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External WebsitesAlso known as: “Leviathan; or the Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil”
Written by Tom SorellProfessor of Politics and Philosophy, University of Warwick. Author of Hobbes and others; editor of the Cambridge Companion to Hobbes and others.
Tom Sorell Fact-checked by The Editors of Encyclopaedia BritannicaEncyclopaedia Britannica's editors oversee subject areas in which they have extensive knowledge, whether from years of experience gained by working on that content or via study for an advanced degree. They write new content and verify and edit content received from contributors.
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Leviathan, magnum opus of the early-modern English political philosopher, ethicist, metaphysician, and scientist Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679). First published in 1651, Leviathan; or, The Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil develops a theory of politics presented in Hobbes’s earlier work (composed in Latin), De Cive (1642; “Concerning the Citizen”), articulating a political philosophy that views government primarily as a device for ensuring collective security. According to Hobbes, political authority is justified by a hypothetical social contract among the many that vests in a sovereign (a monarch, a legislature, or almost any other form of political authority) the responsibility for the safety and well-being of all. Hobbes’s Leviathan influenced not only his famous successors who adopted the social-contract framework—including John Locke (1632–1704), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), and Immanuel Kant (1724–1804)—but also less directly those theorists who connected moral and political decision making in rational human beings to considerations of self-interest broadly understood.
In De Cive and Leviathan, Hobbes rejects one of the most famous theses of the politics of the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–322 bce ), namely that human beings are naturally suited to life in a polis (city-state) and do not fully realize their natures until they exercise the role of citizen. Hobbes turns Aristotle’s claim on its head: human beings, he insists, are by nature unsuited to political life. They naturally denigrate and compete with each other, are very easily swayed by the rhetoric of ambitious persons, and think much more highly of themselves than of other people. In short, their passions magnify the value they place on their own interests, especially their near-term interests. At the same time, most people, in pursuing their own interests, do not have the ability to prevail over competitors. Nor can they appeal to some natural common standard of behaviour that everyone will feel obliged to abide by. There is no natural self-restraint, even when human beings are moderate in their appetites, for a ruthless and bloodthirsty few can make even the moderate feel forced to take violent preemptive action in order to avoid losing everything. The self-restraint even of the moderate, then, easily turns into aggression. In other words, no human being is above aggression and the anarchy (chaos) that goes with it.
War comes more naturally to human beings than political order, according to Hobbes. Indeed, political order is possible only when human beings abandon their natural condition of judging and pursuing what seems best to each and delegate this judgment to someone else. This delegation is effected when the many contract together to submit to a sovereign in return for physical safety and a modicum of well-being. Each of the many in effect says to the other: “I transfer my right of governing myself to X (the sovereign) if you do too.” And the transfer is collectively entered into only on the understanding that it makes one less of a target of attack or dispossession than one would be in one’s natural state. Although Hobbes did not assume that there was ever a real historical event in which a mutual promise was made to delegate self-government to a sovereign, he claimed that the best way to understand the state was to conceive of it as having resulted from such an agreement.
In Hobbes’s social contract, the many trade liberty for safety. Liberty, with its standing invitation to local conflict and finally all-out war—a “war of every man against every man”—is overvalued in traditional political philosophy and popular opinion, according to Hobbes; it is better for people to transfer the right of governing themselves to the sovereign. Once transferred, however, this right of government is absolute, unless the many feel that their lives are threatened by submission. The sovereign determines who owns what, who will hold which public offices, how the economy will be regulated, what acts will be crimes, and what punishments criminals should receive. The sovereign is the supreme commander of the army, supreme interpreter of law, and supreme interpreter of scripture, with authority over any national church. It is unjust—a case of reneging on what one has agreed—for any subject to take issue with these arrangements, for, in the act of creating the state or by receiving its protection, one agrees to leave judgments about the means of collective well-being and security to the sovereign. The sovereign’s laws and decrees and appointments to public office may be unpopular; they may even be wrong. But, unless the sovereign fails so utterly that subjects feel that their condition would be no worse in the free-for-all outside the state, it is better for the subjects to endure the sovereign’s rule.
It is better both prudentially and morally. Because no one can prudently welcome a greater risk of death, no one can prudently prefer total liberty to submission. Total liberty invites war, and submission is the best insurance against war. Morality too supports this conclusion, for, according to Hobbes, all the moral precepts enjoining virtuous behaviour can be understood as derivable from the fundamental moral precept that one should seek peace—that is to say, freedom from war—if it is safe to do so. Without peace, he observed, humans live in “continual fear, and danger of violent death,” and what life they have is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” (Leviathan, Chapter XIII). What Hobbes calls the “laws of nature,” the system of moral rules by which everyone is bound, cannot be safely complied with outside the state, for the total liberty that people have outside the state includes the liberty to flout the moral requirements if one’s survival seems to depend on it.
The sovereign is not a party to the social contract but receives the obedience of the many as a free gift in their hope that their safety will be ensured. The sovereign makes no promises to the many in order to win their submission. Indeed, because no right of self-government is transferred to anyone, the sovereign retains the total liberty that the subjects trade for safety. The sovereign is not bound by law, including the sovereign’s own laws. Nor does the sovereign do anything unjustly by making decisions about the subjects’ safety and well-being that they do not like.
