By Ethan Hollander, Wabash College
States use their power to provide public goods, and to protect us—from others and from each other. Thomas Hobbes, an important political philosopher, advocated for a powerful, centralized state authority—preferably a strong monarchy; he yearned for order in a world of chaos. An Enlightenment thinker, Hobbes set the stage for how we think about state power in the modern world.
Thomas Hobbes: Witness to Political Turmoil
Thomas Hobbes was an Englishman who gave us a political philosophy that was somehow deeply conservative and yet surprisingly radical at the same time.
As someone who lived in England and France during the 1600s, Hobbes was witness to a period of tremendous political transformation.
In 1640, England was on the brink of civil war, with parliamentary forces (led by Oliver Cromwell) challenging the king, Charles I. Parliament wanted to subject the king to democratic accountability. And the king wasn’t having any of it!
In that conflict, Hobbes was sympathetic to the monarchy. And fearing that he’d fall foul of Cromwell’s forces, Hobbes fled to France.
But even on the European continent, Hobbes didn’t escape political turmoil. He arrived just in time to witness the end of the Thirty Years’ War (in 1648). This allowed him to see firsthand the devastation that occurs when the breakdown of political order leads to a war of all against all.
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Leviathan
It was in this context in which Hobbes wrote what was to become his most famous work, Leviathan. Published in 1651, Leviathan is a justification for a powerful, centralized state authority—preferably a strong monarchy. And throughout it, you can really see Hobbes yearning for order in a world of chaos.
Hobbes begins his defense of a centralized state with a famous thought experiment. He asks us to think about what life would be like in a state of nature: a world where there’s no king, no government, just a mass of individuals competing with one another to survive.
In the state of nature, the law of nature is kill or be killed—and, as a result, people in the state of nature spend their lives in constant fear. Nature, says Hobbes, is a state of war, of “all against all”. And as a result, life for the individual in Hobbes’s state of nature is “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short”.
The state of nature is so terrible that people would give up almost anything to get out of it.
Social Contract
But there is one thing in the state of nature that almost everybody agrees on: In the state of nature, every individual wants to protect his or her own life. After all, the state of nature is a place where death is always just around the corner. And so, longing to live a life free of fear of violent death is something to which every reasonable person would agree.
People in a state of nature would do anything to get out of that state, so long as their new society was capable of protecting their lives.
This forms the basis of what comes to be known as the social contract. It’s an agreement—Hobbes calls it a covenant—that every person in the state of nature would sign up for, if given the chance. And the agreement basically says: “If you don’t do anything to threaten my life, I won’t do anything to threaten yours.”
The Rule of a Sovereign
However, we can’t just agree on this with a handshake; Hobbes says, famously, that “covenants, without the sword, are just words”. And so, in order to secure the agreement, humans in the state of nature agree to subject themselves to the rule of a sovereign: a single entity with the power to enforce the social contract. We give the sovereign the power to rule over us, and the sovereign uses that power to protect us from each other, taking us out of the state of nature.
Bear in mind, however, that once the sovereign is empowered to protect us, there aren’t really any limits on what he or she can do. In fact, in naming his book Leviathan, Hobbes is referring to a biblical sea monster—or just a powerful beast. The Leviathan was an awesome, fearsome creature. And Hobbes knew what he was doing when he made the connection between this all-powerful creature from the Bible and the sovereign himself.
All-powerful Sovereign
In fact, in the first edition of Leviathan, the front page featured an image of a giant man, towering over the landscape, with a crown and body made up of hundreds of little people—the subjects of the sovereign—who make up the body politic, both literally and figuratively. And if one looks closely at the Leviathan’s face in that image, they’ll notice that he bears an uncanny resemblance to Charles I, the deposed king to whom Hobbes had been loyal.
In any case, the sovereign was all-powerful. But because he took us out of the state of nature (and because the Hobbesian state of nature was so terrifying), Hobbes believed that we would make such a deal. In Hobbes’s view, the fear of violent death in the state of nature was so extreme that we’d be willing to vest power in a sovereign of biblical proportions, so long as that sovereign protected us.
Common Questions about the Political Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes
Written by Thomas Hobbes and published in 1651, Leviathan is a justification for a powerful, centralized state authority—preferably a strong monarchy.
The state of nature is a world where there’s no king, no government—just a mass of individuals competing with one another to survive. Nature, according to Thomas Hobbes, is a state of war, of “all against all”, and as a result, life for the individual in Hobbes’s state of nature is “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short”.
In the first edition of Leviathan, the front page featured an image of a giant man, towering over the landscape, with a crown and body made up of hundreds of little people—the subjects of the sovereign—who make up the body politic, both literally and figuratively.
