Flies in Our Eyes

Abstract

In this article, I put three works into conversation: William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan and Kenneth Waltz’s Man, the State and War. I do this in order to interrogate the foundations and sources of social violence, both within societies and between them. I compare Golding’s and Hobbes’s stories of ‘origins’ to illustrate how, on the one hand, fairly straightforward notions of supply and demand, production and reproduction, and a social division of labour belie the possibility of a pre-social state. Indeed, that both Hobbes and Golding were commenting on English society and its history, rather than a mythical anarchy, only reinforces this often-ignored point. No one would call Golding a theorist, yet there is a great deal of social theory to be found in the novel. No one would call Thomas Hobbes a political economist, yet there is a great deal of political economy to be found in Leviathan . Waltz, of course, wrote about the conditions outside of societies rather than within them, but we may take the sources of violence that concern him to lie not in the anarchy he posits but in the lessons learned, by both statesmen and schoolboys, as they are socialised into ‘proper’ behaviour towards their inferiors.