Comment: Hobbes as an individualist. (2011)
Individualism treats the individual as the ultimate unit of explanation and value, and the state as a means to individual ends. Thomas Hobbes is its first systematic theorist, despite the absolute sovereign of Leviathan (1651). Michael Oakeshott (Introduction to Leviathan, 1946) judged that Hobbes, without himself being a liberal, had in him more of the philosophy of liberalism than most of its professed defenders. He is individualist in method, morals and purpose, though not in the liberal sense of rights against the state.
Dimensions of Hobbes’s Individualism
| Dimension | Hobbes’s claim | What it rejects |
|---|---|---|
| Method | The resolutive-compositive method dissolves the commonwealth into individuals and rebuilds it | The organic whole prior to its parts (Aristotle) |
| Ontology | Nominalism: only particular bodies exist; universals are names | Real essences and a natural social order |
| Psychology | Appetite, aversion and the restless desire of power after power | Natural sociability |
| Morals | “Good” is what each man desires; no summum bonum | An objective common good |
| Right | The right of nature (jus) comes before law (lex) | Duties given by a prior moral order |
| Equality | The weakest can kill the strongest; the mother holds original dominion | Natural hierarchy of birth or sex |
- Consent. Political authority arises only from each individual’s covenant, including submission to a conqueror. The state is an artificial man, and its only title is the security of the individuals who make it.
- An inalienable core. The right to resist those who come to kill a man cannot be transferred, and obligation ends when protection ends.
- A private sphere. Liberty lies in the silence of the law. Belief cannot be commanded, although profession can.
Rival Readings
- Possessive individualism. C. B. Macpherson (The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, 1962) sees the individual as proprietor of his own person and capacities, owing nothing to society for them. Hobbes defines a man’s worth as his price, which reads as a model of market society projected into nature. Critics reply that glory is not a market motive.
- Individuality. Oakeshott places Hobbes at the head of the tradition of Will and Artifice. His sovereign’s authority serves self-moving individuals and does not impose a collective purpose; in Oakeshott’s phrase, Hobbes is not an absolutist precisely because he is an authoritarian.
- The founder of liberalism. Leo Strauss (Natural Right and History, 1953) holds that making rights rather than duties the basic political fact founded liberalism, while lowering politics to comfortable self-preservation.
The Limits
- Individualism without liberty. Subjects hold no rights against the sovereign. Property is his creation, doctrine is censored, and resistance has no remedy beyond self-defence.
- Communitarian. Charles Taylor (“Atomism”, 1979) argues that the capacities individualists prize develop only within society, so the pre-social atom is a fiction. Karl Marx (Grundrisse, 1857–58) had made the same point.
- Feminist. Carole Pateman (The Sexual Contract, 1988) notes that Hobbes’s egalitarian premise quietly gives way to a male-headed household in civil society.
The Indian Anchor
Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar made Hobbes’s methodological choice for emancipatory ends. Introducing the Draft Constitution on 4 November 1948, he called the village a sink of localism, a den of ignorance and welcomed a Constitution that adopted the individual as its unit. Unlike Hobbes, he armed that individual with enforceable rights in Part III. Mohandas K. Gandhi‘s village republics represent the rival, communitarian ideal.
Conclusion
Hobbes is the first thorough individualist in political theory: the individual is the starting point, the maker and the purpose of the state. His individualism is protective, not emancipatory. Liberalism kept his premises and added the rights against the sovereign that he refused.