Diagnosis of a State [Introduction]

Man is but a being, bound in and by nature and confined to the realm of the finiteness of Earth. Born helpless, man is faced with a conundrum, which is to survive in such a world bound and limited, physically and mentally.

At the most basic level, survival, for man, depends on the ability to maintain a homeostasis within the body. In order to maintain this homeostasis, man must have food, water, and shelter from the environment. Without these three elements, the body cannot function, leading to its eventual shutdown. The human body is also incredibly frail. Without water, an individual cannot survive more than three to six days, depending on the environment. Without food, an individual cannot survive more than a few weeks. Without shelter, the effects of nature, such as temperature, rain, wind, or disasters can have fatal effects on an individual.

The necessity for food, water, and shelter are physical requirements. Given man's ability to reason, there come certain mental requirements. Are these mental requirements necessary for survival? To an extent, they are. Man needs basic, elementary knowledge to carry out mankind's physical necessities. However, is more advanced knowledge, such as philosophy, math, and literacy, a requirement for survival? No, it is not a requirement for survival. In the modern world, many countries have individuals that lack any advanced knowledge whatsoever and yet they survive. Therefore, what purpose does advanced knowledge have if not for survival?

In order to answer that question, one must look at what survival is. First and foremost, survival is the act by which a living object maintains its existence. Secondly, survival is something crucial to animals. Both animals and man have instinct but the former lack reasoning. Survival is instinctively based. Therefore, what separates man from animals is reason, which requires advanced knowledge. Without advanced knowledge, man is nothing more than an animal. Hence, now, we can determine that the object of advanced knowledge is to separate man from animals.

Whilst reason and advanced knowledge allow man to progress, advance, develop, and construct, it cannot absolve man of his necessities, which are food, water, and shelter. Advanced knowledge allows man to develop newer, better, more efficient and much more capable ways of fulfilling these needs. Throughout existence, reason and advanced knowledge has a survival value. It has allowed man to survive against competitive species and especially against other men.

Given that Earth is finite and limited, the resources necessary to develop these newer, better, more efficient, and more capable ways of fulfilling the needs of survival are also limited. This presents a fundamental problem whereby individuals may come in conflict over these limited resources in order to survive. What this creates is a condition of conflict amongst men. Survival and the necessity to maintain as many resources as possible to survive safely becomes a major focal point, a forced condition that now takes precedence. Unfortunately, this leads to a daily life that is dominated by the basic need, survival. With daily life dominated by these ideas, education and the advancement of knowledge through reasoning cannot take place. Survival is crucially central and thus society cannot advance. Moreover, this condition leaves man in a highly primitive state. With the inability of man to advance through knowledge and education, man is left with only survival instincts and tendencies. These instincts and tendencies are nothing more than animalistic. If Earth were to be dominated by such groups dominated by animalistic tendencies, we would be nothing more than cave people grunting rather than intelligent life exploring the universe and improving life on Earth.

Therein, what is required is a state of society that negates the need for survival by providing the safety and sanctity of life. Throughout history, many political thinkers have worked to try to tackle this concept. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Hobbes, Niccolò Machiavelli, Karl Marx, and even Karl von Clausewitz all presented explanations on what they saw to be the best possible system.

For Rousseau it was the social contract. In The Social Contract, he explains how the society must give up their own, self-given rights to defend themselves and entrust the state to do it for them. They must entrust the state to protect them so that they can now shift their focus and attention to learning and advancement. For Rousseau, the most critical problem was the focus on survival. If man focused on survival on a daily basis it meant he had little time to read, to study, or to learn. He would be too busy fixing his shelter or hunting for meat to study philosophy. In such a system, where survival is the most essential principle, it becomes Darwinism, "survival of the fittest." For Rousseau, this is unacceptable for any society in the 1700s, let alone today, in the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Rousseau had a critical issue to contend with when he formulated his idea for the social contract. First, it required all individuals to submit equally to the contract and each individual would have to give up their own possessions, only to get them back as their property. Each and every individual would have to give equally or else the social contract could not be fundamentally valid. Second, the social contract had to protect and provide for those who were part of it and it had to do so without prejudice. However, Rousseau knew that this "perfect" social contract was just a dream. In essence, those writing the laws of the society would be in a position to set the terms of the contract. This would allow them to write the terms to benefit themselves, rather than the majority of those signed onto the contract.

Even he did not expect the "true" social contract to exist; that would require too much of men. In essence, the social contract would have to benefit the majority of those involved, unfortunately not being able to protect everyone. In light of that, it would most likely turn out to be invalid in some way, shape, or form, due to the characters of those writing the contract.

Thomas Hobbes treats this "social contract" in The Leviathan with a different outlook. Hobbes bases his view of human nature by generalizing his own feelings and intentions. Having been born at the sight of the Spanish armada and being forced to flee England during the English Civil War, Hobbes has a bias. This type of thinking relies too heavily on a generalization that is just far too great to make. The feelings and desires of one man cannot define those for all of humanity; humanity is just too diverse.

