Thomas Hobbes

Thomas Hobbes was an English philosopher, best known for Leviathan (1651), the founding work of modern political philosophy. Writing amid the English Civil Wars, he argued that human beings, without a common power to keep them in awe, would fall into a “war of every man against every man”, in which life would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”; that rational persons, seeking above all to preserve themselves, would therefore agree to transfer their rights to an absolute sovereign; and that the sovereign’s power must be undivided and unlimited. His was the first great theory of the social contract, the starting point for John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant and John Rawls. He was also a thoroughgoing materialist, who held that everything, including the mind, is body in motion; a pioneer of the scientific study of human nature; a translator of Thucydides and Homer; and one of the most notorious and feared writers of his age, accused of atheism by bishops and royalists alike.

Life

Hobbes was born on 5 April 1588 at Westport, near Malmesbury in Wiltshire — prematurely, he said, because his mother was frightened by the approach of the Spanish Armada: “my mother gave birth to twins, myself and fear”. His father, a quarrelsome country vicar, abandoned the family after a brawl in his churchyard, and Hobbes was brought up by a wealthy uncle. He studied at Magdalen Hall, Oxford, which he found tedious, and in 1608 became tutor to the son of William Cavendish, later Earl of Devonshire — the beginning of a lifelong connection with the Cavendish family, whose service gave him books, leisure, and travel. On tours of the Continent he met Galileo in Florence (1636) and the circle of Marin Mersenne in Paris, including Gassendi.

His first publication was a translation of Thucydides (1629), the historian of the war that destroyed Athenian democracy, whom he admired for showing “how inept democracy is”. Around 1629, aged forty, he discovered geometry: in a gentleman’s library he found Euclid’s Elements open at proposition 47 of Book I, exclaimed “By God, this is impossible!”, and followed the demonstration back to the axioms. Geometry’s method — from definitions to certain conclusions — became his model for a science of politics.

In 1640, as Parliament challenged Charles I, Hobbes circulated The Elements of Law, defending absolute sovereignty. Fearing for his safety, he fled to Paris, “the first of all that fled”, where he lived for eleven years. He wrote objections to René Descartes‘s Meditations (1641), published De Cive (“On the Citizen”, 1642), and tutored the exiled Prince of Wales in mathematics. Leviathan, published in London in 1651, offended the royalist exiles by its apparent acceptance of any government that could protect its subjects, and the clergy by its attacks on the Church; Hobbes returned to England and submitted to Cromwell’s Commonwealth.

After the Restoration (1660), Charles II welcomed his old tutor and gave him a pension, but Hobbes was attacked by the bishops, by the new Royal Society — whose experimental method he disparaged — and in a long, bitter controversy with the mathematician John Wallis over his mistaken claim to have squared the circle. In 1666 a Commons committee considered investigating Leviathan for blasphemy and atheism; Hobbes burned some papers and was forbidden to publish further on politics in England. In old age he wrote Behemoth, a history of the Civil War, translated the whole of Homer into English verse, and wrote an autobiography in Latin verse. He died at Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire, on 4 December 1679, aged ninety-one.

Materialism and method

Hobbes’s philosophy was conceived as a system in three parts — De Corpore (“On Body”, 1655), De Homine (“On Man”, 1658) and De Cive — moving from physics to human nature to politics. Everything that exists is body; all change is motion. Sensation is the motion of external bodies pressing on the sense organs, transmitted to the brain and heart; imagination is “decaying sense”; thought is a train of imaginations; reasoning is “reckoning”, the adding and subtracting of names. There are no incorporeal substances; to speak of an “incorporeal substance” is as self-contradictory as an “incorporeal body”. Even God, if he exists, must be corporeal. The will is simply “the last appetite in deliberating”; human beings are free when nothing external hinders them from doing what they will, but their wills are as caused as anything else. Hobbes debated free will with Bishop John Bramhall, defending a compatibilist determinism.

