Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) — the first modern thinker

Thomas Hobbes stands at the opening of modern political thought. He turns theory away from divine right and Aristotelian teleology towards fear, consent, law and sovereignty. Politics begins not with the good life but with the problem of violent death. From self-preserving individuals in insecurity he builds the state — combining radical individualism with absolute sovereignty.

Life & works

• Born 1588 (the year the Spanish Armada was repelled); Oxford; tutor to an aristocratic family; lived through the English Civil War and the execution of Charles I; exile in France.
• Major works: translation of Thucydides (used to criticise Athenian democracy); The Elements of Law (1640); De Cive (1642); Leviathan (1651) — the magnum opus on human nature, state of nature, covenant, sovereignty, law, religion and liberty.
• Backdrop: Westphalia (1648), the Reformation associated with Martin Luther, the emerging modern state system. Karl Marx called him “the father of all of us”; widely the father of modern political science.

Placing him: against Machiavelli, against Aristotle

Against Aristotle: politics is about life and death, not virtue, teleology or the good life. The state exists to escape fear, conflict and death — so Hobbes is closer to Machiavelli than to Aristotle.

First-modern-thinker contest & method

• The title is contested between Machiavelli, Jean Bodin and Hobbes. Bodin defined sovereignty but left it under divine and natural restraints; Hobbes gives the first complete theory of sovereignty — absolute, indivisible, final, and extending over religion.
• Resolutive-compositive method: break the whole into parts, study each, reconstruct through causes — “everything is best understood by its constitutive causes.” Deductive, mathematical in style; rests on psychological egoism and ethical relativism. Influenced by Galileo, Bacon, Harvey, Newton, Kepler. John Rawls later reads the state of nature as a classic Prisoner’s Dilemma.

“While Bodin was standing at the gate of modernity, it was Hobbes who jumped inside.”

on Hobbes’s completed sovereignty

Human Nature & Power

Hobbes begins with a hard view of man: not naturally moral, social or public-spirited, but matter in motion, driven by desire, fear and the search for security.

• Two motions: vital (involuntary, e.g. circulation) and voluntary / endeavour. Sensation yields appetite (towards what aids) and aversion (from what harms). Man is a collection of appetites and aversions — a materialist, non-teleological account.
• Self-preservation is the deepest impulse; fear and self-interest the two deepest motives. Felicity is not moral perfection but continual success in obtaining desire — movement, not rest; acquisition, not fulfilment. Hence no Aristotelian highest good.
• Three causes of quarrel: competition (gain), diffidence (safety), glory (reputation). Power must be continually augmented or it dissipates — so struggle is permanent.

“All mankind has a general inclination towards a perpetual and restless desire for power that ceases only in death.”

Thomas Hobbes

“Man is a complex of power; desire is the desire for power, pride is an illusion about power, honour is an opinion about power, life is the unrelenting exercise of power, and death is the absolute loss of power.”

Michael Oakeshott

State of Nature as State of War

The state of nature is a hypothetical pre-political, pre-social condition — no civil law, no state, no common judge, no enforceable authority. Men are naturally equal in vulnerability: even the strongest can be killed by the weakest through cunning or conspiracy (Sharon Lloyd: equality in the ability to conquer or kill). Scarcity meets unlimited desire; Tom Sorell notes scarcity turns equality into enmity.

From equal vulnerability to the war of all against all. Roots (equality of vulnerability · scarcity · endless desire) → 3 Causes (competition · diffidence · glory) → State of War (“war of every man against every man”) → Life (solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, short).

• War is not constant fighting but a known disposition to it: “the nature of war consists not in actual fighting, but in the known disposition thereto during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary.”
• No morality, justice, industry, arts, letters, commerce or society; force and fraud become the cardinal virtues. Every person has a right to everything — yet no one’s rights are secure.

“No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death: and the life of man — solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”

Thomas Hobbes

Natural Right & the Laws of Nature

• Right of nature: the liberty each person has to use his own power for the preservation of his own life — in the state of nature, a right to everything, even to another’s life. Right indicates absence of obligation; law indicates obligation. Rights precede law. Paradox: everyone possesses rights, yet no one enjoys secure rights.
• The right to self-preservation is basic and inalienable — it survives even after the commonwealth is formed.

Laws of nature

Rational articles of peace discovered by reason; Hobbes lists nineteen. The load-bearing ones:

• First: seek peace and follow it. Second: lay down natural rights if others do the same. Third: honour covenants. Nineteenth: no man should be judge in his own case.
• But reason points to peace while passion pulls back to pride, partiality and revenge — so the laws are ineffective without coercion. Philip Pettit’s logic: where promises alone cannot restrain the passions, awe must finish what reason starts.

“For the laws of nature, without the terror of some power to cause them to be observed, are contrary to our natural passions.”

Thomas Hobbes

“It is not wisdom but Authority that makes a law.”

Thomas Hobbes

Covenant, Commonwealth & Absolute Sovereignty

The laws of nature show the road to peace; the covenant creates an authority that can maintain it. Hobbes distinguishes a loose contract from a covenant — a durable, perpetual pledge for future action.

A single covenant — the sovereign is its creation, not its party. All persons (in the state of nature) → Covenant (“each with all and all with each”) → Sovereign created (product & beneficiary — but outside the covenant) → Leviathan (the “Artificial Person” of the commonwealth).

• One contract founds society and state together — no separate social and political contract. William Ebenstein: “the sovereign is not a party to the contract, but its creation.” The covenant is among subjects, not between subjects and sovereign.
• Justice arises only after covenant; injustice is “not performance of a covenant.” Two routes: sovereignty by institution (mutual covenant) and sovereignty by acquisition (conquest) — fear is as valid a basis of obligation as consent.

