Hobbes’s state of nature reframed humans as atomized, appetitive competitors

Evidence

In his Leviathan (1651), Hobbes developed a mechanical model of society as a solution to social disorder. The state of nature was a state of chaos, anarchy, and fear brought about by the material appetites of each individual for competition, domination, and glory. Like disorderly nature, disorderly humans were basically hostile, unfriendly, and violent. Hobbes astutely discerned that neither the communal model of organic society in which the commons was shared by all, nor the hierarchical model that every person was a link in a vast social chain extending from peasant to king was applicable to England’s seventeenth-century market-oriented economy. — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 812

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Hobbes’s sovereign governs atomized society externally as a technician operates a machine — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 816; Hobbes locates his hypothesized state of nature in the living present of Americas’ peoples — , Stephanie B. Martens - Civilization and…, 24; Hobbes reduced human free will, appetite, and liberty to mechanical motion — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 810 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Hobbes reduced human free will, appetite, and liberty to mechanical motion #responds-to (0.85) — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 810
• Hobbes locates his hypothesized state of nature in the living present of Americas’ peoples #expands (0.80) — , Stephanie B. Martens - Civilization and…, 24
• Mechanistic reduction extends nature’s instrumentalisation to humans rather than ending dualism #expands (0.80) — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 458
• Hobbes turned the abstract enemy into every individual human being #expands (0.75) — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 352
• Hobbes prefigured the tragedy-of-the-commons logic two centuries early #expands (0.75) — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 816