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By Eduardo Mendoza

September 12, 2005

Original Article (Spanish)

Leviathan: the Failure of the State in its Present Form

If the southern poor trapped in New Orleans read the press published on the other side of the Atlantic, perhaps they would take advantage of President Bush's visit in order to lynch him - an act that would combine two traditions, one local and one imported. With this I don't mean to say that Bush should take all the blame for the flooding tragedy. Without doubt, he has behaved with incompetence, negligence and insensitivity. And with stupidity: to immediately go to the place of the tragedy and soil one's clothes and stand with the victims is a symbolic gesture, but the president of the United States is, more than anything else, a symbol.

President Bush: It's Not All His Fault

Besides, a show of interest and prompt leadership would have marginally improved the management of the tragedy. But not much. Bush is not a god, but a Chief of State; and the State is a powerful machine, but not an all-purpose one. That he is incapable of solving a domestic problem while sending ships into space and armies halfway around the world should not confound us. This, he didn't invent. Recently, France, which surely possesses the most well-oiled State machinery in the world, was unable to prevent the deaths of dozens of its citizens due to heat and dehydration. This summer, the European Union has been watching, stupefied, as Portugal has burned.

The State was not imposed on man by divinity, nor in its present form is it a byproduct of the genetic code. It arose as a social contract imposed out of necessity, as a mechanism to attack and defend against enemies, both within and without.

Thomas Hobbes attached two names to this mechanism. One was the Commonwealth, alluding to the safeguarding of the common interest. The other was Leviathan, named after the monster that God cites with boastfulness in the book of Job, created to demonstrate his greatness. Beyond this, it was said to have no purpose. Interpreters of scripture usually identify Leviathan with the whale. Herman Melville, in Moby Dick, picks up the metaphor and turns the beast into the very incarnation of evil.

Practically speaking, the State conducts itself like the proverbial bull in the china shop, and sometimes like an octopus in a garage. In actual fact, it doesn't give drink to the thirsty, nor rooms to the homeless, and it doesn't even bury the dead. It is Leviathan, an enormous piece of junk, whose utility in its present form we should begin to question, outside of its Biblical context.