Hobbes treats the system as a protectorate of the people, in a way. He sees a nature of humanity to being something very disgusting. He describes life in a state of nature to be "solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short,"[1] Therefore, because life without any organization and order is such a disgusting and unfathomable condition, the state of society, a bastion of organization and order becomes the natural "want" of men. He acknowledges the scarcity of resources and finiteness of Earth and goes on to say that because of this, man is continually in a state of conflict, a perpetual war to survive. For his society, the goal is to quell this conflict by removing the elements of scarcity and finiteness. However, Hobbes still holds tantamount that men will always be at conflict and it cannot be curtailed at all. The state is to provide for the general welfare of the people and to maintain their existence through the use of law and order.
Machiavelli, on the other hand, sees the duties of the state to be similar to those stated by Hobbes and Rousseau; however, his means to that duty is far different. In two of his most famous works, The Prince and The Discourses, he outlines the duties of the state, the way the prince, his leader, should rule, and the basics of human action and their condition.

Machiavelli is a political scientist and as such lacks a real laboratory to work with; therefore, he is forced to look to history as his laboratory. History, for him, serves as the way to identify the nature of man. Among his purposes for writing The Prince is to provide a manual, so to speak, for a ruler, the prince, to use when rising to power when no such power existed before. He does not deal with hereditary kings but rather new states, which arise from some sort of change, whether it be brutal or not. One word of advice that he presents to the ruler in The Discourses is "it is necessary to whoever arranges to found a Republic and establish laws in it, to presuppose that all men are bad and that they will use their malignity of mind every time they have the opportunity."[2] In many translations it is often stated as "Whoever desires to found a state and give it laws, must start with assuming that all men are bad and ever ready to display their vicious nature, whenever they may find occasion for it."

Machiavelli states, in one of his most famous works, The Discourses, that a ruler must know that whenever he or she founds a state with laws that they must, without pause or reconsideration, place the condition of man to be bad and always ready to revert to an animalistic behavior. This very easily shows where Machiavelli stands in regards to human history. Through his studies in history, using it as a test laboratory, he has come to see that conflict is ever-present throughout time, dating back to 12,000 B.C. in recorded times to the modern world. In his day it was the late 1400s, early 1500s. In the early 2000s, not much has changed in the nature of conflict except the weapons used.

The focus of the state, for Machiavelli is to provide protection for the people from outside and inside enemies, including themselves. This is similar to both Rousseau and Hobbes but he contrasts Rousseau's perfect social contract by putting the prince in a different class than the people he rules. He does not take the massive generalization of Hobbes and uses historical examples to define what the behavior of humanity will be and how to counter that and provide the best possible state. Where Hobbes believes that men will always be at conflict and it cannot be curtailed at all, Machiavelli believes that conflict between men can be curtailed through the leadership of the prince.

Sharing some basic commonality with Hobbes, Karl von Clausewitz, in On War, accepts conflict as being ever-present even in a state of society. He sees conflict as inevitable because he sees man as always being in quarrel with each other over the basic necessities of survival.

Von Clausewitz takes a very rational approach to what conflict is. Von Clausewitz's most famous quote is "War is a mere continuation of policy by other means."[3] Von Clausewitz is often misquoted. His statement means that, when the peaceful arm of diplomacy has failed, the next step is conflict, and by no means should the conflict be the end but rather the means. However, Von Clausewitz does see conflict as inevitable though given the scarcity of resources, which he believes men will always fight over when times become problematic. He sees conflict merely as an alternative to diplomacy that may rear its head when peaceful means fail to work.

Lastly, taking a very different route to defining the human condition, the nature of a society, and the meaning of conflict, Karl Marx blames everything on the means of production. He sees society through an economic point of view that dictates morals and norms. Marx blames the present system of capitalism, which alienates men from this work and produces a small class of people, the bourgeoisie, who continually abuse the workers of a society to further their own greed. It boils down to what class controls the means of production, which presents a major conflict for him.

He puts conflict as class struggle to gain the ownership of the means of production. He defines several classes throughout history and comes down to a final set, the bourgeoisies, who own the means of production and the proletariat, who are the tools for that production to happen. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx describes how, throughout history, this conflict over the means of production, has created societies and civilizations that are founded on the principle of economics. His solution, however, is to have the proletariat lead a revolution against the bourgeoisie and claim the means of production for themselves. Afterwards, in order to end the cycle of class struggle, the proletariat cannot become the new bourgeoisie but rather to abolish it and form the perfect society, a communistic society. Marx simply writes conflict off once this has been established and declares the remainder of history to be peaceful, as long as a competing class does not arise and fight to control the means of production.

