The Disposition to Seek Peace in Hobbes’s Leviathan: A Question of Risk and Trust?

Abstract Even though Hobbes is primarily remembered as a philosopher of war, the focus of my interpretation is on the laws of nature and covenants as two central devices which Hobbes enlists in Leviathan as creating the conditions of peace. Hobbes calls the laws of nature ‘articles of peace’, whereas covenants – or contracts with deferred performance – presuppose (at least temporarily) the relinquishing of hostile, war-like motives. Because the first performer in a covenant acts on trust, first performance in the state of nature is a risky enterprise. My first aim in this discussion is to revisit the debate over the rationality and riskiness of first performance. The second aim is to draw attention to the role of dispositions in Hobbes’s moral theory and to examine the dispositions that incline Hobbesian individuals to seek peace in the state of nature. Recently Larry May (2013) has drawn a contrast between the disposition to seek peace (by following the first law of nature) and the disposition to perform in a covenant of mutual trust, arguing that only the former is a rational one to adopt. My thesis is that actually both dispositions – the pacifist disposition and the trust disposition – are infected by the problem of uncertainty, as it pertains to the risk of trusting strangers in the state of nature. This problem remains fundamental to Hobbes’s moral and political philosophy.