Nor were all governments equally good Leviathans. Whether it was the Romans in Britain or the British in India, pacification could be just as bloody as the savagery it stamped out. The process of making Leviathan was not pretty. ![]() Back in the 1600s the philosopher Thomas Hobbes nicknamed this “Leviathan,” after the terrifying monster of the Old Testament. The reality is that people hardly ever give up their freedoms, including their freedom to kill and impoverish each other, unless forced to do so, and virtually the only force strong enough to scare people straight has been strong government. If Rome could have been built without killing millions of Gauls and Greeks, or the USA without killing millions of Native Americans – in these and countless other cases, if conflicts could have been resolved by reason instead of force, the world would have reaped the benefits without paying such costs.īut that did not happen. War is surely the worst possible way to create larger, more peaceful societies, but the depressing truth is that it seems to be pretty much the only way people have found. States that suppressed violence within their borders tended to grow those that did not, tended to fail. The men who ran these governments cracked down on killing not because they were saints, but because well-behaved subjects were easier to govern and tax than angry, murderous ones. ![]() The victors then found that the only way to make these larger societies work was by developing stronger governments and one of the first things these governments had to do, if they wanted to stay in power, was suppress violence among their subjects. ![]() What happened, it seems, is that starting about 10,000 years ago, the winners of wars began incorporating the losers into larger societies.
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