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Thomas Hobbes: I am Thomas Hobbes, author of Leviathan, the most honest and consequently the most widely despised work of political philosophy ever written. I take considerable pride in that distinction, and I say so with complete awareness that pride in being despised is itself a philosophical position not everyone will find comfortable.
John Locke: I am John Locke, author of the Two Treatises of Government, and I will note at the outset that my work exists in substantial part as a philosophical correction of everything Mr. Hobbes concludes about sovereign power, human nature, and the proper relationship between a government and the people it governs. I approach this conversation already prepared for the experience.
Thomas Hobbes: How gracious of you to frame a refutation as mere preparation. The subject before us today is Nayib Bukele’s crackdown on the MS-13 and Barrio 18 gangs in El Salvador, which has produced over seventy thousand arrests, a murder rate that has fallen from one of the highest on earth to among the lowest in Latin America, and approval ratings for Bukele that approach eighty percent of the population. I must confess that I find the philosophical controversy about this rather difficult to take seriously, though I acknowledge that finding other people’s moral concerns difficult to take seriously is something of a recurring feature of my intellectual career.
John Locke: The controversy, Mr. Hobbes, concerns the fact that tens of thousands of people were imprisoned without trial, that the constitution was suspended by executive decree and kept suspended through a compliant legislature voting to extend emergency powers indefinitely, that credible documentation exists of significant numbers of innocent people imprisoned with no gang affiliation whatsoever, and that the conditions inside the detention facilities are what any honest observer would describe as torture. I do not consider concern about those facts to be philosophical hand-wringing. I consider it the minimum response of anyone who thinks seriously about what governments are for.
Thomas Hobbes: And I consider the minimum response of anyone who thinks seriously about what governments are for to be an honest accounting of what El Salvador actually was before this crackdown. Gangs controlled entire neighborhoods. Businesses paid tribute to armed men on pain of death. Children were recruited into criminal organizations because the alternative was murder. The homicide rate was sixty-two per hundred thousand in 2015, which places it among the most violent conditions that have existed anywhere outside of active warfare. The state was functionally absent from large portions of its own territory. What you are calling a constitutional crisis is a government finally fulfilling the one obligation that justifies its existence, which is to maintain order sufficient for human life to be worth living.
John Locke: I am familiar with the conditions. I am also familiar with the fact that describing conditions as terrible does not constitute an argument that any method of addressing them is therefore acceptable. The severity of the problem does not automatically license the methods used to solve it. That is precisely the kind of reasoning that emergency powers are designed to exploit, and it is precisely the kind of reasoning that every leader who has ever suspended a constitution has offered as justification.
Thomas Hobbes: You have just described every legitimate use of sovereign authority as an exploitation of emergency powers, which is an interesting position for a man who himself justified a revolution on the grounds that the existing government was intolerable. The difference between a justified revolution and an unjustified one is, in your framework, apparently a question of whose side is being inconvenienced. I find that less principled than you appear to believe it is.
John Locke: The difference, Mr. Hobbes, and I will state it plainly since you appear to require the plainness, is that the revolution I justified was directed against a government that had itself violated the terms of the social contract, and it established new constitutional protections rather than dismantling existing ones. Bukele did not establish new protections. He removed the ones that existed and replaced them with his own judgment. Those are not the same action, and treating them as equivalent is either confused or dishonest.
Thomas Hobbes: A government that imprisons gang members without trial and a gang that imprisons people without trial are, in your framing, morally equivalent. Is that the argument you intend to make?
John Locke: A government that imprisons the innocent alongside the guilty in order to remove the guilty has not solved the problem of arbitrary power over citizens. It has simply changed which institution wields that power. A gang that imprisons people without trial and uses violence to enforce compliance is, functionally, what a government that imprisons people without trial and uses violence to enforce compliance has become. The uniform is different. The logic is identical.
Thomas Hobbes: That was nearly witty. I shall acknowledge it and move on.