Human nature

Human beings are moved by appetites and aversions. “Good” is the name of whatever a man desires, “evil” of whatever he hates; there is no “summum bonum”, no final end, as the old moral philosophers taught, but “a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death” — not because men always seek more delight, but because they cannot be sure of keeping what they have without acquiring more. Reason is not a master but a scout: “the thoughts are to the desires, as scouts and spies, to range abroad and find the way to the things desired”.

Against Aristotle, who held that man is by nature a political animal, Hobbes argued that human beings are not naturally sociable; society is an artifice, created by agreement to escape the miseries of nature.

The state of nature

Imagine human beings without any common power over them. Nature has made them roughly equal in body and mind — the weakest can kill the strongest, by secret plot or alliance — and so each hopes for equal success. When two men want the same thing, they become enemies. Three causes of quarrel lie in human nature: competition (for gain), diffidence (distrust, leading to pre-emptive attack, for safety) and glory (for reputation). Without a common power, men live in “that condition which is called war; and such a war as is of every man against every man”. In such a condition “there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation… no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

In the state of nature, there is no justice or injustice, no property, no “mine and thine”; everyone has the right of nature to use any means to preserve himself, even to another’s body. If anyone doubts this, Hobbes adds, let him consider why he locks his doors and chests, and arms himself when he travels. The relations between sovereign states, and the condition of civil war, show what the state of nature is like.

Laws of nature and the contract

Reason, however, discovers laws of nature: general rules forbidding a man to do what is destructive of his life. The first is “to seek peace, and follow it”; the second, that a man be willing, when others are 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”. The third is that men perform their covenants: here justice begins. Hobbes lists nineteen laws in all — gratitude, sociability, pardon, equity, against pride and arrogance — summed up in “Do not that to another, which thou wouldest not have done to thyself”.

But covenants without enforcement are worthless: “covenants, without the sword, are but words, and of no strength to secure a man at all”. So people agree, each with each, to authorise one man or assembly — the sovereign — to act for them all: “I authorise and give up my right of governing myself to this man, or to this assembly of men, on this condition; that thou give up thy right to him, and authorise all his actions in like manner.” The multitude so united is a commonwealth, “that great Leviathan, or rather (to speak more reverently) of that mortal god, to which we owe under the immortal God, our peace and defence”. Sovereignty may also be acquired by conquest, when the vanquished submit to the victor out of fear; Hobbes held such covenants equally binding.

The sovereign

Because the sovereign is not a party to the contract but its beneficiary, he cannot break it, and subjects cannot rebel against him on the ground that he has. His power must be absolute and undivided: he makes the laws, judges disputes, controls the militia, censors doctrines, appoints officials and decides the public religion. Division of power — between king and Parliament, or between Church and state — was, for Hobbes, the cause of the Civil War. Monarchy is the best form, but the logic of sovereignty is the same for an assembly.

There are limits. Since the end of the covenant is self-preservation, no one can be obliged to give up the right to defend his life; a condemned man may resist his executioners, and a man may refuse to kill himself or, in some cases, to fight. The liberty of subjects lies in “the silence of the law” — all that the law does not forbid. And when the sovereign can no longer protect his subjects, their obligation ends: “the obligation of subjects to the sovereign is understood to last as long, and no longer, than the power lasteth by which he is able to protect them.”

Religion

Half of Leviathan concerns religion. Hobbes argued from Scripture that the kingdom of God is not of this world until the Second Coming; that the sovereign is the supreme interpreter of Scripture and head of the Church; that the soul is not naturally immortal; that hell is not eternal torment; and that the Roman Church, with its claims to temporal power, is a “Kingdom of Darkness” — “the Papacy is no other than the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof”. His contemporaries suspected that his Christianity was a cover for atheism; scholars still disagree.

Legacy

Hobbes’s conclusions — absolute sovereignty — were rejected by almost everyone, but his method set the terms of modern political thought: politics begins from individuals with rights and interests in a state of nature, and legitimate authority rests on their consent. Locke answered him with limited government; Rousseau with the general will; game theorists have found in his state of nature the prisoner’s dilemma; realists in international relations a picture of anarchy among states.

In conversation

• “Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” — life in the state of nature.
• “Covenants, without the sword, are but words” — why we need a sovereign.
• “Myself and fear” — the philosopher born of the Armada.