Thomas Hobbes

Western Political Thought: Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, John S. Mill, Marx, Gramsci, Hannah Arendt. Also serves the social-contract theory of the origin of the state, the concept of sovereignty, political obligation, and the realist tradition in international relations.

Official Syllabus: Paper I, Section A, Unit 10

Hobbes is the moment political theory stops asking what the good life is and starts asking what makes any life possible at all. He wrote in the middle of a civil war, from exile, for a country that had executed its king, and he set out to prove — in the manner of a geometrical demonstration, from premises about matter in motion — that the only alternative to unlimited sovereign power is universal violent death.

The argument is repellent to almost everyone and has never been dislodged. Every later theory of the state either accepts its architecture and disputes its conclusion, as Locke did, or must explain why the question it answers is the wrong question. Sovereignty, political obligation, the social contract, the security dilemma and legal positivism all descend from this one book.

He is also the most misread thinker in the unit. The caricature is a defender of tyranny; the text is a defence of the individual, whose life is the only thing the apparatus exists to protect and whose obedience expires the moment that protection does. Hobbes is an authoritarian in his conclusion and a liberal in his method, and the method proved by far the more durable of the two.

England in the Century of Civil War

Malmesbury, the Armada and the Twins

• Born 5 April 1588 at Westport, beside Malmesbury in Wiltshire, and dead at Chatsworth in 1679 at the age of ninety-one. The lifespan is the point: he saw the whole seventeenth-century crisis from beginning to end.
• His mother went into premature labour on hearing that the Spanish Armada had been sighted, and Hobbes made the accident into the epigraph of his own system.

“My mother gave birth to twins: myself and fear.” — Thomas Hobbes

• The line is from the Latin verse autobiography of his eighties, and it is doing philosophical work rather than sentiment. Fear is the passion that inclines men to peace, and therefore the emotion on which the whole state is built.
• His father, a quarrelsome and poorly educated vicar, abandoned the family after a brawl at his own church door; an uncle who was a prosperous glover paid for the boy’s education.
• He was a translator before he was a philosopher. His first published work was an English Thucydides, chosen, he said, because Thucydides showed how badly democracies deliberate.

Oxford, the Cavendishes and the Grand Tours

• At Oxford he was bored and irritated by scholastic Aristotelianism, and the irritation never left him; the assault on the Schools in Leviathan is a settled grudge with a philosophical justification attached.
• From 1608 he was tutor and secretary to the Cavendish family, Earls of Devonshire, and stayed attached to them for most of seventy years. He was a client of the aristocracy all his life, which shaped both his access and his caution.
• Three continental journeys made him. On the second he encountered Euclid’s Elements — the story is that he opened it at a proposition, disbelieved it, followed the demonstration back, and was converted to the geometrical method on the spot.
• On the third journey he met Galileo in Florence, and in Paris joined the circle of Marin Mersenne, where Descartes and Gassendi were the other principals. He read Kepler on planetary motion and Galileo on falling bodies.
• The conviction he brought home was total: everything, including man, morals and politics, could be explained by the laws of motion.

The Civil War, Exile and Return

• The English crisis was constitutional before it was military — the dissolution of the Short Parliament in 1640, the impeachment of Strafford, and the collapse of any settled answer to who had the last word.
• Hobbes circulated The Elements of Law in manuscript in 1640, arguing for undivided sovereignty but pointedly not from the divine right of kings. Fearing for his life he fled to Paris — “the first of all that fled”, as he later put it.
• Eleven years of exile in France were his most productive: De Cive appeared in 1642, and Leviathan was written and published there in 1651.
• The Civil War is the empirical content of the state of nature. Its two theatres — competing sovereigns and competing religious authorities — are precisely the two things his theory forbids.
• He served as tutor in mathematics to the exiled Prince of Wales, the future Charles II, which later saved him from serious persecution.
• He returned to England in 1651 and submitted to the Commonwealth — the practical decision his theory had already justified in the abstract.

The Engagement Controversy: A Book That Pleased Nobody

• The Engagement of 1650 required adult males to promise to be true and faithful to the Commonwealth “as it is now established, without a King or House of Lords”. Hundreds of pamphlets argued over whether a subject of an executed king could take it.
• The de facto theorists — writers such as Anthony Ascham and Marchamont Nedham — answered that obedience is owed to whoever can actually protect you.
• Leviathan‘s “Review and Conclusion” lands squarely in that debate: obligation to a former sovereign ends when he can no longer defend you, and submission to a conqueror who can is lawful.
• The Royalists read this as defection. Hobbes had defended absolute monarchy in the abstract and then supplied the argument by which a regicide regime could claim allegiance; he was expelled from the exiled court in Paris.
• The Parliamentarians could not use him either. His theory has no popular representation, no right of resistance, no accountability of rulers and no independent church — every institutional claim their cause rested on.
• He was out of step with both sides at once — with the parliamentarians’ theory of popular representation, and with the Stuart theory of legitimation grounded in the divine right of kings. That double offence is why his standing as a philosopher was not securely recognised until the nineteenth century.
• Clarendon believed the book was written to flatter Cromwell and secure its author’s return home.
• The paradox is structural, not opportunistic. Hobbes grounds authority on protection and consent, not on descent or divinity, so his absolutism is available to any effective power and guaranteed to none.

A theory that makes protection the ground of obedience will always look like treason to whoever is currently losing.

• Skinner’s contextual reading turns this into the interpretive key: Hobbes is intervening in a live pamphlet war about allegiance, and the abstract theory of obligation is inseparable from that intervention.

The Monster of Malmesbury

• He was denounced almost universally in his lifetime for atheism, blasphemy and impiety, and known as “the Monster of Malmesbury”; Leviathan was described as a book of lewd principles and poisonous doctrine.
• In 1666 a Commons committee on a bill against atheism and profaneness was empowered to receive information about such books, and Leviathan was named — the plague and the Fire were being blamed on national impiety.
• Charles II protected his old tutor but silenced him. Hobbes was barred from publishing on politics or religion in England, and Behemoth was withheld, appearing only after his death.
• Two late controversies mark the man: with Bishop Bramhall on free will and necessity, producing the sharpest early modern statement of compatibilism; and with the mathematician John Wallis, over his disastrous claim to have squared the circle.
• Recognition came late. The utilitarians and the French philosophes read him seriously, but only the nineteenth and twentieth centuries treated him as a major philosopher rather than a scandal. Sabine’s verdict is now standard: probably the greatest writer on political philosophy the English-speaking peoples have produced.

The Corpus and the Tripartite System

Body, Man, Citizen

• Hobbes conceived his philosophy as one deductive system in three parts, published under the general title Elementa Philosophiae.
  • De Corpore — body: first philosophy, geometry, mechanics, the science of motion in general.
  • De Homine — man: sense, imagination, speech, the passions; human motion as a special case of motion.
  • De Cive — the citizen: the commonwealth, obligation, sovereignty, religion.
• The order of composition inverted the order of exposition. War made politics urgent, so he wrote the third part first — De Cive in 1642 — finishing De Corpore only in 1655 and De Homine in 1658.
• This inversion is an argumentative embarrassment. If politics really follows deductively from physics, the political conclusions should not have been available a decade before the physics was written.
• Hobbes’s own defence is that the political conclusions can be reached independently, by introspection — a reader who examines his own passions will find the premises confirmed without following the chain upward from matter.
• That concession is the opening Strauss and Oakeshott both exploited to argue that the materialism is detachable from the politics.

The Works in Sequence

Work	Date	What it adds
The Elements of Law	circulated 1640	The first statement of the whole theory; later split into Human Nature and De Corpore Politico
De Cive	1642	The tightest philosophical statement; rated by some scholars superior to Leviathan as philosophy
Leviathan	1651	Authorisation, the person, the mortal God; half the book on religion
De Corpore	1655	The materialist and geometrical foundations
De Homine	1658	Optics, sense and the passions
Behemoth	published 1682	The Civil War as a case study in the causes of dissolution

• Leviathan is not the only source and should not be the only one cited. The argument is substantially the same across the three political works; what changes is emphasis, idiom and one crucial doctrine.
• The doctrinal change is authorisation. In The Elements and De Cive subjects lay down or transfer their rights; in Leviathan they additionally own and authorise the sovereign’s acts as their own — which is what makes his injustice logically impossible.
• Behemoth matters more than its neglect suggests. It names the causes of the war as seditious doctrine — Presbyterian preachers, Catholic claims, universities teaching Greek and Roman republicanism, and London merchants imitating the Dutch. The remedy is control of doctrine, which is exactly the right the sovereign is given.

The English and the Latin Leviathan

• The English Leviathan of 1651 and the Latin Leviathan of 1668 are not the same book, and the differences are substantive rather than cosmetic.
• The Latin edition was published in Amsterdam, beyond English licensing, because Hobbes could no longer publish on these subjects at home.
• It drops or softens the most provocative English material and adds a three-part Appendix — on the Nicene Creed, on heresy, and on objections to the book — arguing that no law then in force made him punishable.
• The English “Review and Conclusion” is absent from the Latin text, its argument about submitting to a conqueror replaced by material better suited to a Restoration and European readership.
• The Trinity passages are altered. Hobbes’s attempt to explain the persons of the Trinity through his own theory of personation proved indefensible and is handled differently in Latin.
• The consequence for reading him is that the authoritative text is contested, and modern scholarly editions print the Latin variants alongside the English because they change the theological argument.

Method: Politics Built Like Geometry

The Scientific Revolution as Context

• The seventeenth century is the century of genius — Kepler, Galileo, Harvey, Descartes, Boyle — and the prestige of physics was total. No theory could expect a hearing unless it claimed to be scientific.
• Harvey’s circulation of the blood is the model Hobbes cites for the body: an organism explained as a hydraulic mechanism, without souls or purposes.
• Galileo is the decisive influence, and Hobbes said so: Galileo had opened the gate to natural philosophy by making motion the fundamental fact.
  • The key transfer is the principle of inertia — a body in motion continues unless impeded. Applied to human beings it yields desire that never comes to rest.
  • The state of nature is then not a moral claim about wickedness but a mechanical consequence: bodies in motion in a confined space collide.
• Geometry supplies the form, not the content. It is for Hobbes the only science in which men have so far reasoned rightly, because it begins from stipulated definitions and proceeds by demonstration.
• Two corrections to the standard account. He was not an empiricist and was hostile to Bacon’s experimental programme, despite having worked as his amanuensis; and the resolutive-compositive method is not Descartes’s invention but the method of the school of Padua, transmitted through Galileo.

