Today, leviathans work through externality, pushing the entropy they create outside of themselves, their balance books, and their commitment to transparency and sustainability. Our ethics of individual responsibility is inadequate to an age of distributed agency. Even if they weren’t too big to jail, leviathans’ distributed corporeality is unincarcerable. Or, better yet, responsibility falls in the interstices between people. The guilt is borne by the faulty part, the contractor, the rogue employee on a frolic of his own (Gaddis 1994). Their mistakes-the oil spills, the malfunctions, the violence-are never the leviathan’s error. As Robert Jackall (1988) points out, in corporations decisions are pushed up but responsibility is pushed down. Another source of their power is their ability to insulate individual humans from moral responsibility. The curse of bigness is not merely that leviathans are too successful, not just that they turn exploitation into overexploitation. Today, in the Anthropocene, we have learned the power of the leviathans that have swallowed us. For Louis Brandeis (1914), this bigness was a curse not a blessing, and size was inherently noxious because of the uses to which it could be put. Max Weber (1978) argued that leviathans, rationally developed, were the most efficient sort of organization for mobilizing action. Intangible, they dwell offshore and beyond sovereignty-unless, that is, they make their own. Immortal, they outlive the lawsuits of those who oppose them. Today’s leviathans seem invulnerable because of their scales. The Internet, for some a symbol of decentralization, was a piece of Cold War social science invented to ensure that the American leviathan would always have a head, no matter how many nodes were destroyed. Modern logistics, beginning with D-Day and the war in the Pacific, were largely created to overcome them, thus making our own leviathans stronger. Franz Neumann (1963) christened its fascist variant Behemoth. Robert MacIver (1939) called the modern industrial state a New Leviathan. These leviathans-legal entities treated as people-have an unparalleled capacity to organize time and space extensively and intensively. In the three hundred and fifty years since Leviathan, humanity has perfected the art of mastering bigness through corporations. The king was no longer the enemy of Leviathan he was Leviathan. Leviathan’s deductive philosophizing was defeated by an air-pump (Shapin and Schaffer 1985), but its publication joined punitive deterrence and the social contract in a marriage that continues to this day. Ernst Kantorowicz (1957) once wrote that the king had two bodies, but in Abraham Bosse’s frontispiece to Hobbes’s Leviathan, the king had amassed over three hundred. This Leviathan’s rule was rooted not in its calibration with mythocosmic order, but in a neo-Epicurean appreciation of the rational self-interest of citizens faced with overwhelming power (Kahn 2004 Stewart 2015). Searching for certainty, Hobbes imagined a new Leviathan who could secure an orderly world and ensure that England’s nasty and brutish civil war would also be short. The challenge turned into a beheading, and the war sent royalists like Thomas Hobbes fleeing to France. During the English Civil War, Roundheads challenged the divine right of Charles I. Sacred kingship had a good run-scattered adherents remain to this day-but took one of its earliest, most decisive hits in early modern Europe. In humanity’s first experiments in bigness, then, Leviathan was an enemy of the state (see Day 1985 Gunkel 2006 Levenson 1987). Even the Hebrew god defeated Leviathan, though this battle was redacted out of the Torah and relegated to the Psalms. Bronze Age kings legitimated their reign by styling themselves servants of the gods that slew chaos and brought order. These battles were also part of complexity’s first political theologies. All of them were symbols of chaos, threats to an abundant natural order subdued by Baal or Marduk or Yah. In Sumer and Ugarit, Urartu and Akkad, people told stories of dragons’ defeat: Tiamat and Leviathan, Behemoth and Rahab. As infrastructures-nutritional, mythical, political, material-began their slow, millennia-long thickening into the Anthropocene, gods slew dragons. Humanity’s first experiments with the state, city, and surplus were also experiments in myth. Four thousand years ago they knew the world would end the same way it began: with dragons.
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