The pacifist disposition and the problem of trust and uncertainty in Hobbes’s Leviathan

It is conventional to read Hobbes as a philosopher of war. This is because he describes the natural condition of humankind as “a war of all against all”. Nonetheless, in Chapter 14 of Leviathan Hobbes‘s fundamental law of nature enjoins the individual “to seek peace” and to use “the advantages of war” only if this peace-seeking disposition has been sabotaged by non-complying others. Recently Larry May (Limiting Leviathan, 2018) has offered a revisionist reading which emphasises this pacifist disposition. One obstacle in the state of nature where transactions are uncertain is that each individual would have to trust the peaceful intentions of other individuals without assurance to the contrary. On May’s interpretation, this obstacle can be overcome. Against this, I argue that trust is bound to remain a fundamental problem in Hobbes’s political philosophy thereby setting severe limits on how far the pacifist disposition ought to be pursued under conditions of uncertainty (including those obtaining between states in the international realm). This argument is not meant to recover a “realist” Hobbes but to flesh out the importance of a philosophical inquiry into the nature of transactional uncertainty.