“goats and monkeys!”: shakespeare, hobbes, and the state of nature

MOORE: “GOATS AND MONKEYS!”: SHAKESPEARE, HOBBES, AND THE STATE
OF NATURE
liberty allows us to create political community out of chaos and to dismantle political
community with relative regularity. According to Camille Wells Slights a new conception
of individual identity emerged in the sixteenth century, which supplanted the “older
political concept, in which social communities were taken as givens, with a new concept
of political atomism, in which the basic social unit is the individual, whose membership
in community must be created.” 32 This conception of political community as a
manufactured thing (as opposed to a divinely ordained thing), a system produced
collectively by a mass of autonomous individuals is clearly on display in King Lear.
Towards a Secular Political Science in King Lear
In his Leviathan, Hobbes contends that we are born as a species with rights
limited only by our capacities. Our foremost right is the right to preserve our lives insofar
as we are able, using whatever means are at our disposal. It follows then that we have a
right to seize or secure anything that we believe will be conducive to our own
preservation and our good. Thus, humanity’s primal condition is one in which “every
man has a right to every thing, even to one another’s body.” 33 As a consequence of this
radical individual liberty we are all understandably endangered by our fellow humans’
pursuit of security and felicity. Our situation is especially precarious because of the
general equality that Hobbes sees between all people. As far as humans go, he claims,
“the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machination or by
32 Camille Wells Slights, “Slaves and Subjects in Othello,” Shakespeare Quarterly 48, no. 4
(1997): 378.
33 Hobbes, Leviathan, 98.
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