Thomas Hobbes

James Pinkerton (Column Right, May 27) argues that what our government needs is a dominant ideology that would organize our society around entrepreneurism. To show that we lack an ideology and practice merely ad hoc politics, he cites the examples of Democratic senators who oppose the programs of their own party in the interests, real or contrived, of their constituents. To dramatize the danger of mere ad hoc politics he quotes Thomas Hobbes to the effect that when every man wars against every man, life is “nasty, brutish and short.” It may seem odd that the John Locke Foundation Fellow of the Manhattan Institute should misrepresent Hobbes so badly--Hobbes and Locke were contemporaries--but those are the tricks that ideology plays.

Pinkerton certainly knows that what Hobbes is talking about in Chapter 13 of “Leviathan” are not the dangers of interest group politics but precisely that state Pinkerton’s ideology seeks to create in economic and social terms--the state of unfettered individual competition “wherein men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them.” That is Hobbes’ description of the “war of every man against every man,” and in that state, as we see too often in this country, the lives of many people--the necessary victims of a culture that enshrines competition in outfits like the Manhattan Institute--are “nasty, brutish and short.”

EDGAR SCHELL

Irvine