Individualism is inherent in Hobbes’ absolutist ideology. Comment. (2022, 15 Marks)
Thomas Hobbes is often said to begin as an individualist and end as an absolutist, as if the two clashed; the statement claims instead that individualism lies inside the absolutism. In Leviathan (1651) the individual supplies the premises, the purpose and the limits of the sovereign. The claim is largely right, but this individualism is about security, not self-government.
Individualism in the Foundations
- Method. The resolutive-compositive method resolves the commonwealth into individuals and rebuilds it; the state is an artificial man made by and for them (methodological individualism).
- Natural equality. No one is born master or slave. Authority by consent replaces divine right and patriarchal descent, which is why Sir Robert Filmer attacked Hobbes.
- Right before law. The right of nature is the liberty each man hath to use his power to preserve his own life. Hence Leo Strauss (Natural Right and History, 1953) named Hobbes the founder of liberalism, for making rights, not duties, the basic political fact.
- No common good. Good is whatever each desires and there is no summum bonum, so the state has no way of life to impose.
Why Individualism Requires Absolutism
- The logic of fear. Equal, self-judging, distrustful individuals produce war, which only one undivided judge can end. George H. Sabine read the absolutism as the counterpart of the individualism, not its betrayal.
- Authorisation. Each individual authorises the sovereign, an artificial person representing them: its power is theirs, pooled.
- Absolute, but for the individual. The sovereign exists for the safety of the people. The right to resist those who would kill me is inalienable, obligation ends when protection fails, and liberty lies in the silence of the law. Conscience is untouched: a strong but negative state, not a totalitarian one.
- Michael Oakeshott (1946) judged that Hobbes, though no liberal, had more of the philosophy of liberalism in him than most of its professed defenders.
Where the Claim Strains
- C. B. Macpherson (1962) agrees the individualism is built in, but calls it possessive individualism. Absolutism is then the political requirement of a market society.
- John Locke reached limited government from similar premises: absolutism follows from Hobbes’s fear, not individualism as such.
- Rights without remedy. Property, doctrine and taxation belong to the sovereign; self-defence is a right to survive, not a political right.
- Carole Pateman (The Sexual Contract, 1988): the equal individual of the state of nature becomes, in the commonwealth, the male head of household.
Indian Illustration
Article 21 holds the Hobbesian core: the state protects life and may take it only by law. K. S. Puttaswamy (2017) overruled the Hobbesian obedience of ADM Jabalpur (1976), treating life and liberty as inherent, and Kesavananda Bharati (1973) had already denied the state unlimited power. India keeps Hobbes’s premise and rejects his inference.
Conclusion
Individualism is inherent in Hobbes’s absolutism: the Leviathan is the individual’s device for survival and loses its claim when it fails. But the individual it serves is secured rather than self-governing. Liberal constitutionalism retains his premise and limits his sovereign.