DEEP READING · READ 43
Thomas Hobbes · 1651
Hobbes set out to prove something chilling and very hard to refute: absent a common power that everyone fears, human beings slide inevitably into war — and the state is neither natural nor divinely given but a machine built by frightened people, who hand over their right to act for themselves in exchange for one thing: the chance to go on living.
Hobbes (1588–1679) lived to ninety-one, across the English Civil War, the execution of Charles I, Cromwell's rule and the Restoration — he pulled this book out of an actual civil war. In 1640, with collapse coming, he fled to Paris for eleven years, teaching mathematics for a time to the exiled Prince of Wales, the future Charles II. Leviathan was published in London in 1651; that same year he went home and made his political peace with Cromwell's republic. His contemporary John Aubrey records that at forty he opened Euclid's Elements by chance and fell permanently in love with geometry — the ambition of the whole book is to do politics as geometry: define your terms, then derive. He liked to say that he was born prematurely because his mother took fright at the approach of the Spanish Armada, so that "fear and I were born twins" (paraphrased). Less an anecdote than the foundation of everything he wrote.
To follow Hobbes's politics you first have to see how he sees people — and the way he sees people is Galilean physics carried straight into psychology. His mechanism (the view that everything reduces finally to bodies in motion) is unsparing: the universe contains only bodies and motion; sensation is internal motion caused by external pressure on the organs; memory is that motion decaying. Appetite and aversion are no more mysterious — they are the tiny beginnings of motion inside the body, toward a thing or away from it. What you call "good" is simply the name of whatever you presently desire; "evil," the name of what you shun. There is no objective highest good, only what each person is chasing right now.
From which follows the first genuinely unsettling claim. With no final good to rest in, felicity is not arrival but the continual succession of getting what you want — a progress, not a resting place. Hence the famous line in Chapter 11 (paraphrased): I put for a general inclination of all mankind a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.
"Desire of power" is easily misread as "everyone is an empire-builder." Hobbes immediately supplies the mechanism, and the mechanism is the point: people keep grabbing for more power not usually because they crave greater pleasure, but because without more they cannot hold what they already have. Your security today depends on whether anyone else has the capacity to wreck it; as long as others keep growing, your holdings keep depreciating. That is not greed, it is an arms race without a finish line — each person's advance is everybody else's reason to advance. Once you see it, you find it far from politics: an industry where everyone resents the hours and nobody dares be first to stop; parents who all complain about the tutoring treadmill and all enrol earlier each year. That isn't insatiable human nature; it's Hobbes's structure — security is relative, and relative things have no saturation point.
The state of nature is the book's most famous device: strip away the state, the law and the constable, leave a crowd of comparably capable people each trying to stay alive, and see what happens.
Hobbes's argument starts from a counterintuitive premise — human beings are roughly equal. Not morally: in capacity. The weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, by stealth, by confederacy, or while he sleeps. Precisely because anyone can kill anyone, nobody can subdue anybody, so no one can found a stable order on sheer superiority, and everyone must treat everyone as a possible cause of his death. From this equality he derives the three-part chain of Chapter 13:
| Cause of quarrel | Why people strike | Where you meet it today |
| Competition | for gain — two people want the one thing | turf, market share, the single opening |
| Diffidence | for safety — he might move first, so I move first | pre-emption, arms races, bank runs, panic buying |
| Glory | for reputation — a look, a word, a slight | face, flame wars, "I'm not letting that go" |
Three unrelated motives, one destination. Schematic.
The second is the deadly one, and the one most often skipped. Diffidence in Hobbes does not mean shyness; it means distrust — and its force is that a person who wants nothing but a quiet life must also strike first, because he knows the others are reasoning about him the same way. War therefore needs no villain to start it: fill the room with decent people, and if none of them can be sure the others won't move first, they fight anyway. This is the book's deepest insight: catastrophe requires no malice, only a structure of mutual distrust.
