Hobbesian man is too self-interested to found any genuine body politic

Evidence

The crucial feature in Hobbes’s picture of man is not at all the realistic pessimism for which it has been praised in recent times. For if it were true that man is a being such as Hobbes would have him, he would be unable to found any body politic at all. Hobbes, indeed, does not succeed, and does not even want to succeed, in incorporating this being definitely into a political community. Hobbes’s Man owes no loyalty to his country if it has been defeated and he is excused for every treachery if he happens to be taken prisoner. Those who live outside the Commonwealth (for instance, slaves) have no further obligation toward their fellow-men but are permitted to kill as many as they can; while, on the contrary, “to resist the Sword of the Commonwealth in defence of another man, guilty or innocent, no man hath Liberty,” which means that there is neither fellowship nor responsibility between man and man. What holds them together is a common interest which may be “some Capitall crime, for which every one of them expecteth death”; in this case they have the right to “resist the Sword of the Commonwealth,” to “joyn together, and assist, and defend one another… For they but defend their lives.” — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 383

Categorization

• XREF: Arendt’s point that pure self-interest never yields real political community connects to the toolkit’s later concerns with how modern bureaucratic rationality enables exclusion without genuine fellowship. — connects to: Locke’s natural man is political and moral before property makes him self-interested. — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 187