The Penguin and the Leviathan

"The leviathan, everybody should know, is the whale and the name of Hobbes’s famous story of why you need a state, which many will remember from political theory 101. It essentially says, without a state the human condition is a war of all against all and so you need a leviathan, a huge powerful central body to enforce order and prevent people from killing each other. The penguin is the emblem of Linux, the open software system that has no central rules. It has no intellectual property protection and no traditional corporate structure – it’s open and it’s free. In this book Yochai Benkler tells us how human beings can cooperate. He looks at research in many different disciplines – neuroscience, biology, sociology and computer science – to show how we can encourage self-organised cooperative behaviour. The first thing to say is you need both the leviathan and the penguin. Nobody who’s been in foreign policy or, frankly, in human society should ever think we don’t need the state. No, I don’t believe in Rousseau’s happy harmony of human beings. There are plenty of bad people out there – you do need a state empowered to use force and apprehend those who are not willing to play by the rules. In the international system you’ve got North Korea ; you’ve got Iran pursuing a nuclear programme that could be very dangerous, and until recently you had Burma. Then there are states that are not necessarily as outside the system as those three, but even with trading partners and allies, like China and Russia, you still sometimes need to think of relations with those countries in terms of force, power, pressure and very strict rules of the game. So the first thing to say is the leviathan is still very much with us and our foreign policy assumes that there is a need for coercion. “The leviathan is still very much with us and our foreign policy assumes that there is a need for coercion.” But the state as leviathan is premised on a view of only part of human nature – there’s a whole other part. We are social animals and we are happier when we are collaborating with others and connected to others. That part of human nature can be encouraged and harnessed to bring about positive change. I would give the examples of the social political movements across the Middle East where you see young people coming together pretty spontaneously, saying: We want a different way to live, we want our rights, we want democracy, we are going to work together for change. That is cooperative behaviour. That example does not mean that they won’t need a state and a leviathan once they succeed. I offer it to show the other side of human nature which foreign policy can foster and support."

"This could be considered a companion book to my own. I write from the perspective of security – how society induces cooperation. Benkler takes the opposite perspective – how does this cooperation work and what is its value? More specifically, what is its value in the 21st century information-age economy? He challenges the pervasive economic view that people are inherently selfish creatures, and shows that actually we are naturally cooperative. More importantly, he discusses the enormous value of cooperation in society, and the new ways it can be harnessed over the Internet. I think this view is important. Our culture is pervaded with the idea that individualism is paramount – Thomas Hobbes’ notion that we are all autonomous individuals who willingly give up some of our freedom to the government in exchange for safety. It’s complete nonsense. Humans have never lived as individuals. We have always lived in communities, and we have always succeeded or failed as cooperative groups. The fact that people who separate themselves and live alone – think of Henry David Thoreau in Walden – is so remarkable indicates how rare it is. Benkler understands this, and wants us to accept the cooperative nature of ourselves and our societies. He also gives the same advice for the future that I do – that we need to build social mechanisms that encourage cooperation over control. That is, we need to facilitate trust in society."