One neglected definition: for Hobbes the state of war is not constant fighting but the whole stretch of time in which the willingness to fight is known — his lovely image is that foul weather lies not in a shower or two but in an inclination to rain over many days together. So it includes every moment you must lock the door, watch your back, hold something in reserve. He then names the worst of it, which is not violence but that nothing requiring time to accumulate can even begin: no agriculture, no navigation, no building, no knowledge — because nobody invests in a harvest he may not live to reap. Hence the most-quoted sentence in political philosophy (paraphrased): no arts, no letters, no society, and worst of all continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
And a harder line right after (paraphrased): where there is no common power there is no law, and where no law, no injustice; force and fraud become the two cardinal virtues there, because they work. This is not a celebration of the strong. It is a logical verdict: the vocabulary of right and wrong only means anything once there is a public judge.
At the start of Chapter 14 Hobbes stops to separate two words, "though they that speak of this subject use to confound them." The distinction is the hinge of the whole book:
| Right of nature (ius naturale) | Law of nature (lex naturalis) | |
| What it is | a liberty: do anything to preserve yourself | a precept found by reason, forbidding self-destruction |
| Grammar | "you may" — permission without limit | "you ought" — obligation |
| Consequence | everyone has a right to everything → no one is safe | seek peace; lay down rights for it |
The same drive to stay alive appears as permission in one column and constraint in the other — Hobbes's whole state is built in that gap.
Look at what is absurd on the left. If everyone has a right to everything — including to one another's bodies — then the right is worth nothing. I have a right to this field and so do you; nothing anyone holds is secure. A universal right is a self-cancelling right. This is Hobbes's most elegant move: he does not appeal to conscience to make people give ground, he shows arithmetically that holding out is a bad deal.
Enter the laws of nature. The first: every man ought to endeavour peace as far as he has hope of obtaining it; and when he cannot obtain it, he may seek and use all helps and advantages of war. That second clause is almost never quoted and matters enormously — Hobbes never asks anyone to be a saint. Peace is a conditional obligation, conditional on others reciprocating. The second law: a man should be willing, when others are so too, to lay down his right to all things, and be contented with so much liberty against other men as he would allow other men against himself — you can hear the Golden Rule, which he cites here himself. Nineteen laws of nature follow (keep covenants, gratitude, pardon, no contumely, judges must be impartial), every one of them derived from self-preservation alone.
And then he concedes the fatal flaw himself: the laws of nature bind always in conscience but not always in action — because keeping them when others don't is a way of offering yourself up as prey. In other words, a moral law is not by itself enough to make people obey a moral law. Which forces the central question: what could make everybody let go at the same moment?
"Covenant" has a precise meaning here: a contract in which the parties do not exchange on the spot, so that at least one side must perform first and trust the other to follow. That interval is where all the trouble lives. Who disarms first? Whoever does becomes the hostage.
Hence the sentence that holds up the entire book (Chapter 17, paraphrased): covenants without the sword are but words, and of no strength to secure a man at all. Note that he is not claiming people are natural oath-breakers. He is claiming that with no enforcer, performing first is a choice a rational person should not make — not because he is wicked but because he is not stupid. This is precisely what modern game theory draws as a payoff matrix: cooperation is best for both, but if the other defects while I perform I am ruined, so absent enforcement defection is each party's safe play. Hobbes got there three centuries early, in prose.
He knew someone would object, so in Chapter 15 he stages the objection himself in the person of the Foole, who says in his heart: if everything is for self-preservation, why not keep covenants when it pays and break them when it doesn't? Isn't that reason carried through? Hobbes's reply still bites: you cannot reliably compute the consequences of breaking faith. The gain is a visible sum now; the risk is incalculable — you cannot know whether you will be found out, pursued, or shut out of every arrangement that requires cooperation, and a man shut out cannot survive in such a world. Breaking faith looks shrewd but stakes your life on your ability to forecast the one thing that cannot be forecast. He also concedes the weaker half: what finally secures performance is the sword. Argument alone will not contain the Foole — which is why the Leviathan is needed.
Here Hobbes makes his most important and most frequently missed move. Rather than say loosely that people "hand power to a ruler," he first builds an apparatus in Chapter 16 out of person and authorization.
He borrows the vocabulary of theatre and the courts: person originally meant mask, or role. He distinguishes the natural person (whose words are his own) from the artificial person (whose words represent another). The one who speaks for another is the actor; the one represented is the author. The rule that follows is the crucial one: whatever the actor does within his authority counts in law as the author's own deed. A contract your lawyer signs is a contract you signed.