The Resolutive-Compositive Method

• The method has two movements, and the name records both.
  • Resolution, or analysis. Take the whole — the commonwealth — and dissolve it into its simplest parts, which are individuals, and then into sense, appetite and motion.
  • Composition, or synthesis. Having found the elements and their laws, reassemble the whole and show that it could not have been otherwise.
• The image is Hobbes’s own: to understand a watch, take it apart and see how the wheels move. The commonwealth is to be considered as if dissolved, though not actually dissolved.
• The political payoff is enormous. Once the state is resolved into individuals, the individual becomes the unit of political explanation — and the state must then be rebuilt out of individual reasons, not inherited from nature, God or custom.
• This is methodological individualism in its founding form, three centuries before the term. The state is a construction whose only materials are persons and their motives.
• The method also dictates the answer. Begin from separate self-moving units with no natural bond, and the only bond available at the end is one they make — and the only thing that holds an artificial bond together is force.
• The circularity is the standing objection. The parts were defined so as to require exactly the whole he wanted: resolution is not a neutral operation, and what you find in the elements is what you put there.

Materialism and Mechanism

• The universe is body and nothing else. What is not body is not part of the universe, and since the universe is all, what is not body is nothing. There are no incorporeal substances.
• All change is motion, and all motion is caused by contiguous motion. Nothing moves itself.
• Matter is composed of particles in motion, and man is part of that universe on the same terms — the motions of those particles continue so long as he is alive, slowing in sleep and stopping at death.
• Sensation is motion. External bodies press on the sense organs, the pressure travels inward, and the internal motion appears to us as colour, sound and smell. Secondary qualities are in the perceiver, not the object.
• Imagination is decaying sense, memory the awareness of that decay, and thought is computation — the adding and subtracting of the consequences of names.
• The consequences for politics are radical. If mind is motion, there is no soul for a church to claim jurisdiction over, no eternal law written on the heart, and no natural end men are failing to reach.
• The doctrine of separated essences is his standing target. Abstract entities floating free of bodies are for Hobbes both bad metaphysics and the intellectual machinery of clerical power.

The Rejection of Teleology, and of Aristotle

• Aristotle explains by final causes: a thing’s nature is its completed state, the acorn’s nature is the oak, and man’s nature is the polis.
• Hobbes explains by efficient causes only. Nature has no purposes; a final cause is a confusion — the imagined future acting backwards on the present.
• The specific denials matter one by one.
  • Man is not by nature a political animal. He is naturally solitary; society is an artefact produced by fear and reason.
  • The state is not natural but artificial — “an artificial man”, made by art, with sovereignty as its artificial soul.
  • There is no natural hierarchy. No man is born to rule and none to serve, and natural slavery is abolished with the teleology that generated it.
  • The good is not a natural end but simply the name each man gives to what he desires.
• He inverted Aristotle’s priority claim. For Aristotle the whole is prior to the part; for Hobbes the parts are prior to the whole, which exists only for their sake.
• His hostility is explicit. Nothing, he wrote, can be more absurd in natural philosophy than what is now called Aristotle’s Metaphysics, nor more repugnant to government than much of his Politics — and he blamed the universities’ teaching of it for the war.

Nominalism and Why Definitions Matter

• Only individuals exist. Universals are not things but names, given to many things because of a resemblance we have chosen to notice.
• Truth is a property of propositions, not of things: true and false belong to speech, and there is no truth where there is no speech.
• Hence reasoning depends entirely on settled definitions, and the first cause of absurd conclusions is the want of them. Geometry succeeds because geometers define their terms and hold to them.
• The political consequence is the whole theory in miniature. If just, good, heresy and property have no natural meanings, then someone must fix them — and if that someone is each man for himself, disagreement is war.
• So the sovereign is also the definer. The right to determine what counts as just, what may be taught, and what property a man has follows from nominalism as strictly as from the covenant.
• The critique writes itself. If meanings are stipulated by power, the sovereign’s law is beyond criticism by definition rather than by argument, and Hobbes has secured his conclusion in the dictionary before the political argument begins.

How Much of the Method Survives

• Watkins treats the laws of nature as neither moral commands nor factual claims but as hypothetical imperatives — doctors’ orders of a peculiarly compelling kind — preserving the deductive structure without the naturalistic fallacy.
• Strauss denies the science altogether: Hobbes’s political philosophy is pre-scientific and humanist in origin, grounded in a moral attitude that was later dressed in mechanical clothing.
• Oakeshott relocates the unity. What holds the system together is not materialism but philosophic rationalism — a particular conception of what philosophical knowledge is — from which the mechanical picture follows, rather than the reverse.
• The contextualist objection is that a system claiming to be timeless demonstration was assembled inside a specific pamphlet war and carries its marks.
• The influence of the form is not in doubt. The idea that political conclusions can be derived — from premises about individuals, by argument, without appeal to authority or revelation — is the founding move of modern political theory.

The Psychology: Man as Matter in Motion

Vital and Voluntary Motion

• Hobbes divides animal motion into two kinds, and the whole psychology follows.
  • Vital motion is the automatic and continuous working of the organism — circulation, breathing, digestion, excretion. It needs no imagination and never stops between birth and death.
  • Voluntary motion is first fancied in the mind: it begins as an image, produced by an external object pressing on the senses, and issues in movement of the body.
• The small internal beginnings of voluntary motion Hobbes calls endeavour (conatus), and all the passions are endeavour under different names.
• The link between the two motions is the mechanism of value: motion that assists vital motion is felt as pleasure, motion that retards it as pain.
• This is a physiology of desire, not a moral psychology. Nothing in it appeals to virtue, sin, grace or a natural end — which is precisely the scandal.

Appetite, Aversion and the Relativity of Good

• Endeavour toward its cause is appetite; endeavour away from it is aversion. Love and hate are the same motions where the object is present.
• “Good” is whatever a man desires and “evil” whatever he shuns, the words always used with relation to the person using them.
• There is nothing simply and absolutely good, and no common rule of good and evil to be taken from the nature of the objects themselves.
• Where there is no commonwealth there is no common standard, so the measure must come from the person who has the right to command — a second, independent route from the psychology to the sovereign.
• The derived passions are defined mechanically: hope is appetite with an opinion of attaining; fear is aversion with an opinion of hurt; diffidence is constant despair; glory is joy arising from imagination of one’s own power.
• Vainglory — glory grounded in flattery or self-conceit rather than real ability — is the passion Hobbes treats as most politically dangerous, because it makes men fight over trifles.

Deliberation, Will and the Denial of Free Will

• Deliberation is not weighing reasons. It is the alternate succession of appetites and aversions in the mind about one and the same thing, until the thing is done or judged impossible.
• The word is his own joke: deliberation is the putting an end to the liberty we had of doing or omitting.
• The will is the last appetite in deliberation — not a separate faculty, not a power of choosing between motives, but whichever desire is in possession when action begins.
• Therefore there is no free will, and the phrase is for Hobbes literally meaningless: liberty belongs to bodies, not to appetites.
• Beasts deliberate too on this definition, which is exactly the deflation he intends.
• The compatibilist move is his lasting contribution to philosophy. Liberty and necessity are consistent: a free man is one not hindered from doing what he wills, though what he wills was itself caused.
  • The image is water in a channel: it has liberty to descend because nothing stops it, and necessity to descend because it cannot do otherwise.
  • Voluntary actions are free and necessary at once — free because they proceed from the agent’s will, necessary because that will had a cause.
• The Bramhall debate made this explicit and is the first fully worked-out compatibilism in English philosophy, standing behind Hume and Mill.
• The political consequence is direct. If liberty is absence of external impediment and the will is caused, then fear and liberty are perfectly consistent: a man who submits out of terror still acts freely, and his covenant binds.

Felicity and the Denial of a Summum Bonum

• There is no finis ultimus and no summum bonum — no utmost aim, no greatest good — of the kind spoken of in the books of the old moral philosophers.
• Felicity is not tranquillity. It is a continual progress of the desire from one object to another, the attaining of the former being still but the way to the latter.
• Repose is not felicity but death, since sense and imagination are motion, and motion is life.
• This one denial demolishes the classical tradition. Plato’s Good, Aristotle’s eudaimonia, the Christian beatitudo all presuppose a final end at which the soul rests; Hobbes replaces the destination with the journey.
• What replaces the highest good is the greatest evil. The organising fact of his ethics is not the pursuit of a supreme good but the avoidance of a summum malum — violent death at the hands of another.
• The asymmetry is the theory’s real foundation. Men disagree endlessly about what is good; they agree about death. A politics grounded on the shared aversion is possible where one grounded on the shared aspiration is not.
• This is why Hobbes founds the negative state. It secures the one thing everyone wants and leaves the plural and irreconcilable goods to the private life it makes possible.

The Restless Desire of Power After Power

“I put for a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.” — Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

• The reason for the restlessness is defensive, not greedy, and Hobbes says so in the same sentence: not that a man hopes for more intense delight, or cannot be content with moderate power, but that he cannot assure the power and means to live well which he has at present without acquiring more.
• This is the most misread passage in Hobbes. It is not a claim that men are power-mad but that in the absence of guarantees, security requires expansion — and expansion by one is insecurity for another.
• Power is defined instrumentally — a man’s present means to obtain some future apparent good — and so covers riches, reputation, friends, eloquence and good luck, not merely force.
• The reflexive character is crucial. Reputation of power is itself power, because it draws the adherence of those who need protection; glory and honour are opinions about power, and therefore real assets.
• Oakeshott’s compression is unimprovable: man is a complex of power — desire the desire for power, pride illusion about power, honour opinion about power, life the unremitting exercise of power, and death the absolute loss of power.
• The dialectic of power that follows — that masters must ceaselessly reinforce their power for fear of losing it, and so pursue a dominion impossible to attain — was later developed by Acton, Burckhardt and Simone Weil.
• This is the seed of the security dilemma: measures taken for defence are indistinguishable from preparations for attack.

Is Hobbes a Psychological Egoist?

• The textbook reading says yes: every man seeks only his own preservation and pleasure, so morality is either prudence or fraud.
• Plamenatz rejects it. Psychological egoism is not really necessary to the political theory, which survives on the weaker premise that men are not reliably other-regarding.
• Bernard Gert makes the sharper logical point. That my desiring a thing is caused by its benefiting my vital motion does not entail that I desire it because I believe it does. The mechanism is egoistic; the motive need not be.
• Hobbes’s own text names other-regarding passions — pity, benevolence, charity, kindness — and defines pity as grief for another’s calamity arising from imagining it could happen to oneself, which is a mixed rather than purely selfish account.
• Kavka proposes rule-egoism: Hobbesian agents follow rules whose general observance serves them, which is enough to get covenants kept without heroic altruism.
• The alternative diagnosis of conflict is disagreement, not egoism. Hobbes repeatedly locates the trouble in men differing about what is good and evil — a clash of beliefs and ideologies, which fits a religious civil war far better than simple greed.
• What the argument actually needs is modest: that men are roughly equal, that they cannot be sure of each other, and that some are dangerous. Universal selfishness is a much stronger premise than the conclusion requires — a defect in Hobbes’s economy of argument, and a resource for his defenders.

