Astral Codex Ten

Hobbes

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Hobbes

Article

Hobbes is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between April 08, 2021 and July 15, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “Hobbes’ Leviathan is a classic example”; “It disagrees with Hobbes and other legal centrists”; “Hobbes, founder of the political Right, and Rousseau, founder of the political Left”. It most often appears alongside Athens, California, Dunbar’s number.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 4
  • Issue count: 4
  • First seen: April 08, 2021
  • Last seen: July 15, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Your Book Review: Order Without Law
April 08, 2021 · Original source
His own background is in the law-and-economics camp5, which studies the law and its effects in terms of economic theory. Among other things, this camp notably produced the Coase theorem.6 But law-and-economics theorists tend to put too much emphasis on the state. Hobbes’ Leviathan is a classic example:
Inline links: law-and-economics, 5, Coase theorem, 6
Hobbes apparently saw no possibility that some nonlegal system of social control – such as the decentralized enforcement of norms – might bring about at least a modicum of order even under conditions of anarchy. (The term anarchy is used here in its root sense of a lack of government, rather than in its colloquial sense of a state of disorder. Only a legal centralist would equate the two.)
Throughout his scholarly career, Coase has emphasized the capacity of individuals to work out mutually advantageous arrangements without the aid of a central coordinator. Yet in his famous article “The Problem of Social Cost,” Coase fell into a line of analysis that was wholly in the Hobbesian tradition. In analyzing the effect that changes in law might have on human interactions, Coase implicitly assumed that governments have a monopoly on rulemaking functions. … Even in the parts of his article where he took transaction costs into account, Coase failed to note that in some contexts initial rights might arise from norms generated through decentralized social processes, rather than from law.
Your Book Review: The Dawn Of Everything
June 10, 2022 · Original source
Disqualified from winning the contest due to its unapologetic length, the Discourse’s depiction of an original state of nature populated by noble savages, a state eventually sundered by agriculture and the invention of private property, was monumentally influential. His genius move was to politicize the past, offering up an alternative mirror to Hobbes’ view, itself already political, which portrayed life in prehistorical societies with that oft-repeated phrase: “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Hobbes, founder of the political Right, and Rousseau, founder of the political Left, both built their arguments on the bedrock of prehistory. But on different bedrocks. The lesson being: if you want to change human society, change the past first.
Enter The Dawn of Everything, which tries to change the past by taking a third way orthogonal to the Rousseau/Hobbes spectrum. Published to widespread acclaim just six months ago, it was blurbed by the likes of Noam Chomsky and Nassim Taleb, and given glowing reviews in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and many others. A doorstopping tome of public-facing but dense scholarship, it harkens back to back to an older age—it even has overwrought Victorian section titles calligraphed in ALL CAPS.
The original hunter-gatherer tribes are often reasoned about via the analogy of contemporary hunter-gatherer tribes (or at least, those in recent history surveyed by anthropologists). Yet which tribe is an “appropriate” analogy changes depending whether the reasoner is a follower of Hobbes or Rousseau; a modern Hobbesian might prefer to use the war-like Yanomami as the analogy, whereas a follower of Rousseau might prefer the more peaceful and egalitarian Hadza, Pygmies, or !Kung.
Your Book Review: Njal’s Saga
June 16, 2023 · Original source
There can’t be an infinite exchange rate between peace and justice. But what is the exchange rate? Do you, like Hobbes, accept any amount of oppression to keep society running? Or, like the most radical of protesters, do you think that any day that the front page NYT headline isn’t EVERYTHING FINE, DON’T WORRY is a good day to burn cities?
Book Review: Arguments About Aborigines
July 15, 2025 · Original source
Edgerton and Henrich don’t come out of nowhere. They’re the modern reincarnations of Hobbes and Rousseau - with the former calling primitive life “nasty, brutish, and short”, and the latter idealizing it as an Edenic paradise to which we could only dream of returning. Nowadays both sides are in disrepute - young anthropology students are taught to abjure Hobbesians with the scornful incantation “White Man’s Burden”, and Rousseauians by uttering “Noble Savage”. Still, Edgerton and Henrich are proofs that ideas can never be fully banished, and under the surface the debate continues.
It also seems, in other ways, pointless, cruel, and dysfunctional along axes I didn’t even realize were possible. So let’s dig up the corpses of Hobbes and Rousseau and let them duke it out some more.
Hobbes might ask - why worry about the why question? Sometimes old people get the upper hand in a society and successfully implement a gerontocracy that benefits them while screwing over everyone else. There’s no law of physics saying this can’t happen, and there are plenty of Substack articles with the word “Boomer” in the title asserting that it happens even today. If young men and women can’t band together and protect their interests, that’s a skill issue.