Scale that rule up to a whole society and you get the founding formula. Every person covenants with every other person — note that the covenant runs among the subjects, not between subjects and ruler — to the effect: I authorize and give up my right of governing myself to this man, or this assembly, on condition that you give up your right to him and authorize all his actions in like manner. The multitude so united in one person is a commonwealth, or in his phrase that mortal god to which, under the immortal God, we owe our peace and defence.
This step settles the character of the whole book. Since the sovereign's acts count in law as each subject's own acts, a subject complaining that the sovereign wronged him is complaining of a wrong he did himself — in Hobbes's system that is a logical contradiction, not a political taboo. Feel how severe that is: he does not say you may not resist, he says resistance does not parse. But do not miss the other half either: legitimacy therefore rests wholly on human authorization — not divine right, not blood, not natural hierarchy. That is why royalists disliked the book too. Hobbes handed the king absolute power while demolishing the king's sacred warrant and replacing it with a deed of agency between ordinary people. He built an absolutist house on republican foundations.
Several harsh corollaries follow. Sovereignty is indivisible — parcel legislation, adjudication, taxation and the military out to different bodies and you have laid the charge for a civil war; he had watched king and Parliament fight over command of the militia. It is not bound by the covenant, the sovereign not being a party to it. And it decides what is just, what is property, and which doctrines may be publicly taught. That last one repels a modern reader instantly, but see his reasoning: he genuinely believed the proximate fuse of the civil war was incompatible doctrine — preachers naming each other Antichrist from the pulpit, lawyers each with a different account of what was lawful, and no judge, so the matter went to steel. Until the question of who gets to decide is answered, he thought, any peace is only the interval before the next war.
The title is itself the argument in miniature. Leviathan comes from the Book of Job — God's own creature, unmatched on earth; the Latin motto on the frontispiece is Job 41's line that there is no power on earth to be compared to him. Hobbes chose the word half for that overwhelming majesty and half to remind you: the beast is not holy. It was made.
The famous frontispiece (generally attributed to the engraver Abraham Bosse, designed with Hobbes closely involved) rewards reading as a text. A giant rises behind the hills above town and countryside; his torso and arms are composed of hundreds of small human figures, every one of them facing up toward him; his right hand holds a sword, his left a crozier; below, two symmetrical columns pair castle with church, crown with mitre, cannon with thunderbolt.
Three claims are in the picture. First, the sovereign's body is the people themselves — not a conqueror from outside but their own power in assembled form. Second, sword and crozier must be held by the two hands of one giant; the split between temporal and spiritual authority was the disease that produced the war. Third, this is an artificial man: the Introduction says so outright — the commonwealth is a man made by art, sovereignty its soul, magistrates its joints, reward and punishment its nerves, wealth its strength, sedition its sickness, civil war its death.
Treating the state as a machine was itself revolutionary. Machines have designs, faults, repairs and end-of-life; they ask to be built well and watched, not worshipped. When we say "institutional design," "incentive structure," "systemic failure," we are speaking Hobbes's metaphor. And it carries a warning he wrote down himself: a made thing can die — the giant may at any moment come apart into a scatter of small figures running for their lives.
By now you would expect Hobbes to have delivered us into a bottomless pit. But in Chapter 21 he installs a brake, and it is one that cannot logically be removed — because it is the very reason the machine was switched on.
The reasoning: people covenant for one purpose, to preserve themselves; therefore any covenant amounting to a surrender of self-preservation is void, since it cancels its own rationale. From which come conclusions that were startling in 1651: no one is obliged to accuse himself; no one is obliged to kill or wound himself; a man lawfully condemned to death still has the right to resist and to run. The sentence is lawful and the resistance is not a breach — there is no contradiction, because he never did and never could authorize anyone to take his life. The sovereign may lawfully kill you, and you may lawfully flee. This is not a loophole but the core of the system: the right of self-preservation was never handed over. What was handed over is only the right to act first.
