MAIN IDEA:

This book is based on the Hobbs’s idea about the necessity of Leviathan – the big and powerful state to keep people in line and prevent them from killing each other. However, the book also considers the Leviathan’s tendency to become the biggest oppressor and killer of them all. Consequently, the offered solution is to keep Leviathan shackled, meaning to limit its power by applying various tools such as democratic election, division of power, and so on. The book’s general approach is to define two actors: Leviathan and Society, as competitors for power and use historical analysis to define what is the goldilocks’ distribution of power between these actors that provide the best results. Such results occur when the Leviathan is shackled and kept within a narrow corridor of power distribution. Here is the graphic illustration including various paths into a beneficial corridor:

MY TAKE ON IT:

I think this is a pretty good analysis, and the idea of shackled Leviathan is a pretty good approach. However, I believe that any analysis at the level of abstractions such as the state or the society is inherently deficient because these abstractions do not think, feel, or act. Only human beings do, and therefore any actionable analysis should have individual humans as its object. My approach is to analyze how unique people make or fail to make a living in a specific environment based on their resources and external forces that impact them. In my view, it all comes down to the position of individuals among other individuals and the resources under the control of these individuals. There are only two conceivable positions, albeit they are always mixed: either individuals control a clearly defined set of resources, including their own bodies or other people have such control. Therefore, it is always a combination of private property (formal or informal) and place in a Hierarchy that defines wellbeing or lack thereof for each individual. Consequently, the solution for maximizing wellbeing should be to maximize private property as much as possible and limit Hierarchy as the method of interaction between individuals to levels of absolute necessity.