John Locke: I appreciate you noting it. Please continue.
Thomas Hobbes: I will now steelman the opposing argument, which I do not do out of philosophical generosity but purely because a demolished argument is considerably more satisfying when it has first been reconstructed at its strongest. The Lockean position, stated with maximum charity, runs as follows. Government derives its legitimacy from the consent of the governed and exists specifically to protect natural rights, principally life, liberty, and property. Mass detention without due process violates liberty directly and damages property through the removal of working family members from communities that depend on them. Imprisoning the innocent alongside the guilty is itself a rights violation of the most direct kind. When a government commits these violations in the name of protecting rights, it has negated its own justification for existing. Furthermore, the emergency powers precedent does not expire with the emergency. Every future executive in El Salvador and every authoritarian leader elsewhere who needs a philosophical template for the suspension of constitutional constraints now has one, courtesy of Bukele. I want everyone watching to understand that I find this argument coherent, stated in this form, so they can fully appreciate what I am about to do to it.
John Locke: I will extend the same courtesy to Mr. Hobbes, though without the theatrical self-announcement. I present the strongest version of his argument because engaging with anything less would be beneath this conversation, not because I expect the exercise to be enjoyable. The Hobbesian case at its most serious runs as follows. A government that cannot protect its citizens from violence has already failed the social contract, because the exercise of any other right requires a minimum condition of physical security that gang violence had made impossible. In El Salvador’s gang territories that condition did not exist. The social contract had already collapsed, not through government overreach but through government absence. Bukele did not impose emergency powers on a functioning constitutional order. He imposed sovereign authority on a territory where sovereign authority had ceased to exist. The results support the methods. The homicide rate has fallen by over ninety percent. Commerce has returned to neighborhoods where commerce had been impossible. People walk streets they could not walk before. Bukele’s approval ratings suggest that the people most directly affected by both the old conditions and the new measures have reached their own verdict on the tradeoff. This argument has genuine force. I also intend to explain precisely why it fails.
Thomas Hobbes: I am going to pretend I did not notice that my argument improved in your hands.
John Locke: The approval ratings measure relief, not consent. A population that has lived under gang terror for a generation will approve of almost anything that stops the killing, because the standard they are measuring against is not a functioning liberal democracy. It is sixty-two homicides per hundred thousand per year. That is not consent to the methods used. That is a measure of how desperate people were before. The Hobbesian framework makes a fundamental error in treating the absence of fear as the presence of freedom. Freedom is not simply the absence of being murdered by gang members. It is the possession of rights that the government itself cannot violate. The thousands of innocent people currently imprisoned in Bukele’s mega-prison without charge or trial are not represented in those approval ratings. They have been removed from the political community entirely. That removal is not a side effect of the policy. It is the policy.
Thomas Hobbes: You are presenting me with a tradeoff and asking me to treat it as a violation of principle. On one side of the scale: some number of innocent people detained in an imperfect security operation. On the other side: tens of thousands of murders that did not happen because the people who would have committed them are no longer free to do so. I am not going to insult either of us by pretending that is a difficult calculation or that the answer is ambiguous.
John Locke: And there, Mr. Hobbes, is the word I have been waiting for you to use. Calculation. You have just described the liberty of citizens as a variable in a sovereign’s arithmetic, and I would like you to sit with the implications of that for a moment before we continue. We will be returning to it at length.
Thomas Hobbes: I look forward to watching you return to it. Bring provisions. It is a long walk from principle to reality, and in my experience most philosophers do not make it back.
John Locke: The distance between principle and reality, Mr. Hobbes, is precisely the distance between a government that serves its people and one that merely dominates them. I have spent my career arguing that the walk is worth making. You have spent yours arguing that no one should bother. I find that an instructive difference, and I suspect our audience will as well. We will continue this in Part 2, where I intend to show you exactly where your calculation leads when the man doing the arithmetic changes.
