Comment: “Hobbes starts as an individualist but ends as an absolutist”. (2004)
The formula is a standard verdict on Thomas Hobbes‘s Leviathan (1651) and names its apparent paradox. Premises built entirely from the individual (equality, natural right, consent) yield a sovereign with unlimited power. The paradox is real in outcome but not in logic. Hobbes’s absolutism is derived from his individualism and serves it, yet it leaves the individual without any institutional remedy.
The Individualist Start
- Method. The resolutive-compositive method takes the commonwealth apart into individuals and their passions. The state is then rebuilt as an artificial man.
- Equality. Nature makes men so equal that the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest. There are no natural masters or slaves.
- Right before law. The right of nature is each person’s liberty to preserve himself by any means he judges fit. “Good” is simply what each desires, there being no summum bonum.
- Consent. Authority arises only from a covenant of every man with every man, and even conquest binds through submission.
The Absolutist End
- Authorisation. Subjects own the sovereign’s acts, so he can do them no injury and cannot be punished by them.
- No contract with the ruler. The sovereign is not a party to the covenant, so he cannot breach it and cannot forfeit his power.
- Undivided power. Legislation, judicature, war, taxation and property all belong to him, and mixed government is rejected as a recipe for civil war.
- Control of opinion. He judges which doctrines may be taught and subordinates the church.
Contradiction or Consequence?
- The contradiction reading. John Locke used the same individualist starting point to reach limited government and a right of resistance. His retort was that men avoid polecats or foxes only to be devoured by lions; the premise did not require the conclusion.
- The consequence reading. George H. Sabine treats the absolutism as the complement of the individualism. Because men are atomised and competitive, only an overwhelming common power can unite them. C. B. Macpherson (The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, 1962) adds that a society of market competitors needs such a sovereign to enforce contracts.
- The individualist ending. Hobbes also ends with the individual. Obligation lasts only while the sovereign protects. The true liberty of subjects keeps the right to resist death, and freedom lies in the silence of the law. Michael Oakeshott judged that Hobbes is not an absolutist precisely because he is an authoritarian: his sovereign’s authority is unlimited in kind but narrow in purpose.
- The residual flaw. A theory can be individualist in its ground and purpose and still give the individual no remedy except flight or self-defence once protection has already failed.
The Indian Illustration
ADM Jabalpur (1976) showed the absolutist end in practice: with Article 21 suspended, detenus had no remedy. Justice Hans Raj Khanna dissented alone. The 44th Amendment (1978) made Articles 20 and 21 non-suspendable, and K. S. Puttaswamy (2017) overruled the majority, calling life and liberty inalienable. India kept the individualist start and refused the absolutist end.
Conclusion
The formula describes Hobbes accurately but misleads with its “but”; “therefore” would be truer. He is an individualist in premise and purpose and an absolutist only in the means. The flaw is a sovereign without checks, which constitutionalism was built to correct.