The Fear of Death and the Longing for Immortality: Hobbes and Thucydides on Human Nature and the Problem of Anarchy

Abstract

Recent challenges to the modern secular state invite us to reexamine the arguments made by its theoretical founders, especially Hobbes. Hobbes argues that the desire for security is the most reliable and rational desire of our nature, and the state based on satisfying that desire is fully in harmony with human nature and therefore fully capable of solving the problem of anarchy. I will examine his argument that anarchy, although in some sense the natural human condition, can be overcome once and for all through political institutions that ensure the rational fear of death will control humans' destabilizing hopes and longings for immortality. I then turn to Thucydides, the classical thinker whom Hobbes admired most and who seems closest to Hobbes in outlook, and consider his more somber thesis: Because human hopes for immortality are more powerful than the fear of violent death, anarchy will return over and over again.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 76 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.