Germany. But a bureaucratic bottleneck quickly emerged. Things had to be done properly, so each Jew had to assemble a number of papers and documents to be able to leave. This took an inordinate amount of time. The man who occupied desk IV-B-4 in the SS (Schutzstaffel, a Nazi paramilitary organization), Adolf Eichmann, was put in charge. Eichmann came up with the idea for what the World Bank would nowadays call a “one-stop shop.” He developed an assembly line system that integrated all the offices concerned—the Ministry of Finance, the income tax people, the police, and the Jewish leaders. He also sent Jewish functionaries abroad to solicit funds from Jewish organizations so that the Jews could buy the visas needed for emigration. As Hannah Arendt put it in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem:
At one end you put in a Jew who still has some property, a factory, or a shop, or a bank account, and he goes through the building from counter to counter, from office to office, and comes out at the other end without any money, without any rights, with only a passport on which it says: “You must leave the country within a fortnight. Otherwise you will go to a concentration camp.”
As a result of the one-stop shop, 45,000 Jews left Austria in eight months. Eichmann was promoted to the rank of Obersturmbannführer (lieutenant colonel), and moved on to become the transport coordinator for the Final Solution, which involved solving many similar bureaucratic bottlenecks to facilitate mass murder.
Here was a powerful, capable state at work, a bureaucratic Leviathan. But it was using this capacity not for solving conflicts or stopping Warre, but for harassing and dispossessing and then murdering Jews. The German Third Reich, building on the tradition of Prussian bureaucracy and its professional military, certainly counts as a Leviathan by Hobbes’s definition. Just as Hobbes wanted, Germans, at least a good portion of them, did “submit their Wills, every one to his Will, and their Judgments, to his Judgment.” Indeed, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger told students, “The Führer alone is the present and future German reality and its law.” The German state also generated awe in the population, not just among Hitler’s supporters. Not many wanted to cross it or break its laws.
Awe turned into fear, with the SA (Sturmabteilung, brown-shirted paramilitaries), SS, and Gestapo roaming the streets. Germans spent their nights in cold sweats, waiting for the hard knocks on their doors and the jackboots in their living rooms that would take them to some basement for interrogation or draft them to go to the Eastern front to face almost certain death. The German Leviathan was feared much more than the anarchy in Nigeria or the Congo. And for good reason. It imprisoned, tortured, and killed huge numbers of Germans—social democrats, Communists, political opponents, homosexuals, and Jehovah’s Witnesses. It murdered 6 million Jews, many of whom were German citizens, and 200,000 Roma; according to some estimates, the number of Slavs it murdered in Poland and Russia exceeded 10 million.
What Germans and citizens of the territories Germany occupied suffered under Hitler’s reign wasn’t Hobbes’s Warre. It was the war of the state against its citizens. It was dominance and murder. Not the sort of thing Hobbes was hoping for from his Leviathan.
Reeducation Through Labor
Fear of the all-powerful state is not confined to abhorrent exceptions such as the Nazi state. It is much more common than that. In the 1950s, China was still the darling of many Europeans on the left, Maoist thought was de rigueur in French cafés, and Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book was a choice item in trendy booksellers. After all, here was the Chinese Communist Party that had thrown off the yoke of Japanese colonialism and Western imperialism and was busy building a capable state and socialist society out of the ashes.
On November 11, 1959, the secretary of the Communist Party in Guangshan County, Zhang Fuhong, was attacked. A man called Ma Longshan took the lead and started to kick him. Others set on him with fists and feet. He was beaten bloody and his hair ripped out in patches, his uniform was torn to threads, and he was left barely able to walk. By November 15, after repeated further attacks, he could only lie on the floor while he was kicked and punched and the rest of his hair torn out. By the time he was dragged home he had lost control of his bodily functions and could no longer eat or drink. The next day he was attacked again, and when he asked for water, it was refused. On November 19, he died.
This harrowing depiction is painted by Yang Jisheng in his book Tombstone. He recalls how earlier that year he was urgently called home from boarding school because his father was starving. Upon reaching home in Wanli, he noticed that
the elm tree in front of our house had been reduced to a barkless trunk, and even its roots had been dug up and stripped, leaving only a ragged hole in the earth. The pond was dry; neighbors said it had been drained to dredge for rank-tasting mollusks that had never been eaten in the past. There was no sound of dogs barking, no chickens running about … Wanli was like a ghost town. Upon entering our home, I found utter destitution; there was not a grain of rice, nothing edible whatsoever, and not even water in the vat … My father was half-reclined on his bed, his eyes sunken and lifeless, his face gaunt, the skin creased and flaccid … I boiled congee from the rice I’d brought … but he was no longer able to swallow. Three days later he departed this world.