The State of Nature

What Kind of Claim It Is

• The state of nature is the condition of men living without a common power to keep them all in awe. It is defined negatively — by an absence, not by a date or a place.
• It is a thought experiment, not a history — the resolutive half of the method applied to politics: the commonwealth taken apart to see what its parts do without it.
• Hobbes concedes the point his critics press. He accepts it may never have existed generally over all the world, and the concession costs nothing, because the argument is counterfactual and analytical.
• What it isolates is a variable. Hold human beings constant, remove the common power, and see what follows: the claim is about the effect of an absence, testable wherever the absence occurs.
• This is why “bad anthropology” is not a refutation. Evidence about early societies would matter only if the claim were historical; what matters is what happens when authority collapses among people otherwise like us.
• The device has a normative use as well: it converts obedience into a comparison. The question is never “is this government good?” but “is it better than no government?”

Equality of Ability

• Nature has made men so equal in the faculties of body and mind that the difference is not so considerable that one may claim a benefit another may not pretend to as well.
• The argument turns on the weakest case, not the average. Even the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest — by secret machination, or by confederacy with others in the same danger.
• Mental equality is argued mischievously. Prudence is only experience, which equal time bestows equally; and as proof of equal wit Hobbes offers the fact that every man is contented with his share of it.
• The consequence is equality of hope in attaining our ends, which makes conflict general rather than local. Were men plainly unequal, the weak would submit and there would be order of a kind.
• This is a radical premise and easy to miss. Hobbes’s absolutism rests on the most egalitarian foundation in the tradition — no natural masters, no natural slaves, no natural superiors of birth, sex or blood.
• The equality is also the standing threat. Where anyone can kill anyone, nothing short of a power greater than all of them is stable.

The Three Causes of Quarrel

Cause	The passion behind it	What men invade for	The modern name
Competition	Appetite for the same scarce thing	Gain — masters of other men’s persons, wives, cattle	Scarcity conflict
Diffidence	Distrust and fear	Safety — pre-emption, to defend what one has	The security dilemma
Glory	Vanity and the desire for esteem	Reputation — a word, a smile, a differing opinion	Status competition

• The three are a sequence, not alternatives. Competition creates scarcity conflict; scarcity conflict creates distrust; distrust makes anticipation rational; and glory makes even the settled fight over nothing.
• Diffidence is the analytically important one, and the least noticed. It generates war among men who all want peace, because the rational response to uncertainty is to strike first, and each man’s prudence makes every other man less safe.
• Anticipation is Hobbes’s word for pre-emption: the reasonable way to secure oneself is by force or wiles to master the persons of others, and this is no more than one’s own conservation requires.
• Glory is the one cause that is not about resources at all. Men fight over a word or a differing opinion, and it is this passion that makes the state of nature not merely competitive but explosive.

What “War” Means

• War does not consist in battle only, or in actual fighting, but in the known disposition to fight during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary.
• The weather analogy does the work. The nature of foul weather lies not in a shower or two but in an inclination of many days together.
• Peace is all other time — and peace therefore requires not the absence of blows but the presence of assurance.
• The definition is what makes the theory apply to modern conditions. A society of armed households in which nobody is currently being killed is still in a state of war, because nobody can plan on tomorrow.
• It is also what makes it apply to nuclear deterrence, arms races and any situation of mutual armed watchfulness — which is why realists took it up.

The Consequences: No Arts, No Letters, No Society

• The famous passage is a list of things that require confidence in the future — its logic is not squalor but the impossibility of investment.
  • No industry, because the fruit of it is uncertain.
  • No culture of the earth, no navigation, no commodious building — no use of things that require force to move.
  • No knowledge of the face of the earth, no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society.
  • And worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death.

“And the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” — Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

• The phrase without the derivation is worthless. Equality of ability, scarcity, the rationality of anticipation and the absence of a common power are the argument; the five adjectives are only its conclusion.
• The deepest consequence is the loss of a future. Where there is no assurance there is no point in planting, building or learning, and civilisation is exactly the set of activities that presuppose tomorrow.
• The order of the list is not random. Industry comes first and letters last: Hobbes is describing the collapse of an economy before the collapse of a culture.

The Moral Vacuum

• To this war of every man against every man, nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, have no place there.
• Where there is no common power there is no law; where no law, no injustice.
• Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues — a deliberate inversion of the classical virtues, and a sentence designed to shock.
• Justice and injustice are qualities of men in society, not in solitude. They are relative to a rule, and there is no rule without a lawgiver.
• This is a claim about the conditions of morality, not a denial of morality. Hobbes is not saying cruelty is fine; he is saying moral vocabulary has no purchase where there is no shared authority to fix its meaning and no expectation that others will be bound.
• There is also no property. There is no mine and thine distinct, but only what a man can get and keep. Property is a creature of the sovereign — the exact point at which Locke breaks away.
• The one thing that does exist is the right of nature, the liberty of each to do anything, including to another’s body. A right of all to everything is functionally a right of none to anything.

Hobbes’s Own Three Illustrations

• He anticipates the charge that no such condition existed, and offers three pieces of evidence, each of a different kind.
  • Savage peoples in many places of America, said to live without government except the small concord of families. This is his weakest illustration and has aged worst: second-hand colonial report, empirically false of the societies concerned, and entangled with the ideology of settlement.
  • Civil war — what life is like where there is no common power may be seen from the manner of life men fall into in a civil war, degenerating from peaceable government. This is his strongest illustration, because it is a controlled case: same people, authority removed.
  • Sovereigns in the posture of gladiators. Kings and persons of sovereign authority are, because of their independency, in continual jealousies and in the state and posture of gladiators — forts, garrisons and guns upon the frontiers, and spies among neighbours.
• The third illustration carries a concession that is easy to miss. Because sovereigns uphold the industry of their subjects, there does not follow from the international state of nature the misery that accompanies the liberty of particular men.
• That concession is the seed of every later objection to the domestic analogy. Hobbes himself says the international state of nature is tolerable — which is exactly why there is no world Leviathan in his system.

Right of Nature and Laws of Nature

Jus and Lex: The Distinction Everything Turns On

• The right of nature (jus naturale) is the liberty each man has to use his own power as he will for the preservation of his own nature — and consequently of doing anything which in his own judgement and reason he conceives to be the aptest means to it.
• A law of nature (lex naturalis) is a precept or general rule found out by reason, by which a man is forbidden to do what is destructive of his life, or to omit what may best preserve it.
• Right and law differ as much as liberty and obligation, which in one and the same matter are inconsistent. Right is a liberty to act; law is a bond that binds.
• The whole modern tradition begins here. Classical and medieval natural law started from lex — an objective moral order — and derived rights from duties. Hobbes reverses the order and starts from jus, an entitlement belonging to the individual, from which obligations are then constructed.
• Strauss made this reversal the centre of his reading: by starting from right and denying the primacy of law, Hobbes stands against the idealist tradition; by grounding morals on right rather than on appetite, he stands apart from the naturalistic one. Right is a specifically juridical conception, midway between the two.
• This is why Hobbes is called the founder of modern natural rights doctrine even though his conclusion is absolutism: the individual entitlement is prior, and the state is what the entitlement requires.
• The paradox he never resolves. In the state of nature the right of nature is unlimited and worthless; in civil society it is secure and almost extinguished, surviving as the bare right to life.
  • He uses the word inconsistently — sometimes as power, sometimes as absence of obligation, sometimes as the liberty to do what right reason prescribes.

The First Three Laws

• The fundamental law of nature is 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 two branches are the whole theory in a sentence — the first contains the first law of nature, seek peace and follow it; the second contains the sum of the right of nature, by all means we can, to defend ourselves.
• The second law is that a man be willing, when others are so too, to lay down this right to all things, and be contented with so much liberty against other men as he would allow other men against himself.
  • The condition is decisive: when others are so too. Unilateral disarmament is not merely foolish but contrary to the laws of nature, since it makes a man a prey to others.
  • Hobbes identifies this with the Gospel rule — a piece of rhetorical cover for a thoroughly prudential doctrine.
• The third law is that men perform their covenants made, without which covenants are vain and empty words.
  • In this law consisteth the fountain and original of justice. Where no covenant has preceded, no action can be unjust: injustice is nothing else but the not performance of covenant.
  • This is a definitional theory of justice, and it is what Adam Smith condemned as an odious doctrine offensive to all sound moralists — that there was no natural distinction between right and wrong, these depending on the arbitrary will of the civil magistrate.

The Full Nineteen

• Hobbes lists nineteen laws of nature, and most accounts stop at three. The rest matter for what they show about his moral psychology.
• They include gratitude; complaisance, that every man strive to accommodate himself to the rest; pardon upon repentance; and that revenge look only to future good.
  • Against contumely, that no man declare hatred or contempt of another; against pride, that each acknowledge others as his equal by nature; against arrogance, that no man reserve a right he would not allow others.
  • Equity, that a judge deal equally between parties; the equal use of things that cannot be divided; submission to arbitration; and that no man be judge in his own cause.
• The list is a recognisably conventional morality, which is awkward for the reading of Hobbes as an amoralist.
• His own summary is the golden rule in negative form — do not that to another which thou wouldst not have done to thyself — offered as a rule intelligible even to the meanest capacity.
• They are immutable and eternal, he says, for it can never be that war shall preserve life and peace destroy it.
• But they are not laws properly so called. They are conclusions or theorems concerning what conduces to preservation — dictates of reason improperly called laws, becoming laws properly only if considered as delivered in the word of God.
• The alternative names are the ones to remember: articles of peace, and counsels of prudence. A counsel appeals to your interest; a command appeals to another’s authority.

In Foro Interno and In Foro Externo

• The laws of nature oblige in foro interno always — they bind to a desire that they should take place.
• They oblige in foro externo, in the putting of them into act, not always — because a man who performs all his promises where no one else does would make himself a prey to others and procure his own certain ruin.
• The condition of external obligation is security that others will observe them towards him. Without assurance, morality is suicide.
• The subtlety usually missed: a man may breach an internal obligation even by an act that conforms to the law, if his purpose was contrary — because where the obligation is internal, intention is what is bound.
• The distinction rescues Hobbes from pure amoralism and is the textual foundation of the deontological readings.

Counsels of Prudence, or Divine Commands?

