Leviathan

Leviathan, published in London in 1651, is Thomas Hobbes‘s masterpiece and the first great work of modern political philosophy written in English. Composed in Paris during the English Civil Wars, it attempts to derive the necessity of an absolute sovereign from the most basic facts about human nature — our appetites, our fears, our rough equality — by a method modelled on geometry. Its picture of the state of nature as “a war of every man against every man”, in which life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”, and its theory of the social contract, by which individuals create a sovereign to escape that war, have shaped political thought ever since. Its title comes from the sea monster of the Book of Job, “king over all the children of pride”; its famous frontispiece shows a giant crowned figure, holding sword and crozier, whose body is composed of hundreds of tiny people, rising over a landscape of towns and fields.

At a glance

The argument

The artificial man. The Introduction announces the book’s design. Nature, “the art whereby God hath made and governs the world”, is imitated by human art, which can make “an artificial animal” — as automata, watches and engines have “artificial life”. Art goes further, and creates “that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMONWEALTH, or STATE”, an artificial man, in which sovereignty is the soul, magistrates the joints, rewards and punishments the nerves, wealth its strength, counsellors its memory, laws its reason and will, concord its health, sedition its sickness, and civil war its death. To understand it, we must first understand its matter and maker, man; and for this, Hobbes advises, “read thyself” — nosce teipsum.

Of man. Part I builds a materialist psychology. All thought originates in sense, the pressure of external objects on our organs; imagination is “decaying sense”; memory is the same thing seen as past. Speech — the invention of names — makes reasoning possible but also absurdity: “words are wise men’s counters… but they are the money of fools”. Reason is “reckoning”, adding and subtracting the consequences of names; science is knowledge of consequences. The passions are forms of appetite and aversion: hope, fear, anger, courage, glory, pity, curiosity. “Good” and “evil” name what we desire and hate. There is no final good; felicity is “a continual progress of the desire, from one object to another”. Hence “a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death”. Religion springs from anxiety about the future and ignorance of causes.

The natural condition of mankind (chapter 13). Nature made men so equal in faculties of body and mind that “the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest”. From equality of ability arises equality of hope, and so, when two desire the same thing, enmity. There are three principal causes of quarrel — competition, diffidence and glory — the first for gain, the second for safety, the third for reputation. “Hereby it is manifest that during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war as is of every man against every man.” Then follows the most famous passage in English political philosophy: in such a condition there is “no place for industry… no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; 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 this war, “nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, have there no place. Where there is no common power, there is no law; where no law, no injustice.”

Laws of nature (chapters 14–15). The right of nature is each man’s liberty to use his own power for the preservation of his life. A law of nature is a rule found out by reason forbidding a man to do what destroys his life. The first: “that every man ought to endeavour peace, as far as he has hope of obtaining it; and when he cannot obtain it, that he may seek and use all helps and advantages of war”. The second: that a man be willing, when others are so too, to lay down his right to all things. The third: “that men perform their covenants made” — the origin of justice. To the “Fool” who “hath said in his heart, there is no such thing as justice”, and that it is reasonable to break covenants when it pays, Hobbes replies that no one can safely rely on escaping the consequences, and no confederacy will accept a known covenant-breaker. Nineteen laws in all are summed up in the negative golden rule.

The commonwealth (chapters 17–19). But “covenants, without the sword, are but words”. The only way to erect a common power is for men “to confer all their power and strength upon one man, or upon one assembly of men, that may reduce all their wills, by plurality of voices, unto one will”. Each covenants with each: “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 sovereign is the representative of the people, who are the “authors” of his actions; hence he can do them no injury. His rights are indivisible: making war and peace, judging, legislating, appointing ministers, rewarding and punishing, and deciding “what opinions and doctrines are averse, and what conducing to peace”. Of the three forms — monarchy, aristocracy, democracy — monarchy is best, since the private interest of a monarch coincides most closely with the public.

The liberty of subjects (chapter 21). Liberty is “the absence of external impediments”; fear and liberty are consistent, as a man who throws his goods into the sea for fear of drowning does so freely. The liberty of subjects consists in what the sovereign has left unregulated — “the liberty to buy and sell… to choose their own abode, their own diet, their own trade of life”. But some rights cannot be transferred: no one is obliged to kill or wound himself, or to refrain from resisting those who would kill him, or to accuse himself. And “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”.

Laws and diseases of the commonwealth (chapters 26–30). Civil law is the command of the sovereign; interpretation belongs to him. Hobbes lists the causes of the dissolution of commonwealths: the doctrines that every private man is judge of good and evil, that conscience may override law, that sovereigns are subject to civil laws, that property is absolute against the sovereign, that sovereign power may be divided; the reading of Greek and Roman histories, which teach the love of tyrannicide; and the claim of spiritual authorities to rival the temporal.

A Christian commonwealth and the kingdom of darkness (Parts III–IV). Hobbes examines Scripture to show that it supports his politics: prophecy has ceased; the kingdom of God will come only at the Second Coming; meanwhile the Christian sovereign is the supreme pastor; and the only article of faith necessary to salvation is “that Jesus is the Christ”. The “kingdom of darkness” is the confederacy of deceivers — above all the Roman Church — who use “vain philosophy” (Aristotle’s metaphysics of “separated essences”), fabulous traditions and demonology to gain power over men. “The Papacy is no other than the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof.”

Reception

Leviathan outraged almost everyone. Royalists thought it justified submission to Cromwell; churchmen denounced its materialism and its subordination of the Church to the state; Oxford burned it in 1683. Yet it was read everywhere, and its framework — individuals in a state of nature, consent, the contract, the sovereign — became the common language of political philosophy. Baruch Spinoza, John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau answered it; in the twentieth century it was read anew by Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, C. B. Macpherson (as the philosophy of “possessive individualism”) and game theorists.

In conversation

• The war of all against all — the state of nature.
• The frontispiece — the giant made of citizens.
• The Fool — why it is rational to keep one’s promises.