Then the line with the most real-world bite (paraphrased): the obligation of subjects to the sovereign lasts as long, and no longer, than the power by which he is able to protect them. The reason is blunt: the natural right of self-preservation cannot be relinquished by any covenant. Protection and obedience are a priced exchange, not a one-way loyalty. Fail to protect, and nothing is owed.
In 1651 this was not abstract. Charles I was dead, and thousands of Englishmen were stuck on a concrete question: I swore an oath to the king — must I now obey this new regime? Hobbes's answer amounts to: obey whoever is actually protecting you. Royalists read it as a licence for usurpers; republicans suspected his absolutism would one day serve a king again. Both sides attacked him, and neither misread him. The principle is still sharp: to judge whether a government is legitimate, don't start with how sacred its pedigree is — start with what it delivers to the people under it.
Most readers today take only Parts I and II. Parts III and IV — Of a Christian Commonwealth, and Of the Kingdom of Darkness — are close to half the book, and are routinely skipped. That half is where his practical motive lives.
Because in 1651 the real rival to sovereignty was not a foreign king but the church. If a man may claim a private line to God, or a pope may void a temporal ruler's commands, or every believer may decide by conscience whether the government is Antichrist, then there is permanently a second source of sovereignty in the realm, and permanently more than one sword. So Hobbes spends two whole parts doing one thing: arguing from inside Scripture that religious authority must belong to the civil sovereign. True prophecy must be judged by public authority rather than by each man privately; a "church" not united with the commonwealth is not a person capable of acting at all.
"The Kingdom of Darkness" does not mean Satan's realm but the darkness produced by erroneous doctrine. He names two sources: misreading Scripture, and the Aristotelian scholasticism folded into Christianity, which he mocks as "vain philosophy" for manufacturing things like "incorporeal substances" — phrases pointing at no body and no motion — while clergy use the unintelligible vocabulary to keep hold of the right to judge. The modern echo is unmistakable: what he is really indicting is a form of power that monopolizes a vocabulary outsiders cannot check, and thereby owns the verdict. The price was a lasting suspicion of atheism; in 1666 a House of Commons committee took up an inquiry into books tending to atheism and profaneness, with Leviathan named among them. But note his method — verse by verse, citation by citation. He was not attacking faith; he was fighting over who has the right to interpret it. That was what the century was actually about.
The book is a single line, from one assumption about people to one conclusion about states, with no step you are allowed to skip:
What does it actually establish? Not that monarchs ought to be despots, but this: grant the two premises — that people seek above all to stay alive, and that they cannot be sure of one another — and a universally feared public authority becomes a logical necessity rather than a moral preference. The book's whole force rides on that if-then. To refute it you must attack the premises, which is exactly what Locke and Rousseau went on to do.
Misreading 1: Hobbes thought human beings evil. He denied it himself. People are not wicked; they are afraid of death, calculating, and obliged to hedge when they cannot know. The book's real power is that even a population of decent people ends in war if none of them can be sure of the others. Read as a doctrine of innate depravity, it shrinks to nothing.
Misreading 2: the state of nature is prehistory. Hobbes concedes it may never have obtained generally over the whole world; it is closer to a thought experiment — remove the state, see what remains. But he offers three real approximations: certain American peoples as Europeans then described them (an example resting on partial travellers' reports that modern anthropology does not support, and that should be said plainly); civil war, which he had lived through; and relations between states, sovereigns standing toward one another exactly as men in nature do, fortified and wary. That third example grew directly into realism in international relations.
Misreading 3: he is the forerunner of totalitarianism. His sovereign is indeed unlimited in scope, but its purpose is only peace and safety; it has no ambition to remake the inner life of subjects, who are free wherever the law is silent. Totalitarian regimes want total mobilization and the transformation of minds; the Leviathan just wants people to stop fighting. Calling him the classic statement of absolutism is right; calling him the father of twentieth-century totalitarianism is anachronism.
Now the objections that genuinely land:
Locke: the cure is worse than the disease. Locke denied that the state of nature must be a state of war — natural law and property already exist there, what is missing is an impartial judge — so what is needed is limited government and separated powers, not absolute sovereignty. His famous retort (paraphrased): men are not so foolish as to think themselves safe from polecats and foxes yet content to be devoured by lions. It goes straight to the weak spot: Hobbes exhausted himself demonstrating the cost of having no sovereign, and barely argued the cost of having one. His answer, that the sovereign's inconveniences are slight beside civil war, is an assertion rather than a proof.