• The Taylor–Warrender thesis is the great twentieth-century controversy about Hobbes, and the standard reference point for political obligation.
  • A.E. Taylor argued that Hobbes’s ethics is a strict deontology of a Kantian type — duty for duty’s sake, logically detachable from the egoistic psychology and drawn largely from De Cive.
  • Howard Warrender placed him in the natural law tradition based on theistic metaphysics, deriving the obligatory force of the laws of nature from divine command. On his reading a single consistent theory of obligation runs through the work, differing between nature and civil society only in circumstance, not in principle.
  • F.C. Hood pressed the case further, arguing for a genuinely religious Hobbes.
• Warrender’s strongest argument is that the laws of nature are rules for the preservation of men in general, not for personal survival — act so that all men can be preserved, except where this is inconsistent with your own — and no such principle can be derived from individual self-interest alone.
• Against it, Plamenatz holds that God is superfluous to Hobbes’s morality, since an obligation to obey God as Hobbes conceives it does not differ in kind from the obligation to obey a human sovereign in a world without God.
• Gauthier agrees on the substance: what matters is natural law as a dictate of reason, not as a command of God.
• Skinner’s contextual demolition ended the debate for most historians. None of Hobbes’s contemporaries — and they were exhaustive in their hostility — read him as grounding obligation on a prior duty to obey God.
  • Had he been saying that, the people accusing him of atheism would have noticed. The deontological reading makes Hobbes more consistent than he was, at the cost of the historical record.
• The methodological quarrel underneath is worth naming. Warrender and Taylor read the text as a self-contained system to be made coherent; Skinner reads it as an intervention in a specific argument, whose meaning is what its author was doing in writing it. This is the founding dispute of the Cambridge School.
• The honest conclusion is that the text supports both readings because Hobbes needed both: prudence to persuade the sceptic, and something more binding to hold covenants together when prudence points the other way.

The Foole and Hobbes’s Reply

• The Foole says in his heart there is no such thing as justice — that since every man’s conservation is committed to his own care, there is no reason not to break covenants when it is to his benefit.
• The system stands or falls on this objection, and Hobbes states it in its strongest form: the Foole is not denying that covenants exist but arguing that reason itself licenses defection where defection pays.
• The reply has three moves.
  • The epistemic move. Breach cannot reasonably be expected to conduce to one’s benefit, because the consequences cannot be foreseen; successes that follow from breach are windfalls, not the fruits of reason.
  • The reputational move. He who breaks covenant cannot be received into any society that unites for peace and defence, except by an error of those who receive him — and he cannot count on that error. Exclusion is death.
  • The definitional move. Keeping covenant is a rule of reason forbidding what destroys life, and therefore a law of nature — so the Foole’s claim is self-contradictory.
• The modern verdict is that the reply is incomplete. It answers the visible defector but not the successful secret one, and Hobbes effectively concedes by insisting no one can be certain of secrecy.
• This is exactly the gap the sovereign fills. The Foole proves that morality without enforcement is unstable, not that morality is nothing — which is why the argument leads to a sword rather than to nihilism.

Hobbes’s whole political conclusion is contained in his answer to the Foole: reason recommends justice, but only enforcement makes the recommendation safe to follow.

The Covenant and the Making of the Mortal God

Renunciation, Transfer and Covenant

• Laying down a right happens in two ways, carefully distinguished.
  • Renouncing — standing out of the way, without caring who benefits.
  • Transferring — laying it down in favour of a particular person, so that the beneficiary is intended.
• The mutual transferring of right is what men call a contract.
• A covenant is a contract with time in it — one party performs now and the other is trusted to perform later. Covenant is contract plus trust.
• This is why covenants are fragile, and why the third law of nature is needed at all: whoever performs first is exposed.
• Some rights are inalienable, because no benefit could be intended by giving them up: the right to resist those who assault a man by force to take away his life, or to wound or imprison him. A man cannot be understood to have parted with the thing the parting was meant to protect.
• Pufendorf thought the contract–covenant distinction philosophically unimportant, and Jean Hampton agrees: it emphasises trust and promise-keeping, which the argument presupposes anyway.

Authorisation, the Person and the Artificial Man

• Leviathan introduces the concept of the person, the most original piece of political theory in the book.
  • A natural person is one whose words and actions are considered as his own.
  • An artificial person is one whose words and actions are considered as representing those of another.
  • The one represented is the author, the representer the actor, and the actor acts by authority.
• The multitude becomes one person only by being represented. A crowd is not a unity: it is the unity of the representer, not of the represented, that makes the person one.
• This solves the problem Hobbes needed solved. A scattered multitude cannot contract with anyone, because it is not yet an agent; it can only make contracts among its members, and the effect of those contracts is to constitute an agent.
• Authorisation means the subject owns the sovereign’s acts as his own. Whatever the sovereign does, the subject is the author of — and no man can be injured by his own act.
• This is the sharpest weapon in the armoury: it makes complaint against the sovereign not merely futile but incoherent. Gauthier called authorisation rather than covenant the dominant metaphor in Hobbes’s political thought; Hampton objected that pressing it too far turns Hobbes into a kind of Whig.
• The words of the covenant are Hobbes’s own: 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.

“This is the generation of 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.” — Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

• The name is from the Book of Job, where Leviathan is the sea-monster over whom no earthly power compares — “king of all the children of pride”. The point of the metaphor is that the state must overawe pride.
• The frontispiece is an argument in a picture: a crowned giant whose body is composed of hundreds of small human figures, holding sword and crozier — temporal and spiritual power in one pair of hands.
• “Mortal God” is precisely calibrated. It is a god because it has no superior on earth; it is mortal because it is made, can fail, and dies when it can no longer protect.

The Four Peculiarities of the Contract

• One. It is a contract among the subjects, each with each, and not between subjects and the sovereign.
• Two. The sovereign is not a party to it. He is its beneficiary — a third party who receives everything and promises nothing.
• Three. Three consequences follow immediately, and they are Hobbes’s absolutism.
  • The sovereign can commit no injustice, since injustice is breach of covenant and he has made none — and since the subject authorised the act in any case.
  • Sovereignty cannot be forfeited for breach, because there is no covenant he could breach. There is no right of revolution because there is no contract to violate.
  • Sovereignty cannot be divided, because division means competing judgements, and competing judgements are the state of nature returning.
• Four. It is irrevocable and binds successors. Subjects cannot change the form of government, cannot recall the grant, and a dissenting minority must consent or be left in the state of nature with respect to the rest.
• The comparison with Locke is exact. Locke keeps the first contract and adds a second, creating a government that holds power on trust — and a trust, unlike a covenant, can be breached, which is where the right of revolution comes from.
• The comparison with Rousseau differs again. His contract is also among all with all and also total, but the recipient is the community itself, not a separate person — which is why his sovereign cannot be alienated.

The Social Contract Among Rival Theories of Origin

• Social contract is a method as much as a doctrine, and it always runs in three steps.
  • A description of human nature, isolating the qualities that make a contract necessary.
  • A state of nature, showing how life goes when men live without a common power.
  • The process of contract, fixing the parties, the terms, and the obligations of each.
• Change the first step and everything downstream changes, which is why Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau reach three different destinations from one method.
• The contract theory is one of four accounts of how the state came to be, and its rivals show what it is claiming.
  • Divine origin — the state as God’s creation, the theory Hobbes and Locke jointly destroyed.
  • Force — the state as the settled result of conquest, which Hobbes partly absorbs as sovereignty by acquisition.
  • Historical or evolutionary — the state as a slow growth from kinship, religion, war and property, with MacIver and Garner as exponents. On this view the state is not the deliberate creation of man at all, and grew with political consciousness over a very long time.
  • Marxian — for Engels, the state appears when private property splits society into antagonistic classes, and is the instrument of the dominant one.
• Two contributions of contract theory survive its bad history. It made the state the product of the people’s consent, which is the basis of modern democratic legitimacy; and it displaced the divine origin theory by supplying a usable alternative.
• The historical objection is fatal only if the theory is read historically. As MacIver insists, states grew rather than were made; as Hobbes insists, the covenant is an analysis of authority, not a report of an event.
• The mechanistic view of the state follows from the contract: the state is a machine made by men for their own ends, and therefore an institution of utility, to be judged by what it delivers.
• The organic or naturalistic view is its opposite — the state as a living whole prior to its members, running from Aristotle through Hegel to the idealists. Calling the state a machine is already a demotion, and Hobbes means it as one.

Institution and Acquisition

• Sovereignty by institution is what the covenant produces: men agreeing among themselves to submit to a person or assembly chosen by the majority.
• Sovereignty by acquisition is where sovereign power is acquired by force — and Hobbes insists it is exactly as legitimate.
  • By conquest, where the vanquished, to avoid death, covenants to obey the victor.
  • By generation — paternal dominion, from the consent of the child, expressed or supposed.
• The two differ only in how fear operates. In institution men fear each other; in acquisition they fear the person to whom they submit. In both cases covenants extorted by fear are binding.
• This is one of the most radical claims in the book. Consent under threat of death is real consent, because in the state of nature all consent is given under that threat, and if fear vitiated agreement no commonwealth could ever be formed.
• The practical purpose is the Engagement debate. If conquest founds legitimate title once protection is delivered, then Cromwell’s regime is as lawful as Charles I’s was.
• The theoretical cost is high. It makes the theory look like might makes right, and the standard reply — that might does not create right but effective protection does create obligation — is true but thin.

Sovereignty

Why Sovereignty Became Necessary

• Medieval authority was divided, and that is the problem Hobbes was answering. King, Emperor, Pope, feudal lord, guild and customary court all claimed jurisdiction, and nobody could say whose law prevailed or who had the last word.
• Western law came in four competing traditions, and the confusion was a confusion between them.
  • Natural law, grounded in reason.
  • Religious law, grounded in a sacred book.
  • Customary law, grounded in usage and precedent.
  • Positive law — the law made by the state.
• The theory of sovereignty establishes the supremacy of positive law over all three others, and Hobbes’s case for that supremacy is that state-made law is the product of deliberate reason, certain in its content, and armed with the power of punishment.
• The rise of capitalism made the need acute. Under feudalism the relations of production were fixed by birth and status; a commercial society runs on contract, and contract needs an authority able to enforce agreements between strangers.
• This is the deepest reason Hobbes counts as the first modern thinker. He is not merely describing a stronger king; he is describing the legal infrastructure a market society cannot do without.
• The state accordingly claims a monopoly of legitimate coercion within a territory — the point Weber later made definitional. Any other body using force is a rival sovereign, and rival sovereigns are war.

Why the Lawbreaker Must Be Punished

• Hobbes gives two reasons, and both are about the system rather than the offender.
  • The imitation argument. If one man breaks the law and is not punished, others are tempted to follow, and the slide ends in the general disobedience that is anarchy.
  • The sovereignty argument. A man who refuses the law claims in effect to be sovereign himself — to be entitled to a law of his own. In one territory there cannot be more than one sovereign.
• The life of all cannot be returned to anarchy for the mischiefs of a few, which is why punishment is not revenge but maintenance of the condition that makes law possible.

