The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,99

violence.

By the 17th and 18th centuries, many countries had begun to cut back on tyranny and political murder.97 Between the early Middle Ages and 1800, Eisner calculates, the European regicide rate declined fivefold, particularly in Western and Northern Europe. A famous example of this change is the fate of the two Stuart kings who locked horns with the English Parliament. In 1649 Charles I was beheaded, but in 1688 his son James II was deposed bloodlessly in the Glorious Revolution. Even after attempting to stage a coup he was merely forced into exile. By 1776 the American revolutionaries had defined “despotism” down to the level of taxing tea and quartering soldiers.

At the same time that governments were gradually becoming less tyrannical, thinkers were seeking a principled way to reel in government violence to the minimum necessary. It began with a conceptual revolution. Instead of taking government for granted as an organic part of the society, or as the local franchise of God’s rule over his kingdom, people began to think of a government as a gadget—a piece of technology invented by humans for the purpose of enhancing their collective welfare. Of course, governments had never been deliberately invented, and they had been in place long before history was recorded, so this way of thinking required a considerable leap of the imagination. Thinkers such as Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, and Rousseau, and later Jefferson, Hamilton, James Madison, and John Adams, fantasized about what life was like in a state of nature, and played out thought experiments about what a group of rational actors would come up with to better their lives. The resulting institutions would clearly bear no resemblance to the theocracies and hereditary monarchies of the day. It’s hard to imagine a plausible simulation of rational actors in a state of nature choosing an arrangement that would give them the divine right of kings, “L’état, c’est moi,” or inbred ten-year-olds ascending to the throne. Instead, the government would serve at the pleasure of the people it governed. Its power to “keep them all in awe,” as Hobbes put it, was not a license to brutalize its citizens in pursuit of its own interests but only a mandate to implement the agreement “that a man be willing, when others are so too . . . to lay down this right to all things; and be contented with so much liberty against other men, as he would allow other men against himself.”98

It’s fair to say that Hobbes himself didn’t think through the problem deeply enough. He imagined that somehow people would vest authority in a sovereign or a committee once and for all at the dawn of time, and thereafter it would embody their interests so perfectly that they would never have reason to question it. One only has to think of a typical American congressman or member of the British royal family (to say nothing of a generalissimo or a commissar) to see how this would be a recipe for disaster. Real-life Leviathans are human beings, with all the greed and foolishness we should expect of a specimen of Homo sapiens. Locke recognized that people in power would be tempted to “exempt themselves from the obedience to the Laws they make, and suit the Law, both in its making and its execution, to their own private Wish, and thereby come to have a distinct Interest from the rest of the Community, contrary to the end of Society and Government.”99 He called for a separation between the legislative and executive branches of government, and for the citizenry to reserve the power to throw out a government that was no longer carrying out its mandate.

This line of thinking was taken to the next level by the heirs of Hobbes and Locke who hashed out a design for American constitutional government after years of study and debate. They were obsessed with the problem of how a ruling body composed of fallible humans could wield enough force to prevent citizens from preying on each other without arrogating so much that it would become the most destructive predator of all.100 As Madison wrote, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.”101 And so Locke’s ideal of the separation of powers was written into the design of the new government, because “ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” 102 The result was the division of government into executive, judicial, and legislative