Rousseau: you mistook civil-war man for natural man. The competitive, suspicious, honour-hungry creature in Hobbes's pages is, Rousseau argued, a product of society; natural man is solitary, simple in his wants, with neither vanity nor long-range calculation, and his conflicts are limited. Hobbes wrote seventeenth-century Englishmen into "nature." If the disposition to fight is historical rather than innate, half the necessity of the Leviathan collapses.
The bootstrapping problem. Hobbes says that without a common power there is no justice and covenants are void — yet the covenant that creates the sovereign is made precisely before any common power exists. What makes that one binding? The difficulty has been pressed for centuries and still has no clean answer.
The psychological foundation is too narrow. He reduces all motive to self-preservation and appetite. Bishop Joseph Butler's classic eighteenth-century reply: people plainly feel benevolence and compassion not derived from self-interest, and translating those into self-interest is a verbal trick. Strict psychological egoism (the doctrine that every act is finally self-interested) also fares poorly in modern experiments, where anonymous, unrewarded cooperation shows up again and again. This one hits the foundations: if people come with some innate disposition to cooperate, the state of nature is not nearly so desperate.
"Indivisible sovereignty" was falsified by history. Hobbes was certain that divided power means civil war. For three centuries since, constitutional states with separated and checked powers have not merely survived, they have been among the most stable. In fairness: he had never seen a mature independent judiciary or a peaceful transfer of power — the division of powers he had seen was a king and a parliament each with an army.
One technical dispute worth knowing. Contemporary scholars often restate the state of nature in game-theoretic terms: is it a prisoner's dilemma (defection dominates whatever the other does, so cooperation cannot arise unaided), or an assurance game (if I am confident you will cooperate, cooperating is my best move too, and the only failure is one of confidence)? The political implications diverge completely: on the first reading nothing short of absolute sovereignty will do; on the second, anything that supplies credible assurance — reputation, repeated dealing, a far weaker enforcement agency — suffices. This is the origin, inside Hobbes's own text, of the question of how big a state we need — and honestly, the scholarship has not settled it, because his prose supports both readings.
1. With no final good to rest in, happiness is not arrival but continual getting — hence "a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death" (paraphrased), which springs less from greed than from the fact that whoever stops advancing cannot hold what he has.
2. The engine of the state of nature is rough equality: the weakest can kill the strongest, so nobody can subdue anybody, and everyone must watch everyone.
3. Quarrels have three sources — competition (gain), diffidence (safety), glory (reputation); the deadly one is the second: even a man with no greed in him must strike first.
4. A state of war is not constant fighting but the whole period in which the will to fight is known — as foul weather lies not in a shower but in an inclination to rain over many days (paraphrased).
5. Its worst consequence is not violence but that nothing requiring accumulated time can begin: no agriculture, navigation, building or knowledge; "the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" (paraphrased).
6. "Where there is no common power there is no law; where no law, no injustice" (paraphrased) — the vocabulary of right and wrong only becomes meaningful once there is a public judge.
7. A right of everyone to everything leaves everyone with nothing: a universal right is a self-cancelling right. The laws of nature can bend the conscience but not the hand — whoever performs first is prey.
8. Hence the load-bearing line: "covenants without the sword are but words" (paraphrased). The sword comes from people covenanting with one another to authorize a single person — so the sovereign's deeds are legally your own, and that mortal god is the shape our own power takes when it is gathered up.
9. One brake cannot be removed: the right of self-preservation was never surrendered — a man lawfully condemned may still resist and run — and "the obligation of subjects lasts as long as the power by which he is able to protect them" (paraphrased). Protection and obedience are an exchange, not a loyalty.
10. He built an absolutist conclusion on radically individualist premises, which is why royalists and republicans attacked him at once; and what he really bequeathed is not "be ruled absolutely" but a way of asking — treat the state as a machine, and ask why it was built, where it fails, and when it should be shut down.