On Leviathan

Hobbes wrote Leviathan out of fear, and he was honest about it. England was tearing itself apart in civil war when he set down his great argument, and the horror of that breakdown is the engine of the whole book. Strip away a strong common power, Hobbes argues, and human life collapses into a war of all against all, a condition he described in one of the most famous phrases in the language: a life solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Everything in Leviathan follows from the determination never to return to that.

Hobbes begins by imagining human beings without any government at all, in what he calls the state of nature. It is not a peaceful wilderness. With no common power to keep them in awe, people are driven by fear and by the endless pursuit of their own preservation and advantage, and the result is perpetual insecurity. Even the strong cannot rest, because the weak can combine or strike while they sleep. In such a condition there is no industry, no agriculture, no arts, no society, only the unrelenting danger of violent death.

This is a thought experiment, not history, and its purpose is to show what government is for. We submit to authority, Hobbes argues, not because we are virtuous or social by nature but because the alternative is unbearable. The state exists to deliver us from mutual terror.

The solution is the social contract. People agree, each with all, to surrender their right to govern themselves to a sovereign power, the great Leviathan, a mortal god to which they owe their peace. Once made, Hobbes insists, the bargain is nearly absolute. The sovereign's power must be undivided and effectively unlimited, because any division, any reserved right to resist, threatens to crack the state back open into the chaos it was built to escape.

That conclusion is where most readers part company with Hobbes, and where a citizen of a republic must read against him hardest. The thinkers who built modern free government, Locke above all, accepted the premise of a social contract and then rejected Hobbes's terms, arguing that the people keep rights the sovereign cannot touch and may reclaim power that is abused. You cannot fully understand that liberal answer without first understanding the bleak alternative it was answering. Leviathan is that alternative, stated with a rigor no one has matched.

The full text is public domain and freely available. The prose is seventeenth-century and demanding, but the famous early chapters on the state of nature and the social contract are worth the effort, they are the dark foundation the whole tradition of consent and rights was built to escape.