All of these philosophers look at the source of conflict in a different way. Rousseau blames the need for survival, Hobbes blames an inherently bad nature of man, Machiavelli blames the condition and history of mankind, von Clausewitz blames the inevitable failure of diplomacy and Marx blames class struggle.

For each philosopher, the duty of the state varies. For Rousseau, the duty of the state is to provide a general, equal welfare from aggression and from a dominance of survival instincts. Hobbes demands that the state keep man in check and do its best to quell an uncontainable conflict that rages on over resources. Machiavelli sees the state as the protector of the people, which would allow the greatest number of people to live in prosperity, at the sacrifice of the prince. For von Clausewitz, the state is to provide a means of communication with other states and to prepare and protect its people from an inevitable failure of peaceful relations. Lastly, for Marx, the duty of the state is to put an end to class struggle, greed, and the ills of capitalism and provide a society that is communistic and then fade away.

Alas, no such society, in practice, has been a complete and equal social contract. If it were, then its system would dominate all civilized societies and be spread far through societies dominated by animalistic tendencies, which shall be called "animalistic societies." Can any system fully create a true and equal social contract? The answer to that is "no" and the reasoning behind it can be found throughout history. One can go back as far as recorded history and find, ultimately, one thing that has always existed and that is conflict as well as its reciprocal, peace. War and peace are as old as human history. In Ancient Sumeria, people gathered in cities to live peacefully but they erected walls around the city to protect against outside harm and danger. In Rome and Ancient Egypt, conflict existed both inside and outside of states.

Throughout history there have been alternating times of war and peace. This leads to a lack of certainty of which one will be on at a time. Therein, if life lacks a certainty of peace and war, what can anyone surmise as being a certainty? With that, one will have to look at the cycle of life to gain two certainties. The first is birth, which means that there will always be a chance to start anew. At the end of life is death, meaning that nothing will last forever. These provide the first two certainties, of which there are four. The remaining two come from Earth and its finite space. The first is plurality, which means the large number of individuals on this planet and its limited space. The second is a scarcity of resources.

Given these four certainties and the uncertainty of war and peace, daily life for individuals in a society can be vastly different from the day before. On one day there can be peace and the next, war. This overbearing threat of war is enough to force the individuals, even in an advanced society, into a necessity for survival. This would bring out their animalistic tendencies. Such effects, especially in view of the plurality of people and the scarcity of resources will often make the normal scarcity of resources seem even more severe. Individuals will begin to hoard and do whatever is necessary to get the number of resources they need. All of this comes from an ill-perception of the threat of the scarcity of resources.

In order for a state to fulfill its duties of protecting people, it must curb any feelings that the scarcity of resources is much more severe than it actual is. This presents a serious problem that cannot just be overcome by a simple yes or no answer. It must be thought out and processed, studied, and materialized. This has been the focus of many political philosophy works throughout time, from the early Greek thinkers of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, to even the most modern thinkers. In due time, perhaps the problem will be answered without consequence but it is unlikely.

History shows us that the human condition is problematic, that even inside of a state of society, it can be unmerciful, even more so when the scarcity of resources presents a far greater perceived threat than it actually is. This leads to the "true" social contract, which Rousseau describes, in detail. Therefore, giving legitimacy to a flawed, social contract is a daunting task that every political scientist must undertake. In doing so, the source of conflict must be identified. Such is just as daunting a task as proving a flawed, social contract is just and valid. No political scientist has yet to provide the correct answer for either and none may ever. It is not likely that any political scientist can explain either with such correctness that it cannot be refuted.

Therein the nature of any work will have to focus not on the most perfect system but rather on the optimal system. Philosophers often focus on a system that they believe to be a perfect system but which, in practice, turns out to be far from perfect. The focus of any work should be on providing the details of an ideal or optimal system, which is based on the condition of humanity, which results from this ever-fighting imbalance of conflict and peace and the off balanced, misperceived threat of the scarcity of resources. It should offer a system that can provide, perhaps, a highly effective and highly efficient answer to the question of government. Any work concerning this should also discuss the condition of humanity and identify it through key examples using historical references and apply the definition to examples. Lastly, any work should study the role of the governing body in this system and by the definition of that role, determine how best to run the system. It is simply not enough to identify the condition of humanity; but rather, one must go on to identify what role should be taken in concern to that condition and how the political system will address said role. With all of these elements, a political philosophy can be founded and though it may never be complete or one hundred percent correct, it will be a well-rounded philosophy that provides insight and alternatives into political philosophy, humanity, and government.

[1] Hobbes, Thomas, The Leviathan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 89.
[2] Machiavelli, Niccolò and Bernard Crick, ed, The Discourses (London: Penguin Books, 2003). 112.
[3] Von Clausewitz, Karl and Rapoport, Anatol, ed, On War (London: Penguin Books, 1968). 119.

© 2005 - 2006, James Devlin, written for Dr. Schmidt, Iona College, Fall 2005, protected under college manuscript rules & regulations. Permission must be obtained before usage.