The Twelve Rights of the Sovereign

• Hobbes enumerates the rights of sovereignty, and they are incommunicable and inseparable — losing any one destroys the rest.
  • The subjects cannot change the form of government, being bound to own the sovereign’s acts.
  • Sovereign power cannot be forfeited, since the sovereign made no covenant to break.
  • No man can protest against the institution declared by the majority without injustice.
  • The sovereign’s acts cannot be justly accused by the subject, who is their author.
  • The sovereign cannot justly be put to death or punished by his subjects.
  • The right to judge what doctrines and opinions may be taught — censorship, and control of universities and pulpits.
  • The whole legislative power, and with it the rules of property — what is mine, thine and his own.
  • Judicature — the right to decide all controversies of law and fact.
  • The right of making war and peace, and of commanding the armed forces.
  • The choice of all counsellors, ministers, magistrates and officers.
  • The power of reward and punishment, at discretion where no law has determined it.
  • The right of honour and precedence — conferring titles and settling rank.
• The seventh has the widest reach. Property is a creature of the law, so a sovereign who is the source of law cannot commit theft against a subject, and taxation needs no further consent.
• The sixth alarmed contemporaries most, and it is not an afterthought. Since actions proceed from opinions, government of opinion is government of actions — the lesson Hobbes drew from a religious civil war.

The Marks of Sovereignty

Mark	What it means	Why Hobbes needs it
Absolute	No legal limit on the power	Any limit needs a judge of the limit, who would then be sovereign
Indivisible	Cannot be shared between organs or estates	Divided power means divided judgement, which is civil war
Inalienable	Cannot be given away by grant	A partial grant creates a rival authority
Perpetual	Continuous, not periodic	An authority that lapses returns men to nature in the interval
Above civil law	Not bound by his own laws	He can repeal them; a man bound only to himself is not bound
Judge of doctrine	Determines what may be taught	Actions follow opinions, and seditious doctrine causes war
Unpunishable	Cannot be tried by subjects	The subject is the author of the act he would punish

• The sovereign is not above the law of nature. He is obliged to seek the safety of the people and is accountable to God for it — but he alone interprets that law, and no act of his can be challenged before any earthly tribunal.
• Salus populi suprema lex is a genuine duty of office, and by “safety” Hobbes means not a bare preservation but all other contentments of life lawfully acquired. It is a standard of good rule with no institutional remedy.
• The case against mixed government is the practical heart of the doctrine. Power divided between king, Lords and Commons is not a government but three factions, and when they disagree there is no lawful way to decide — which is what England had just discovered.
• On forms of commonwealth Hobbes is formally indifferent: monarchy, aristocracy and democracy differ not in power but in convenience, and all must be equally absolute.
• His practical preference is monarchy, on administrative grounds — the monarch’s private interest coincides with the public, he can take secret counsel, and he cannot disagree with himself. Tyranny is simply monarchy disliked; the word names an attitude, not a constitution.

From Bodin to Hobbes to Austin

	Bodin	Hobbes	Austin
Definition	Supreme power over subjects, unrestrained by law	The artificial soul of the commonwealth, made by covenant	The determinate superior habitually obeyed
Limits kept	Divine and natural law, fundamental laws of the realm, property and consent to taxation	None enforceable	None legally; positive morality only
Church	Supreme in religion	Subordinate to the state	Outside the analysis
Basis	Royal authority	Consent, or conquest plus protection	Habit of obedience

• Who counts as the first modern thinker is contested, and the test is usually the first complete theory of sovereignty, since sovereignty is what distinguishes the modern state.
  • Machiavelli established the primacy of the nation state but gave no systematic account of sovereignty.
  • Bodin gave the first theory of sovereignty, but a partial one: the state supreme in secular matters, the church supreme in religion.
  • Hobbes gave the first complete account, holding that even the church is under the state — which is why his book was prohibited by it.
• The standard formulation is that Bodin stood at the gate of modernity and Hobbes walked through it. Bodin could not shed the medieval limits; Hobbes discarded them all.
• This is the substance of Sabine’s judgment. Bodin proclaimed an absolute power and then attached exceptions — the Salic law, the inalienability of the royal domain, the sanctity of property — which the definition cannot survive.
• Hobbes removed every one of them. His sovereign makes and unmakes property, taxes without consent, defines heresy, and has no church above him.
• The line runs on to legal positivism: Austin perfected the theory as jurisprudence, and Kelsen and Hart continued the separation of law from morals on different foundations.

The Pluralist Reply

• Laski attacks the monistic theory on three fronts: history shows no state ever exercised such power; law has multiple sources and cannot be reduced to command; and federalism makes an Austinian sovereign impossible to locate.
• The state is one association among many and has no automatic superiority of claim on allegiance; it must earn its authority in competition with churches, unions and communities.
• The pluralist current — Duguit, Krabbe, Barker, Lindsay and MacIver — recasts the state as a coordinator and arbiter between associations.
• The danger they identify is real in Hobbes. The distinction between state and government is quietly lost, and a government then claims absolute power in the state’s name.
• Globalisation is the sharpest contemporary test, and it cuts both ways: Brexit was fought explicitly over the recovery of sovereign control, which is evidence that the concept still commands loyalty even where it has been pooled.
• Contemporary erosion of sovereignty — supranational bodies, human rights regimes, global capital — extends the case; the counter-argument is that globalisation has transformed sovereignty rather than abolished it.

Liberty

Liberty as Absence of External Impediments

“Liberty, or freedom, signifieth properly the absence of opposition; by opposition, I mean external impediments of motion.” — Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

• The definition is taken from physics and applied to men unchanged, and applies as properly to inanimate things: water in a vessel is not at liberty, because the vessel hinders it; water spilled on the earth is.
• A free man is he that is not hindered from doing what he has a will to do, in the things he is able to do.
• Liberty is not ability. A man bound is unfree; a man sick or lame lacks power, not liberty. The distinction is the whole point of the definition.
• This is the founding statement of negative liberty, and Berlin treats it as such — freedom as the area within which one acts unobstructed by others.
• Positive liberty belongs to a later world. It arrives with the welfare state and the capacity-building functions of government, reaching its sharpest modern form in Amartya Sen’s account of development as freedom — freedom as the real ability to achieve what one has reason to value.
• Hobbes would reject the extension outright, because his whole definition depends on separating liberty from capacity, which is the distinction Sen’s position is designed to collapse.
• Three consequences are built in deliberately.
  • Fear and liberty are consistent. A man who obeys from fear of prison acts freely, and consent under threat is consent.
  • Liberty and necessity are consistent. Free actions are caused actions, in a chain reaching back to a first cause.
  • Law is by definition a restriction on liberty, not its condition — exactly what the later idealist tradition denies.

The Silence of the Law

“The liberty of a subject lieth therefore only in those things which, in regulating their actions, the sovereign hath praetermitted.” — Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

• The subject’s liberty is the residue — what is left where the law has not spoken.
• Hobbes’s own examples are the ordinary business of a life: to buy and sell and otherwise contract; to choose their own abode, their own diet, their own trade of life, and to institute their children as they think fit.
• The residue is expected to be large. The sovereign has no reason to regulate what does not endanger peace, and every reason not to, since needless laws are traps.
• The corollary offends modern readers: liberty is not a right against the sovereign, who may reduce it to nothing without injustice. What protects it is his interest, not the subject’s title.
• The point of contact with modern doctrine is nonetheless real: everything not forbidden is permitted, and the burden of justification falls on the law.

Lucca, and the Confusion About Corporate Liberty

• Hobbes’s target is the republican conception of freedom taught in the universities — that men are free only in a free state.
• On the towers of the city of Lucca the word LIBERTAS was written in great characters; yet no man can infer from it that a particular man there has more liberty or immunity from the service of the commonwealth than in Constantinople.
• Whether a commonwealth is monarchical or popular, the freedom is the same — it is the liberty of the commonwealth, not of the individual.
• The conflation he attacks is between the independence of a state from external control and the freedom of an individual from his own state’s law. A republic can be perfectly independent and its citizens perfectly regulated.
• This is where Hobbes and the republicans part for good, and the passage Skinner made central to his work on the two competing conceptions of liberty. For Hobbes only chains restrict; for the neo-Roman writers dependence on another’s arbitrary will is itself unfreedom, even if that will is never exercised.
• The stake was constitutional. If living under arbitrary power is slavery, Parliament’s cause was a cause of liberty — and Hobbes’s redefinition removes the premise.

The True Liberty of Subjects

• One right is inalienable, because the covenant exists to secure it: no man is bound by covenant to abstain from resisting those who assault him by force to take away his life.
• The specific liberties are startling in a theory of absolute power.
  • A condemned man may resist his executioners and commits no injustice — while the sovereign commits none in killing him. Both act by right.
  • No man is bound to kill, wound or maim himself, or to abstain from food, air or medicine.
  • No man is bound to accuse himself. Interrogated about a crime, he need not confess without assurance of pardon.
  • A man commanded as a soldier may in many cases refuse — where he can find a substitute, or from natural timorousness. Cowardice is dishonourable but not injustice.
  • A body of men who have unjustly rebelled may lawfully defend themselves, since laying down arms confesses a capital crime.
• The limit on all of them is the purpose of sovereignty: when refusal frustrates the end for which sovereignty was ordained, there is no liberty to refuse; otherwise there is.
• Critics call this the Achilles heel — a right of self-defence held by everyone exactly when the state most needs obedience. The defence is that it is a right of survival, not of resistance: it justifies flight and struggle, never a claim to rule.

Where Protection Ceases

“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.” — Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

• This sentence is what makes Hobbes something other than a theorist of despotism. The mutual relation between protection and obedience is, he says, the whole reason sovereignty exists.
• The right men have by nature to protect themselves, when none else can protect them, can by no covenant be relinquished.
• The application is unsentimental. A sovereign who cannot put down a rebellion, and whose rebels then deliver security, loses his legitimacy in fact, and the new regime is the real commonwealth.
• It is not a right of revolution. Nothing licenses rebellion; it merely records that when a state has ceased to be a state, obligation to it has ceased. The distinction is real but thin, and no critic has been satisfied by it.

