Kubi-Nage Hobbes: An Ecocritique

Abstract This paper uses Thomas Hobbes’ argument for Commonwealth and the existence of the Leviathan as a foil within an immanent critique rejecting the notion of “the state’' presenting an escape from “the state of nature’' as Hobbes characterized it. It does so through a negative dialectic arguing that both conceptually and materially “civilization” needs “the wild,” or “the wilderness” to justify its everyday existence but, instead, rethreads wildness and wilderness through the production of lifeforms necessary for its continued expansion. I motivatie this Lukean ecocritique of Hobbes through Benton MacKaye’s philosophy of regional planning drawing from work in anthropology, sociology, geography, critical animal studies, and environmental studies to argue that “civilization” not only transcends the nation-state but is constituted as material fact through the manifestation of wildness within its environs. The Leviathan co-authors environment but has the power to unleash wildness on a planetary scale – creating localized states of nature, and cannot help but do so. I argue that as the Leviathan attempts to rid itself of wildness, it simply creates “wilderness” elsewhere in its material being through its material needs. This displacement is coupled with a critique recognizing that through Hobbes’ logic, those living within “states of nature,” or civilizational wildernesses have no reason to bind themselves to the Leviathan as it is the Leviathan that threatens their lives by displacing wildness through the rule of artifice. We may, after this examination, conclude that the Leviathan does not end the “State of Nature” but in fact extends and energizes it through manifesting multiple “states of nature” where life may be “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.”