The State by Anthony de Jasay by Anthony de Jasay Page B

that every man has reason to fear his fellow man if they are alike.
     
All men, needing self-approval, seek eminence over others. If I let my fellow man seek eminence, he will invade my property, therefore I must attack his first. Self-preservation must drive both of us to fight each other, and there will be "savage war for glory." Both our lives will become "nasty, brutish and short."
     
While self-preservation is said to be the spring of all Hobbesian conduct, it is clear that I would not have to worry about preserving myself if my neighbour, whether to become eminent or to forestall me, did not invade my property. Is there a way of persuading the neighbour to desist? Perhaps by letting him know that I am not seeking eminence over him and he has nothing to fear? If self-preservation no longer obliged him to keep up his guard, and he lowered it, I could pounce and gain eminence over him; and so could he if I agreed to let him be and lowered my
    guard. As he is like me, I have to fear him, and cannot prudently make the first step which would break the vicious circle if he were unlike me.
     
In modern decision theory, such situations are called "prisoners' dilemmas."*19 As set up, they have no spontaneous cooperative solution. Left to themselves, both "prisoners" must, if they are rational, seek to get the better of each other by "confessing" first, and both end up with a longer sentence than if they had both played "thief's honour" and refused to confess. In Hobbes, they both end up with a shorter and nastier life. Their sole escape is to abandon the state of nature and conclude a "covenant of mutual trust" whereby a designated sovereign is invested with whatever power it takes to enforce peace (or natural right). Thus nobody need fear that, by behaving trustingly, he will be taken advantage of by the others; therefore all can behave trustingly. The sovereign will, for some reason, use his absolute power only for obtaining this result. His subjects have no right to rebel but nor do they have any reason for doing so. It is not clear whether, if they did have cause, they would have a right to rebel.
     
The prisoners' dilemma implicit in Hobbes requires, for its proper study, the state of nature where no sovereign authority stops the participants from making themselves miserable if they are so inclined.*20 States are in a state of nature in that they retain the faculty of recourse to force against each other and do not transfer their arms and their sovereignty to a super-state.*21
     
I will consider, in this context, two Hobbesian dilemmas, those of war and trade. While I am at it, I will go on briefly to look at Rousseau's problem of general social cooperation also, though the
    latter is quite different in nature (it is not a "prisoners' dilemma" and requires a special psychological assumption in order not to result in voluntary cooperation).
     
Let there be two sovereign countries (to borrow the language of army manoeuvres, "Blue" and "Red"). Both want "eminence" in Hobbes's sense. The order of their preferences is: (1) victory in war, (2) disarmament, (3) armed peace and (4) defeat in war. They must choose between two "strategies"-arming and disarming-without knowing what the other country chooses. The "pay-off matrix" resulting from this situation will then be as in figure 1.
     
Though Blue does not know whether Red will arm or disarm, he will choose to arm because by doing so he avoids defeat, gets peace at a cost as the worst-case pay-off and may get victory if Red is a sucker. Red is like Blue, and reasons similarly. He, too, chooses to arm. They end up in the southeast corner of the figure, in armed peace which is the "maximin" (the best worst-case) solution proper to hostile players. The northwest corner of costless peace is denied them, though they would both prefer it, because of their even greater preference for victory over each other. Once in the northwest corner, Blue would try to go into the southwest and