Law: Command, Positivism and the Common Law

• Civil law is the command of the sovereign — those rules the commonwealth has commanded a man to use for the distinction of right and wrong.
• The definition contains three claims: law is a command, not advice; it issues from a determinate authority, not from custom or reason; and it is addressed to those already obliged to obey.
• Natural law is not abolished but absorbed. Civil law and the law of nature contain each other and are of equal extent — one part written and called civil, the other unwritten and called natural.
• The absorption is asymmetrical in practice. Since the sovereign alone interprets natural law, a subject may never plead it against the civil law. As Plamenatz puts it, men may well believe a law contrary to nature, but they promised to accept the sovereign’s interpretation as alone valid.
• Against Coke and the common lawyers. Sir Edward Coke claimed the supremacy of common law — an artificial reason perfected by long study — over King and Parliament alike. Hobbes replies that it is not wisdom but authority that makes a law, and a judge’s reason is one man’s reason like any other.
• The quarrel is the constitutional crisis in miniature: is there a law above the sovereign that the courts can find? Hobbes says no, and that is the answer that won in England.
• He is therefore a founder of legal positivism, on its two defining theses — the separation of law and morals (an unjust law is still a law) and the social-source thesis (origin, not content, makes a rule legal).
• Hart’s critique is the standard modern one. The command-and-sanction model — the gunman writ large — cannot explain power-conferring rules, the continuity of authority across successions, or the internal point of view from which officials treat a rule as a standard rather than a threat.
• Covenants without the sword are but words, and of no strength to secure a man at all; the bonds of words are too weak to bridle ambition, avarice and anger without fear of some coercive power.
• Hobbes’s own test case still works. International law is a body of rules with real content, no determinate superior, and enforcement that depends on the interests of the strong.

Religion and the Christian Commonwealth

• Roughly half of Leviathan is about religion, and the half is routinely skipped. It is not an appendix — the war he was explaining was a religious war.
• His position is Erastian: the church is subordinate to the civil sovereign in all matters of external worship, discipline and doctrine.
  • A church is nothing more than a corporation of Christians, governed by the commonwealth like any other association within it.
  • There is no universal church on earth, because there is no universal sovereign.
  • Temporal and spiritual government are but two words brought into the world to make men see double and mistake their lawful sovereign.
• Belief is exempt; action is not. Faith cannot be coerced, since belief follows evidence rather than command — but worship, preaching and profession are public acts and therefore the sovereign’s business.
• Hence his notorious advice on martyrdom: a subject commanded to profess a faith he does not hold may comply outwardly, since the profession is the sovereign’s act, not his own.
• The Kingdom of Darkness is the fourth and least-read part of the book, and it is a work of political sociology.
  • The darkness is not sin but error deliberately maintained — a confederacy of deceivers who extinguish the light of nature in order to gain power.
  • Its instruments are misinterpretation of Scripture, the vain philosophy of the Schools, the doctrine of separated essences and incorporeal souls, and the fables of purgatory and exorcism that sustain a priesthood’s claim on the fears of the living.
  • The Papacy, he writes, is no other than the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof.
• The metaphysics was always aimed at the clergy. Abolish incorporeal substances and you abolish the ontology on which an independent spiritual jurisdiction rests.
• The charge of atheism dogged him for a century, and the scholarly question stays open — heterodox Christian, or unbeliever using Scripture ironically. The political conclusion is not in doubt: no organised body may hold a jurisdiction over conscience that competes with the sovereign’s.

Political Obligation, and the Negative State

Why Obey?

• Hobbes gives the discipline its central question. Not “who should rule?” — the classical question — but “why should I obey?”, asked from the standpoint of an individual assumed to have no natural duty at all.
• The grounds he offers are layered rather than single, which is why the literature is so large.
  • Consent — I authorised the sovereign’s acts, so resistance is self-contradiction.
  • Prudence — the alternative is the state of nature, worse for me than any government.
  • Protection — obedience is the price of security actually delivered, and expires with it.
  • Natural law — covenants are to be kept, which obliges in conscience.
• Oakeshott finds three kinds running through the text: a moral obligation to obey the authorised will of the sovereign, a physical obligation arising from power, and a rational obligation of self-interest.
  • Political obligation in Hobbes is therefore a mixed obligation, combined to serve one end but never assimilated to one another.
• Hobbes is not a right-based amoralist. On Dworkin’s account a right-based theory treats codes of conduct as merely instrumental, putting at its centre the man who benefits from others’ compliance rather than the man who complies.
  • Hobbes rejects that picture. The laws of nature always oblige in foro interno, and his reply to the Foole is that reneging is not rational — which is a moral claim, not merely a prudential one.
• The modern feature is that obligation is grounded in the individual — not in birth, station, divine appointment or the good of the whole, but in something he did and something the state does for him.
• Where it ends is what makes it modern. An obligation that lapses when protection fails is conditional, however absolute it looks in operation.

An Absolute State That Is Not a Totalitarian One

	Hobbes’s Leviathan	The totalitarian state
Purpose	Security of life, and nothing beyond it	Transformation of society and of human beings
Reach	Public acts only; conscience untouched	Total — private life, family, belief, art
Silence of the law	Wide, and expected to be	Nothing is indifferent; silence is suspicion
Basis	Consent and protection	Ideology — race, class or destiny
Ends of life	Private and plural	Prescribed by the movement
Mobilisation	None; subjects are left alone	Permanent; enthusiasm is compulsory

• The state is negative in purpose. It exists to prevent the worst, not to produce the best, and Hobbes has no theory of the good life for it to promote because he denies there is one.
• There is no organic community, no natural hierarchy, no divine right and no collective destiny — the four things a genuinely authoritarian tradition needs.
• What Hobbes licenses is a strong state, not a large one: enormous authority over a narrow range. That combination is unfamiliar today, which is why the theory is so often misdescribed.
• The honest qualification. Censorship, control of doctrine and a monopoly of religious profession are genuinely repressive, and a sovereign who legislated on everything would be within his rights. Hobbes gives the subject no title to complain — only the expectation that no sovereign would bother.

Individualism and Absolutism: The Central Quarrel

Macpherson and Possessive Individualism

• C.B. Macpherson gave the century its most influential reading: Hobbes’s premises describe not human nature as such but human nature in a bourgeois market society, read back into nature and mistaken for it.
• Possessive individualism is the doctrine that the individual is the absolute natural proprietor of his own person and capacities, owing nothing to society for them and free to alienate them for a price.
• The argument runs in three steps: Hobbes’s man is insatiable because a market makes him so; a society of such men needs an all-powerful arbiter; therefore absolutism is the political requirement of market relations.
• The textual evidence is Hobbes’s treatment of a man’s worth as his price — so much as would be given for the use of his power — which is labour treated as a commodity a century before political economy.
• The famous verdict is Macpherson’s summary of the tension: Hobbes starts as an individualist and ends as an absolutist — individualist in his assumptions, absolutist in his conclusions.
• Marx read Hobbes with respect, and in Capital uses precisely that definition of a man’s worth when analysing labour-power as a commodity. For the Marxist tradition Hobbes is the first honest theorist of bourgeois society — its diagnostician rather than its apologist.
• The objections to Macpherson are serious.
  • Anachronism — seventeenth-century England was not a possessive market society in the sense required.
  • Textual strain — Hobbes’s man is driven by glory and fear as much as by acquisition, and vainglory is not a market motive.
  • Over-determination — if bourgeois premises entail absolutism, Locke should not have reached the opposite conclusion from the same premises.
  • The state of nature is not a market but the condition in which no contract can be relied on — the opposite of a functioning market order.

Hedonism, Utility and the Capitalist Class

• Hobbes lays the foundation of utilitarianism without using the word. If good is what a man desires and evil what he shuns, then pleasure and pain are the only springs of action, and politics becomes the management of them.
• Bentham completed the move a century and a half later: mankind is placed under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure, and the business of legislation is to arrange incentives accordingly.
• The connection to individualism is not decorative. Pleasure and pain are experiences no one else can have for you, so a philosophy that makes them the measure of value has already made the individual the unit of value.
• The same premises serve a market society. Utilitarian man is acquisitive, comparative and never satisfied, which is the psychology consumption requires — and the reason Hobbes’s account of desire reads as a description of capitalism written before capitalism was named.
• This is what possessive individualism means as a charge. Hobbes removes the moral objection to self-interest, and in doing so supplies the capitalist class with a philosophy in which maximising one’s own advantage needs no defence.
• The defence available to Hobbes is that the psychology is offered as natural fact rather than moral recommendation — but since he denies any distinction between what men are and what they ought to be, the defence is thinner than it looks.

Sabine’s Reply, and the Question of Contradiction

• Sabine’s answer is that there is no contradiction. Hobbes’s absolutism is a derivative of his individualism: the absolute state exists for the protection of the individual’s right to life, and even inside it he keeps the right to resist a sovereign who attacks that life.
• In its strongest form: precisely because men are so thoroughly individualistic, nothing less than an absolute common power can hold them together. A weaker premise about human nature would license a weaker state.
• Two kinds of individualism should be distinguished, and Hobbes is both.
  • Methodological individualism — theory built from the individual as the unit of explanation. Hobbes founds this in politics.
  • Normative individualism — the view that there is nothing wrong with self-interest and no duty to become otherwise. Hobbes accepts it: he does not think human nature has to be reformed, and he collapses the gap between is and ought.
• He was the first to remove the guilt from self-interest, treating egoism as a natural fact of the same order as planetary motion — which is why he is called the greatest of the individualists despite the conclusion he drew.
• The genealogy runs back to the Sophists, who first made self-interest prior to the common good, and forward to utilitarianism. Pollock’s image is the sharpest statement of the link: the greatest-happiness formula was a hook to be put in the nostrils of Leviathan, so that it could be harnessed to the chariot of utility.
• The residual objection survives Sabine. A theory can be individualist in its foundations and still leave the individual without a remedy; grounding power in the individual is not the same as limiting it for him.

Criticism

The Contemporaries

• Robert Filmer, in his Observations Concerning the Originall of Government, attacks from the right, and the attack is precise: he agrees with Hobbes about the rights of exercising government and disagrees only about the means of acquiring it.
  • There never was an independent multitude with a natural right to all things; men are born into families and subject from birth.
  • The state of nature is incoherent on Hobbes’s own admission that the father of every man was originally his sovereign lord.
  • Consent cannot bind posterity — no later generation is bound by a contract made by its forefathers.
  • Property by contract is unstable. If the earth was originally common, private property is a usurpation, and inheritance is a firmer basis.
• The Earl of Clarendon poses the objection to which no satisfactory answer has been given. Hobbes, having made it unavoidably necessary for every man to cut his neighbour’s throat, then sets down a body of laws prescribed by Nature itself, immutable and eternal.
  • Which would be a full remedy against the very confusion for which he invented his covenant.
• Bishop Bramhall attacked the determinism: a theory in which the will is caused cannot support praise, blame, punishment or sin.
• C.E. Vaughan’s later verdict is the most quoted dismissal — Leviathan is useless as a book of history and fruitless as a book of politics.
  • The reply is that the charge mistakes the genre. Hobbes was not writing anthropology; his question is why we should obey the state and what life would be without it, and nothing in the argument depends on the history being true.

The Liberal and Constitutionalist Objection

• Locke makes the decisive move by separating the state of nature from the state of war, which Hobbes conflates. War arises wherever force is used without right — which can happen inside civil society as easily as outside it.
• Locke’s reductio is the most quoted sentence in the quarrel: this is to think that men are so foolish that they take care to avoid what mischiefs may be done them by polecats or foxes, but are content, nay think it safety, to be devoured by lions.
  • The sovereign is a man. He has the same passions as everyone else and now has more power than anyone else: concentrating power does not abolish the danger, it centralises it.
  • The absolute monarch remains in the state of nature with respect to his subjects — Hobbes concedes it — so the condition the covenant was meant to escape survives at the top of the system.
• The constitutionalist generalisation: a power no institution can check is not made safe by a duty to seek the people’s safety. Remedies must be institutional or they are nothing.
• The three devices Hobbes rules out are the three liberal constitutionalism is made of — separation of powers, judicial review of sovereign acts, and a right of resistance — and he rules them out for the same reason each time: each needs a judge above the sovereign, who would then be sovereign.
• The disagreement is finally empirical. Locke accepts the individualist premises and rejects the absolutist inference by denying that the alternative is that bad — which is why every generation settles it differently, according to how safe it feels.

Laslett on Filmer, Not Hobbes, as Locke’s Antagonist

• The traditional account made Locke’s Two Treatises a reply to Hobbes: absolutism from contract answered by limited government from contract.
• Peter Laslett’s critical edition dismantled it, on textual and chronological rather than interpretive grounds.
  • Dating. The Two Treatises was written around 1679–83, during the Exclusion Crisis, not after 1688 as the preface implies. It is a revolutionary tract written before the revolution, not a justification after it.
  • Filmer’s revival prompted it. Patriarcha was published posthumously in 1680 and became the court party’s intellectual weapon; Locke was answering the book everyone was reading.
  • The First Treatise is devoted entirely to Filmer, line by line, and the Second opens by referring back to that refutation.
  • Hobbes is barely mentioned, and there is little evidence Locke engaged closely with Leviathan.
• What the thesis establishes and what it does not.
  • Established — the polemical target, the date and the political occasion. Locke’s declared antagonist is Filmer.
  • Not established — that Hobbes is irrelevant to the argument. The polemical antagonist and the conceptual antagonist need not be the same person.
• The counter-arguments are strong.
  • Attacking Hobbes by name was dangerous — Leviathan was under investigation for atheism, and Filmer was the safer target for the same argument.
  • Filmer never argued from contract at all, so Locke’s sustained case against contractual absolutism cannot be aimed at him; the polecats-and-lions passage answers the Hobbesian conclusion whoever holds it.
  • Filmer had himself attacked Hobbes, so the two were paired in the controversy, and refuting one engaged the other.
• The balanced conclusion. Laslett is right about the target and the dating, and the correction removes a genuine myth. But the Hobbes–Locke opposition is real at the level of theory — they share a method and divide on its conclusion — and that structural relation is untouched by whom Locke happened to be arguing with.
• The episode is a case study in the contextualist method, the same one Skinner applies to Hobbes and the Engagement controversy, producing the same kind of gain and the same risk of overreach.

Rousseau, and the Leviathan with Its Head Chopped Off

• Rousseau’s central objection is that Hobbes made the characteristic error of everyone who went looking for natural man: he took the traits of the man around him and projected them backwards. Writers speaking continually of need, avarice, oppression and pride spoke of savage man and described civil man.
• Natural man is not wicked but pre-moral — solitary, timid, indolent, self-sufficient, moved by amour de soi and restrained by pity, a natural repugnance at seeing another suffer.
• The vices Hobbes describes are social products. Amour propre, the comparative desire to be esteemed above others, arises only once men live together and measure themselves against each other. Vanity presupposes society and cannot explain its origin.
• Against the equality argument specifically: it is society that makes men mutually dependent and therefore mutually dangerous, and the isolated savage has nothing worth stealing.
• The formula — that Rousseau’s Social Contract is Hobbes’s Leviathan with its head chopped off — captures a real structural identity.
  • Retained: total alienation of rights, a single indivisible and inalienable sovereign, no right of resistance, no partial associations, even a civil religion prescribed by the sovereign.
  • Removed: the separate person of the sovereign. The community itself holds the power Hobbes gives to a man or assembly outside the contract.
  • The critical sting is that an absolutism whose holder is “the people” is no less absolute, and being forced to be free is not obviously better than being forced to obey.
• Talmon’s charge of totalitarian democracy follows this reading directly, and is the standard bridge between the two thinkers.

The Idealist and Communitarian Objection

• The organic tradition denies the premise. For Hegel, T.H. Green and Bosanquet, the isolated pre-social individual never existed and could not, because personality, language, reason and even self-interest are social achievements.
• Green’s version answers Hobbes directly on obligation: will, not force, is the basis of the state. A state resting only on fear could not command the habitual obedience it actually receives.
• The sociological form: trust precedes contract. Hobbes takes for granted the shared language, meanings and expectations that his state of nature makes impossible.
• Tönnies placed him exactly here — the Leviathan is the political theory of Gesellschaft, the associational society of contract and interest, against the Gemeinschaft it replaced.

The Anarchist and Marxist Critiques

• The anarchist reply inverts the causal claim. Bakunin and Kropotkin argue that the state produces the disorder it claims to cure — by monopolising force, creating the property relations that generate conflict, and destroying customary self-regulation.
• Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid supplies the counter-evidence: cooperation is as prominent a factor in evolution as competition, and stateless societies have sustained complex order through custom, reciprocity and reputation.
• Elinor Ostrom’s work on common-pool resources is the modern institutional form of the objection: communities repeatedly solve collective-action problems without either a Leviathan or privatisation.
• The Marxist critique attacks the sovereign’s neutrality. For Engels, the state arises from the cleavage of society into antagonistic classes and is the instrument of the dominant one — not an arbiter above the war of all against all but an organised expression of one side of it.
• The Marxist reading of Hobbes is not dismissive. He grasped that the modern state is public power resting on force in a society of competing private interests; he simply mistook a historical form for human nature.

Feminist Readings

• Carole Pateman’s The Sexual Contract argues that behind the social contract that founds political right lies a sexual contract founding men’s right over women — the story of freedom concealing a story of subjection.
• The “individual” of contract theory is male by construction — a head of household who enters the public realm having already secured a private one — and women appear only as objects of the marriage contract.
• Hobbes is the striking exception, and Pateman says so.
  • His state of nature contains no natural subordination of women. Men and women are equal in the decisive respect — either can kill the other — and he denies that the difference of strength settles dominion without war.
  • Dominion over a child is originally the mother’s, since in the state of nature no matrimonial law determines paternity and the child is in the power of whoever nourishes it. Hobbes calls this maternal, not paternal, dominion.
  • He rejects patriarchalism as a theory of political origin more radically than Locke does — not that fathers lack authority, but that mothers had it first.
• Pateman’s point is what happens next. Despite the egalitarian premise, every commonwealth Hobbes describes is patriarchal, and the transition to civil society silently converts mother-right into father-right without argument.
• The critical payoff is large. If women are naturally equal and end up subordinate, the subordination is a product of conquest and contract, not nature — which makes it political, and therefore alterable.
• The counter-reading, pressed by scholars such as Joanne Boucher, is that the sexual contract is too tidy a device, and that Hobbes’s egalitarian premises are better used as a feminist resource than as evidence of a suppressed patriarchal pact.

Game-Theoretic Reconstructions

• Rawls called Hobbes’s state of nature the classic example of the prisoner’s dilemma, and the identification launched a literature.
• The prisoner’s dilemma reading: attacking is a dominant strategy whatever the other does, so both defect and both end worse off, and the sovereign changes the payoffs by adding punishment.
• The paradox is fatal if pressed. If defection dominates, no covenant creating the sovereign could ever be made — and the covenant is the only way the sovereign comes into being. The solution presupposes the cooperation whose impossibility it explains.
• The assurance game reading solves this and is now better supported. Each prefers to cooperate if others do; the problem is uncertainty, not malice — which fits Hobbes’s own diagnosis of diffidence and of obligation in foro externo conditional on security.
  • On this reading the sovereign’s function is informational as well as punitive: he supplies the assurance that makes it rational to keep a covenant one already wants to keep.
• Kavka and Hampton built the formal reconstructions; Kavka’s Hobbesian agents are disaster-avoiders rather than utility-maximisers, which softens the dominance result.
• The reply to the Foole decides between the models. Hobbes insists it is rational to perform when the other party has already performed — assurance-game reasoning, not prisoner’s-dilemma reasoning.
• The general caution: a seventeenth-century argument is not a payoff matrix, and the models capture the strategic skeleton while losing the passions, glory above all, that Hobbes thought did most of the damage.

Strauss and Oakeshott: Two Rehabilitations

• Leo Strauss reads Hobbes as the founder of modern political philosophy, and treats that as a catastrophe rather than an achievement.
  • The break is the substitution of right for law — a subjective entitlement in place of an objective order — which lowers the aim of politics from virtue to comfortable self-preservation.
  • The foundation is a passion, not a science: the fear of violent death set against aristocratic vainglory is the humanist attitude the system really grows from, later dressed in mechanical clothing.
  • Hobbes is the first liberal on this account, precisely because he made rights rather than duties the ground of politics — and modern liberalism is, on Strauss’s telling, the working out of that lowered standard.
• Michael Oakeshott offers the opposite rehabilitation.
  • Leviathan is the greatest, perhaps the sole, masterpiece of political philosophy written in the English language.
  • Hobbes belongs to the tradition of Will and Artifice rather than Reason and Nature — the tradition in which civil association is made, not found — and is its head and crown.
  • The important corrective: Hobbes is a philosopher of authority, not of power. The sovereign’s title rests on authorisation, and the office is defined by the covenant that constitutes it.
  • Civil association is association in the recognition of rules, not in a shared purpose — the anti-totalitarian reading, in which the state prescribes conditions of conduct, not ends of conduct.
  • His formula is that Hobbes was not an absolutist because he was an authoritarian: the authority is unlimited in kind but narrow in purpose, and the two are constantly confused.

Hobbes in International Relations

• Hobbes did not write a theory of international politics, but the gladiators passage became one — the founding text of the anarchy problematique.
• What realism takes from him is a structure, not a psychology: no common power above states, therefore self-help; self-help, therefore arms; arms, therefore mutual fear. Waltz keeps the structure and drops the human nature; Morgenthau keeps both.
• The security dilemma — that measures taken for defence are indistinguishable from preparations for attack — is the restless-desire-of-power argument transposed to states.
• The “domestic analogy” is the standard objection, and Hobbes supplied the material for it himself.
  • States are not equally vulnerable. The weakest man can kill the strongest; the weakest state cannot destroy the strongest, so the equality premise fails.
  • States are not persons. They have divisible interests, internal politics and lives longer than any individual’s, and are not moved by fear of violent death.
  • The consequences do not follow. Because sovereigns uphold the industry of their subjects, there does not follow that misery which accompanies the liberty of particular men — Hobbes’s own words, and the whole objection in one clause.
  • International life has more order than the analogy predicts. Hedley Bull’s anarchical society is the point: states form a society with international law, diplomacy, the balance of power, war as an institution and the great powers — and no Leviathan at all.
• Bull’s three traditions map the field — the Hobbesian or realist (a state of war), the Grotian or internationalist (a society of states), and the Kantian or universalist (a community of mankind). Hobbes names one and is defined against the other two.
• The Hobbesian solution is not available internationally, and Hobbes knew it. He never proposed a world sovereign, which is why cosmopolitans and world federalists must argue past him rather than from him.

The Indian Context

Matsyanyaya: The Indian State of Nature

• Kautilya’s Arthashastra states the doctrine with an exactness that makes this more than analogy: in the absence of the wielder of the rod, the strong swallow the weak; under his protection, the weak resist the strong.
• Matsyanyaya, the law of the fishes, is the condition of a society without punishment — the big fish eats the small, and no holding, life or family is secure.
• The parallel is exact on the essentials. The cause is the absence of a common power, not innate wickedness; the consequence is universal insecurity; the remedy is an authority strong enough to overawe everyone.
• Danda is the rod of punishment and dandaniti the science of wielding it — at once punishment, coercive authority and the office of the king, and the condition of dharma being practicable at all.

	Hobbes’s Leviathan	Kautilya’s danda
Source of authority	Covenant among individuals; wholly artificial	Dharmic office — a duty, not a contract
Limits	None enforceable; sole interpreter of natural law	Bound by dharma, custom, shastra and the counsel of ministers
Purpose	Preservation of life; no view of the good	Yogakshema — welfare, prosperity and spiritual good
Punishment	Discretionary	Proportionate — excess terrifies, deficiency is despised
Underlying unit	The individual	The social order — varna, ashrama, the saptanga state

• The decisive contrast is that danda is a duty and Leviathan is a right. Kautilya’s king holds office in a moral order that exists independently of him; Hobbes’s sovereign is the source of the moral order and cannot be measured against it.
• Kautilya also warns against the excess Hobbes never worries about: only the rightly wielded rod produces welfare — an internal criterion of good rule that the Hobbesian system lacks.

Article 21 and the State’s Protective Duty

• The Hobbesian core of the modern state is written into Article 21: no person shall be deprived of his life or personal liberty except according to procedure established by law.
• The article carries both halves of the argument — the state alone may take life, and only through law. Life is at once what the state exists to protect and what it must not touch arbitrarily.
• The judicial expansion goes far beyond Hobbes. From Maneka Gandhi onwards, procedure must be fair, just and reasonable, not merely enacted — a substantive limit Hobbes explicitly denies is possible.
• A positive protective duty has been read into the article in the cases on custodial death, police excess and mob violence. A state that fails to protect life fails its constitutional purpose, which is Hobbes’s own test of a failed commonwealth.
• Article 355 — the Union’s duty to protect every State against external aggression and internal disturbance — is the same idea at the level of the federation.

The Emergency, ADM Jabalpur and Its Burial

• The Emergency of 1975–77 is India’s Hobbesian episode, argued in Hobbesian terms: order and national security against the disorder of agitation and a disputed election.
• ADM Jabalpur v. Shivkant Shukla (1976) put the question in its purest form — during a Proclamation of Emergency suspending Article 21, could a detenu approach a High Court at all?
  • The majority of four said no. With enforcement of Article 21 suspended there was no remedy even against an illegal or mala fide detention; the Attorney General accepted in argument that the position extended even to an unlawful killing.
  • This is Hobbes’s sovereign in a courtroom — an authority whose acts cannot be called unjust because the subject has no forum in which to call them anything.
  • Justice H.R. Khanna dissented alone, holding that the sanctity of life and liberty does not depend on the Constitution alone. He was passed over for the Chief Justiceship and resigned.
• The political correction came first. The 44th Amendment (1978) provided that Articles 20 and 21 can never be suspended, and replaced “internal disturbance” with “armed rebellion” as a ground under Article 352.
• The judicial burial came in K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India (2017), where a nine-judge bench held the judgments of all four majority judges in ADM Jabalpur to be seriously flawed and expressly overruled them.
  • Life and personal liberty are inalienable to human existence — recognised by the Constitution, not conferred by it.
  • The symmetry is not incidental. The plurality was written by Justice D.Y. Chandrachud, overruling a majority to which his father, Justice Y.V. Chandrachud, had been a party.
• The doctrinal lesson is anti-Hobbesian. The Indian constitutional order has concluded that the argument from necessity is exactly when rights are most needed, and that a power which cannot be questioned is not made safe by the good intentions of its holder.

Preventive Detention and AFSPA as Hobbesian Bargains

• India constitutionalised preventive detention at the founding. Article 22(3)–(7) allows detention without trial, subject to an Advisory Board of High Court judges and a three-month limit without its approval.
• The bargain is explicitly Hobbesian: liberty traded for security in advance of any offence, on the state’s own assessment of danger. Ambedkar defended it in the Constituent Assembly as a necessity of the times.
• The statutory line runs from the Preventive Detention Act through MISA to the National Security Act, with the Emergency showing what the power looks like unchecked.
• AFSPA is the sharper case. In areas declared “disturbed”, the Act permits use of force to the causing of death on suspicion, and bars prosecution without the Union Government’s sanction.
  • This is sovereignty in Hobbesian form — a zone where the monopoly of force operates without ordinary answerability, justified by the claim that the alternative is the state of nature.
  • The reviews have not accepted the justification. The Justice Jeevan Reddy Committee recommended repeal, describing the Act as a symbol of oppression; the Santosh Hegde Commission found encounter deaths in Manipur unjustified.
  • In Extra Judicial Execution Victim Families Association the Supreme Court held that there is no absolute immunity, that excessive or retaliatory force is impermissible even in a disturbed area, and that allegations of extra-judicial killing must be investigated.
• The persisting question is Hobbes’s own, asked in reverse. He argued a subject can never complain of the sovereign because he authorised him; the Indian answer is that authorisation is exactly why the sovereign must account.

Gandhi’s Counter-Position

• Gandhi objects to the premise, not the conclusion. He accepts Hobbes’s description of the modern state and rejects the state.
• The state represents violence in a concentrated and organised form. The individual has a soul, but the state is a soulless machine, and can never be weaned from the violence that is the source of its existence.
• His target is the modern state specifically — the centralised coercive apparatus colonial rule installed — not authority as such. Its foundation is not justice but power, which is precisely what Hobbes said and celebrated.
• The alternative is a decentralised order: swaraj as self-rule, oceanic circles of self-sufficient villages rather than a pyramid, panchayati raj, and satyagraha as conflict resolution without the sword.
• The Hobbesian reply is obvious — a society of villages without a common power is the state of nature at a smaller scale, and Gandhi presupposes the moral transformation Hobbes thought impossible.
• The Gandhian counter-reply is equally direct. If the state’s power rests on the cooperation of the governed, then withdrawal of cooperation dissolves it — an empirical claim about sovereignty that 1947 gave some support to.
• The constitutional compromise is visible in the text. India built a strong Hobbesian centre with emergency powers and a monopoly of force, and wrote the village republics into Article 40 as a non-justiciable directive, later given substance by the 73rd Amendment.

Contemporary Relevance

• Hobbes returns whenever order is in question. Failed states reproduce exactly the consequences he predicted; civil wars and insurgencies restate the argument; and the security-versus-liberty debate follows every major terrorist attack.
• The pandemic revived him directly. Emergency powers, restrictions on movement and assembly, and compulsory measures justified by the preservation of life were argued in almost literally Hobbesian terms — and so was the resistance to them.
• Acemoglu and Robinson’s The Narrow Corridor is the most influential recent engagement, and it is a friendly amendment that becomes a critique.
  • The Absent Leviathan — societies without a strong state, held together by a cage of norms that is its own kind of unfreedom.
  • The Despotic Leviathan — a state strong enough to impose order and unconstrained by society.
  • The Shackled Leviathan — the narrow corridor, where a strong state and a strong society grow together, each checking the other in a permanent Red Queen race.
  • The charge against Hobbes is precise: he showed why the Leviathan is necessary and said nothing about who shackles it. Liberty requires not the absence of the state but a society mobilised enough to hold it.
• Carl Schmitt took the argument the other way, making the sovereign the one who decides on the exception — the reading that connects Hobbes to emergency powers and to arguments about executive discretion.
• The surveillance state is the newest form of the question. Digital identity, mass data collection and predictive policing offer Hobbes’s bargain in a new medium, with the difference that the modern Leviathan can watch what it has praetermitted.
• The republican revival is the live counter-argument. Pettit’s freedom as non-domination revives exactly the position attacked in the Lucca passage — that subjection to another’s arbitrary will is unfreedom, even when that will is never exercised.

Conclusion

• Hobbes’s achievement is a single sustained argument: from matter in motion to appetite, from appetite to conflict, from conflict to covenant, and from covenant to a power that cannot be resisted — with no appeal at any point to God, tradition, nature or the good.
• The premises have outlasted the conclusion. Individuals are the units; the state is an artefact; authority requires justification to those who bear it; and the justification is what the state does for them.
• His conclusion has been rejected almost universally and his question has never been retired. Every later account of political obligation answers Hobbes’s question, and every constitutional device is an attempt to get his security without his sovereign.
• Both readings of him are correct, which is why the quarrel persists. He is the greatest of the individualists, because he made the individual the sole material of politics, and the greatest of the absolutists, because he showed what unlimited authority individualism could require.
• What separates him from the theorists of tyranny is purpose and limit. The Leviathan exists for the life of the subject, says nothing about how he should live, and dies as an obligation the moment it stops protecting him.
• What he cannot supply is a remedy. A state that fails may be abandoned but never corrected, and constitutional government is the whole of what the tradition has built in the space that absence left.
• The state of nature is the real bequest. It survives as a device rather than a description — a way of asking what an institution is for by imagining its absence — and is used now by game theorists, development economists and international relations scholars who would never call themselves Hobbesians.

Hobbes answered that the choice is between absolute authority and absolute anarchy; the whole constitutional tradition is the attempt to prove him wrong about that alternative.