“I authorize and give up my right of governing myself to this man, or to this assembly of men, on condition that you give up your right to him and authorize all his actions in like manner.”

Thomas Hobbes

“Covenants, without the sword, are but words, and of no strength to secure a man at all.”

Thomas Hobbes

Theory of sovereignty — and why it must be absolute

Sovereignty is the highest, final and effective authority: absolute, indivisible, inalienable, perpetual, legally unconstrained. The sole limit lies on the subject’s side — the inalienable right of self-preservation; obligation lasts only while protection lasts. Multiple centres of power breed civil war (Robert Caponigri: a limited sovereign is merely one more contender). Hence the hard choice — anarchy or absolutism — and “to divide the power of a commonwealth is to dissolve it.”

Hobbes admits no middle ground

Quentin Skinner: the political covenant “shows that the powers of the crown have no limits at all.” Hobbes secularises sovereignty and subordinates Church to state — completing internal sovereignty.

Law, Religion, Liberty & Political Obligation

Law & religion

• Not bare command theory: law is the sovereign’s command after a normative relation already made by covenant. Private judgement is surrendered; the sovereign’s reason becomes public reason. Civil law is the only functioning law; natural law binds only through sovereign adoption. Hobbes stands between natural law and legal positivism.
• Religion grows from anxiety and can breed disorder — so it needs sovereign coordination. The church is “nothing more than a corporation governed by the commonwealth”; no profession of faith is lawful unless sanctioned by the sovereign. Even the Church falls under the state — a strong mark of his modernity.

Liberty — negative, with one exception

• Liberty is the absence of external impediments; subjects are free to do what the sovereign has not forbidden — trade, property, diet, education of children, private conscience. Liberty is distinct from ability (a man without legs is unable, not unfree, to run).
• Hobbes is among the earliest advocates of negative liberty; Isaiah Berlin later: liberty is “not being interfered with by others… the wider the area of non-interference, the wider my freedom.” The exception is self-preservation: no subject is bound to kill himself or surrender self-defence; if the sovereign cannot protect life, the subject may resist.

“Liberty is where the law is silent.”

Thomas Hobbes

Political obligation

One of the strongest theories in the canon — obligation almost unlimited, resting on fear of punishment, duty to keep the bargain, the sovereign as authorised representative, and the overlap of civil and natural law. Yet it is not blind: it lasts only while protection lasts, and the right of self-preservation is inalienable. A.E. Taylor reads it as prudential (one never truly gains by breaking peace); Howard Warrender grounds it in a natural law that obliges “antecedently to… the commands of the civil sovereign” — giving obligation a divine-command structure.

Individualism, Absolutism & Liberalism

The deepest tension in Hobbes — and the resolution. He begins from the individual, not the community: a methodological individualist (society explained through separate persons’ passions) and a normative individualist (the sovereign exists to preserve life). Human beings are self-interested, utilitarian, materialistic, possessive; he removes guilt from selfishness and treats it as a fact.

• George H. Sabine calls him “the greatest of all individualists”; C.B. Macpherson, with Ferdinand Tonnies and Michael Oakeshott, recognises the individualist core — Macpherson names Hobbes, with Locke, “a father of possessive individualism” and an ideologue of a nascent capitalist market.
• Yet he ends in absolutism — not a contradiction but a derivation: unregulated natural liberty destroys security, so the all-powerful state is created for the individual. The retained right of self-preservation proves the individual never disappears under Leviathan.

“Hobbes starts as an individualist but ends as an absolutist — an individualist in his assumptions, an absolutist in his conclusions.”

C.B. Macpherson

Hobbes & liberalism; the gender question

• His rights are narrower than later liberalism’s, but he lays liberal starting points: consent, natural rights, self-preservation, negative liberty, government as protection rather than moral tutelage. Judith Shklar’s reading sees him as a founding father of liberalism.
• On women: he accepts basic equality (a mother is also a lord; female subordination forms with civil society) yet denies women political participation and upholds paternal authority in the home — equality in language, patriarchy in structure.

Evaluation, Criticism & Legacy

Defence

• William Ebenstein: Leviathan “is not an apology for the Stuart monarchy nor a grammar of despotic government but the first general theory of politics in the English language.” His break with divine right and teleology earns the title “Father of Revolutionary Philosophy.”
• Kenneth Minogue: Hobbes treats politics as “an aspect of a universal human dilemma involving freedom and security.” And the sovereign cannot reach conscience — laws are like hedges, set “not to stop travellers, but to keep them in the right way.”

“The Leviathan is the greatest, perhaps the sole, masterpiece of political philosophy in the English language.”

Michael Oakeshott

Criticism

• Absolute power without legal limit invites arbitrariness. C.E. Vaughan: “Leviathan is useless as a book of history and fruitless as a book of politics” — “pernicious and impossible,” reducing “the whole herd to slavery.” The state of nature is criticised as excessively pessimistic and wrongly taken as literal history.
• John Locke, Rousseau and Immanuel Kant are major critics; Karl Popper counts Hobbes an enemy of the open society; he has been accused of anticipating totalitarian politics — a reading Ebenstein rejects (covenantal origin, order for well-being, equality before law, the sovereign may be an assembly, no glorification of war).

Legacy

The first complete modern theory of sovereignty; legitimacy shifted from divine right to covenant; the seedbed of legal positivism (Bentham, Austin) and of realism. Hans Morgenthau: “International politics, like all politics, is a struggle for power.” Max Weber’s state echoes him: “the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.” He remains live wherever security and liberty collide — emergency powers, lockdowns, concentrated authority justified as peace and order.