Nasty, Brutish and Short - too short - there are 5 things on Hobbes's list

Even Political Scientist, podcaster, and Hobbesian, David Runciman, who is at Cambridge University, where he is Professor of Politics and a fellow of Trinity Hall, and host of the Talking Politics podcast (brought to us by the London Review of Books, and sometimes by that ad that starts "Buddy, Daddy needs his laptop back now", and then I skip froward so I don't ever find out what product they're spruiking - maybe it's Macquarie Bank, (arsehole private capital business busters, selling off the best parts, and leaving the dregs, like employees, on the shit heap) whose name I hear embedded in my fast-forwardings, in a dulcet female voice snippet saying shy-boastfully "I bank with MacQuarie".

Runciman wrote the 12 part accompanying podcast Talking Politics - THE HISTORY OF IDEAS [no I'm not shouting, that's the case they use in the title] which starts with an ad for the podcast series itself [ep. 0], and in ep 1 introduces Hobbes and Leviathan, but only quotes the last 3 items of Hobbes's characterisation of what it's like to live in the State of Nature [gratuitous capitalisation]: nasty, brutish and short.

It's a shame that in the 21st century everything must be reduced to a list of 3 things -- not 4, not 6, not even the original 5: solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. Which is the last clause of a single sentence with only 5 clauses, which provide its context:

"No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death: and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short."

And it comes at the end of only 3 paragraphs from chapter 12 of Leviathan, which explain the whole concept of the State of Nature, which I think is best rendered in German as "Alle Gegen Alle" (also the name of an excellent DAF industrial electro song from 1981 - although the video linked here contains an image of Tank Man from the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre):

"During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that conditions called war; and such a war, as if of every man, against every man.

"To this war of every man against every man, this also in consequent; that nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice have there no place. Where there is no common power, there is no law, where no law, no injustice. Force, and fraud, are in war the cardinal virtues.


"No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death: and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short."

...|<

P.S. I also though Hobbes coined "Nature... red in tooth and claw...", but Google tells me it was actually:

Tennyson

'A thousand types are gone: / I care for nothing, all shall go. ' Nature is a world of strife and conflict and violence – 'red in tooth and claw' as Tennyson memorably puts it (the first use of this famous expression).