Hobbes’ own model undermines the durable community he intended to found

Evidence

Thus membership in any form of community is for Hobbes a temporary and limited affair which essentially does not change the solitary and private character of the individual (who has “no pleasure, but on the contrary a great deale of griefe in keeping company, where there is no power to overawe them all”) or create permanent bonds between him and his fellow-men. It seems as though Hobbes’s picture of man defeats his purpose of providing the basis for a Commonwealth and gives instead a consistent pattern of attitudes through which every genuine community can easily be destroyed. This results in the inherent and admitted instability of Hobbes’s Commonwealth, whose very conception includes its own dissolution—“when in a warre (forraign, or intestine,) the enemies get a final Victory …then is the Commonwealth dissolved, and every man at liberty to protect him-selfe”—an instability that is all the more striking as Hobbes’s primary and frequently repeated aim was to secure a maximum of safety and stability. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 384

Categorization

• XREF: Previews Arendt’s core claim that bourgeois society’s atomism and conformism carry the seeds of totalitarian dissolution — a tension between stated aim and structural outcome. — connects to: Hobbes’s civility is a fragile, ever-in-progress pacified space built by contract, not brute protection. — , Stephanie B. Martens - Civilization and…, 49