GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY 1938 - 1947.pdf - Rare Books at ...

SOCIETY. ITS NATURE AND ORIGIN 479
Contract theory. These criticisms have already been indicated
in Chapter I in connection with the similar
view advanced by Glaucon and Adcimantus in the second
book of Plato's Republic. Briefly, there is no evidence for a
pre-social condition of man and Hobbes's state of nature
is, therefore, a fiction. Hobbes might perhaps be prepared
to admit this, while at the same time maintaining that
the admission did not invalidate his theory, for 'the opera-
tion of some form of implied Contract is', he might say,
'a logical presupposition of the maintenance of any society
formed by beings who acknowledge no motive save that
of self-interest, and this is all that I ever meant to assert'.
Whether people are in fact purely self-interested is a
question for ethics, and in the criticisms of Psychological
Hedonism and of Subjectivism contained in Chapters XI
and XII, I have ventured to suggest doubts as to whether
a theory of universal Egoism is logically maintainable.
Here it is sufficient to point out that, if people do in fact
and
acknowledge no motive except that of self-interest,
Hobbes is at once the most extreme and the most consistent
of all those who hold this view, then it is impossible to
account for that degree of co-operation and trust which
are required for the formation of the Contract. Men come
together, Hobbes says in effect, in order to form society.
But the coming together entails a willingness to co-operate
on the part of those who come, and a willingness to
co-operate implies a social sentiment in the form of a
recognition of the need for rules, and a social disposition
which is prepared to observe them. These cannot, therefore,
be as Hobbes maintained, exclusively the product of a
contract to form society; they must in some degree have
pre-existed such a contract. Man, in other words, as Plato
and Aristotle saw, must be regarded as having been in
some degree a social animal from the first
(2) THE POWER OF HOBBES'S RULER NOT
UNLIMITED. Secondly, it is impossible on Hobbes's
premises to justify the unlimited character of the power