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Social Peace as a Collective Good or How well does ‘Well does Leviathan…?’ undermine ‘Can Leviathan…?’?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

John M. Orbell  and
Brent M. Rutherford
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British Journal of Political Science , Volume 4 , Issue 4 , October 1974 , pp. 501 - 510
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1974

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References

1 This is not the place for listing an extensive bibliography of this well-known work. A useful, although by now somewhat out of date, critical review is Jacob, Herbert and Lipsky, Michael, ‘Outputs, Structure, and Power: an Assessment of Changes in the Study of State and Local Government’, in Irish, Marian D., ed., Political Science: Advance of the Discipline (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1968), p. 220.Google Scholar

2 Especially Olson, Mancur, The Logic of Collective Action (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard, 1965)Google Scholar; Frohlich, Norman, Oppenheimer, Joe A. and Young, Oran R., Political Leadership a Collective Goods (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971).Google Scholar

3 Olson, , Logic of Collective Action, p.2.Google Scholar

4 See especially Hardin, G., ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’, Science, 162 (1968) 1243–8Google ScholarPubMed; R. M. Dawes, J. Delay and W. Champlin, ‘The Decision to Pollute’, Journal of Environment and Planning, forthcoming. The well-known prisoner's dilemma has much the same structure as the commons tragedy: it involves two individuals rather than a society, but demonstrates how both

4 See especially Hardin, G., ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’, Science, 162 (1968) 1243–8;Google ScholarPubMed R. M. Dawes, J. Delay and W. Champlin, ‘The Decision to Pollute’, Journal of Environment and Planning, forthcoming. The well-known prisoner's dilemma has much the same structure as the commons tragedy: it involves two individuals rather than a society, but demonstrates how both can lose through rational action taken without the opportunity for co-ordination of behaviour. See, for a discussion of the commons logic in these terms, Dawes, Robyn M., ‘The Commons Dilemma: an N-Person Mixed-Motive Game with a Dominating Strategy for Defection’, Oregon Research Bulletin, Vol. 13, No. 2.Google Scholar See also the very considerable work of Rapoport, Anatol in this area, particularly, Strategy and Conscience (New York: Shocken, 1964);Google Scholar with Chammah, A. M, Prisoner's Dilemma (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1965).Google Scholar

5 Frohlich, et al. , Political Leadership, p. 18.Google Scholar

6 Frohlich, et al. , Political Leadership, p. 25.Google Scholar

7 It is important to notice, however, that peace might not be quite the unambiguous public good Hobbes assumes it to be. Under some conditions of income distribution, peace might cost one segment of the population the only means, violence, that they have available for acquiring a life that is at all acceptable — they might, in short, have nothing to lose but their chains. To the extent this is the case, Hobbes's first law of nature is not, in fact, a universal behavioural principle and the justification for Leviathan that he builds on it is qualified. This would seem to be the thin edge of the Marxist wedge against Hobbes. See Head, J. H. and Shoup, C. S., ‘Public Goods, Private Goods and Ambiguous Goods’, Economic Journal, LXXIX (1969), 567–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 In Hobbes: ‘Nor is the joining together of a small number of men that gives them this security, because in small numbers small additions on the one side or the other make the advantage of strength so great as is sufficient to carry the victory, and therefore gives encouragement to an invasion.’ And later: ‘For being distracted in opinions concerning the best use and application of their strength, they do not help but hinder one another, and reduce their strength by mutual opposition to nothing; whereby they are easily not only subdued by a very few that agree together, but also, when there is no common enemy, they make war upon each other for their particular interest.’ Leviathan (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1958), p. 140.Google Scholar

9 Leviathan p. 110. Or, in more modern terms: ‘nice guys finish last’.

10 Leviathan, p. 115.

11 We are less concerned here with the commodiousness part of the model (peace → commodiousness) then we are with the peace part (Leviathan → peace) if only because of the high positive correlation revealed in our data between peace and commodiousness. All we claim to have shown is that these things go together, as indeed Hobbes seemed to expect. Commodiousness is obviously a less important part of Hobbes's thinking than is social peace.

12 Leviathan, p. 150.

13 However, there is the danger of a tautological definition of Leviathan in Hobbes when he comes close to arguing that Leviathan can be recognized by its consequences; Leviathan exists when there is peace and does not when there is not. If Hobbes in fact argued this way his case would be impossible to test because it would be true by definition. This would make his whole case far less impressive and interesting but, we believe, he knew enough to skirt such a position.

14 Sharpe, L. J., ‘American Democracy Reconsidered’, British Journal of Political Science, III (1973). 1–28,129–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15 See Downs, Anthony, Opening Up the Suburbs (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973)Google Scholar for an important discussion of the consequences of failing to take such redistributive action in the United States and the low probability of it actually happening.

16 Leviathan, p. 86.

17 Leviathan, p. 86. For a development of the theme of possessive individualism in Hobbes and others, see Macpherson, C. B., The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962)Google Scholar and his collected essays around the same theme: Democratic Theory: Essays in Retrieval (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973).Google Scholar His position has been attacked by Laslett, Peter, ‘Market Society and Political Theory’, Historical Journal, VII (1964)Google Scholar, 150–4, p. 152. See also Laslett, Peter, The World We Have Lost (London: Methuen, 1965).Google Scholar

18 Brickman, Philip and Campbell, Donald T., ‘Hedonic Relativism and Planning the Good Society’, in Appelby, M. H., ed., Adaptation-Level Theory: A Symposium (New York: Academic Press, 1971), pp. 287–301.Google Scholar For other related ideas in this small but valuable literature, see Easterlin, Richard A., ‘Does Economic Growth Improve the Human Lot? Some Empirical Evidence’, in David, Paul A. and Reder, Melvin W., eds., Nations and Households in Economic Growth: Essays in Honor of Moses Abramovitz (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, forthcoming).Google Scholar

19 Brickman, and Campbell, , ‘Hedonic Relativism’, p. 287.Google Scholar

20 Most formally, see Davies, James C., ‘Toward a Theory of Revolution’, American Sociological Review, XXVII (1962), 5–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Gurr, Ted Robert, Why Men Rebel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970).Google Scholar

21 Olson, , Logic of Collective Action, pp. 1–2.Google Scholar

22 Frohlich, Norman and Oppenheimer, Joe A., ‘I Get By With A Little Help From My Friends’, World Politics (10, 1970), p. 119.Google Scholar

23 Such an argument has been made by Dawes, Delay and Champlin in their ‘The Decision to Pollute’, by means of a computer simulation.

24 Remembering that peace is a ‘non-lumpy’ public good (one that must be supplied on a continuous basis) and assuming, therefore, that a continuous succession of peaceable acts is necessary, it would seem possible to build up peaceable expectations on the part of others by a series of relatively small peaceable acts. Thus individuals who ‘seek peace and try to follow it’ would be provided with a means of contributing toward this public good in a manner that does not involve impossible costs to themselves. This ‘strategy of peace’ is similar to the strategy of ‘decomposition’ advocated by Thomas Schelling as a device for building up the credibility of threats and promises in the process of bargaining. The Strategy of Conflict (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960), p. 45.Google Scholar