2024.04.29 - The Origins of War version 2

Introduction: Understanding War

As I write, there are two disastrous wars being fought, one in Ukraine and one in Israel. If we wish to prevent or stop such wars, we must endeavour to understand what causes war in the first place, just as a doctor seeks to understand the causes of a disease in order to prescribe effective interventions against it. This essay will attempt to achieve such an understanding through a sustained investigation into the nature and causes of war. The desire for such an understanding motivated Thomas Hobbes to write his great treatise Leviathan (published in 1651), and it is with that great work that I will begin my analysis. 

By “war” Hobbes did not mean the phenomenon that we typically refer to when we use the word today, namely, armed conflict between political groups, especially nation-states. Certainly, Hobbes did understand that meaning of the word, and he was writing in the historical context of a just such a war, namely, the English civil war. However, he saw war between political factions as a secondary expression of a primary experience that structures the human condition. Put more simply, Hobbes saw wars between political groups as the manifestations of a tendency toward conflict that is endemic to human life. Below, I will examine this distinction between war as an armed conflict between political groups and war as a fundamental structure of the human condition through a close reading of chapters 13-15 of Leviathan. 

The layer diagram below visualizes the organizational structure of my close reading: