Leviathan

Overview

Leviathan or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil, published in London in 1651, is Thomas Hobbes's masterwork and one of the founding texts of modern political philosophy. Written in English rather than the Latin customary for serious philosophy, it was meant to be read by the educated public and by those who held power. Its argument is at once terrifying and rational: that human beings, left without government, would descend into a war of all against all, and that only the absolute authority of a sovereign can secure them from this condition. The book's name, drawn from the Old Testament sea-monster, signals the awesome, almost monstrous power Hobbes assigns to the commonwealth he describes.

The work is divided into four parts. The first, "Of Man," sets out Hobbes's materialist psychology and the famous argument from the state of nature. The second, "Of Commonwealth," constructs the social contract and the doctrine of sovereignty. The third and fourth parts, "Of a Christian Commonwealth" and "Of the Kingdom of Darkness," extend the argument to religion and scripture, attempting to subordinate ecclesiastical authority to the civil sovereign. The Stanford Encyclopedia notes that Leviathan is distinguished by the rigor with which it deduces political obligation from a theory of human nature, and by the radicalism of its conclusion that sovereignty must be undivided and absolute.

Author Context

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) was already in his sixties when Leviathan appeared, and his thought had been shaped by decades of study and experience. Educated at Oxford and employed as tutor to the Cavendish family, he traveled widely on the Continent, met Galileo and Gassendi, and became absorbed in the new mechanistic science. His intellectual ambition was to construct a complete philosophy of nature, man, and the state on the model of geometry and the Galilean science of motion. Earlier works, including The Elements of Law (1640) and De Cive (1642), had already sketched the political argument, but Leviathan was the full, English-language statement, revised and sharpened by the intervening years of civil war.

Historical Background

Leviathan was written during the English Civil War (1642-1651), the conflict that pitted Charles I against Parliament and ended with the king's execution in 1649. Hobbes had fled to France in 1640, fearing that his early royalist sympathies might attract the hostility of the Long Parliament, and it was in Paris that he composed much of the book. The war was not merely a struggle for power but a conflict over the very basis of authority, involving competing claims of crown, parliament, church, and army. Hobbes's argument was a direct response to this chaos. He saw in the multiplication of sovereign claims, the divided loyalties of citizens, and the interference of clerics in politics the very conditions that dissolve a commonwealth into civil war. The book's central conviction, that authority must be undivided and absolute if peace is to be preserved, was forged in the experience of a society tearing itself apart.

Key Ideas

The State of Nature

Hobbes's argument begins with a thought experiment: what would human beings be like without government? He calls this condition the state of nature, and his account of it is the most famous and most disturbing passage in the book. Human beings are roughly equal in body and mind; no one is so strong as to be beyond fear of another, and no one is so clever as to be beyond being outwitted. From this equality arises diffidence: because anyone can be a threat, everyone has reason to suspect everyone else. Diffidence leads to preemptive violence, and violence to the pursuit of power after power, which Hobbes insists never ceases but continues until death. In the state of nature there is no common power, no law, and therefore no injustice. There is only what Hobbes famously calls "the war of every man against every man," a condition in which there is no industry, no culture, no society, and in which the life of man is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."

The phrase has become proverbial, but its philosophical function is precise. Hobbes is not making an anthropological claim that prehistoric humans actually lived this way; he is constructing an analytic model that reveals the logic of life without authority. The Stanford Encyclopedia emphasizes that the state of nature is, for Hobbes, a generalization from the passions, an account of what rational agents would do in the absence of coercive law. It applies not only to a hypothetical past but to any situation where the restraints of government fail, including the relations between sovereign states and the breakdown of order in civil war.

The Laws of Nature

From the misery of the state of nature, Hobbes derives the laws of nature, which are not laws imposed from above but rational precepts for self-preservation. The first and fundamental law is to seek peace and follow it, but if peace cannot be obtained, to use all means of war for defense. From this follow the second law, that a person should be willing to lay down their natural right to all things when others are willing to do likewise, and further laws requiring the keeping of covenants, gratitude, equity, and mutual accommodation. Hobbes enumerates nineteen such laws, which he summarizes in the golden rule: do not that to another which you would not have done to yourself.

The crucial point is that these laws of nature, in themselves, do not bind. They are merely rational principles, theorems concerning what condueth to the conservation and defense of oneself. A person who keeps a covenant when others break it is not virtuous but foolish. The laws of nature become binding, become genuine laws, only when there is a power sufficient to enforce them. This is the gap that the social contract is designed to fill.

