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State of Insecurity: The Trial of Job and Secular Political Order

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 February 2008

Keally McBride
Keally McBride
Affiliation:
University of San Francisco (kdmcbride@usfca.edu)
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Abstract

Thomas Hobbes observed that the human mind seeks causality in order to propagate good fortune or avoid disaster. However, events occur that cannot be linked to direct causes, leading human beings to invent beliefs and other mechanisms to produce a system of order and probability that can be applied to the seemingly random universe. Examining the relationship between Hobbes and the Book of Job reveals the failure of religion to provide for perfectly comprehensible causality since Job is forced to accept that God works in ways that he cannot understand in delivering rewards and punishments. Hobbes offers secular political order as an alternative that will conform to the structure of human reason. The attempt to order the universe is always incomplete, yet it is this lack of control that helps us to understand the inspiration to create and recreate political order, even when it fails to create a predictable, comprehensible environment. While the need for security is often seen as a malevolent or irrational element in political life, this article explains how the desire for order can also be understood as a dynamic interaction between the structure of human reason and the uncontrollable aspects of human life.Keally McBride is Assistant Professor of Politics at the University of San Francisco (kdmcbride@usfca.edu). Work on this essay began in a seminar sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities. She would like to thank Kevin Bundy, Carl Cheeseman, Mary Dietz, Nancy Hirshmann, James Martel, Hanna Pitkin, and John Zarobell for their comments.

Type
Research Article
Information
Perspectives on Politics , Volume 6 , Issue 1 , March 2008 , pp. 11 - 20
Copyright
© 2008 American Political Science Association

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