Sarah asked:

What would Hobbes have thought about the events of September 11th? Also, What would Locke
have felt about September 11th?

============

Briefly, Hobbes was a maximal statist and Locke a minimal statist, and each would regard the events
of September 11th as a horrible consequence of the failure to implement his respective political
philosophy.

Hobbes believed that the primary motivator of human action is not so much a positive goal as the
avoidance of what is most feared. He further held that human beings fear nothing as much as the
prospect of a violent death. Consequently, they would give up freedom to say and do as they please
with their property if they knew that such forfeiture were a necessary condition of avoiding a violent
death. In Hobbes' view, the forfeiture of freedom requires transferring all individual rights to a
monarch. The monarch's job is to protect his subjects from danger, terrorize those who would
contemplate endangering them, and punish those whom terror does not deter.

Hobbes would point out that because there is no such monarch in the United States, those who
inflicted violent death, on a scale unimaginable to people in Hobbes' day, were not deterred that
September morn. He would also note with some satisfaction that Americans now seem willing to
forfeit their freedom — airport by airport, stadium by stadium, street by street — to a
monarch-substitute, the Federal Government. To the extent that they do this, to that extent they
demonstrate their preference of safety to freedom when the choice is put before them starkly enough.

Locke thought quite differently. He believed that the sole job of government is to protect the people
living under it as they peacefully deploy their property in individual pursuits of happiness. He was not
favorably impressed with the record of absolute monarchs in protecting their subjects from violent
death. Rather, he regarded absolute monarchs as a major threat to the lives, limbs, and property of
their hapless subjects, a threat that had to be reined in through a system of governmental checks and
balances.

Were he resurrected to comment on September 11th, I predict that Locke would note with horror the
historical record of governments, even the one explicitly founded on his political philosophy, to
accumulate powers that go far beyond protecting property rights. He would also cite the frequency, in
the two centuries between his time and ours, with which governments have militarily collided with
each other in the furtherance, not of the universal interest in peace and prosperity, but rather the
particular, private interests of a few. He would lament that this has happened at the cost of millions of
lives and trillions of dollars coercively taken via taxation. He would, I suspect, argue that modern
world wars, all fomented by non-Lockean states, are hardly more desirable than the "war of all
against all" that Hobbes' absolute monarch is supposed to prevent. He would not take seriously the
suggestion that the answer to squabbling megastates is a global totalitarianism regime from which no
refuge is possible. Locke would make clear that the American government's steadily increasing
involvement over the last century in the affairs of Europe, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East
can find no justification in his doctrine of government. Finally, he might conclude that such
involvement has only made America vulnerable to attack from those who resent that involvement and
who would, absent that involvement, not be sufficiently motivated to cross land and sea to kill
thousands of Americans in a terroristic assault.

Anthony Flood