The Social Contract and Sovereignty

The bridge from the state of nature to civil society is the covenant. Hobbes argues that rational individuals, recognizing the misery of their natural condition, would agree to confer all their power and strength upon one man or assembly of men, and to submit their wills to his will and their judgments to his judgment. This is more than a promise; it is the creation of a new artificial person, the sovereign, who represents them all. The sovereign is not a party to the covenant but its product. He is created by the mutual agreement of the subjects, and his authority is therefore absolute: because he did not covenant with them, he cannot breach the covenant, and he cannot be deposed or resisted except when he fails in the fundamental task of protection.

The frontispiece of Leviathan dramatizes this doctrine. It depicts a giant crowned figure rising above the landscape, its body composed of innumerable tiny citizens all gazing upward toward the sovereign's face, one arm holding a sword of civil power and the other a crozier of ecclesiastical authority. The image captures Hobbes's central claim: the sovereign is a single artificial person constituted by the multitude, and his power encompasses both the temporal and the spiritual. The Stanford Encyclopedia notes that the frontispiece is among the most analyzed images in the history of political thought, a visual statement of the theory of representation that underlies Hobbes's entire argument.

The Commonwealth

The commonwealth created by the contract is what Hobbes calls a "mortal god," an artificial man of immense power and, like the biblical Leviathan, terrifying to behold. Its purpose is the preservation of the lives of its members, and to this end the sovereign must have undivided control over legislation, judgment, warfare, taxation, and the regulation of doctrine. Hobbes insists that the division of sovereignty, whether between king and parliament or between civil and ecclesiastical authority, is the surest path to dissolution and civil war. The forms of government, monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, are less important than the unity of sovereign power; what matters is that authority be single and unchallengeable.

Key Themes

Several themes pervade Leviathan. The first is the primacy of peace over freedom: Hobbes values liberty, but he insists that the freedoms worth having are possible only within the security that absolute sovereignty provides. The second is the artificiality of the state: the commonwealth is not natural but made, a product of human reason and agreement, and this sets Hobbes apart from medieval theories that located political authority in divine or natural hierarchies. The third is the indivisibility of sovereignty: divided authority is no authority, and the multiplication of competing powers is the cause of civil war. A fourth theme is the subordination of religion to politics: the sovereign must control religious doctrine and practice, because competing spiritual authorities are a standing threat to civil peace.

Philosophical Meaning

Leviathan marks a decisive break with the classical and medieval tradition of political philosophy. Where Aristotle had held that the political association is natural to human beings, Hobbes argues that the state is an artifact, constructed by frightened and rational individuals to escape a condition that is anything but natural in the sense of fulfilling. Where medieval theorists derived authority from God or from natural hierarchy, Hobbes derives it from the consent, however fearful, of the governed. The result is a strikingly modern picture: the individual, possessing natural rights prior to society, is the basic unit of political analysis, and the state exists to serve the interests of its members rather than to realize an intrinsic human telos.

The philosophical force of Leviathan lies in its deductive rigor and its unflinching conclusions. Hobbes does not temper his argument to fit received opinion. If the state of nature is as terrible as he says, then only absolute sovereignty will do, and the conventional distinctions between tyranny and legitimate rule dissolve. The Stanford Encyclopedia notes that readers have long debated whether Hobbes is a theorist of authoritarianism or, paradoxically, of individualism, since his entire edifice rests on the rights and rational choices of individuals. The tension between these readings is part of what makes Leviathan a permanently provocative text, and a foundation for later thinking about power, justice, and the rights of individuals against the state.

Influence

Leviathan transformed political philosophy. Its theory of the state of nature and the social contract became the framework within which John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau worked, even as they reached opposite conclusions about the nature and limits of sovereign power. Locke accepted the contract but argued for limited government and the right of revolution; Rousseau accepted the contract but located sovereignty in the general will of the people. The tradition they inaugurated, social contract theory, supplied the conceptual vocabulary of the American and French Revolutions and remains foundational to modern democratic thought.

Beyond the contract tradition, Hobbes's materialist psychology, his analysis of power, and his insistence on the artificiality of political authority shaped later thinkers from Spinoza to Bentham. The Hobbesian insight that political order is a human construction, fragile and dependent on the enforcement of covenants, recurs wherever the question of obedience and legitimacy is pressed. The Stanford Encyclopedia observes that Leviathan remains, after nearly four centuries, the indispensable starting point for the philosophy of political authority, and its central question, why should anyone obey the state, has lost none of its urgency.

Sources

1. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Thomas Hobbes." A comprehensive scholarly reference covering Hobbes's life, his natural philosophy, and the arguments of Leviathan.
2. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Hobbes's Moral and Political Philosophy." A detailed treatment of the state of nature, the laws of nature, and the theory of sovereignty in Leviathan.