Cooking with Gas, Baby

I'm writing a paper for Politics and Markets on Hobbes and Axelrod...and boy, oh boy, am I cooking with gas, baby. Kicking butt and taking names, as it were. Woot woot!

Okay. Back to paper. But my word, I have my moments.

(Kindly ignore this thirty seconds of self-praise. You want proof? Here, I'll give you my intro. You all can help me make my cooking fire even hotter.)

Hobbes’ Leviathan is one of the earliest writings on social contract theory. It has proved to be incredibly influential and is to this day well-read and cited. But Hobbes’ belief in the necessity of a militaristic central authority is not accepted without dissent. Many scholars believe that Hobbes is too pessimistic about human nature or take exception to the idea that government must necessarily hold military authority over its subjects in order to be effective. One such scholar may appear to be Axelrod, a philosopher who argues, using the model of the prisoner’s dilemma game, that cooperation can evolve in humanity and that small clusters of cooperators are able to invade a community of “defectors.” Axelrod certainly seems to be writing in contradiction to Hobbes, as he cites him in the first few pages of his argument, stating that “[Hobbes] argued that before governments existed, the state of nature was dominated by the problem of selfish individuals who competed on such ruthless terms that life was ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’” (Axelrod, 4) and goes on to argue that, contrary to Hobbes, he believes cooperation can emerge without a strong government. But are these two men’s arguments truly contradictory or is it possible to reconcile them?
To begin, a look at the assumptions both of the men make. The first statement that Hobbes makes is an assertion of the equality of men in capacity: “the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest” (Hobbes 1). This assumption is made, though not explicitly expressed, by Axelrod, as the setup of his prisoner’s dilemma game requires both players to be fully capable of making all possible moves to equal degrees. Axelrod does explicitly state the assumption that his approach in seeking to answer this question of cooperation was “to investigate how individuals pursuing their own interests will act” (Axelrod 6). Hobbes, too, assumed that people act in accordance with their self-interest. The third of Hobbes’ major assumptions is where he and Axelrod have their first major split. “…if any two men desire the same thing, which nevertheless they cannot both enjoy, they become enemies…” (Hobbes 2, emphasis added). The entirety of Hobbes’ argument is built on a world in which men desire the same thing and it is not possible for the object of desire to be shared. Axelrod’s argument, however, is founded in a world where men are able to cooperate towards a common goal and each benefit.

And that's where I stopped to glory. Just to clarify - most of the genius I was glorying in is still in my head, not typed out. We'll see if it stays. lol.