"Well, I guess we’re about to find out whether Hobbes was right about the state of nature!"
So joked one of my students in mid-March, as we said our goodbyes for what would turn out to be the rest of the semester. It was a good way to lighten the mood. Knowing that the coronavirus was coming, and with only a hazy impression of its nature and effects, it was easy to jump to dire predictions of social collapse. The joke was also true to Hobbes, who exhorts the readers of Leviathan to verify his arguments by observing their own habits. But if conditions became sufficiently extreme, we would all be forced to see what is normally hidden—the truth about human nature unobscured by political order. Hobbes described this state as one in which there is "continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."
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